1960 New Yorkers awoke on Monday morning, 22 November, to read in the New York Times that the city’s most famous novelist might be writing his future works from Sing Sing. He had been arrested a few hours earlier, charged with stabbing his 37-year-old wife Adele in the abdomen, chest and back. She was in critical condition at University Hospital, having been driven there in a private car.
It was fascinating stuff, but there was much confusion about what had happened. As the Times reported:
According to the police of the West 100th Street station, where the 37-year-old writer was being held, Mrs Mailer told physicians at the hospital that she had fallen on glass in her apartment at 250 West 94th Street. The physicians were suspicious and notified the police.
It had not been a good week for Mailer, as regards the law. He had been arrested a few days before on a disorderly conduct charge after an argument over a $7.60 bill at the Birdland jazz nightclub (he attempted to pay by credit card, illegal where liquor was purchased, and became violent with the waiter).
When detectives went to question Mrs Mailer, she was reluctant to talk to them, claiming to be too ill. She finally conceded that Norman had stabbed her at a party on Sunday around 5.00am, for ‘no reason that she could offer’.
He had ‘suddenly walked up to her, looked at her, stabbed her with what she thought was a penknife or clasp knife, and left the apartment’. He returned and drove her to the hospital, some ten hours later. He was arrested when he came to visit her, late on Sunday night. He denied everything and was paroled on Monday morning.
It all blew over, thanks to Adele’s refusing to press charges (had she done so, the novelist would certainly have served time in prison). Mailer, six times married, kept none of his wives long (although in the other cases his divorce procedures were more orthodox).
Adele, after separation, went on to pursue a successful career as an alternative healer. She wrote a late-life memoir, in which she recalled her version of the stabbing episode. The weapon in question had been ‘a dirty three-inch penknife’. In those hours in the apartment before she went to hospital he had gone down tearfully on his knees, she recalled, begging her not to prosecute. It would ruin him. Mailer (in imagination, at least) went through with the uxoricide more manfully, in his novel published later in the year, An American Dream. The narrative opens with the hero, Rojack, strangling his wife before proceeding to anally rape her German maid. All in the Mailerian day, one apprehends.