The Moronic Inferno Part 3

The first thing to be said about In the Belly of the Beast is that it isn't any good. It isn't any good. One can then add that it is also the work of a thoroughly, obviously and understandably psychotic mind: as such, it is a manifesto for recidivism. Its author, plainly, could never hope to abjure violence. Abbott is quoted in Mailer, from his prison cell, and it is pitiable to read the confused and terrified ramblings of the man Mailer called 'an intellectual, a radical, a potential leader'. You can hear paranoia snickering and wincing behind every word.

During the trial Mailer admitted that he had 'blood on his hands'. Yet he never expressed sympathy for the murdered boy or his family. Why not? Why not? The omission was conspicuous, and was meant to be; it is thus doubly inexpiable. But however this may be, the Abbott episode is clearly full of misery for Mailer; and it was, at least, a human folly as much as an ideological one. There is no echo here of the sinister idiocies to be found in Mailer's introduction to In the Belly of the Beast. He should have listened to his wife Norris (who, after the release, had the time and will to give Abbott a fraction of the human contact he needed). This is Norris Mailer: I hadn't wanted any part of it. My att.i.tude to Norman's involvement all along had been, 'You wrote the book about Gilmore - didn't you learn anything? It's not gonna work, these guys don't change.' Norman is the eternal optimist and said, 'It'll be fine, this guy's different, blah blah blah'...

Anthony Powell stabs Lady Violet - near-fatally. William Golding risks a trigamy scandal by divorcing his fourth wife, marrying and divorcing his fifth, and then marrying his sixth in the s.p.a.ce of a week. Arrested for drunkenness, Malcolm Bradbury 'takes out' one policeman but is blackjacked by a second, earning himself fifteen st.i.tches. A.N. Wilson goes five rounds with drinking-buddy Frank Bruno.

None of this sounds terribly likely, does it? In British literary circles, what one might loosely call 'bad behaviour' is normally the preserve of Celtic micrometeorites like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, who burn brightly and briefly, and very soon rejoin the cosmic dust. But in the United States, provided you are Norman Mailer, it seems that you can act like a maniac for forty years - and survive, prosper and multiply, and write the books.' The work is what it is: sublime, ridiculous, always interesting. But the deeds - the human works - are a monotonous disgrace.

This 7oo-pager is an oral biography, or better say a verbal one. Peter Manso provides no links, no introduction; after his epic mar-shallings of the tapes and transcriptions, he was presumably hard pressed to manage the acknowledgments and the dedication. Even in America the book has been sniffed at as a by-blow of the new barbarism, but I think there is an appropriate madness in Manso's method. What's so great about the literary biography anyway? Mailer intercuts about 150 voices: family, friends, peers, onlookers, enemies. It is deeply discordant, naggingly graphic and atrociously indiscreet. No living writer, you'd have thought, could have more to lose by such an exposure. But then, programmatic self-destruction has always been the keynote of Mailer's life and times.

'Do things that frighten you' is one of Norman's pet maxims. Needless to say, in real life, doing things that frighten you tends to involve doing things that frighten other people. For some reason or other, Mailer spent the years between 1950 and 1980 in a tireless quest for a fistfight. He liked his dirty-talking, h.e.l.l-cat women to have fights too, teaching them how and egging them on. 'Drinking runs through this whole story,' as one of his wives remarks, 'drinking, drinking, drinking.' 'I am an American dissident," Mailer has been claiming for more than thirty years. But 'I am an American drunk' sounds nearer the mark.

Half-way through most evenings, Mailer would be 'snorting and weaving', insulting his friends, goading strangers. He picked his pals with care, and so there were usually a few ex-boxers, criminals and aspiring tough-guys or psychopaths on hand to engage with him in ritual arm-wrestling, elbow-digging and head-banging bouts. Having walked his two poodles one night in New York, Mailer returned home 'on cloud nine', 'in ecstasy', with his left eye 'almost out of his head'. He had got into a fight, he told his wife, because a couple of sailors 'accused my dog of being queer'. According to the doctor, it was 'a h.e.l.l of a beating he took'. But 'Stormin' Norman' was unrepentant. 'n.o.body's going to call my dog a queer,' he growled.

Irving Howe once said that Mailer risked becoming 'a hostage to the temper of his times'. But he was a willing hostage, and in fact he normally behaved more like a terrorist. 'For I wish to attempt an entrance', wrote Mailer in 1959, with typical pomp, 'into the mysteries of murder, suicide, incest, orgy, o.r.g.a.s.m and Time.' He was referring to his work rather than his life, but the two activities (like bar-room brawlers) were hard to keep apart.

The book is strewn with vicious confrontations, drunken couplings, ostentatious suicide bids, cruel human manipulations, incessant violence - and incessant cant. It is like a distillation of every Sixties hysteria, every radical-chic inanity. A girl's drink is spiked with LSD. On a brief h.o.m.oeopathic fad, Mailer refuses to let his baby daughter have her shots. While Mailer was directing his third cinematic 'happening' (and flop), Maidsfone, there were 'people by the dozens, running around, chasing each other, fighting, f.u.c.king, acting insane'; 'the violence ... was so thick you could feel it'. Sure enough, 'all of a sudden there's kids screeching, Beverly [wife 4] screaming, and blood.' This is a common background noise in Mailer: screaming children.

