The Devil You Know

Some years ago, when I lived in Provincetown, MA, I had a nodding acquaintance with the writer Norman Mailer. I didn’t know him at all well, but we were cordial enough – I did pop him in the head with a champagne cork once, at close range, when I was tending bar at a gallery opening. I was mortified, but he laughed it off. I never saw a side to him that was ungenerous or self-important.

Credit: Simie Maryles - Provincetown, Winter

Provincetown, at the very end of Cape Cod, has always been a place for outsiders and eccentrics. My pal Alice used to say, the further away you got from Boston and the Puritan influence, the less you’d be hampered by convention. Early on, there were smugglers and wreckers, and in the 1850’s, when New England whaling hit its peak, the saloons and whorehouses on Long Point, across the harbor from Provincetown proper (emphasis intentional), gave it the name Hell Town. Playwrights and plein air painters, and others of their Bohemian ilk, came at the beginning of the 1900’s, and even then, it was known as a gay haven, a place where you could let your hair down.

Alice had known Mailer from Brooklyn, when her then-husband Ray Brock, along with the painter and jazz French horn player Bob Swisshelm, had built an unlicensed loft addition on the top floor of Mailer’s brownstone. In the here and now, back in Provincetown, a guy named Peter Manso was working on a Mailer biography – an oral biography, as it happens, put together from a witness list of family, friends, and adversaries, who were willing to talk about Mailer on the record – and the way these things happen, I’d gotten to know Manso.

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Here’s where it gets a little odd. Or the stories may differ. But this is how I understood it to have happened. Manso, sometime previous, had pitched an interview with Roy Cohn to Playboy. This in itself was a big deal, the Playboy interview very high visibility, for the subjects, and Playboy a very high-paying market, for the interviewer. Now, why Roy Cohn? This would have been the winter of 1980. Cohn was working behind the scenes on the Reagan campaign, with Roger Stone, separately representing Donald Trump and Fat Tony Salerno, in New York. All of this was under the radar. I’m wondering, what benefit did Roy Cohn see in giving such an interview, and why did Playboy see it as an attention-grabber for their audience?

In the event, when Manso submitted the interview, Playboy spiked it. Roy Cohn was yesterday’s news. Manso got a kill fee, but he was furious. The way he saw it, Cohn was a window into rightwing dirty politics, for one, going back to the Red Scare, and secondly, Cohn was mercilessly entertaining: he came out with all kinds of juicy stuff, mostly making fun of famous Lefties and their pretensions to political seriousness, and Manso was convinced that this material was what got the promised publication cancelled. Playboy prided itself on being a liberal bellwether, but it was in fact pretty middlebrow. Cohn had gone out of his way to be gratuitously insulting, to brand names from Dick Cavett to Lauren Bacall, at a level of gleeful vitriol that made Playboy clutch their pearls.

Manso had miles and miles of Cohn, on tape. And when Norman Mailer got wind of it, he asked if he could read some of the transcripts. You understand, Mailer is one of those Leftie icons, himself, just as Roy Cohn is no less than Satan in the flesh, to that generation of postwar liberals. Cohn sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair; he was Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel; he was a fixer for Nixon. Mailer devoured the raw, unedited Cohn. And in the end, he decided he wanted to meet Cohn in person.

If you’ve read Mailer’s early book Barbary Shore, it’s an attempt at a Novel of Ideas, and he just isn’t the guy for it, let’s be honest. But there’s a big set piece, where the old, unreconstructed Commie and the corrupt FBI agent face off, and talk past each other in a battle for the soul of America. It was a lot better when Clancy Sigal did it, as drama and as polemic, but that scene prefigures this metafictional moment when Norman Mailer chooses to sit down at table and sup with the Devil.

Stop me if you’ve heard this. Mailer and Roy Cohn get along like two old drunks closing the bar. Not only that, but Mailer and Cohn buy a waterfront property together, along with Manso, in the East End of Provincetown. Mailer and Manso split the main house, Cohn converts the garage. Manso works on the Mailer bio, but after it’s published in 1985, they have a bitter falling-out, and never repair their differences. You might have seen it coming, but that doesn’t make it any less sad.

What you very well might not have seen coming was the gracious relationship that presently developed between Mailer, his wife, Norris Church, and Cohn, as Cohn lived out the last year of his life, dying of AIDS. Cohn had always been closeted, a cliché of the queer-baiting crusader, rooting out the Lavender Mafia in government with Biblical fury. The ironies had long been in the open – “Cohn gave it to Schine,” was an inside joke, during the Army-McCarthy hearings – but now the chickens came home to roost. Cohn pretended it was liver cancer, AIDS was too embarrassing. Trump, of course, had dropped him like a hot rock as soon as word got out Cohn was sick, Trump one of those guys who thinks failure is catching, and terrified of guilt by association, with this unmanly affliction.

Those were plague years, in Provincetown, a visitation of mortality. It took the good, the bad, and the indifferent. There was no sense that the virtuous would be redeemed or the villainous cast down. Roy Cohn, like all too many others, died of AIDS not because he deserved to, but because death didn’t care, one way or the other. I think it says something that this vile little pimp of a man, who never in his life repented of his abuses, or offered an apology, was abandoned by his own, in his extremity, and given refuge by strangers. It was the Mailers who took him under their wing, and gave him some dignity in dying.

I’m not sure there’s a lesson here, exactly, so much as a passing footnote. We don’t know what history will say, or whether we’ll even get to take a bow. Most of us are guilty of omissions, at least, even if we didn’t commit larger injuries, but perhaps we performed the occasional small kindness, as well. It would be nice to be remembered for them. We’ve lived in scoundrel times, after all.