Remaining, vs renaming, The Cape Cod Voice
Norman Mailer’s help, and then some, kept us alive
Mailer, from a superb 2007 Voice interview with Michael Lee, five years after the Village Voice fiasco. Photo by Barry A. Donahue
A quick recap of part one:
A year after starting The Cape Cod Voice, I received a call from The Village Voice in Manhattan threatening to put us out of business unless we stopped using the word “Voice.” After figuring out that this wasn’t some sick joke, I started marshaling resources to invoke the First Amendment and fight back. That led me to the door of a handsome brick home in Provincetown, heart pounding, waiting to be received by an American icon by the name of Norman Mailer.
One more note: Omitting profanity would not be true to Mailer’s style, content, or legacy, so it remains.
******
As he stood at the threshold, gesturing for me to come in, I remembered that though I thought of him as huge, he was a short burly guy. His mischievous blue eyes twinkled and glittered, lines around them crinkling as if to imply that all of his muscular prose, confrontational antics, political controversies, iconoclastic pronouncements, transcendent insights, dumb movie scenes, cultural interventions, had been accomplished while pumping from a well of great good humor and idealism -- even if camouflaged by political intrigue, conspiracy theories that too often turned out to be true, thorny relationships that too often turned bad, episodic violence and rage.
“How’s Norris?” I asked, meaning his wife.
“Good, but away,” said Mailer, padding into the living room overlooking Cape Cod Bay, his thick, short, bowed legs exposed under baggy briefs, reminding me of his interest in boxing. “I’d offer you a drink but I’m trying not to go there so much.”
“Don’t let me be a bad influence.”
“So what the fuck is this now?” he asked as we settled down.
He heard my account, and ran stubby fingers through his curly gray mop.
“I was one of the founders of that newspaper,” he growled. “Me and two other guys. It was my name, the Voice, but I figured you probably knew that, maybe your choice was a little tip of the hat?”
“I wish I could say yes, but no.”
“It’s a good name, original or not.” And there were the blue eyes, just to be sure I caught the little dig.
“So,” he asked, “have you decided what your new name will be?”
He pursed his lips, then we burst into laughter.
“My hunch,” he mused, “is that these assholes have some ambulance chaser on a cheap retainer to single out publications that are young and vulnerable, and pick them off. Like hyenas at the edge of a herd. You’re new, you’re small, you’re a target. They might be in for a surprise though, because you have more resources and more balls than they expect.”
We talked strategy, he offered a plan. And then I stood to go. I always wanted to ask how his writing was going but never did, because I knew he worried that talking about it would diminish what he had left for the pages; he referred to it as a kind of masturbation.
He had many less prurient theories about writing. For example, there was “the diamond”:
“Every writer has an internal diamond,” he once told me, “a hard nugget at the core. Every story passes through that diamond. When the light of an idea passes through the facets of that diamond, that light prisms into colors, and that allows a writer to create variety. So the key is to shine light through the diamond, see how it refracts, but never, ever, try to write about the diamond itself. Because if you do, you pulverize it, and it no longer serves as your prism.”
I remember taking a breath and chancing a question: “Would it be bad form to guess what your diamond might be?”
“Let’s hear it.”
“I think it’s your relationship with your parents.”
“Why the hell would you say that?”
“Because I’ve never heard you talk about them, let alone write about them.”
“What are you, some shrink now?” Those blue eyes crinkled from a faux scowl into lines of enjoyment.
A few days passed and I got a letter to the editor that I printed as fast as print deadlines allowed back then:
26 November, 2002
Dear Seth,
In 1955, Ed Fancher, Don Wolf and myself were the founding fathers of The Village Voice. I also came up with the name --- not a bad name for a small independent newspaper.
So I read of your troubles with woe. The notion that you must change the title of the Cape Cod Voice because the corporate legal and editorial types who now own the Village Voice feel that your presence might conceivably come to a possible loss of future profit for them is enough to make one retch. It’s monstrous. It violates everything that The Village Voice stood for over the decades. But you can’t stop a young corporate type who’s never been embarrassed by himself.
Yours in outrage,
Norman Mailer
Then the anonymous phone rang again, this time a Washington Post reporter who wanted to do a story on the “amazing irony” that the Village Voice would try to “strong-arm” another independent newspaper while “stomping all over the First Amendment.”
“How’d you hear about me?” I asked, though I knew.
“We have a mutual acquaintance,” he said. “A famous mutual acquaintance.”
Then came phone calls from The New York Times, The Boston Globe, National Public Radio.
But the phone never rang again with Gregg Goff on the line. For a long time I wasn’t sure whether the bad publicity was sufficient to drive them off. Then a couple of years later my managing editor Dan Hamilton happened to be in a Vermont bed and breakfast where he met some people over eggs and coffee. Turned out they worked at the Village Voice. When he explained where he worked, they freaked out and told him this:
After all the media attention, a group of employees got together and went into the publisher’s office to inform him that if he didn’t stop this harassment and profound embarrassment, they would quit.
Mailer and I only talked a couple times after that. His funeral was open casket, not something Jews are supposed to do but of course he could do whatever he wanted. His face in death was nearly unrecognizable because animation defined him, lips pursing, blue eyes squinting, mouth fomenting another phrase, hands running through his hair.
But strange as he looked I wanted to tell him one more thing, so I leaned over and whispered, “Thanks, Norman, wherever the fuck you and your diamond are.”
NEXT: A PUBLIC MOVE TO TAKE THE SEA CAMPS BECOMES ‘FRIENDLY’
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Terrific story!
what a great memory. You really had me sitting right there in his home... Bravo