Sunday reprise: I was a Fug for a night. We played the legendary Mudd Club. It was cool.

Norman Mailer and George Plimpton make an appearance, and The Living Theater gets naked -- in a time long ago in New York City.

This is a slightly revised version of a column I wrote for Salon in 2020, back in the days before I started my Substack.

Travel with me now through the mists of time to an era when it was still possible for a novelist  to occasionally appear on magazine covers and on late night television shows like Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett.  You might call it a more innocent time, although it didn’t feel innocent back then.  It was a time that teemed with intellectual and artistic and political ferment, a time when writers picked fights with one another that were covered in the pages of the New York Times, a time when the release of a rock and roll album by Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones or a movie like “Easy Rider” or “2001” was an earth-shattering event.

One novelist in particular had an uncanny ability to dominate the national conversation. Norman Mailer made the news when he covered an anti-war march on the Pentagon in his book, “The Armies of the Night,” or picked a fight with fellow novelist Gore Vidal on the Cavett show, or wrote a magazine cover story on a prize fight in Kinshasa, Zaire, or bit off a chunk of actor Rip Torn’s ear during the filming of his underground movie,“Maidstone,” in the Hamptons. 

I was a young man back then.  Correction:  I was an ambitious young man, and I don’t mean ambitious in the sense of aspiring to ,make a lot of money or become famous.  It was the 1960’s, and there was an exciting national conversation going on, and I wanted to meet the people who made the news with what they had to say, or in their music, or up on stage in the theater.

I remember sitting in my room listening to “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” holding the album with the photograph of Dylan and his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo walking down a wintery Jones Street in the Village, and saying to myself, I’m going to walk down that street. I remember listening to Dylan singing the line, “Lights flickered from the opposite loft,” on “Visions of Johanna,” and thinking, I’ve got to get to know this guy. I want to live in a loft.”  I remember lying in my bed reading Mailer’s “Advertisements for Myself,” and “The Deer Park” and “The Naked and the Dead” and “Why Are We in Vietnam?” and thinking, I want to be in that argument. I have to meet this guy.

I didn’t want to just sit on the sidelines reading the books and listening to the music and going to the movies.  It wasn’t just fandom or hero worship.  I wasn’t interested in their celebrity. I wanted in.

When I was a Plebe at West Point, I got a subscription to The Village Voice, the weekly newspaper Mailer had founded with Daniel Wolf and Edwin Fancher, and I started writing letters to the editor.  The first letter I wrote that the Voice printed said in its entirety, “Abbie Hoffman is an asshole.” The next week, there were responses attacking me in the letters column from Dwight McDonald, a an anti-war activist and cultural critic, Aryeh Neier, a director and lawyer for the ACLU, and Paul Goodman, a prominent social critic and author of “Growing Up Absurd.”  Well, that was a start.  I wrote a letter to the Voice in reply to their attacks, and we were off. Norman Mailer would respond to another of my letters to the editor later.  I took it as a sign and began to correspond with him by mail.  We argued about an article he wrote, or a book he had recommended, or a movie we had both seen, and of course, the war in Vietnam.  He was everything his public persona indicated he was:  whip-smart, acerbic, brutally direct, and at times, hilarious. 

I was having the time of my life writing letters back and forth to one of America’s most famous novelists and public intellectuals when one day I received a letter from Mailer inviting me to an appearance he would be making at the “Theater for Ideas” on Grammercy Park. You see what I mean?  This was a time in America when they actually had a goddamned theater where every month or so, very smart people would talk about ideas — hot topics in the news, intellectual theories, the war in Vietnam, or American politics.  It turned out on this night that Mailer would be  discussing the state of the American theater on a panel moderated by the Voice columnist Nat Hentoff with Paul Goodman and the two people who ran the radical group of performance artists known at The Living Theater, Judith Malina and Julian Beck.

The group had recently put on their controversial play, “Paradise Now” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.  It was a semi-improvisational piece during which some members of the audience were invited to sit on the stage and participate in the action.  Most famously, during the performance, actors moved through the audience loudly reciting a long list of political and social taboos, and when they got to “nudity,” they disrobed en masse, standing naked in the audience shouting the rest of their list.  It was wildly popular.

My girlfriend and I made our way down to Gramercy Park and paid our admission -- $10 at the door, including an open bar at the close of the discussion – and took our seats.  Mailer and the rest of the panel took the stage with each of them making an opening statement in turn.  I found it peculiar that with five people on the panel, there was only one microphone, which they passed from hand to hand.  It became quickly obvious that whoever had the mic was in control of the “discussion,” such as it was, and the evening soon devolved into Mailer shouting at Julian Beck and Judith Malina who shouted at Nat Hentoff with Paul Goodman trying, usually fruitlessly, to get a word in from the sidelines and the audience shouting questions from the floor.

