The Deer Park: A Play Read online

  Praise for Norman Mailer

  “[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any writer of his generation.”

  —The New York Times

  “A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.”

  —The Washington Post

  “A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.”

  —Life

  “Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.”

  —The New York Review of Books

  “The largest mind and imagination at work [in modern] American literature … Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.”

  —The Cincinnati Post

  2013 Random House eBook Edition

  Copyright © 1955, 1983 by Norman Mailer

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, in 1955.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mailer, Norman

  The deer park / Norman Mailer.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-8129-8599-3

  www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  To Adele my wife and

  to Daniel Wolf my friend

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Two Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Three Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Part Four Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Part Five Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Part Six Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  … the Deer Park, that gorge of innocence and virtue in which were engulfed so many victims who when they returned to society brought with them depravity, debauchery and all the vices they naturally acquired from the infamous officials of such a place.

  Apart from the evil which this dreadful place did to the morals of the people, it is horrible to calculate the immense sums of money it cost the state. Indeed who can reckon the expense of that band of pimps and madames who were constantly searching all the corners of the kingdom to discover the objects of their investigation; the costs of conveying the girls to their destination; of polishing them, dressing them, perfuming them, and furnishing them with all the means of seduction that art could provide. To this must be added the gratuities presented to those who were not successful in arousing the jaded passions of the sultan but had nonetheless to be paid for their submission, for their discretion, and still more for their being eventually despised.

  —MOUFFLE D’ANGERVILLE

  VIE PRIVEE DE LOUIS XV:

  ou principaux évènements, particularités

  et anecdotes de son règne

  Please do not understand me too quickly.

  —ANDRE GIDE

  Part One

  CHAPTER ONE

  IN THE CACTUS WILD of Southern California, a distance of two hundred miles from the capital of cinema as I choose to call it is the town of Desert D’Or. There I went from the Air Force to look for a good time. Some time ago.

  Almost everybody I knew in Desert D’Or had had an unusual career, and it was the same for me. I grew up in a home for orphans. Still intact at the age of twenty-three, wearing my flying wings and a First Lieutenant’s uniform, I arrived at the resort with fourteen thousand dollars, a sum I picked up via a poker game in a Tokyo hotel room while waiting with other fliers for our plane home. The curiosity is that I was never a gambler, I did not even like the game, but I had nothing to lose that night, and maybe for such a reason I accepted the luck of my cards. Let me leave it at that. I came out of the Air Force with no place to go, no family to visit, and I wandered down to Desert D’Or.

  Built since the Second World War, it is the only place I know which is all new. A long time ago, Desert D’Or was called Desert Door by the prospectors who put up their shanties at the edge of its oasis and went into the mountains above the desert to look for gold. But there is nothing left of those men; when the site of Desert D’Or was chosen, none of the old shacks remained.

  No, everything is in the present tense, and during the months I stayed at the resort, I came to know it in a way we can know few places. It was a town built out of no other obvious motive than commercial profit and so no sign of commerce was allowed to appear. Desert D’Or was without a main street, and its stores looked like anything but stores. In those places which sold clothing, no clothing was laid out, and you waited in a modern living room while salesmen opened panels in the wall to exhibit summer suits, or held between their hands the blooms and sprays of a tropical scarf. There was a jewelry store built like a cabin cruiser; from the street one peeped through a porthole to see a thirty-thousand-dollar necklace hung on the silver antlers of a piece of driftwood. None of the hotels—not the Yacht Club, nor the Debonair, not the Yucca Plaza, the Sandpiper, the Creedmor, nor the Desert D’Or Arms—could even be seen from outside. Put behind cement-brick fences or wooden palings, one hardly came across a building which was not green, yellow, rose, orange, or pink, and the approach was hidden by a shrubbery of bright flowers. You passed through the gate to the Yacht Club, the biggest and therefore the most exclusive hotel in the resort, and followed its private road which twisted through the grounds for several hundred yards, expecting a mansion at the end, but came instead to no more than a carport, a swimming pool in the shape of a free-form coffee table with curved-wall cabañas and canasta tables, and a set of lawn-tennis courts, the only lawn in all that part of Southern California. At night, along yellow sidewalks which crossed a winding artificial creek, lit up with Japanese lanterns strung to the tropical trees, you could wander by the guest bungalows scattered along the route, their flush pastel-colored doors another part of the maze of the arrangement.

