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Here I am making a quarter-of-a-million-dollar sale on my book, and you keep trying to sit on Lancaster's lap." Finally when Burt got up to call the Gotham for our messages, Norman said, "Gee, thanks Shelley.
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I couldn't figure out what I could play in that book, so I kept trying to change the subject. Norman Mailer sat down with us and began talking to Burt about buying his great war novel, "The Naked and the Dead," for a film. Shelley Winters, actor: Looking for a film deal I was deliberately careful to use the qualifying word "woman.") He said he would be "the best novelist of our time" (no qualification).įrom "Here but Not Here: My Life With William Shawn and the New Yorker," by Lillian Ross (Random House, 1998) I said I wanted to be "the best woman reporter in the world." (It was before women's lib. Mailer has an uneasy feeling that Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, between them, have written everything worth writing, but he nevertheless means to go on turning out novels.") After that, although he told me he didn't think much of my "ear" for his talk, we became friends. ("Mailer is a good-looking fellow of twenty-five, with blue eyes and big ears, a soft voice, and a forthright manner. I had written a "Talk of the Town" story about him in 1948, when his first book, "The Naked and the Dead," was published and became a best-seller. Lillian Ross, staff writer for the New Yorker: His goal (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1947)įrom "Timebends: A Life," by Arthur Miller (Grove Press, 1987) (I am at the age when it is best to be charitable.) In any event, although we lived for years in the same neighborhood, our paths rarely crossed. Since I was at a time when I was hammering out my place in the world, I made few friends then, and Mailer struck me as someone who seemed to want to make converts rather than friends, so our impulses, essentially similar, could hardly mesh. It was so obtusely flat an assertion that I began to laugh, but he was completely serious and indeed would make intermittent attempts to write plays in the many years that lay ahead.
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"I could write a play like that," he said. Later the young soldier, by now out of uniform, approached me on the street and introduced himself as a writer. They went silent on seeing me, so I figured everything was under control and went back into our apartment. Thinking violence was about to break out, I opened the door to find a small young man in army uniform sitting on the stairs with a young and beautiful woman whom I recognized as our upstairs neighbor. We were living then in a converted brownstone on Pierpont Street whose normal quiet was blasted one afternoon by a yelling argument in the hallway outside. (New York, 1943)įrom "Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me," by Marlon Brando with Robert Lindsey (Random House, 1994)Īrthur Miller, playwright: Seeking converts So I pretended to be a Texan." He said he had been out of the army for about eight months, but still hadn't broken the habit. "It was protective coloration," he said, "because if you were a Jew in the army, they called you all kinds of names, teased you and made it hard on you. "But why would you get a Texas accent in the army?" I'm sure I had a look of puzzlement on my face. "How did you get that Texas accent?" I asked. When we started talking, one man spoke with a thick Texas accent, so I asked him where he was from. One afternoon I went to a cafeteria on Fourth Street and Seventh Avenue and sat down beside two men.