Mike Tyson

Once a week I go to dinner at Michael Mailer’s in Brooklyn, where the food is excellent, the wine ditto, and the female company superb. Michael is a movie producer as well as a heterosexual, and that tends to draw the fairer sex. He’s also very good-looking and a great amateur boxer. His father Norman had the reputation of a toughie, but Michael is the tough Mailer as far as I’m concerned. His house overlooking the water and the Statue of Liberty I first visited a very long time ago. Elia Kazan was Norman’s guest and during dinner he noticed I was being awfully quiet. “His wife just kicked him out,” whispered Norman to the great director. Kazan got up, came over to me, put his hands on my shoulders and in bad Greek said, “All you need to do is be nice for a while and you’ll be right back where you were before.”

“You are assuming I’m married to a Greek,” I answered. “She’s a German.”

“Doesn’t matter, all women are the same, just be nice and keep it in your pants.”

Sure enough he was right. Neither Kazan nor Norman Mailer is around these days, but I feel the latter’s presence once a week chez Michael’s. The other memorable friend of Norman’s I remember well is Larry McMurtry, author of Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show, and other memorable works of small Western towns of long ago. McMurtry told me over dinner that he had three subscriptions to the Spectator, as he was always traveling back and forth and didn’t want to miss an issue. I got underneath the table and tried to kiss his shoes, but Norman kicked me. I was having a shoulder operation the next morning—a real one, with a scalpel—but one thing led to another, so Larry and I hit the hot spots. Three hours away from being put to sleep I confessed to McMurtry and, horrified, he forced me to go home. He wrote very nice things about me in his autobiography. Brooklyn is good for me.