The Life and Death of the Celebrity Author in Maidstone

JUST AS THE TEXT OF NORMAN MAILER'S ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF IS AN attempt to let the reader in on a range of aspects of Norman Mailer's writing life, the paratext of the original 1959 edition is remarkable for its efforts to show the consumer detailed facets of Mailer's image. The cover shows him smiling seductively into the camera, in a white t-shirt and yacht cap, playfully upper-class clothing that resonates with images of Mailer's own existential hero, presidential hopeful Senator John F. Kennedy, who was frequently photographed at the Hyannis Port Yacht Club (Fig. 1). The back cover of the book shows the author in four different poses: in the first, Mailer is the young and brooding author of The Naked and the Dead; in the second, he is the more mature intellectual behind Barbary Shore; the third captures him in a checkered shirt, looking casual and cool, the real-life model for Sergius O'Shaugnessy in The Deer Park; and the fourth portrays him as a bearded beatnik, a middle-aged white hipster with his head resting pensively on his hand (Fig. 2). Showing Mailer from every angle, Advertisements for Myselfoffers up "the real" Mailer for the reader's entertainment. A meditation on both self-expression and self-promotion, Advertisements for Myselfanthologizes Mailer's existential quest for authenticity at the same time as it reveals his performative approach to celebrity authorship. Depicting himself as the authentic author, unfettered by the need to maintain a carefully crafted image, take on false airs, or play a public role, Mailer presents himself as immune to the demands of his critics, his readers, and, most importantly, the market--a strange thing to do in a text entitled "Advertisements for Myself." Featuring the notorious essay "The White Negro," in which Mailer envisions the black hipster as a natural Method actor, Advertisements piggy-backs onto the paradoxical association that it delineates between the black subject as authentic and the black subject as performer in order to open up a space between reality and fantasy that Mailer can use to both political and profitable ends. Honing his ability to take on a variety of roles in the public eye as his celebrity grew in the 1960s, Mailer inspired the BBC documentary Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? (1968) and inspired Laura Adams to comment that "it would appear that [Mailer's] only consistency has been in deviating from commonly accepted literary manners" (4) in the introduction to her 1974 anthology of the same name. [FIGURE 2.1 OMITTED] [FIGURE 2.2 OMITTED] Meeting direct cinema filmmaker Don Pennebaker in the middle of the decade, Mailer began testing the individual's ability to seem authentic and keep "cool" in the sights of the film camera. Making and starring in his third film, Maidstone (1968), Mailer finally got a chance to turn the cameras on the countercultural agenda for which he had recently become a figurehead. Creating a record of the creative and often violent authority that always exists behind the image of "the real," Maidstone reveals the ways in which the counterculture's utopian vision of reality is just another ideological construct that, unfortunately, often emulates the mainstream social hierarchies it claims to oppose. But in the end, Maidstone is most memorable for what it tells us about Mailer himself. Finally showing audiences what seems to "really" be the "real" Mailer--a Mailer who seems anything but cool--Maidstone manifests Mailer's own masterful manipulation of the fine line between representation and reality that made his authorial career a media success. Locating both individual freedom and political power in the ability to pass the real off as simulation and simulation off as the real, Maidstone reminds us that Mailer matters because he used his celebrity to demonstrate the individual's potential for resisting authority and redefining reality--even if this potential could only be practically realized by an elite few. …