Of course, everyone was at it, in that convulsive bad-behaviour festival that beset America after the war. Often the urge to scandalise a non-existent bourgeoisie took a more benevolent form. One of the funniest pa.s.sages in the book describes a c.o.c.ktail party on Cape Cod given by the distinguished belles-lettrist Dwight Macdonald. 'We got out of the car,' says Mailer's second wife, Adele, and there was everyone standing around nude. All these intellectuals, the whole bunch. It was just so cute. Norman and I looked at each other and shrugged and took off our clothes. No, I think Norman left his shorts on.

Let's be thankful for small mercies. If I go to a literary party this summer, I shall certainly pause to count my blessings.

The knifing of Adele - known as The Trouble - stands as the pivotal incident of the book: as Mailer's sociopathic epiphany. In 1960 Mailer threw a party in New York as 'an unofficial kick-off" for his mayoralty campaign (the campaign was perforce abandoned thereafter; and it was a decade later that Mailer made a slightly more serious attempt to become the Ken Livingstone of New York). Intending a creative confrontation between the city's haves and have-nots, Mailer invited the local bigwigs and machine politicians together with a rabble of punks and pimps - the disenfranchised whom Mailer hoped to represent. Predictably, none of the haves showed up. The have-nots, however, had no prior engagements.

Mailer had already got a few fights under his belt by the time the party collapsed and he staggered, b.l.o.o.d.y-lipped, into the kitchen and reached for the knife. Adele had apparently been baiting him all night; she had been fooling around with a woman 'in the John'; she was 'definitely' heard to remark that Mailer 'wasn't as good a writer as Dostoevsky'. Or perhaps she simply called his poodle a queer. Later, friends were considering whether to go in 'with a baseball bat' to rescue Mailer's daughter. 'He had this marvellous rationale', muses a friend, about art and life - and he actually did it, he lived it. And it wasn't just something he did half-a.s.s. It almost killed him - or actually Adele...

There is a fair bit to be said on the credit side. And, after all, better writers have behaved worse. There is manifest charm, strong loyalty, an absence of sn.o.bbery, the novelist's gift of finding interest everywhere (even in bores and boredom), the enviable - if not admirable - shamelessness, and above all the selective but delightfully strident honesty. In a letter: I've decided that at bottom I'm just a s.a.d.i.s.t, and no d.a.m.n good for any woman. The reason - I can beat them up. Only with men do I act decently cause I'm scared they'll whop me, isn't human nature depressing?

One of the most formidable and endearing voices running through this book is that of f.a.n.n.y ('my kids are tops') Mailer, Norman's 86-year-oId-mother. 'I couldn't understand why he hadn't gotten the n.o.bel Prize.' 'Why he picked Adele I never could understand.' 'If Norman would stop marrying these women who make him do these terrible things.' f.a.n.n.y named her 'really lovely baby' Nachum Malech Mailer, 'Nachum' becoming Norman, while 'Malech' ('king' in Hebrew) became Kingsley. 'He was our king', 'a little G.o.d'. '"He's going to be a great man." I knew that. Absolutely.' f.a.n.n.y never waivered, and all his life Norman had plenty of collaborators in building the mansion of his self-esteem.

His name is Norman Mailer, king of kings: look on his works, ye Mighty, and - what? Despair? Burst out laughing? In secure retrospect, Mailer's life and times seem mostly ridiculous: incorrigibly ridiculous. Some observers talk of his 'great huge ambition', his 'great grace and correct.i.tude'; others just lick their wounds. A devout immoralist, he always veered between the superhuman and the subhuman, between Menenhetet I and Gary Gilmore. Like America, he went too far in all directions, and only towards the end, perhaps - with no more drink and 'no more stunts', dedicated to his work and to a non-combatant sixth wife - has he struck a human balance. As for the past, nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.

Observer 1981,1982 and 1985

Palm Beach: Don't You Love It?

The only road-accidents in Palm Beach take place between pedestrians. And you can see them happening a mile off. The mottled, golf-trousered oldsters square up to each other on pavement and zebra, and head forward, inexorably, like slow-motion stock-cars or distressed supertankers. (Everyone is pretty sleek and rounded in Palm Beach - unlike New York, where people's faces are as thin as credit cards.) Then it happens. Oof!... The old-timers rebound and stagger on. 'Hey!' 'This is a sidewalk, honey.' 'Oh yeah? How'd you like that!'

Meanwhile the tamed gas-guzzlers toil in line along the seafront strip, hea.r.s.e-like limousines, roadsters with their haunches and biceps - Toronadoes, Thunderbirds, Cutla.s.ses. But these gas-guzzlers are on the wagon. The limit is between 25 and 35 m.p.h., and people drive even slower than that. There are never any accidents, no alarms of any kind. A flat tire on a Mercedes will bring out the squad cars, helicopters, state troopers. The only people who need to get anywhere fast are behind the wheels of the Emergency Service Units, which specialise in heart attacks and are the most efficient and advanced in the world. Everyone else cruises in meandering, Sunday-sightseeing style. The speedometer on my gurgling 1981 Mustang stopped at 85, like a Mini. Energy is being conserved. But for what?

