Of course Mailer and Vidal had a proper feud. They even both referred to it as such, and it actually got physical more than once.
Here's the scuttlebutt:
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Vidal and Norman Mailer first met at a mutual friend’s Manhattan apartment in 1952. Mailer had made a huge splash with The Naked and the Dead, his bestselling novel of the Pacific war, frustrating Vidal, whose own war novel, Williwaw, had barely registered. The two young writers circled each other warily, and a complicated friendship began that would play out over the next five decades. The two had little in common. “Norman imagined himself by nature a kind of boxer – though he wasn’t, not really,” says Gay Talese, a friend to both men. “In reality, Norman was soft. But he put on this aggressive mask. Vidal had another kind of mask: cool, suave, worldly-wise. It was a good contrast with Norman. They played well together, but it was always a kind of act. They both understood the publicity value of this contest, and they let it play out in different ways.”
The real trouble started in 1971, when Vidal chose to review Mailer’s incendiary book about the feminist movement, The Prisoner of Sex. He dismissed Mailer, combining him with two other macho men, Henry Miller and the murderer Charles Manson, to create a single male aggressor and sexist pig he called “M3”. Vidal wrote: “Women are not going to make it until M3 is reformed, and that is going to take a long time.”
Needless to say, Mailer didn’t enjoy being compared to the likes of Manson. Never, by his own admission, one to pass up the opportunity to be on television, Vidal accepted an offer from Dick Cavett to appear on his talk show with Mailer. In the green room, according to Mailer, Vidal put a warm hand on the back of his neck, a gesture that he interpreted as veiled aggression. Mailer answered with a not-so playful swipe on the cheek. Much to Mailer’s surprise, Vidal slapped him back. Then Mailer leaned forward like a boxer and, in a move that suggested to Vidal he had been drinking, winked before headbutting his cheek.
On the show, Mailer expressed his disapproval of Vidal, saying he was intellectually shameless. Somewhat clumsily, he described Vidal’s writing as “no more interesting than the stomach of an intellectual cow”. Vidal ignored him, offering an innocent smile. But Mailer attacked again, asking him why he didn’t, for once, speak to him directly instead of talking to the audience. Then he attacked Vidal for alluding to the fact that Mailer had stabbed his wife in 1960, calling him “a liar and a hypocrite”. Vidal didn’t flinch. Instead, he remained eerily calm when Mailer asked him to apologise for comparing him to Manson. “I would apologise if – if it hurts your feelings, of course I would,” said Vidal. Mailer replied: “No, it hurts my sense of intellectual pollution.” Vidal smiled serenely. “Well,” he said, “I must say that as an expert, you should know about such things.” The conversation grew ever more hostile, but – as anyone who watches a clip of this broadcast will notice – Vidal never lost control of himself. On the other hand, Mailer came off as a bully.
The two avoided each other for some years, but their rivalry came to a head in 1977, when Vidal and his partner, Howard Austen, were passing through New York. “Howard adored New York,” said Vidal. “I never did. It has all of the filth and confusion of Calcutta without the cultural amenities.”
One night they attended a party for Princess Margaret, before going on to an expansive apartment owned by Lally Weymouth, a journalist and daughter of Katherine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post. More than 100 guests crammed together. “You could hardly breathe,” Austen recalled, “everyone standing shoulder to shoulder.” It was a glittering affair, with Mailer, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, JK Galbraith, Gay Talese, William Styron and Jerry Brown – Vidal’s future rival for a senate seat in California – among the guests. (cont.)
