"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." I found that hysterically funny.
My bad luck (or maybe not) I did not meet him until he was an old man, and gentle as a lamb.
That parenthesis is everything. Margo missed Mailer when he gave a talk at Brandeis when he was promoting "Advertisements for Myself" and afterwards, at an off-campus party, produced a joint when asked for one -- a really big deal in the winter of 1959. Mailer also told someone (or two) where he'd bought the pot, a Boston dealer, who was then patronized by that Brandeis someone (or two), who were blissfully unaware that by then the dealer was being watched by the feds and Boston police, who then followed and watched the purchasers before raiding the off-campus apartment of one student --- whose girlfriend was expelled, not for pot, but because her diaphragm was found at his apartment, illegal then in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for an unmarried woman to own a contraceptive device. Five years later, in Griswold v. Connecticut, the then-correclt-named SCOTUS ruled that privacy outweighed state sheet-sniffers. Enough with the ancient history, you're thinking? Easy RV Rider Thomas (the one who worried to Anita Hill about the provenance of pubic hairs on cans of Coca-Cola in their office) wants to revisit Griswold with an eye for the six MAGAstraights to overturn it. No birth control, no abortion. There's a recipe for a just society.
I heard about what I'd missed ... but when I did catch up with pot, I was maybe 30. I was spending the summer at the Cape, and a friend we'll call Sam could not tolerate smoke -- but he had great dope. So our hostess baked brownies, believing if a little was good, a lot was better. Well, after spending hours watching the music dance up and down the walls, and perhaps napping now and then, the hostess and I could barely drag ourselves to the kitchen at about 6 to make coffee. I decided then I belonged to the wine generation.
I had visited the pop perp's apartment in full view of the fuzz watching it, so I was questioned, and then some. No, I hadn't smoked any (truth) probably because I was a young Philadelphian (those two words about as close to the star of the movie, The Young Philadelphian, Paul Newman, as I'll ever be). But the questioning, and Brandeis throwing me out at the end of the school year because I was tainted (Dean of Students, a well-regarded history prof, lied by telling me I should take a year off to "find myself," then some back). Result was I refused pot for six years, until some friends in Laurel Canyon -- I'd moved to L.A. for romance -- gently persuaded me to try the stems-and-seeds stuff prevalent, even among up-and-coming musicians. No music dancing up and down walls, altough four years later the chef of the legenday Black Rabbit Inn put just the right amount of weed in the stuffing of Thanksgiving turkey served at a celebration by one of the restaurant owner's. Oh, my. Enough geezer nostalgia. L.A. Times recently hired a lab to test legal weed, found all sorts of stuff which were not reported by state labs that ostensibly ensure that legal weed is free of it...and the gunk is also in edibles. I stopped smoking weed in 1976, primarily because I was working at New West Magazine, where it was impossible to float through the day. But hey! let's hear it for the often-overlooked, or looked down on, gamay grape. A cru Beaujolais? Music to my ears, not the walls. :-)
Damn, when I wrote my "long paper" for law school on Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) it was completely beyond the discussion to even raise any question of overturning it, that's how backwards this SCOTUS has become!
I never met Norman Mailer. My memory of him was from a time when he was a guest on the Dick Cavett show. Mailer was drunk (or so it seemed) and he was obnoxious as hell, baiting Cavett. He kept saying to Cavett, “ why don’t you ask me (something)”. Cavett finally had enough and his response was “ why don’t you fold it five ways and stick it where the sun don’t shine”—a line I use to this day.
Mailer replied sarcastically, "Did you just make that up or have you been saving it for the right moment, Dick?" To which Cavett calmly answered, " Norman, I'm shocked that you, of all people, failed to recognize a quote from Dostoyevsky!" Better times.
Wonderful recounting of a time long past - it seems now like it was so much more innocent and creative then. Perhaps that is what you see when you look though the prism of life experience. But at least it can make us all smile at those memories, and divert us for a short while from today's troubles. Thank you for that.
I did see Abbie Hoffman at his last public appearance before he went underground. This was at my college, then called Millersville State College, Millersville, PA -- somewhat unkindly known as a teacher factory. I managed to get into the auditorium -- they turned people away (fire marshall rules).
Hoffman passed right by me. Provincial snot that I was, I recall wondering if he rubbed motor oil into the pores of his face.
What's sad is that as prim as most of the audience members probably were, a lot of people actuallly did want to hear what he had to say -- and he basically said nothing. He was loud, rude, and worst of all -- incoherent.
There was the mandatory bomb threat (ignored) and someone broke one of the glass doors in the lobby. (Probably one of the frat boys -- they never had any imagination.)