Your psychic clock needs time to adjust to Palm Beach, to the sun, the wealth, the safety and the pool fatigue. For the first forty-eight hours 1 felt 1 was going to be spontaneously arrested by the police for having such a relaxing time.'... But Officer - what's the charge?'

'You're too relaxed. Way too relaxed.' The truth was, of course, that I wasn't nearly relaxed enough. I sprawled nervously by my personal swimming-pool, dozed jumpily on my baronial bed, idled edgily into town at the wheel of my sparkling car ...

There is no sign of any work going on here. There is no sign of anyone who hasn't got lots of money. The only black faces you see, you see through gla.s.s: tr.i.m.m.i.n.g the borders, washing the dishes, or licking your windscreen. There is no litter, there is no crime; a s.n.a.t.c.hed purse in the shopping mall would cause headlines, statewide man-hunts. There is only one kind of activity in Palm Beach: leisure.

Palm Beach proper, the strip of land between Lake Worth and the Atlantic Ocean, is the most expensive piece of real estate in America, out-tabbing Martha's Vineyard or Beverly Hills. People talk obsessively about real estate - partly, I suppose, because it is an informal way of talking obsessively about money. 'And I mean those are top prices. And I mean top. Top. Top.' 'Then I raised the money at 140 per cent of the asking price. Don't you love it?' In one of the main shopping streets in Palm Beach there is a plush-looking office called Creative Realtors. Perhaps there is even a course at Miami University in creative realting.

I visited an average middle-income Palm Beach home and was shown round by its droll and hospitable owner. From the point of view of ostentation - well, the house had a monogrammed marble driveway, and went on from there. Additional features included a telephonic computer system (if you dial a certain number in the study, the drapes draw shut in the bedroom), weather control in the jungly courtyard, visual and aural monitoring of the sculpture-infested grounds. In the garage is a custom-built $90,000 Clenet ('I have some Rouses out there too, and they ain't bad'). In the Mae-West bathroom art jereboams of Madame Rochas and Paco Rabanne. The lawn is like astroturf, the carpets like bubble-baths. Never in my life have I seen such clogged, stifling luxury.

My host was a businessman from the North who had settled in Palm Beach. On arrival, he did not attempt to join the 'most exclusive' club in town. There would have been no point: he is a Jew. He did try to join the club next door. He was willing to pay his dues ($10,000 a year), and could prove, as all hopefuls must, that he had given over a million dollars to charity. He couldn't get in there either. His wife hired a press secretary, and the couple began to appear in the Palm Beach Daily News, or The Shiny Sheet' as it is known. Eventually they were accepted by Palm Beach cafe society. Like all provincial elites, the Palm Beach beau monde is both baffling and uninteresting, an enigma that you don't particularly want to solve. Names are mentioned with reverence, irony or contempt. Some have an old-style Confederate ring; others sound ersatz European. Appropriately for America, the only monikers with an aristocratic tang are brand-names - perfumes, cars, domestic appliances. There are occasional scandals. The loo-paper heiress has run off with the bra-strap boss! The deodorant queen has divorced the bath-salt giant! Large parties are thrown under the cover of charity. You buy your own drinks and the money goes to a disadvantaged minority group, or to combat a fashionable disease. I formed the impression that most of the entertaining consists of small but opulent pool-side dinner-parties, in which each hosting couple tries to out-Gatsby the other with the vintage of their wines, the poundage of their steaks, the antiquity of their tableware, the mult.i.tudinousness of their servants. But there are other big dates on the calendar too.

'The drama of diamonds!... Yes, diamonds are a girl's best friend ... This exquisite necklace! A unison of n.o.ble gems. Yours for a mere - $250,000!'

This was the seasonal Gucci party, given at the Gucci arcade and fronted by Gucci himself (or, rather, by 'Doctor Aldo Gucci' himself. 'Doctor': don't you love it?). Gucci himself is a resplendently handsome maniac with operatic manners and impossible English. 'Let us give thanks that G.o.d has forgiven this evening,' and so on. Sw.a.n.ky girls and jinking pretty-boys modelled the Doc's latest creations. Gucci then repaired to the minstrels' gallery and, with a tambourine in one hand and a microphone in the other, actually mimed to the songs being played by the sedative pop group behind him.

Meanwhile I mingled with the clotted cream of Palm Beach. The old men - these tuxed G.o.ds and molten robots, with silver-studded dress shirts and metallic hair, all doing fine, alt in great shape. 'How are you, Buck?' 'Good, Dale. You?' Tm good, Buck. I'm good.' And the women, still going strong, prinked, snipped, tucked, capped, patched, pinched, rinsed, lopped, pruned, pared, but still going strong, and intending to be around for a very long time.

The average age in Palm Beach is fifty-seven. According to popular belief - i.e. according to the famous Alan Whicker doc.u.mentary a few years ago - the Beach is peopled entirely by widows with faces like snake-skin handbags, the menfolk having checked out with the lifelong effort of establishing themselves on this golden mile. 'That Alvin Whicker there. You're not going to write something like that,' I was told on several occasions. No, I said, I wasn't. I saw little of this - or rather I saw other things also.

