Norman Mailer as Shelley Winters’ Audition Coach

Taken from an interview with Mailer for The Paris Review included in The Paris Review Interviews, III (I am now devouring all 4 volumes, thanks to cousin Mike). The interview was done by Andrew O’Hagan and took place in 2007, the year Mailer died.

INTERVIEWER
There’s a story Shelley Winters told about you. The way I heard it, she came to you around 1950 and asked you to help her understand Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy. She badly wanted to be cast as the factory girl in George Stevens’s screen adaptation. It eventually came out as A Place in the Sun, with Montgomery Clift. A sweet story, that.

MAILER
And absolutely true.

INTERVIEWER
I love the idea of a girl coming to a novelist wanting to be educated.

MAILER
Well, we’d known each other. Shelley called me up one day. She was hysterical. She said, I have to go see George Stevens tomorrow. In those days she was viewed as a ditzy blonde who was not much of an actress. She was terribly serious about acting but she played silly blondes in silly movies and she wanted something better.

She said, I’ve got to read this book An American Tragedy, and it’s seven hundred pages, I can’t read it by tomorrow, and so forth. So I said, All right, I’ll come over and see you. And of course I had my own little agenda tucked into the middle of it. Hey, I’ll be alone with this blonde movie actress and maybe good things will come out of it. So I get there and she’s got a bad case of hives, and she’s got a bandanna wrapped around her head, and her chin is swollen, and she looks like hell, and she’s in an old kimono, totally unsexy, and she looks ready to go in for a strong case of the weeps.

In those days I wasn’t always very effective, but that day I was. I said, Now, look, first of all it’s a seven-hundred-page book, but your part of it is only in the middle, and I showed her about two hundred and fifty pages in the middle. Read as much as you can tonight, and don’t panic. The key thing is that you can play this role, and what you want to remember is, she’s a working-class girl you’re playing, and she’s a girl who’s completely without artifice. She is what she is. And that’s the core of Roberta Alden. It’s what gets her into the love affair with Clyde, and it’s what makes her lose it.

So I go home afterward. I might as well have been in the desert for all the sex there was going to be that day. And I speak to my wife, in the righteous tones of a husband who’s been out trying to gallivant and has failed. And then, of course, twenty-four hours later Shelley calls me up and says, Norman, I got the role. She says, I was talking to him and I said, Mr. Stevens, the way I look at it is Roberta Alden is a girl completely without artifice. And he said, Hey, you know, you’re not the dummy I thought you were. So she got the role. Once she’d been working on it for a few weeks, she called again and said, Norman, I need some new dialogue. I need some new lines. I’ve used that statement about artifice a few times now and he’s getting tired of it.