"You take on enormities with gusto," she said, and launched a few of her own, including a lengthy peroration on the Russian poets. Though clearly up to snuff when it came to debating literature with one of its contemporary greats, the ardently feminist Muske-Dukes seemed unsure whether to fight or flirt with the ardently macho Mailer, who came on downright avuncular. Undaunted by his amused tolerance, she was at pains to show the audience — many of them graying, corduroyed NPR types clutching Mailer's new book, The Spooky Art, or dog-eared copies of his earlier books that awaited signing — that she wasn't about to be intimidated.
Not that he was trying. "Reverence is not one of my favorite words," he observed mildly of her use of the word in relation to something he'd written. "I don't care," snapped Muske-Dukes, and rapped him over the knuckles (not without cause) for ignoring women writers or condescending to them, for his aggression toward women in general, and — clearly for her the unkindest cut — for referring to poetry as "a one-night stand."
Mailer fired dutifully back. Virginia Woolf "had talent, but she was much too satisfied with the smell of her own armpit." Early Madonna was the greatest media artist alive, but he hadn't much enjoyed her breast cones. Picasso was a major inspiration, because "every time he had a new wife or mistress, his style changed." And so on . . . but Mailer's heart clearly wasn't in it. Notwithstanding a couple of rote slugs at his enemies — Tom Wolfe, George Bush — he appears to have lost interest in the cockfight.
"So you've left me, Carol, without a question," he pointed out amiably after a particularly long soliloquy on her part. But when some clod in the audience yelled out, "Let's have more of Mr. Mailer, and less of you!," Mailer sprang to the understandably flustered Muske-Dukes' defense, pronounced her questions excellent — and promptly seized the terrain for a wonderfully digressive riff on writers and writing, the subjects of his book.
More impish than waspish these days, Mailer still knows how to put on a show. He speaks in perfectly turned sentences laced with the elegance of a Harvard education and the wisecracking ebullience of pre-World War II Brooklyn. Every other line, delivered with the delight of a Jewish uncle producing a coin from a child's ear, set his audience guffawing. On writing he waxed quotable, eloquent and savvy — effortlessly trotting from Borges ("a torturer because he knew that plot is a malicious fallacy") to Kierkegaard, who understood that self-satisfaction is a sure way to be working for the devil. At question time, a fledgling writer who aspired to honesty and "the audacity to try to get published," asked him to comment. "You don't need audacity for that," said Mailer gently. "You need an agent."
Astonishingly, the emergent theme was — of all things — humility. With the audience eating out of his hand, Mailer described his fantasy of dying and meeting the Karmic Monitor, who tells him he's been selected for reincarnation. "I rather thought I would be," Mailer says in the fantasy, and asks to return as a black athlete. The Karmic Monitor shuts his book and says he's sorry, but black athletes are oversubscribed. "We've got you selected for cockroach," says the Monitor. "But you'll be the fastest cockroach on the block." The audience roared. For dessert, Mailer read his favorite passage from his book, an imaginary exchange between Tolstoy and Chekhov. Then the fans surged forward.
—Ella Taylor
ARCHITECTURAL BATTLES: The View That Surrounds You
STAND AT THE END OF A LONG PRIvate driveway off Pacific Palisades' Chautauqua Boulevard, in a meadow that extends outward to a plateau overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and you will see the home known to architecture buffs as Case Study House No. 8, or the Eames House. Its shape is deceptively simple: merely two rectangular boxes resting side by side, as if a third, imaginary box has been displaced from the middle of one large rectangle. The box on the left is the living space, the box on the right a studio. Inserted at various intervals are panels painted orange, blue, black, white, gray and gold, the overall arrangement resembling a Piet Mondrian composition. Even to an undiscerning eye it is easy to see that the steel- and glass-framed house, nestled between a hillside and a row of eucalyptus trees, accommodates the surrounding environment almost as much as the surrounding environment accommodates the house. Unfortunately, this symbiotic relationship — specifically the pristine frontal view of the house, cropped like a photograph to include the Santa Monica Canyon hillside as a backdrop — is now in jeopardy. The owner of the neighboring parcel of land is getting ready to break ground on an 11,000-square-foot faux Tuscan villa . . . But not if Eames Demetrios has his way.
Eames Demetrios, author, filmmaker and, as grandson of celebrated innovators Charles and Ray Eames, bearer of pop-culture lineage, uses part of the Eames House as an office from which he serves as director of the Eames Office, dedicated to preserving his grandparents' extensive architectural and design legacy. His mother lives in the other part of the house. Built in 1949 out of prefabricated parts, it is one of nine case-study houses commissioned by Arts and Architecture publisher John Entenza to create modern yet affordable housing prototypes after World War II. Both the house and the grounds are recognized by the city of Los Angeles as a historic-cultural monument. Which may explain why Demetrios' neighbor, Ron Flury, was gracious enough to engage the Eames Office in a discussion about what should and shouldn't be allowed as it pertains to the construction of his house. But that was two years ago.