'Do you do c.o.ke?' someone asked me at a cattle-baron's hoedown (dress: Western) at the Palm Beach Polo and Country Club. (How do you do c.o.ke? At Miami airport I happened to notice a iiustered-looking Bruce Forsyth, standing in front of an ad that read: 'Do A Daquiri'. As I write this sentence, I am doing a cigarette.) There were plenty of young things at the hoedown, lots of little Bo Dereks and Farrah Fawcetts bobbing to the Okey band, and squired by many a six-gunned young dude. You hear tell of the usual hang-gliding, water-skiing, scuba-diving, Cessna-flying, polo-playing, drug-and-discoing young rabble that traditionally adorn such pleasure spots, their activities indulged by their parents and winked at by the police. The rich have children, just like everybody else.

Driving inland from Palm Beach, you are immediately confronted by the booming chaos of middle America. On the bridge into West Palm (a community founded for the servants and amenity operators of the Beach itself), there are morose old black men fishing for scrod over the rails. Within seconds you are in drive-in, shopping-mall land. Beef n'Booze, Seven Eleven, X-Rated Movies, Totally Nude Encounter Sessions, Jack's Bike World, Eats - 24 Hrs. Developments are rearing up everywhere, condominiums, conurbations, the bleak toytowns formed by mobile homes. Drive a little further and you are in the redneck swampland of Wellington and Loxahatchee. Anything, you feel, could happen here - crocodiles slithering across the dirt roads, good ole boys staring and snickering at your out-of-county plates ...

Drop me down anywhere in America and I'll tell you where I am: in America. I soon turned round and headed back to the Beach, where you feel old and safe. I longed to be on the patio of my villa, and to hear my maid calling out protectively to ask if I wanted my tea. She deals with everything, with the tradesmen and delivery boys who zoom round to cater to my whims and to fix all the labour-saving appliances. She does all the washing-up and laundry. My shirts never had it so good. Out in the sun I read a little poem by Von Humboldt Fleischer which perfectly answered my mood: Mice hide when hawks are high; Hawks shy from airplanes; Planes dread the ack-ack-ack; Each one fears somebody. Only the heedless lions Under the Booloo tree Snooze in each other's arms After their lunch of blood - I call that living good.'

By now my psychic clock was attuned to Palm Beach, I felt completely at home among the old American lions.

Tatler 1979

Brian De Palma: The Movie Brute

Burbank Studios, Sound Stage 16. In silent hommage to Hitchc.o.c.k, perhaps, Brian De Palma's belly swells formidably over the waistband of his safari suit - So, at any rate, I had thought of beginning this profile of the light-fingered, flash-trash movie brute, director of Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Scarface - and Body Double. But that was before I had been exposed to De Palma's obscure though unmistakable charm: three weeks, twenty telephone calls, and a few thousand miles later. 'I know you've come all the way from London, and I know Brian promised to see you while you were in LA,' his PA told me at the entrance to the lot. 'Well, he's rescinded on that,' she said, and laughed with musical significance. This significant laughter told me three things: one, that she was scandalised by his behaviour; two, that he did it all the time; and three, that I wasn't to take him seriously, because no one else did. I laughed too. I had never met a real-life moody genius before; and they are very funny.

So let's start again. Brian De Palma sits slumped on his director's chair, down at Burbank, in boiling Los Angeles. It is 'wrap' day on Body Double, his p.o.r.nographic new thriller: only two climactic scenes remain to be shot. 'Put the chest back on,' De Palma tells the villain, played by Gregg Henry. 'Okay. New chest! New belly!' This means another forty-minute delay. De Palma gets to his feet and wanders heavily round the set. He is indeed rather tubby now, the back resting burdensomely on the b.u.t.tocks, and he walks with an effortful, cross-footed gait. 'Hitchc.o.c.k was sixty when he made Psycho,' De Palma would later tell me. '1 don't know if I'll be able to walk when I'm sixty.' A curious remark - but then Brian is not a good walker, even now, at forty-four; he is not a talented walker.

He walks as if he is concentrating very hard on what he has in his pockets.

I approached the sinister Gregg Henry and asked him about the scene they were shooting. It sounded like standard De Palma: 'I throttle Craig Wa.s.son to the ground or whatever. I jump out of the grave. I rip off my false belly.' The false belly is part of Gregg's disguise, along with the rug, the redskin facial pancake, and the Meccano dentures. As in Dressed to Kill, a goody turns out to be a baddy, in disguise. It takes a headlining make-up veteran three-and-a-half hours to get Gregg looking as sinister as this. Presumably it takes the baddy in the film even longer - but this is a De Palma picture, where gross insults to plausibility are routine. The second shot involves an elaborate false-perspective prop (to dramatise the hero's claustrophobia as he is buried alive), like the staircase scene in Vertigo. The camera will wobble. 'With luck, you'll feel sick,' says the amiable first a.s.sistant. Body Double has gone pretty smoothly, within schedule and under budget. The only real hitch was a 'hair problem' with Melanie Griffith. She spent two weeks under the drier and over the sink. 'We tried brown, red, platinum - until we got what Brian wanted.'

