Foreword to Dear Muffo
Mailer's foreword to Harold Conrad's memoir Dear Muffo: 35 Years in the Fast Lane (Stein and Day, 1982), a warm tribute to the boxing publicist and fixer and his cast of legends and hoods.
Mailer’s foreword (pp. xix–xxii) to Dear Muffo: 35 Years in the Fast Lane, the memoir of Harold Conrad — boxing publicist, “trouble-shooter,” and longtime Mailer friend — published by Stein and Day in 1982, with a separate introduction by Budd Schulberg. A full transcription (rights cleared) is held at full text. Mailer celebrates Conrad’s “saturnine, mildly cynical calm in the eye of the vortex,” his gift for telling “a few hard unforgettable little things” about the galaxy of stars, hustlers, and “legendary hoods” he worked among — and turns the tribute into a riff against the People-magazine flattening of American celebrity: Conrad brings “his crazy laser to the same material, for it breathes under his sharp light.”