The Mailer-Vidal Fight at Lally Weymouth's Party
Hub page for Mailer's 24 October 1977 altercation with Gore Vidal at Lally Weymouth's New York party - a renewal of their feud, precipitated by Vidal's 1971 review comparing Mailer to Manson - and the cluster of press coverage it drew (77.4-77.9).
On 24 October 1977, at a New York party given by Lally Weymouth, Mailer and Gore Vidal came to blows — Mailer throwing a drink (and, by some accounts, a punch) at Vidal, a renewal of the feud that ran from their 1971 Dick Cavett Show confrontation. The immediate provocation reached back to Vidal’s 22 July 1971 New York Review of Books review of Eva Figes’s Patriarchal Attitudes, which had likened Mailer to Charles Manson.
This page is the hub for the cluster of contemporaneous coverage, recorded as bibliography rows for 1977: Liz Smith’s “Vidal Plus Mailer: Pow” (77.4) and “There’s Always a Morning After” (77.5) in the Daily News; Nancy Collins’s “‘The Fight,’ Starring Mailer and Vidal” (77.6, Boston Globe); the Newsweek “Newsmakers” item (77.8), in which Mailer and Vidal add final words; and the People Weekly report (77.9). Mailer set down his own running account of the television years and the feud in “Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling with Dots” (77.7). See also 85.6 and Harlot’s Ghost (91.3).