Suddenly - that is to say, after a fifteen-minute yelling relay - the shot is ready to go again. De Palma talks to no one but the camera operator. 'Why don't you pull back a bit? Why don't you try to hold him from head to foot?' All his instructions are in this dogged rhetorical style. Action. Gregg Henry and Craig Wa.s.son perform creditably ('Oh man,' says Gregg, peeling off his false belly, 'you ruined my whole surprise ending'), but De Palma is unhap ?y about the camera's swooning back-track. He should have been unhappy about his surprise ending, which doesn't work. 'New belly,' says Brian, and the delay resumes. A series of delays interrupted by repet.i.tions: that's motion pictures.

De Palma went trudge-about. 'I think this would be a good time for you to be introduced to Brian,' said Rob, the unit publicist - also likeable. 'He's in a receptive mood.'

'Are you sure?'

'Yes. Very receptive.'

We walked over. I was introduced. De Palma wearily offered his hand. Rob explained who I was. 'Uh,' said De Palma, and turned away.

'Is that as good as it gets?' I asked as we walked off.

See him in New York, said Rob. He 11 be better, when he s wrapped.'

And so an hour or two later I left him in the lot, which was still doing its imitation of h.e.l.l. Gaunt ladies lurk near the catering caravan. Fat minders or shifters or teamsters called Buck and Flip and Heck move stoically about. The place is big and dark and hot, swathed in black drapes, vulcanic, loud with vile engines, horrid buzzers, expert noise-makers. Nearly all the time absolutely nothing is happening. Eight hours later, at midnight, De Palma wrapped.

As a film-maker, Brian De Palma knows exactly what he wants. Unlike his peers and pals, Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola and Scorsese (they all teamed up at Warner Brothers in the early Seventies), De Palma doesn't shoot miles of footage and then redesign the movie in the editing room. His rough cuts are usually shorter than the finished film. Every scene is meticulously story-boarded, every pan and zoom, every camera angle. Here's a sample on-set interview: So, Brian, before you make a movie, do you see the whole thing in your head?

Yes.

Do you have problems re-creating the movie you see?

No.

How does the actual movie measure up to what you originally imagined?

It measures up.

He seldom advises or encourages his actors. Michael Caine has said that the highest praise you'll hear from De Palma is 'Print'. As a film-maker, Brian De Palma knows exactly what he wants. The only question is: why does he want it?

Always an ungainly cultural phenomenon, De Palma's reputation has never been more oddly poised. He likes to think of himself as over the top and beyond the pale, an iconoclast and controversialist, someone that people love to hate or hate to love - someone, above all, who cannot be ignored. In moments of excitement he will grandly refer to 'whole schools of De Palma criticism' which say this, that and the other about his work. Well, too many people have failed to ignore De Palma for us to start ignoring him now. But it may be that the only serious school of De Palma criticism is the one where all the cla.s.srooms are empty. Everyone is off playing hookey. They're all busy ignoring him.

De Palma's history forms a promising confection, full of quir-kiness and mild exoticism. His parents were both Italian Catholics yet little Brian was reared as a Presbyterian, The Catholic imagery was naturally the more tenacious for the young artist ('that is one spooky religion') and its themes and forms linger in his work: the diabolism, the ritualised but arbitrary moral schemes, the guilt. De Palma Senior was a surgeon - orthopaedics, the correction of deformity. Brian used to sit in on operations, often catching a skin graft or a bone transplant, and would later do vacation jobs in medical laboratories. 'I have a high tolerance for blood,' he says. The cast of The Fury (1978) nicknamed him Brian De Plasma. On the set his most frequent remarks are 'Action', 'Print' and 'More blood!' De Palma was tempted by medicine but rejected the discipline as 'not precise enough'.

He used to be keen on precision, and still sees his work in terms of 'precise visual story-telling', streamlined and dynamic, all pincer grips and rapier thrusts. In fact, 'precision' in De Palma is entirely a matter of sharp surfaces and smooth a.s.sembly; within, all is smudge and fudge, woolliness, approximation. The young Brian was also something of a physics prodigy and computer whiz. At a National Science Fair compet.i.tion he took second prize for his critical study of hydrogen quantum mechanics through cybernetics. (This is impressive all right. You try it.) One imagines the teenage De Palma as owlish, bespectacled and solitary, like the kid in Dressed to Kill. That solitude is still with him, I would say. Then at university the brainy loner changed tack, selling his home-made computers for a olex film camera, 'trading one obsession for another'.