The two funniest parts of the whole episode was that The Millersville Militia, a squadron especially created for the occasion, was supposed to circle the building and save us from the godless Bolsheviks. None of them showed up -- this mini-army was apparently a fantasy of one Earl J. Pfautz. (Can't believe I remember the name as this was fifty-some years ago!!!)
The other chuckle was that the campus radio station broadcast Hoffman's blather (I'm sorry, that's how it sounded) live. They did their best to sanitize Hoffman's outpourings -- but they couldn't keep up with his rapid barrage of four-letter words. They were able to mute things like "and" and "the" -- but missed the shits and fucks. Finally, they just gave up and let him rip.
You just can't edit a lava flow.
I do remember thinking that the campus police didn't appear to be terribly concerned about keeping us safe from left-wing rhetoric and radical violence. They were much more interested in flirting with the college girls who were hanging (and I do mean hanging) out of the dormitory windows.
Quite a night. Almost as good as the night that a mob of students streaked the President's mansion.
I love your stories. Hopping into Mailer's cab, priceless-as they say, fortune favors the bold! I was in Sacramento, which we called Scrotumento, of course, at the time. At 15, we discovered The Fugs. Oh did we have fun singing along with "Boobs-a-lot" or "Dirty Old Man." Almost sixty years later, I find myself occasionally breaking into the song "Nothing."
We've lost so much in the intervening decades. Not so much lost as having it stolen from us.
Lucian, you Crack me up with your wonderful storied. I get totally pulled in and enjoy myself as you reminisce. That you would just follow Norman Mailer into his cab and then into George Plimpton's party takes hutspa, even in a more innocent time. Mazel Tov you pulled it off.
Thank you so much, Lucian, Speaking just for myself, I need this so much. We can't lose sight of why and what we are here for.
Totally agree!
Great column and photo! May I say, to me that seems like really long hair on a West Point plebe!
It would have been except this is like ten years after LKTIV graduated from West Point!
"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." I found that hysterically funny.
My bad luck (or maybe not) I did not meet him until he was an old man, and gentle as a lamb.
That parenthesis is everything. Margo missed Mailer when he gave a talk at Brandeis when he was promoting "Advertisements for Myself" and afterwards, at an off-campus party, produced a joint when asked for one -- a really big deal in the winter of 1959. Mailer also told someone (or two) where he'd bought the pot, a Boston dealer, who was then patronized by that Brandeis someone (or two), who were blissfully unaware that by then the dealer was being watched by the feds and Boston police, who then followed and watched the purchasers before raiding the off-campus apartment of one student --- whose girlfriend was expelled, not for pot, but because her diaphragm was found at his apartment, illegal then in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for an unmarried woman to own a contraceptive device. Five years later, in Griswold v. Connecticut, the then-correclt-named SCOTUS ruled that privacy outweighed state sheet-sniffers. Enough with the ancient history, you're thinking? Easy RV Rider Thomas (the one who worried to Anita Hill about the provenance of pubic hairs on cans of Coca-Cola in their office) wants to revisit Griswold with an eye for the six MAGAstraights to overturn it. No birth control, no abortion. There's a recipe for a just society.
I heard about what I'd missed ... but when I did catch up with pot, I was maybe 30. I was spending the summer at the Cape, and a friend we'll call Sam could not tolerate smoke -- but he had great dope. So our hostess baked brownies, believing if a little was good, a lot was better. Well, after spending hours watching the music dance up and down the walls, and perhaps napping now and then, the hostess and I could barely drag ourselves to the kitchen at about 6 to make coffee. I decided then I belonged to the wine generation.
I had visited the pop perp's apartment in full view of the fuzz watching it, so I was questioned, and then some. No, I hadn't smoked any (truth) probably because I was a young Philadelphian (those two words about as close to the star of the movie, The Young Philadelphian, Paul Newman, as I'll ever be). But the questioning, and Brandeis throwing me out at the end of the school year because I was tainted (Dean of Students, a well-regarded history prof, lied by telling me I should take a year off to "find myself," then some back). Result was I refused pot for six years, until some friends in Laurel Canyon -- I'd moved to L.A. for romance -- gently persuaded me to try the stems-and-seeds stuff prevalent, even among up-and-coming musicians. No music dancing up and down walls, altough four years later the chef of the legenday Black Rabbit Inn put just the right amount of weed in the stuffing of Thanksgiving turkey served at a celebration by one of the restaurant owner's. Oh, my. Enough geezer nostalgia. L.A. Times recently hired a lab to test legal weed, found all sorts of stuff which were not reported by state labs that ostensibly ensure that legal weed is free of it...and the gunk is also in edibles. I stopped smoking weed in 1976, primarily because I was working at New West Magazine, where it was impossible to float through the day. But hey! let's hear it for the often-overlooked, or looked down on, gamay grape. A cru Beaujolais? Music to my ears, not the walls. :-)
Damn, when I wrote my "long paper" for law school on Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) it was completely beyond the discussion to even raise any question of overturning it, that's how backwards this SCOTUS has become!