Suddenly, some of the people in the audience began standing and loudly calling out, “I am not permitted to speak freely,” and “I cannot smoke marijuana.”  They were members of the Living Theater who had sprinkled themselves through the audience before the panel began, and of course when they reached, “I cannot be naked,” they began taking their clothes off.

The discussion of the state of the American theater was over. No one could get anyone else’s attention. In the middle of the madness, I pointed out two speakers on the floor at either side of the stage and told her to take the left one, and I took the speaker on the right. We undid the sound system wires on the back of the speaker cabinets, and the shouting from the stage ended. Nat Hentoff grabbed the dead mic from Mailer, blew into it trying to see if it worked, and when it didn’t he shouted, “the bar is open,” and the audience began making its way past the now nude members of the Living Theater, who were still yelling about the freedoms society taken from them. 

I introduced myself and my girlfriend to Mailer and we stood around and watched as people from the audience accosted him with complaints about remarks he had made that night and essays he had recently published.  Mailer seemed in his element jousting with the public, but his wife, the actress Beverly Bentley, wasn’t having it.  She grabbed him and began dragging him toward the door.  My girlfriend and I followed close behind.

By the time they reached the street outside, Mailer and his wife were arguing loudly.  She wanted to leave.  He was the object of attention inside, and he didn’t.  A cab pulled up, and she opened the back door, screaming at him that if he didn’t get in, not to bother coming home tonight.  Mailer hesitated, then reluctantly got in the cab, still arguing loudly with his wife.  The cab driver was leaning over the seat asking, like cab drivers did back then, “Where to, Mac?”  Mailer ignored him, so the cab was just sitting there with the back door open.  I figured, wherever they’re going has got to be better than anything I had planned, which was nothing, so I opened the cab’s front passenger door and told my girlfriend to get in, and I climbed into the backseat.

Mailer and his wife were still fighting and hadn’t even noticed we were there.  The cab driver, yelling over their argument, asked again, “Where to, Mac?” and Mailer paused long enough to give him an address on East 72^nd Street, and the cab driver threw the meter and drove away.  We had traveled blocks uptown before Mailer noticed me sitting next to him and my girlfriend in the front seat.  He chuckled and shrugged his shoulders and started in again with his wife.

When the cab pulled to a stop, we were at the very eastern end of 72^nd Street in front of a townhouse.  We followed Mailer and his wife up a flight of stairs and into a large living room with windows overlooking the East River that was filled with people with drinks in their hands.  It was a party, and soon the smiling host approached Mailer and welcomed him.  It was George Plimpton, and this was his house and without knowing where were going, we had ended up at one of his famous parties.

Mailer noticed us standing there behind him and introduced me to Plimpton, and he introduced himself to my girlfriend and welcomed us in.  Mailer and his wife were soon spotted by friends across the room and drifted away on a cushion of fame.  My girlfriend and I made our way to the bar and got drinks and took in the scene.  We didn’t know a soul, but haute New York was in attendance:  there was Gay Talese, over by one of the windows.  Truman Capote was sitting on a sofa talking to a woman as thin as a lampstand.  Kurt Vonnegut was nearby, looking studiously morose. 

At the street end of the room was a pool table.  I recognized one of the guys playing pool.  It was Ed Sanders, the founder of the magazine, “Fuck You:  A Magazine of the Arts,” and the lead singer of the Fugs.  I grabbed my girlfriend’s hand and we walked over and I introduced myself and asked if I could have the next game.  Ed gave me a big smile, and said, “You’re the guy from West Point who’s been writing in the Voice, aren’t you?”  I said yes, he showed me where the cues were, I picked one, and we started to play. 

We became fast friends.  Years later, in 1972, I would see him at the Republican National Convention when he and Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman were leading protests by the Yippies.  The next year, we drove to Washington, D.C. together and attended the first three days of the Senate Watergate hearings. 

Nine years after that, Ed called me up one day and asked, “You still do hambone?” Hambone is a form of musical percussion where you keep rhythm by rapidly slapping your thighs and chest that I had learned in high school in Leavenworth, Kansas.  I answered yes.  “How would you like to play hambone with us at the Mudd Club in a couple of weeks?’  I said, you mean with the Fugs?  Ed answered, “Yeah, I’m getting the Fugs back together for one night. You should come.  We’ll have fun.”  I practically swallowed my tongue saying yes.

That’s me wearing a striped shirt in the foreground in the photo above, doing hambone. That’s Ed singing lead standing against the brick wall in the background. And that’s how I became a Fug for one night at the Mudd Club.