Born in Newark, raised in Philadelphia, a student of physics at Columbia and of drama at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, De Palma is solidly East Coast in his origins, urban, radical, anti-establishment, anti-Hollywood. He admired G.o.dard, Polanski and of course Hitchc.o.c.k, but he entered the industry from left field: via the TV-dominated world of doc.u.mentary and verite, low-budget satire and chaotic improvisation, war protest and s.e.xual daring - a product of the Sixties, that golden age of high energy and low art. It must be said that of all De Palma's early work, from Greetings in 1968 to Phantom of the Paradise in 1974, nothing survives. These films are now no more than memories of art-house late nights, student screenings, left-wing laughter and radical applause. De Palma's first visit to Hollywood, for Get to Know Your Rabbit, was a disaster movie in itself. His authority attacked, his star out of control, De Palma 'quit' the picture two weeks before its completion - as he would later quit Prince of the City and Flashdance. The film was shelved for two years. On his own admission De Palma was suddenly 'dead' in Los Angeles, where the locals are superst.i.tious about failure; they quarantine you, in case failure is catching. No one returned his calls. They crossed the street to avoid him. 'People think - what has he got in that can?' In any event, Rabbit was a dog. Furtively released in 1974 as a B-feature, it interred itself within a week.

Then two years later along came Carrie, far and away De Palma's most successful film, in all senses. By now Brian's contemporaries, his Warner brothers, were all drowning in riches and esteem, and he was 'more than ready' for a smash of his own. 'I pleaded, pleaded to do Carrie.' And so began De Palma's a.s.similation into the Hollywood machine, his extended stay in 'the land of the devil'. The Sixties radical package was merely the set of values that got to him first, and he had wearied of a 'revolution' he found ever more commercialised. De Palma now wanted the other kind of independence, the 'dignity' that comes from power and success within the establishment. He is honest - or at any rate brazen - about the reversal. 'I too became a capitalist,' he has said. 'By even dealing with the devil you become devilish. There's no clean money. There I was, worrying about Carrie not doing forty million. That's how deranged your perspectives get." Nowadays his politics are cautious and pragmatic: 'capitalism tempered by compa.s.sion, do unto others - stuff like that'. The liberal minimum. His later films do sometimes deal in political questions of the Watergate-buff variety, but the slant is personal, prankish, paranoid - De Palmaesque. All that remains of the Sixties guerrilla is an unquenchable taste for anarchy: moral anarchy, artistic anarchy.

What use has he made of his freedom? What exactly are we looking at here? 'Mature' De Palma consists of Dressed to Kill, Blowout and now Body Double. These are the medium-budget films which De Palma conceived, wrote, directed and cut. (The Fury and Scarface we can set aside as fancy-priced hackwork, while Home'

Movies, a shoe-string project put together at Sarah Lawrence and released'in 1980, is already a vanished curiosity.) De Palma's three main credits, or debits, reveal his cinematic vision, unfettered by any constraints other than those imposed by the censors. They also show how blinkered, intransigent and marginal that vision really is. Such unedifying fixity has no equivalent in mainstream cinema, and none in literature, except perhaps Celine, or William Burroughs - or Kathy Acker.

Each instalment in the De Palma trilogy concerns itself with a man who goes about the place cutting up women: straight razor, chisel, power drill. The women are either prost.i.tutes, s.e.xual adventuresses or adult-movie queens. There is no conventional s.e.x whatever in De Palma's movies: it is always a function of money, violence or defilement, glimpsed at a voyeuristic remove or through a p.o.r.nographic sheen (and this interest in flash and peep goes right back to Greetings). The heroes are childish or ineffectual figures, helpless in the face of the villain's superior human energies. There are no plots: the narratives themselves submit to a psychopathic rationale, and are Jittered with coincidence, blind spots, black holes. Like its predecessors, Body Double could be exploded by a telephone call, by a pertinent question, by five minutes' thought. Most candidly of all, De Palma dispenses with the humanistic ensemble of character, motive, development and resolution. He tries his best, but people bore him, and that's that.

Brian has something, though. Without it, he would be indistinguishable from the gory hucksters of the exploitation circuit, the slashers and manglers, the Movie Morons who gave us The Evil Dead, Prom Night and I Spit On Your Grave. Brian has style - a rare and volatile commodity. Style will always convince cinematic purists that the surfaces they admire contain depth, and that clear shortcomings are really subtle virtues in disguise. De Palma isn't logical, so he must be impressionistic. He isn't realistic, so he must be surrealistic. He isn't scrupulous, so he must be audacious. He isn't earnest, so he must be ironical. He isn't funny, so he must be serious.

And so I hung around in damp New York, waiting on the man. Every now and then De Palma's 'people' at Columbia would apologetically pa.s.s on the odd message: 'Brian's probably going to decide tomorrow whether he'll let you have this interview...' I had urgent reasons for returning to London. A week pa.s.sed. Now, there is no reason why celebrities should submit to journalistic inspection, and in fact they are increasingly reluctant to do so - except in the trash press, where publicity is always tilted towards celebration. But having agreed to an interview, they should play by the rules, which are rules of ordinary etiquette: do unto others - stuff like that. A week pa.s.sed. And then Brian came down from the mountain.

'Mr De Palma? He's right over there,' said the porter down in lower Fifth Avenue. Brian sat ponderously on a bench by the lift with a newspaper under his arm. Always keen to stay in touch with 'street reality', De Palma had just staggered out for a New York Times. 'Hi,' I said, and reintroduced myself. De Palma nodded at the floor. 'It's kind of you to give me your time.' De Palma shrugged helplessly - yes, what a bountiful old softie he was. In eerie silence we rode the swaying lift.

