Norman Mailer Stabs Wife — New York City, 1960
“ Mailer went down into the street to fight…”
In November 1960 the heir to the throne of Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, had decided to enter the race for New York Mayor, and was intending to make an informal announcement during a 30th birthday party he was throwing for the Bronx born boxer Roger Donoghue. A press conference was planned for a day or two later to make a formal announcement: he was to put himself forward as the candidate who, in the words of George Plimpton, “…would represent the disenfranchised of the city.” Mailer’s wife, Adele Morales was none too happy about it.
The party was held in the Mailers 94th Street apartment, and was a packed affair, with over two-hundred guests, including the poet Allen Ginsberg, who had something of an altercation with the influential writer and editor Norman Podhoretz who’d told Ginsberg he’d never make it as a poet unless he left the ‘Beats’. Ginsberg lost his rag and started shouting at the influential editor. An increasingly inebriated Mailer intervened just in time to stop a fight (although Ginsberg always said he had no intention of getting violent); it was that sort of party.
As J. Michael Lennon writes in his biography of Mailer:
“ Scuffles kept breaking out as the party wore on. Larry Alson… remembers that people kept challenging…
