At a 1981 press conference before New York media, a grim-faced Norman Mailer held up that day’s edition of The Post. A headline blared, “Norman Mailer Shocker: I’d Help Killer Again.” The city was aghast, Mailer lobbed a $2 million libel suit against the paper, and a law-abiding restaurant manager was dead.
The headlined killer in this disaster tale was Jack Henry Abbott, a lifetime product of the American prison system and an unlikely darling of Manhattan’s literary scene.
In the guilt-stink of “Radical Chic” — a term coined by Tom Wolfe after Leonard Bernstein hosted an event in his home that brought together society types and the Black Panthers — Abbott’s prison memoir, “In The Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison,” was poised to be published to rave reviews and best-seller status.
The collision of macho posturing, a publishing industry hungry for authenticity and an ex-con whose considerable literary gifts were tragically overshadowed by jailhouse paranoia are all chronicled in “Jack and Norman” (St. Martin’s Press), by Jerome Loving, out Tuesday.
Long before Abbott entered the picture, Mailer thrived on his reputation as an Ivy League brawler. He punched out Gore Vidal, stabbed his wife and, as Loving tells The Post, he was “a tough guy in the way that Hemingway was a tough guy. Mailer boxed until he was 60, got drunk and fought people in the street; he once got into a confrontation with somebody who made fun of his dog. Mailer had a bad temper and would not back down from anyone, but he had never been in a true danger zone. Abbott with a knife was very dangerous — and he often had a knife on him.”
In early 1978, Mailer was working out of a windowless, prison cell of an office inside his Brooklyn Heights brownstone. His factual novel about Gary Gilmore, “The Executioner’s Song,” which would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize, was due to the publisher in six months. But Mailer had a problem: He could not get inside his subject’s head.
So when he received a stunningly well-written letter from Abbott, it must have felt like kismet. Less than four years later, however, their relationship would resemble a hellish fever dream. For the moment, Abbott served a purpose. He not only did time in the same prisons as Gilmore but also had insights about the man and his thought processes. He provided Mailer with information that allowed entree to the mind of a murderer and elucidation on what happens within jailhouse walls. As Mailer conveyed to Abbott, “There are parts of this book that I don’t pretend to understand, and prison life is a big part of it.”
Abbott fixed that problem with eloquent, handwritten missives that ran to 50 pages. “Mailer read the letters,” says Loving. “He kind of fell in love with Abbott as a correspondent. Mailer’s letters back, of course, were not as long. Prisoners have plenty of time for letter writing.”
In the acknowledgments of his book, published in 1979, Mailer thanked Abbott for his assistance. Abbott, however, was looking for more than gratitude.
He had hoped to latch onto a prestigious figure who could help get him out of jail. In that regard, Mailer and Abbott were using each other. Abbott provided Mailer with details for his book. And Mailer, though he must not have realized this until it was too late, had been cornered into getting an early release for a killer.
When it counted, Mailer vouched for Abbott’s literary talents — on full display in pieces published in 1980 editions of the New York Review of Books and a book contract he landed with Random House for his prison tale — and promised to employ him as an assistant.
“There was a point when Mailer knew he was getting in too deep,” says Loving. “I think he realized . . . when Abbott got out of jail in June 1981. Nobody expected him to be released for another two or three years. Mailer found himself kind of baby-sitting the guy — and [Mailer] wanted to get back to his next book, ‘Ancient Evenings.’ So his wife and daughter wound up taking care of Abbott.”
Wasn’t that a dangerous move, considering Abbott had killed people and was freshly sprung from prison? “Women annoyed Abbott,” says Loving. “But not in the same way that men did.”
Nevertheless, Mailer’s then-wife, Norris Church, was hardly thrilled with the idea of the ex-con working in their home, following them to their summer retreat in Provincetown, Mass., and living in New York City under her husband’s watch. “Didn’t you learn anything from writing about Gary Gilmore?” she asked Mailer. “Somebody who’s been in prison his whole life can’t just change and be a normal person overnight.”
Few people seemed to share her concerns. Abbott’s editor was It boy Erroll McDonald (a running buddy of Jay McInerney’s) and the book had Manhattan’s literary scene abuzz. Abbott appeared on “Good Morning America” on TV, right after actor Dudley Moore, with Mailer at his side. Celebrity photographer Jill Krementz photographed the jailbird. Robert De Niro was being bandied about to play Abbott in a film version of “Belly.”
Lavish dinners were thrown to herald his arrival. But Abbott was uptight and introverted at these affairs, refusing to sit with his back to the room. He showed his true colors on a shopping trip with McDonald. When a Macy’s clerk said that alterations on his freshly purchased trousers could not be done immediately, Abbott asked for a pair of scissors so he could administer them himself.
Things were not helped by the former convict’s habit of keeping a knife on him at all times — McDonald was dismayed to see it strapped to his ankle during an editorial sit-down. Making things worse, Abbott was remanded to a halfway house in the East Village at a time when the neighborhood teemed with vagrants, heroin and punk rock.
Nevertheless, Abbott made the most of his high-tone success, and certain women found his outlaw ways to be intoxicating. On the night of July 17, 1981, he was out with two ladies. They danced and drank at a German beer garden before taking an ill-fated stroll to Binibon, a 24-hour restaurant on the corner of Second Avenue and Fifth Street.
What went down there radically changed at least three lives — those of Mailer, Abbott and 22-year-old restaurant manager Richard Adan — after Abbott asked for directions to the restroom.
Adan told him that it was for employees only, suggesting that Abbott urinate outside in an alleyway, near a dumpster. Adan followed Abbott out of the restaurant, supposedly offering to make sure nobody spotted his customer relieving himself in public. After Abbott did his business, he irrationally claimed that Adan was about to assault him, and got heated. Wanting none of it, Adan turned around and proceeded back to the restaurant. Abbott followed him. Attacking from behind, Abbott grabbed Adan’s neck and stuck a knife into his heart.
Stunned, with just seconds to live, Adan voiced his final words: “Are you crazy? You didn’t have to kill me.”
Abbott left his victim laying in a bloody mess on the pavement. He returned to his female companions in the restaurant as dawn encroached over Manhattan. “I just killed a man,” Abbott said before making a hasty exit and preparing to go on the lam.
One day after the murder, the New York Times ran a rave review of Abbott’s book. Laudatory prose characterized it as “awesome, brilliant, perversely ingenuous.”
Clearly, the jailhouse author’s bona fides were beyond reproach. Among publishing’s macho poseurs, he stood out, tragically, as the authentic article. On September 23, 1981, a little more than two months after Abbott plunged the knife, a dogged New York City detective by the name of William Majeski arrested the fugitive in Morgan City, La., where he was unloading trucks for $4 per hour, hoping to finance a trip to Cuba.
A jury found Abbott guilty of first-degree manslaughter and he received a sentence of 15 years to life. But his stretch ended prematurely. Abbott committed suicide in 2002, using shoelaces and bedsheets to orchestrate a prison-cell hanging. In a “60 Minutes” segment that aired after Abbott killed himself, Mailer sounded chastened. “I think a lot of people are partially responsible, and I’m the foremost of them,” said the author, who himself would die some five years later in 2007.
“It’s obviously something I’m going to carry for the rest of my life.”