NORMAN MAILER
179
f
A:
It's really crowded with material. That brings up another question:
how did you get together this great volume of information? I mean,
were you on the scene during the whole of the last days, the last
weeks before Gilmore's execution?
NM:
No. In fact, I read about it in the papers, like everyone else, and
was equally fascinated. I felt I might just understand what Gilmore
was doing. But I didn't think about it anymore than that. Then after,
oh, a month after the execution, Larry Schiller called me. Now,
Schiller and I worked together on my book
Marilyn,
closely at one
point, and very badly at another. There was a period when we didn't
even speak for six months. After that, we did a short book on graffiti
together.
As
with
Marilyn,
he got the photographs and I wrote the
text for it. Our relations became friendly again. Now he called me to
read an interview with Gilmore that he and Barry Farrell had done
for
Playboy.
I thought it was the best interview I'd ever read. So I got
the idea it would be nice to direct a play out of that dialogue. Schiller
said, "You can, but first you have to write the book." I was going
well on my Egyptian novel at that point, and didn ' t really want to
give it up. He sent me more material and then Warner Paperbacks
offered a good sum, and I thought: "I can do this book in six months.
It will give me more time to work on the novel." Of course, once
again, six months took two years. Make uch an error in estimate on
two books, as I have, and you are seriously in debt. But to do the job
in six months would have slaughtered all the possibilities of doing
something exceptional. Schiller had been doing a lot of interviews
before I came in, and I spent the first six months wandering around
in bewilderment trying to put people and events together. I really
had to work it out. Try encountering a hundred names at once. It's
like looking at the laid-out pieces of a clock.
fA:
So you essentially drew on the material that Schiller had already
gathered. He had first rights, didn't he, to all the stories of almost all
the principals?
NM:
He had acquired rights to the principals. Also, he had done about
sixty interviews before I came aboard. After that, he did another forty
or fifty. I probably did almost as many. A lot were follow-up. I had
the advantage of reading the initial interview he'd done, and he's a
very good interviewer. But I must have collected a hundred inter–
views on my own. Then my secretary, Judith McNally, proved to be a
marvelous interviewer and she talked to a lot of people toward the
end, a lot of lawyers-she has a fine legal mind for a layman-and
much of the jurisprudence in the book comes from her research. I'm