  I blew a piece of my fourteen-thousand-dollar fortune and stayed at the Yacht Club until I picked the house I was to rent for the rest of my stay in Desert D’Or. I could describe that house in detail, but what would be the use? It was like most of the houses in the resort; it was modern, ranch-style, of course, with light furniture and rugs which felt like poodle wool, and it had a garden and a wall which went around the garden, the standard fault of Desert D’Or architecture; along the desert table, the walls were made of glass to have a view of mesa-colored sand and violet mountains, but t
he houses were so close to each other that the builders had to fence them in, and the result was like living in a room whose walls are mirrors. In fact, my house had a twenty-foot mirror which faced the wall of plate-glass window. No matter where I stood in the living room, I could never miss the sight of my rented garden with its desert flowers and the lone yucca tree.

  During the dry season which lasted for nine months of the year, the resort was parched by the sun. Every twilight the spray from a thousand sprinklers washed dust and sand from the gray foliage; morning and afternoon the sun scorched the sap from the plants and the desert circled the resort, its cacti standing on the horizon while croppings of dusty rock gathered like scavengers in the distance. The blue sky burned on the pale desert. It would come on me at times that Desert D’Or was a place where no trees bear leaves. The palms and the yuccas lifted a foliage of tufts and fans and fronds and shoots, but never leaves, and on some of the roads where tall palms lined the way, their dead fronds hung from the trunk like an ostrich’s muff.

  During the off-season, most of the activity took place in the bars. The bars were a village in the town, or at least a kind of main street in the absence of any other, yet they were as different from the warm front of Desert D’Or as the inside of one’s body is separate from the surface of one’s skin. Like so many other places in Southern California, the bars, cocktail lounges, and night clubs were made to look like a jungle, an underwater grotto, or the lounge of a modern movie theater. The Cerulean Room, to take an example, had an irregular space of rose-orange walls and booths of yellow leatherette under the influence of a dark blue ceiling. Above the serving bar with its bank of bottles, its pyramids of citrus fruit, a smoky-yellow false ceiling reflected into the mirror behind the bar and colored the etching of a half-nude girl which had been cut into the glass. Drinking in that atmosphere, I never knew whether it was night or day, and I think that kind of uncertainty got into everybody’s conversation. Men lacquered with liquor talked to other men who were sober, stories were started and never finished. On a typical afternoon in the air-cooled midnight of the bar, you could see a fat old man in a Palm Beach suit talking to a young girl with orange lipstick and the deep sun tan of Desert D’Or, the girl more interested in the old gent than the gentleman in her. Promoters and tourists, middle-aged women with new-colored hair, and high school kids who had competed in running hotrods across the desert, were jammed together. The talk was made up of horses, stories of parties the night before, and systems for roulette. Running along the heavy beat of a third-rate promoter trying to raise money, there would come the solo shriek of one hysterical blond or another, who seemed to be laughing in that tune which goes, “I’m dumb, I’m dumb, but you’re a scream.”

  In such a way, afternoon was always passing into night, and drunken nights into the dawn of a desert morning. One seemed to leave the theatrical darkness of afternoon for the illumination of night, and the sun of Desert D’Or became like the stranger who the drunk imagines to be following him. So I spent my first few weeks doing little more than pick up the bar checks of all those small sharp prospectors for pleasure from the capital, and in the capsule biography by which most of the people knew one another, I was understood to be an Air Force pilot whose family was wealthy and lived in the East, and I even added the detail that I had a broken marriage and drank to get over it. As a story it was reasonable enough to pass, and I sometimes believed what I said and tried to take the cure in the very real sun of Desert D’Or with its cactus, its mountain, and the bright green foliage of its love and its money.

  CHAPTER TWO

  TO MOST OF THE BAR-FLIES in Desert D’Or I must have been passing impressive. I had my First Lieutenant’s bars and my wings, I had combat decorations from that Asiatic war which has gone its intermittent way, I even looked the part. I had blond hair and blue eyes and I was six-feet one. I was good-looking and I knew it; I had studied the mirror long enough. Yet I never believed I was convincing. When I would put on my uniform, I would feel like an unemployed actor who tries to interest a casting director by dressing for the role.

  Of course, everybody sees himself through his own eyes, and I can hardly know with any confidence how I looked to other people. In those days I was a young man who felt temporarily like an old man, and although I believed I knew a great many things, I was able to do very little I wanted to do. Given the poker money, however, and the Air Force uniform and me with our arms around each other, most people assumed I was able to take care of myself, and I was careful not to correct their impression. There is that much to be said for having the build of a light-heavyweight.

