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DID YOU KNOW? In the fall of 2002 Mailer directed a one-night staged reading of Don Juan in Hell in Provincetown, MA. He played Don Juan, his wife Norris Church Mailer played his wife Dona Ana, Mike Lennon was her father, the Commodore, and Vidal played the Devil. He wore a jacket with a wine-red vest and stole the show. The play is the dream sequence from George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman. Ten years earlier, Vidal also stole the show when he did it with Mailer (as the commodore), Susan Sontag and Gay Talese at Carnegie Hall.
DID YOU KNOW? Asked by Parade Magazine how he was seen by his high school classmates, he answered, “Quiet, studious and inconsequential.”
DID YOU KNOW? Mailer’s all-time favorite novels were John Dos Passos’s U.S.A., a three-part chronicle of the country from the late 1890s to the 1930s, and Leo Tolstoy’s 1877 novel, Anna Karenina, often called the greatest realistic novel ever written.