Jerusalem-based journalist Elli Wohlgelernter, Sports and Pop Music Editor of the new Encyclopaedia Judaica (among many other things), who we expect will become a regular contributor to In My Heart, writes (courtesy of TabloidBaby):
“I only met Norman Mailer once, at the Ali-Norton fight at Yankee Stadium, September 28, 1976. It was a controversial fight then, and the result – an Ali win by decision – remains in question to this day. I thought Norton had won, as did he and many others. After the fight – I had jumped over the railing and was sitting in the eighth row ringside – Mailer stood and discussed with everyone who was milling around why he thought Ali won, showing his notes round by round, and why Ali’s use of his Rope-a-Dope trick had saved him, as it had against Foreman two years earlier (the subject of his book, The Fight).
“Standing nearby was his latest and last wife, the lovely model Norris Church. A bunch of fellas from the ‘hood, watching Mailer’s pontification over the fight, asked, ‘Who’s he?’
“Informed he was one of the preeminent writers of our time, they were uninterested. ‘Yeah? Who’s da broad?’” (more…)
Categories: Americans · Artists · Athletes · Celebrities · Journalists · Politicians · Writers
Tagged: ali, breslin, mailer, mayor, new-york-city, norton, reminiscence
The words have not stopped flowing since author Norman Mailer, 84, died November 10, 2007, of renal failure. He has been called a Jewish pugilist, a towering writer with a matching ego, and nothing if not ambitious.
We call him the greatest Jewish-American novelist who never wrote about Jewish subjects. It was Mailer’s ambition to get away from his upbringing as a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn that led him to a life of writing about arts and sports giants like Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Ali, and murderers and tyrants like Gary Gilmore and Adolph Hitler, rather than subjects closer to his own origins, as his contemporaries Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud have done.
We found two pieces that captured some of Mailer’s Jewish essence, as well as all the other facets of his life.
Mailer and his work was influenced by controversial psychiatrist and sex researcher, Wilhelm Reich, whose 50th yahrzeit passed this month.
Categories: Americans · Celebrities · Hollywood · Journalists · Veterans · Writers
Tagged: ali, author, hitler, mailer, monroe, obituaries, picasso, vietnam
