Norman Mailer and Russia

From: Elaine Showalter, "Naked and the rest" [review of J. Michael Lennon: Norman Mailer [:] A double life 960pp.Simon and Schuster], The Times Literary Supplement (December 20 and 27, 2013), p. 7

Mailer's persistence and commitment to the big stories of our time became more impressive, even heroic, as he aged. In 1992, Larry Schiller [from the review: "Another Brooklyn boy, he [Schiller] had created an outsized career for himself as photojournalist, director, screenwriter, producer, packager, middle man and 'media entrepreneur'"] who had heard while filming in Russia that the KGB was ready to sell access to the files of Lee Harvey Oswald, persuaded Mailer to work with  him on a book about the assassin. Off he flew, at the age

of seventy, to join Schiller for eight months in Minsk. Norris (the clever, glamorous, and final wife) feared he might be "schtupping fat, old, ugly Russia in babushkas ", but he was hard at work, despite freezing weather and terrible food, in an overheated rented apartment, where he often cooked pasta in his undershirt. Schiller had told the Russians that Mailer was "the American Tolstoy" and that "they owed it to history to be interviewed us". After Minsk, they went to Dallas to talk with Marina Oswald, who was offended at Mailer's questions about her sexual history. When Oswald's Tale came out in 1995, Schiller sent her an excerpt. She wrote back furiously, "Tolstoy, he's not".

On Mailer, see. Image from