  I saw only a few people regularly. It would have taken too much effort to find new friends. In the off-season, any celebrity who lived in Desert D’Or was surrounded by a court. It did not matter where you went to visit; dependably there would be the same people pouring the host’s drinks, laughing at his remarks, working I suppose as servants of his pleasure, so that his favorite games were played, his favorite stories were told, and the court was split into cliques which jockeyed for his favor. Nothing was so unusual as to find two celebrities who liked to see each other often.

  At Dorothea O’Faye’s home which she called The Hangover—it was the place I went to most often, Dorothea having picked me up one night in a bar and taken me home with her friends—the court was made up of a garage owner and his wife, a real-estate operator and his wife, a publicity man for Supreme Pictures, an old show girl who had been a friend of Dorothea’s years ago, and a drunk named O’Faye who had been married to Dorothea, had been divorced, and now was kept by her to run odd errands. Dorothea was a former personality who had been an actress of sorts, a night-club singer of some reputation, and had temporarily retired at the age of forty-three. Years ago, a friend advised her to invest in Desert D’Or property, and it was said that now Dorothea was rich. How rich she was no one could guess, however, for she had the secrecy about money which gives itself away in being generous and stingy by turns.

  Dorothea was handsome with a full body and exciting black hair, and she had been notorious as a show girl years ago, and famous again in her night-club days as a singer. Her boast was that she had been everywhere, had done everything, and knew everything there was to know. She had been a call girl, a gossip columnist (at separate times, be it said), a celebrity, a failure; she had been born in Chicago and discovered in New York, her father had been a drunk and died that way, her mother had disappeared with another man. Dorothea had done her father’s work when she was twelve; he was a sot of a janitor, and she collected rent from tenants and put the garbage out. At sixteen she was kept by the heir to a steel fortune, and a couple of years later she had an affair with a European prince and gave birth to his illegitimate son; she had made money and lost money, she had been married three times, the last to a man of whom she said, “I can’t remember him as well as guys I’ve had for a one-night stand.” She had even had her great romance. He was an Air Force pilot who was killed flying the mail, and she would tell me that was why she took to me. “I never knew a guy like him,” she would sigh. When she was on the sentimental side of her drinking she would decide that her whole life would have been different if he had lived; sober, or very drunk, she thought the opposite. “If he hadn’t died,” she would say, “we’d have killed it. The great thing is when something good hasn’t time to be spoiled.”

  Known for her rough wit and the force of her style, Dorothea was considered a catch by that revolving troupe of oilmen, men who made their money in the garment industries, and men … let me not pursue the series. What characterized most of them was that their business allowed them to travel and they worked for the reputation of having women who opened the eyes of other men. I admired the convenience of their itinerary which was triangulated by California, Florida, and the East. Generally, these men were seen with young women—models kept by millionaires, or child divorcées so fortunate as to be mixed in scandal—but Dorothea offered, in contrast to these girls, a quick min
d and a tough tongue which was respected greatly. My theory is that her men took her out like a business partner, and in all the sweat of a night club, they found Dorothea easy, they could talk to her. By the parade of her admirers I was always told, “She’s a great kid. She’s one of the best.” To which Dorothea might answer when asked her opinion, “He’ll pass. He’s a bastard, but no phony.” She had categories. There were good guys, bastards, and phonies, and the worst was a phony. A good guy, I learned by example, was a guy who made no excuses about looking out only for himself. A bastard was a man who had the same philosophy but took extra pleasure in hurting people. A phony was somebody who claimed to be concerned with anything but himself. For a while, she had trouble with me, she hardly knew where to set me in the cosmos of good guys, bastards, and phonies. I was out for a good time as I always told her, and she approved of that, but I also made the mistake of telling her I wanted to write, and writers were phonies in her book.

  All the same, she had her points. Her loyalty was strong. To be her friend was to be her friend, and if she was rough in business, as I often heard, it was her code never to leave you in needless trouble. She was a generous woman. There were always people for dinner, there was always whisky, and though she had two living rooms in her house puffed with heavy velvet furniture, the court stayed in the paneled den with its big home bar, its television set, and its night-club posters of old engagements Dorothea had played. Now, at Dorothea’s, all that was played were the games she liked, the gossip was told which interested her, and we spent evening after evening in doing almost exactly what we had done the night before. Her favorite was the game of Ghost, and I had to admire the heat with which she worked to win. Dorothea had had no education, and to be able to spell down everybody in the house left her in a fine mood.