Nine months before his death November 2007, Norman Mailer recommended John T. “Ike” Williams as the best agent to sell Mailer’s biography, the book I’d not yet begun to write. Ike was Norman’s friend going back to 1978 when he was legal counsel at Mailer’s then-publisher. Little, Brown.
In my interview with Ike for Norman Mailer: A Double Life (2013), which he ushered to publication, he recalled his meetings with Mailer in Little, Brown’s Boston offices in 1979. They got off to a good start because they were both Harvard grads, and also serious boxing fans who had done some amateur boxing. Ike, got his nickname from another boxer, Isiah “Ike” Williams. He had seen the original “Ike,” lightweight champ from 1945-51, box several times at Madison Square Garden in the late 1940s and early 50s, as had Mailer.
But Ike’s first meeting with Mailer was at a Manhattan cocktail party. Ike was there with Dorothy Dean, an actress who later appeared in some of Andy Warhol’s films. As he recalled:
I was at one end of this very crowded room and Norman was way over the other end with a bunch of people. This was the summer of 1963—had to be either July or August. He was drunk and at my end I was drunk. He comes over because he knew Dorothy, and said, “Who the fuck are you?” to me. And I said, “Well, who the fuck are you? Why don’t you go back there where you were having a good time, and we’ll stay here where we were having a good time with our friends. If you stay and keep doing this I’m going to do something.” More words were exchanged and so I got up and punched him in the nose and down he went. And there was some blood and people were saying, “Oh poor Norman.” Then Dorothy said to me, “Let’s get out of here.” So we did.
Fifteen years later, working side by side in Boston, Mailer didn’t recognize the guy who socked him in the summer of 1963. When Ike told him, some weeks after they’d begun working together, Mailer said, “Son of a bitch,” and immediately recalled the party, the punch, and hitting the deck. He said he deserved what Ike had dished out.
By the time I met him, Ike had punched his way to the top. After stints at several law firms, in 1990 he founded the Kneerim and Williams Literary Agency in Boston with novelist Jill Kneerim. A list of his clients (books, films, TV series) includes Frances Fitzgerald, Richard Wilbur, Howard Zinn, James MacGregor Burns, Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot, Lawrence Tribe, Ben Affleck, E.O. Wilson, and Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust. A dominant presence on the Boston-Cambridge literary scene for decades, Ike was also a key figure in the Cape Cod artistic community. He and his wife Noa and their three sons spent summers at their home on Bound Brook Island in Wellfleet, and knew everybody. He served on numerous boards and committees, and for several years was Chair of the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. He was a champion of Civil and First Amendment causes, and a great friend of the underdog.
He knew Mailer and knew his work, but didn’t really know me. We had several meetings in which he patiently and systematically questioned me about my knowledge of Mailer’s life and writings. His plan was to sell the biography a few months after Mailer’s memorial service at Carnegie Hall in April 2007. The summer isn’t a good time to visit publishing houses, Ike explained, and interest in Mailer would still be strong in the fall. We sent out a 10,000-word sample chapter, written in haste, and a two-page bio to about ten publishers. Seven expressed interest: Random House, HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, St. Martin’s, Little, Brown, Henry Holt, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All seven had Manhattan offices and Ike set up meetings for a week in mid-October. By every measure, it was one of the most exciting and consequential weeks of my life.
Ike was, to borrow a line from Charles Dickens, “an oyster of the old school, whom nobody was able to open.” He asked lots of questions, but when he got questions, was careful, even stingy, with his answers. He told me, however, to be expansive. Biographies of writers are a special genre, he said. The paramount question is always what kind of relationships the biographer has with the subject’s family and friends. Almost as important is access to the subject’s papers—manuscripts, diaries, interview transcripts, book and film contracts, telephone, email, and snail mail lists, diaries, journals, photographs, and medical records (and dental records—I ended up with Mailer’s false teeth, but that’s another story). A writer’s library (Mailer owned over 7,000 books in three different locations) was also a major source, he explained. Biographers, he concluded, have to ferret out and gather up everything that might reveal the writer’s struggles, victories, love affairs, failures, and secrets, and what was said at dinner. Gabriel Garcia Marquez once told an interviewer, Ike said, that he had three lives: public, private, and secret. At the meetings, the publishers and editors will want to know what you know and don’t know about all of Mailer’s lives, a brain dump in an hour.
