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Love of My Life

Barbara Mailer Wasserman

By Ron Fried
Published: Nov 07, 2021
Category: Memoir

GUEST BUTLER RON FRIED is the author of two novels, as well as a collection of profiles of 20th century boxing trainers. More recently, he’s written a novel about the gangster Frank Costello, as well as a play about Norman Mailer, which is slated for an off-Broadway production in 2022.

At the age of 94, Barbara Mailer Wasserman, Norman Mailer’s splendid sister, has just published her first book. Her memoir, Love of My Life, is not merely an account of what it was like to be the sister of the most controversial American writer of the post-War generation, a man who, as Wasserman puts it, “always made the air bounce.” It’s also a portrait of what life was like for a generation of extremely bright and adventurous—and often frustrated—women. It captures a moment when the intelligentsia indulged in plenty of sex, booze, and passionate conversation, all of which made wish I could have hung out with Barbara back in the day.

When one of Barbara’s cousins was a little girl, she was told she was about to meet a genius. The genius was the then seven-year-old Norman Mailer. That tells you something about what life was like in the Mailer family, where young Norman was treated like a prince. Under the watchful eye of their fierce, opinionated mother, the Mailer children came of age in Depression-era Brooklyn — as Barbara puts it, “the world felt Jewish, even though I knew it wasn’t.”

On her fifteenth birthday, Norman gave his sister a copy of both Moby Dick and Freud’s An Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Barbara followed her brother’s lead, attending Radcliffe in 1943 while Norman—and many of the other young men in her life—went off to war. In her senior year, she was told if she didn’t want to be teacher, she “had better learn shorthand” so she could become a secretary.

Instead of taking dictation at some dreary office, Barbara headed to Paris, which turned out to be pretty great: “It was extraordinary to be an American in Europe in those early post-war years when we were all looked upon as saviors. It was possibly the only time in history when one could be both rich and loved. Even the French treated us with a modicum of affection.”

During an automobile trip through Europe, Barbara, Norman, and his first wife, Beatrice, stopped at the American Express office in Nice where Norman opened his forwarded mail and discovered that his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, had become a big deal. Barbara captures the life-changing moment:

“’Gee,’ he [Norman] said in a small boy’s voice, ‘I’m first on The Times bestseller list.’ Suddenly we were shrieking with laughter. There we were, tired and grubby from a long day’s drive, the little car was a mess, and my brother was creating this stir three thousand miles away. It seemed so remote as to be absurd.”

This may have been the last time Norman spoke with “a small boy’s voice.”

Soon Barbara, whose “politics were less militant than romantic,” was given the opportunity to help smuggle two political prisoners out of Franco’s Spain. She headed south on her mission in the company of the writer Barbara Probst Solomon, who would prove to be a lifelong friend. The story of how the two young women managed to sneak the prisoners out of Spain thanks to their courage, naivete, and good luck, would make for a fine, thrilling film.

Barbara’s next stop was the Greenwich Village of the 1950s, where romance was in the air, there seemed to always be a party to go to, and a small Manhattan apartment could be had for reasonable rent. But post-war America remained a place where one’s parents were shocked at the notion of women having sex outside of marriage. And job opportunities for women still involved serving the professional class rather than being a part of it. Barbara married, she says, at least in part, because at the age of 23, it was thought she was “pushing the old maid envelope.”

That marriage was marked by Barbara’s agonized, on-again-off-again romance with the charismatic artist Harry Jackson. At one point, Barbara left her husband and young son behind to go off to Italy for a month with Jackson. “Harry was the first lover I’d ever had whose presence made me feel intensely alive, the way Norman had made me feel when we were young,” she writes. Her second marriage to Al Wasserman, a documentary filmmaker, proved to be less turbulent, more satisfying, and longer lasting. Barbara went on to a career as a researcher on television documentaries and an editor at a publishing house.

In 1960, in the most notorious act of Norman Mailer’s tumultuous life, he stabbed and nearly killed his second wife, Adele Morales. When Barbara went to break the news to her intensely loyal mother, she took along a friend for support. Her mother’s reaction reminded her friend of a Mafia matriarch who would protect her son at all costs. Barbara devotes much of this memoir to sorting through her relationship to this indomitable Jewish mother who an enduring presence in her children’s lives. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

I had a virtual chat with Barbara about her life and her brother, whose most abiding lesson may have been the existential principle that “if you act stronger than you feel, you often end up feeling as strong as you act.”

RF: For me, the most shocking thing in the book is that as a Radcliffe graduate you were told your work options were to teach or learn shorthand. Was that shocking to you at the time?

BW: (Laughs) No, no. There were very few things that one could do at the time, unless you’d studied in a way that gave you a specific skill. But I had no particular skill, other than my degree in the history of literature. Really, the expectation was that we were all going to get married.

RF: The account of your mission to rescue prisoners from Franco’s Spain was pretty amazing. Did you not understand the risks you were taking?

BW: We certainly didn’t understand. We knew there were risks, but we didn’t understand them. Because of the attitude towards Americans in Western Europe at the time, we felt that we had saved the world, and therefore nobody was going to do anything terrible to us.

RF: You devoted a great deal of time to the research of your parents’ lives. What stays with you the most about what you learned?

BW:I began to have a better sense of my relationship to Judaism. Even though I’m not religious, I saw how imbued by it I was. And also how extraordinary it is to have that sense of family, where there really is a kind of loyalty that is probably not that pervasive. I think it comes from the fierceness of the mothers, particularly the mothers on my mother’s side, which a certain strain of Eastern European families had.

RF: Can you talk about the effect that reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex had on you?

BW: It was really eye-opening, the whole notion of women thinking of themselves as “the other” rather than as a subject. What it means is that, as a woman, one did not think that one had the rights that men took for granted.

RF: How did you feel when your brother became the target of this movement that you believed in — feminism?

BW: I knew how feminists felt about Norman and resented it to a great extent. I really never felt part of the feminist movement because I just so disagreed with the anti-male attitude — I didn’t feel that way about men myself.

RF: You often gave your brother feedback on the things he wrote, and I take it he wasn’t always pleased by what you had to say.

BW: He hated me to criticize him for anything. (laughs) At one point he said to me, “You’re a terrible editor.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Because you’re mean.” (laughs) He said that because I’d made maybe half a dozen quibbles about a book he’d written.

RF: This is your first book. Do you think if Norman hadn’t been your brother, you would have written more or written earlier?

BW: Perhaps. I did feel after ‘The Naked and the Dead,’ ‘Oh, why bother? He’s done it, I’m not that good, and why do it?’ I wanted to be a writer and I finally wrote myself into a box.

RF: Norman says in the book that while your mother loved you both, she never taught you to deal with people who didn’t love you. Did you—or your brother—ever learn how to do that?

BW: I don’t think either of us ever learned. (Laughs.) Norman tried to handle it more than I did, but I don’t think he ever did learn how to really handle it.

RF: Do think it’s better to be a woman now than when you were young?

BW: Yes and no. I think women expect more of themselves today than we did then. I think I probably would have done much more. But I think I would not have had as enjoyable a life. There was not as much pressure to do as many things as are expected of women now, not only have families and love affairs, but work is enormously important, whereas then it was not. And while that was terrible in a way, in some ways it made some lives easier.