Norman Mailer's Stabbing of Adele Morales

Background

During the 1950's and 1960's, there was speculation that Norman Mailer would often partake in many types of drugs and alcohol. People close to Mailer said he had a short temper and would frequently engage in head-butting, arm-wrestling, and random punch-throwing. For much of the '50s, he drifted, frequently drunk or stoned or both. This is considered to be a result of his habit of overspending and recent projects not performing as well as his previous works.

Norman was waiting on a hearing of a charge of disorderly conduct because of a tussle over a tab of $7.60 the week before at a jazz club, Birdland. The Mailers had been married for six years at that point. Adele told the arresting detectives the night of November 20th that he had been displaying "homicidal tendencies" and their family had been attempting to get him to see a psychiatrist.

The Incident

While Mailer was running for mayor of New York City, he hosted a party to boost his campaign on November 19, 1960. The attendees of this event witnessed Mailer's irregular mental state at the time, as it was reported that alongside the formal guests, many individuals had come straight from the streets.. Mailer cursed and told the crowd to shut up when being interrupted. He shouted: “You’re nothing but a bunch of spoiled pigs!” . As the hours passed, many of the guests including Mailer had become heavily intoxicated, and quarrels broke out. An argument between Mailer and his sister, thought to be regarding the campaign, came up, resulting in Mailer assaulting her. The Mailer couple themselves began arguing when Adele Morales tried to defend her. It was reported that Mailer had begun physically attacking the other guests and then proceeded to leave and fight those who were not involved with the party. When he had returned at around 4:30 a.m., witnesses say that Morales taunted Mailer's masculinity and literary talents during their argument.

She yelled “Toro! Toro!” to further ridicule Mailer’s bullfighter fetish, their routine of making public displays of their distress hit bottom. In a blind rage, Mailer thrust with a penknife and with two striking blows. He stabbed Morales once in the back and once in the upper abdomen, near her heart. As she lay there, hemorrhaging, a man at the party came to assist her and Mailer yelled, "Get away from her. Let the bitch die.".

Reports state that Morales was not taken to the hospital until three hours after the altercation. After arriving at the hospital, she said that she was at a party and fell onto a broken bottle, though doctors were skeptical. She told the police later that "He didn't say anything, he just looked at me. He didn't say a word. He just stabbed me".

The Aftermath

Mailer was arrested at the hospital at around 10 pm. Morales did not press charges to protect her daughters. Mailer was charged with felonious assault and his psych was watched closely. Initially, Mailer pleaded “not guilty,” but later changed his plea to “guilty” to avoid harmful publicity for his family. Mailer was later committed to Bellevue Mental Hospital. "I was very upset because my feeling was I committed a crime." Mailer said. His criminal lawyer had suggested he go to the hospital. "He was thinking like a criminal lawyer" Mailer said. They used the mental hospital as a way to save him had his wife did end up dying from the injuries inflicted upon her. Mailer hated this, he felt he would go crazy if he'd be there any longer. Mailer briefly sat in jail, before being court-ordered to Bellevue for 17 days. In less than one month, he was back home. After plea bargaining was agreed to, Mailer’s reduced charges led to a suspended sentence and probation. Yet in an aftermath dominated by friends, family members, colleagues, and other enablers rallying to Norman, it became clear that he’d be “protected” and Adele, for all intent and purposes, was left to recover from her wounds and resume her life. Morales never made a full recovery. She developed pleurisy and found herself coughing up black phlegm several times throughout the day. Several years later, she fell into poverty and became an alcoholic.

Personal Response

After being remanded to Bellevue, Mailer confessed to the judge: “I feel I did a lousy, dirty, cowardly thing.”In an interview, Mailer was asked if he drank often. Mailer went on to say the only time he ever drank heavily was when a marriage was breaking up. When asked why Mailer stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, Mailer opts out of talking about it saying that he'd maybe write about it later. He was then asked if he hated women to which he responds that he doesn't hate them; however, he does get irritated with them differently than he does with men. Mailer said he considers himself "apart of the generation, who considers fucking up an interesting way to express yourself, a way to do things." When asked how he considers himself one, he mentions how he'd lost some books that could've been written, but he was too absorbed in himself and his problems. He thinks he's one because he went into debt. Nowhere does he mention the stabbing of his wife Adele.

Critical Response

Mailer's published poem in 1962 indirectly poking at the stabbing has received criticism. It reads, "So long as you use a knife, there's some love left."Despite his sentence to Bellevue Hospital, he continued to spend later years facing public scrutiny for the event.

Susan Mailer, in her 2019 memoir, said in her book, In Another Place: with and Without My Father, Norman Mailer, that she "had no choice but to face with considerable angst what this painful episode meant to me and my family." She admits she was afraid of her father, but she also understood her fears of him: "He had stabbed his wife, my stepmother, Adele." Mailer adds, "We had to deal with the shame of having a father who had almost killed his wife. A father who was famous enough so that no one ever let you forget what he had done."

In her 1997 memoir The Last Party, Adele Morales, writing as Adele Mailer, recollects stabbing. She recalls seeing Mailer punching people in the street. She suggests that he was delirious and couldn't "remember who he was, or what his name was." She remembers Mailer bursting into their apartment, but did not notice the knife in his hand when he rushed toward her. Morales notes that Mailer seemed indifferent while she lay on the floor bleeding.

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