I never met Norman Mailer. My memory of him was from a time when he was a guest on the Dick Cavett show. Mailer was drunk (or so it seemed) and he was obnoxious as hell, baiting Cavett. He kept saying to Cavett, “ why don’t you ask me (something)”. Cavett finally had enough and his response was “ why don’t you fold it five ways and stick it where the sun don’t shine”—a line I use to this day.
Mailer replied sarcastically, "Did you just make that up or have you been saving it for the right moment, Dick?" To which Cavett calmly answered, " Norman, I'm shocked that you, of all people, failed to recognize a quote from Dostoyevsky!" Better times.
Ha! Thanks!!
Wonderful recounting of a time long past - it seems now like it was so much more innocent and creative then. Perhaps that is what you see when you look though the prism of life experience. But at least it can make us all smile at those memories, and divert us for a short while from today's troubles. Thank you for that.
WOW really real--feels like time travel :D
So cool. I think this is a good time for us all to be Fugs for a week.
I did see Abbie Hoffman at his last public appearance before he went underground. This was at my college, then called Millersville State College, Millersville, PA -- somewhat unkindly known as a teacher factory. I managed to get into the auditorium -- they turned people away (fire marshall rules).
Hoffman passed right by me. Provincial snot that I was, I recall wondering if he rubbed motor oil into the pores of his face.
What's sad is that as prim as most of the audience members probably were, a lot of people actuallly did want to hear what he had to say -- and he basically said nothing. He was loud, rude, and worst of all -- incoherent.
There was the mandatory bomb threat (ignored) and someone broke one of the glass doors in the lobby. (Probably one of the frat boys -- they never had any imagination.)
The two funniest parts of the whole episode was that The Millersville Militia, a squadron especially created for the occasion, was supposed to circle the building and save us from the godless Bolsheviks. None of them showed up -- this mini-army was apparently a fantasy of one Earl J. Pfautz. (Can't believe I remember the name as this was fifty-some years ago!!!)
The other chuckle was that the campus radio station broadcast Hoffman's blather (I'm sorry, that's how it sounded) live. They did their best to sanitize Hoffman's outpourings -- but they couldn't keep up with his rapid barrage of four-letter words. They were able to mute things like "and" and "the" -- but missed the shits and fucks. Finally, they just gave up and let him rip.
You just can't edit a lava flow.
I do remember thinking that the campus police didn't appear to be terribly concerned about keeping us safe from left-wing rhetoric and radical violence. They were much more interested in flirting with the college girls who were hanging (and I do mean hanging) out of the dormitory windows.
Quite a night. Almost as good as the night that a mob of students streaked the President's mansion.
That's hilarious. And incredibly enough, streaking was a thing!
Loved the song Slum Goddess From The Lower East Side … lol
I love your stories. Hopping into Mailer's cab, priceless-as they say, fortune favors the bold! I was in Sacramento, which we called Scrotumento, of course, at the time. At 15, we discovered The Fugs. Oh did we have fun singing along with "Boobs-a-lot" or "Dirty Old Man." Almost sixty years later, I find myself occasionally breaking into the song "Nothing."
We've lost so much in the intervening decades. Not so much lost as having it stolen from us.
What a time to not only be alive, but be INVOLVED!!
you have had an interesting life, well lived...and wonderful memories
Lucian, you Crack me up with your wonderful storied. I get totally pulled in and enjoy myself as you reminisce. That you would just follow Norman Mailer into his cab and then into George Plimpton's party takes hutspa, even in a more innocent time. Mazel Tov you pulled it off.
"Time it was, and what a time it was, it was
A time of innocence, A time of confidences."
Whoa, East 72nd Street -- across Central Park from the Dakota!
I miss Dick Cavett.
Say the secret woid and win a trip down memory lane!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VckmK-ZCpAU
Groucho Marx Dick Cavett 1969
Archy L 71.6K subscribers
3,416,477 views Mar 4, 2014
I recognized the guy in the pic who was slapping his thighs and chest but had no idea who the others were. Thanks for clearing that up. (Smile)
Welcome aboard