'Coffee?' he sighed. With studied gracelessness he shuffled around his four-room office - televisions, hi-fis, a pinball machine, De Palma film posters, curved white tables, orderly work-surfaces. This was where Brian did all his writing and conceiving. Wordlessly he gave me my coffee mug and sloped off to take a few telephone calls. At last he levered himself in behind the desk, his nostrils flaring with a suppressed yawn, and waved a limp hand at me. The interview began. Great, I thought, after ten minutes. He really is bananas. This is going like a dream.

'My films are so filmically astute that people think I'm not good with actors. Actors trust me and my judgment because I'm so up front about what I feel ... I don't make "aggressive" use of the camera. I make the right use. I go with my instinct - I use Hitchc.o.c.k's grammar but I have a romantic vision that's more sweeping and Wagnerian__I have a tremendous amount of experience. I'm not afraid to try new things ... Financially in Hollywood I'm a sound economic given. Three-quarters of my films have made money. Anybody who can make one film that makes money is a genius!'

'Casting all modesty aside,' I said, fondling my biro, 'where would you place yourself among your contemporaries - Coppola, Scorsese?'

'Oh, I don't know. I'm up there, I guess. Time ...' he said, and paused. De Palma is generally tentative about time - aware, perhaps, of what time has already done to much of his oeuvre. 'Let's face up to it! I'm never going to get a lifetime-achievement award. I never bought those values anyway. In ten years hence they ... I don't know. Time will find a place for me.'

On this note of caution, Brian unwound. His mood of frenzied self-advertis.e.m.e.nt receded, alas, and I have to report that he then talked pretty soberly and fluently for well over an hour - bearish, grinning, gesturing, his laughter frayed by hidden wildness. Of course, the time to catch De Palma in full manic babble is when he is writhing under the tethers of a collaborative project, as on Scarf ace, or tangling with the censors, as he did on Dressed to Kill, which barely escaped an X. But he was relatively calm during our meeting, with Body Double in the can and another project nicely brewing: Carpool, in which he intends to indulge his fascination with rearview mirrors. 'Steven will produce,' says Brian snugly. In January he had told Esquire: 'As soon as I get this dignity from Scarface I am going to go out and make an X-rated suspense p.o.r.n picture.' Later he added, 'If Body Double doesn't get an X, nothing I ever do is going to. I'm going to give them everything they hate, and more of it than they've ever seen.' What major company, you wonder, would finance and distribute an X? I asked Brian about this. He grew sheepish. 'No major company would finance or distribute it,' he said. So it's an R. 'Most frustrating,' De Palma muses. 'I mean, look at cable TV. Kids can watch anything these days.'

Despite such checks and balances De Palma is quick to claim full responsibility for his projects. 'It is an auteur situation out there. You guys, you writers, you got to stop thinking of directors as still living in the Fifties. It's not an entrenched power system. There's a lot of free will. No one wants to confront you. No one wants to take responsibility. That's why directors are emergent figures. If the executives lean on you, you just have to say, "Okay, guys, you do it." Either they let you alone, or its "Goodbye, Bri! Well, De Palma f.u.c.ked up!'"

After a little coaxing, however, Brian confessed to moments of self-doubt. 'It's an intolerable kind of regime. You wake up at four in the morning, thinking - Who wants it! Who needs it! It's all so complex. It's like Waiting for G.o.dot [this last word stressed oddly too, like Gdansk]. Then the rushes, the final mix - that's pleasure. I like to write. My own pace. I basically like to work by myself.'

At this point I recalled the morose and taciturn figure at Burbank Studios, in LA. Among all the clamour and clatter, the compulsive wisecracking and bovine bonhomie, there was De Palma, doing as good an impersonation of a man alone as the circ.u.mstances could well permit. Occasionally, too, I thought I glimpsed the obsessive and abstracted kid in him, the bristle of a more rarefied talent. Human relations are always difficult'for this kind of artist - messy, confusing, 'not precise enough'. De Palma has been married once, and briefly, to Nancy Allen, whom he had cast as a monosyllabic hooker in three movies running. Informed Hollywood gossip maintains that Nancy wanted a family, and Brian didn't. Well, he's batching it now. Asked why he always equates s.e.x with terror, De Palma says equably, 'Casual s.e.x is terrifying. It's one of the few areas of terror still left to us.' And this is why p.o.r.nography interests him. It is casual, but safe. And it is solitary: n.o.body else need come in on the act.

The time had come for the crucial question, made more ticklish by the fact that De Palma's manner had softened - was bordering, indeed, on outright civility. One could now see traces of his man-management skills, his knack with actors, how he calms and charms them into a confident partisanship. Despite De Palma's indifference to characterisation, there are remarkably few bad performances in his films. 'I always felt that Brian adored me," John Travolta has said. 'He seemed to get pure joy out of watching me work.' But perhaps Travolta feels that way about everybody. De Palma is best with the stock types of lowbrow fiction, as in Carrie. Elsewhere, he is about as penetrating as the studio make-up girl. Even with an award-winning writer (Oliver Stone), an award-winning star (Al Pacino), and an unlimited canvas ($zz million and three hours plus of screen time), De Palma showed no inkling of human complexity: Scarf ace might as well have been called s.h.i.tface for all the subtlety he applied to the monotonous turpitude of Tony Montana.