We started the meetings at the Flatiron Building, the iconic, triangular, Terracotta-clad building on 22nd Street, pointing north on Fifth Avenue. Macmillan Publishing Company’s various imprints occupied most of the building, and had since from 1959. Our first three meetings were on three different floors of the 22-story building, built in 1902. The first two, with Henry Holt, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, went well. The editors and publishers and sales directors we met with obviously knew Ike well, and their interest in the project was a notch higher than warm. I was feeling optimistic, but there was no time to find out what Ike thought. He was silent as we rode the elevator up to the next meeting.
Our third stop, was the office of St. Martin’s senior editor, Sally Richardson. From the window at the “prow” of her triangular office on the 18th floor, you could see down a long stretch of Fifth Avenue. Ike said he’d known her for a long time. When we entered, she shouted “Ike,” and ran to his arms. Ike, who was six-foot-six, swung her around twice, her blonde hair sailing out. She seemed inordinately happy to see him. As they talked, it suddenly became clear why editors and publishers were always glad to see him. He didn’t show up unless he had something that they wanted: a manuscript with potential. The bonds between agents and editors rest squarely on the fact that they need each other, desperately. So when an agent with many prize-winning clients makes the trip from Boston to New York to present the author of an unwritten biography of Norman Mailer, it’s a good day.
All our meetings that week had been with no more than three people—publishers, editors, and sales directors. But at our final meeting at Simon and Schuster’s Sixth Avenue offices, we were brought to a room where more than a dozen people were waiting. There weren’t many pleasantries. They knew my resume, had read my sample chapter, and had their questions ready. As Ike had forewarned, they were keen to know in granular detail about what kind of literary collaborations I’d had with Mailer (I’d edited three of his books); what kind of relationships I’d had with his long-time, recently deceased assistant, Judith McNally, a formidable figure; with his previous wives (I knew three of them, but not well); and how well I knew his widow, Norris, with whom he’d lived for more than 30 years, and his nine children. It was quite a grilling. I felt a shift in the room when I explained that my wife and I had bought a condo ten years earlier in Provincetown just down the road from Mailer’s home, and become citizens of the town. Three or four days a week day, I told the group, I visited him after breakfast for coffee and conversation, and my wife Donna and I had dinner with Norman and his wife, Norris, a couple of times a week.
Sitting in the back of the room I noticed an older woman who was smoking one cigarette after another. I was surprised as smoking had been banned at most office buildings years ago. She didn’t ask any questions, but took notes. I learned later that she was Alice Mayhew, the legendary editor of All the President’s Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. She was also Doris Kearns Goodwin’s editor, and Doris had been a close friend of Mailer’s. She and her husband, Dick Goodwin, stood at Mailer’s grave in Provincetown when I read his eulogy. We finished on a Thursday, and Ike conducted an auction via email the next day. All seven publishers we met sent in bids. I thought that Random House, Mailer’s publisher, would make the highest bid, but it was Simon and Schuster, and not by a little. Ike and I celebrated that night at a dinner with Norris at a restaurant in the Village. I wanted to pick up the check, but Ike insisted. He read every chapter of the biography as I wrote them, and gave me shrewd feedback. The biography was published five years later and got a generous and thoughtful front-page review by Graydon Carter in the New York Times Book Review.
I learned later from my masterly editor at Simon and Schuster, Robert Bender, that Alice Mayhew had put in a call to Doris Goodwin to ask about my bona fides. Doris gave me a thumbs up. I owe Doris, who also gave me a terrific interview and a blurb, a large debt. But my greatest thanks must go to the late, great John T. “Ike” Williams.