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Norman Mailer's Stabbing of Adele Morales

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Background

During this time, Norman Mailer would often partake in many types of drugs and alcohol.[1] Mailer also had a short temper and would frequently engage in head-butting, arm-wrestling, and random punch-throwing.[1] For much of the '50s, he drifted, frequently drunk or stoned or both.[1] The Mailers had been married for six years. Norman was waiting on a hearing of a charge of disorderly conduct.[2] He had gotten into a hassle over a tab of $7.60 a week before at Birdland.[2] Adele told the arresting detectives the night of November 20th that he had been displaying "homicidal tendencies".[2] Their family had been attempting to get him to see a psychiatrist.[2] Time after time, his wife saw how toxic, pugnacious, and depressed Norman could be.[3] Everyone and everything become targets.[3] Their marriage was no exception.[3]

The Incident

Mailer had decided to run for Mayor of New York.[citation needed] On November 19th, 1960, in an effort to boost the campaign, a party was hosted.[citation needed][needs copy edit] The attendees of this event however would be given a clear insight into 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.[citation needed] As the hours passed, many of the guests including Mailer had become heavily intoxicated, and quarrels broke out. [4] An argument between Mailer and his sister regarding the campaign came up, resulting in Mailer assaulting her.[citation needed] The Mailer couple themselves began arguing when Adele Morales tried to defend her. Mailer had begun physically attacking the other guests and then proceeded to leave and fight those who were not involved with the party.[citation needed] When he had returned at around 4:30 a.m., witnesses say that Morales taunted Mailer's masculinity and literary talents during their argument.[citation needed]

Angered, he grabbed a penknife and then proceeded to stab Morales once in the back and once in the upper abdomen, narrowly avoiding her heart.[citation needed] As she lay there, hemorrhaging, a man at the party came to assist her and Mailer snapped, saying "Get away from her. Let the bitch die."[5]. Before being stabbed in the back and the breast, 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 in two striking blows. [3]

She was not taken to the hospital until three hours after the altercation.[citation needed] After arriving at the hospital, she said that she was at a party and fell onto glass, though doctors were skeptical.[citation needed] She told the police after that "He didn't say anything, he just looked at me. He didn't say a word. He just stabbed me".[verify] Morales never made a full recovery.[citation needed] She developed pleurisy and found herself coughing up black phlegm several times throughout the day.[citation needed] Several years later, she fell into poverty and became an alcoholic.[citation needed]

The Aftermath

Mailer was arrested at the hospital around 10 pm.[citation needed] Initially, Mailer pleaded “not guilty,” but later changed his plea to “guilty” to avoid harmful publicity for his family.[6] "He was charged with felonious assault and placed under psychiatric observation. Anxious above all, however, to protect her two young daughters, she declined to press charges. In the end Mailer pleaded guilty to third-degree assault and received only a suspended sentence. A year later, they divorced."[7][excessive quote] 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.[citation needed] Mailer briefly sat in jail, before being court-ordered to Bellevue for 17 days.[citation needed] 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.[3] After the stabbing, Mailer was committed to Bellevue Mental Hospital.[citation needed] "I was very upset because my feeling was I committed a crime."[citation needed][verify] His criminal lawyer had suggested he go to the hospital. "He was thinking like a criminal lawyer" Mailer spoke.[citation needed][verify] They used the mental hospital as a way to save him had his wife did end up dying from the injuries inflicted upon her.[citation needed] Mailer hated this, he felt he would go crazy if he'd be there any longer.[8]

Not wanting to separate a father from his children and with some hopes their marriage could be reconciled, Adele pressed no charges.[9] Instead, He was confined to the Bellevue Mental Hospital for seventeen days as a result.[10]

Personal Response

After being remanded to Bellevue, Mailer confessed to the judge: “I feel I did a lousy, dirty, cowardly thing.”[11] 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.[12] 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.[citation needed] 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.[13] Mailer said he considers himself "apart of the generation, who considers fucking up an interesting way to express yourself, a way to do things."[12] 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.[citation needed] He thinks he's one because he went into debt. Nowhere does he mention his crimes against Adele.[citation needed]

Critical Response

This incident wasn't well received in the public eye.[citation needed] They weren't amused by Mailer's published poem in 1962 indirectly poking at the stabbing. "So long as you use a knife, there's some love left."[14]

Susan Mailer, in her 2019 memoir, admits she was afraid of her father, but she also understood her fears of him: "He had stabbed his wife, my stepmother, Adele."[15] 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."[15]

In her 1997 memoir The Last Party, Adele Morales, writing as Adele Mailer, recollects of the 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."[16] 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.[16]

Citations

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 McGrath 2007.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Moberley 2015.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Moore 2020.
  4. ↑ Mills 1982, p. 221.
  5. ↑ Hari 2007.
  6. ↑ Lennon 2013, p. 269.
  7. ↑ Cornwell 2015.
  8. ↑ McNeil 2020, p. 51.
  9. ↑ Mailer 2019, p. 80.
  10. ↑ Merill 1978, p. 23.
  11. ↑ McKinley 2021, p. 3.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 McNeil 2020, p. 50.
  13. ↑ McNeil 2020, p. 52.
  14. ↑ Mailer 1962.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Mailer 2019, p. 114.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 LA Obit 2015.

Bibliography

  • "Adele Morales Mailer Dies at 90". Los Angeles Times. November 23, 2015. Retrieved 2022-10-12.
  • "Author Norman Mailer Held in Wife Stabbing". Evening Star. November 22, 1960. p. A-7. Retrieved 2022-10-12.
  • Bufithis, Philip H. (1978). Norman Mailer. NewYork: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co.
  • Cornwell, Rupert (2015). "Adele Mailer". Independent. UK. Retrieved 2022-10-12.
  • Grimes, William (November 23, 2015). "Adele Mailer, Artist Who Married Norman Mailer, Dies at 90". The New York Times. Retrieved 2022-09-21.
  • Hari, Johann (November 15, 2007). "Why Do We Ignore the Abuse of Women?". The Independent. Retrieved 2022-10-03.
  • Lennon, J. Michael (2013). Norman Mailer: A Double Life. New York: Simon and Schuster.
  • Lucid, Robert F. (1971). Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work. Boston: Little, Brown & Company.
  • Mailer, Adele (1997). The Last Party. Barricade Books Inc.
  • Mailer, Norman (1962). Death for the Ladies (and Other Disasters). New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.
  • Mailer, Susan (2019). In Another Place: With and Without My Father Norman Mailer. ‎Northampton House Press.
  • McGrath, Charles (2007). "Norman Mailer, Towering Writer With Matching Ego, Dies at 84". The New York Times. Retrieved 2022-10-12.
  • McKinley, Maggie (2021). "Introduction". Norman Mailer in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. pp. 1–10.
  • McNeil, Legs (2020). "Interview: Norman Mailer". The Mailer Review. 14 (1): 36–64.
  • Merill, Robert (1978). Norman Miller. Boston: Twayne Publishers.
  • Mills, Hilary (1982). Mailer: A Biography. New York: Empire Books. Retrieved 2022-10-12.
  • Moberley, Leeds (2015). "Norman Mailer Stabs His Wife Adele in 1960". Daily News. Retrieved 2022-10-12.
  • Moore, M.J. (February 21, 2020). "Blood in the Morning: The Turbulent Relationship of Norman Mailer and Adele Morales". Criminal Element. Retrieved 2022-09-21.
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