Girding myself, I asked De Palma why his films made no sense. He bounced back with some eagerness, explaining that Hitchc.o.c.k was illogical too and that, besides, life didn't make any sense either. 'Hitchc.o.c.k did it all the time! Didn't anyone look at the corpse in Vertigo? In Blowout the illogic was immense - but it was in Watergate too! I'm not interested in being Agatha Christie! Life is not like a crossword puzzle! I trust my instinct and emotion! I go with that!''

Brian De Palma once described, with typical recklessness, his notion of an ideal viewership: 'I like a real street audience - people who talk during and at a movie, a very unsophisticated Forty-Second Street crowd.' He is right to think that he has an affinity with these cineasts, who have trouble distinguishing filmic life from the real thing. De Palma movies depend, not on a suspension of disbelief, but on a suspension of intelligence such as the Forty-Second Street crowd have already made before they come jabbering into the stalls. Quite simply, you cannot watch his films twice. Reinspect them on video (on the small screen with, the lights up, with the sharply reduced affect) and they disintegrate into strident chaos. Niggling doubts become farcical certainties. Where? When? How? Why? There's hardly a sequitur in sight.

The illogicality, the reality-blurring, the media-borne cretini-sation of modern life is indeed a great theme, and all De Palma's major contemporaries are on to it. De Paima is on to it too, but in a different way. He abets and exemplifies it, pa.s.sively. In the conception of his films De Palma has half-a-dozen big scenes that he knows how to shoot. How he gets from one to the other is a matter of indifference. On some level he realises that the ignorant will not care or notice, and that the over-informed will mistake his wantonness for something else.

De Palma is regarded as an intellectual. Now it clearly isn't hard to come by such a reputation in the film world, particularly among the present generation of movie-makers. Spielberg, the most popular, is bright and articulate; but his idea of intellection is to skip an hour's TV. And Scorsese, the most brilliant (and the most prescient), is a giggling mute. De Palma isn't an intellectual, though his films, like his conversation, have a patina of smartness. He isn't a cynic either, nor is he the cheerful charlatan I had geared myself to expect. Is he a 'master' (as critics on both sides of the Atlantic claim), or is he a moron? He has no middlebrow following: his fans are to be found either in the street or in the screening-room. Occupying an area rich in double-think, De Palma is simply the innocent beneficiary of a cultural joke. It is an achievement of a kind, to fashion an art that appeals to the purist, the hooligan, and n.o.body else.

Vanity Fair 1984

Here's Ronnie: On the Road with Reagan

Ronald Reagan's personal jet, which goes by the name of Free Enterprise II, flew in late for a Reagan Rally at the Transient Terminal of El Paso Airport, Texas. Practically everyone in the waiting crowd was either a journalist, a secret-serviceman, or a delegate, one of Reagan's local 'people'. We were all wearing prominent name-tags, something that Americans especially like doing. I strolled among the Skips and Dexters, the Lavernes and Francines, admiring all the bulging Wranglers and stretched stretch-slacks. This felt like Reagan Country all right, where everything is big and fat and fine. This is where you feel slightly h.o.m.os.e.xual and left-wing if you don't weigh twenty-five stone.

The blue-jodhpurred Tijuana band fell silent as Reagan climbed up on to the podium. 'Doesn't move like an old man,' I thought to myself; and his hair can't be a day over forty-five. Pretty Nancy Reagan sat down beside her husband. As I was soon to learn, her adoring, damp-eyed expression never changes when she is in public. Bathed in Ronnie's aura, she always looks like Bambi being reunited with her parents. Reagan sat in modest silence as a local Republican bigwig presented him with a pair of El Paso cowboy spurs to go with his 1976 El Paso cowboy boots. Then it happened: 'Ladies and gentlemen! The next President of the United States!' And with a bashful shrug ex-Governor Ronald Reagan stepped up to the lectern.

'You know, some funny things happen to you on the campaign trail,' Reagan mused into the mike. 'Not so long back a little boy came up to me - he must have been, why, no more than eleven or twelve years of age. He looked up at me and he said, "Mister, you're pretty old." (Forgiving laughter as Reagan cleverly defuses the age issue.) "What was it like when you were a boy?" (Long, wry pause.) And I said... "Well, son. When I was a little boy, America was the strongest country in the world. (Applause and cheers.) When I was a little boy, every working American could expect to buy his own home. (Applause.) When I was a little boy, gasoline was twenty-eight cents a gallon." (Cheers.) ... The little boy looked up at me and he said, "Hey, mister. You ain't so old. Things were like that when I was a little boy too.'" (Laughter, applause, cheers and whoops.) Ronald Reagan is quite right. Some funny things do happen to you on the campaign trail.

Lined up with forty swearing pressmen over the chaotic trench of a hotel reception desk in Fort Worth, Texas, I noticed that the two-faced illuminated sign in the courtyard said, on one side, holiday inn - welcome cov mrs reagan, and, on the other, STEAK AND SHRIMP SPECIAL $6.95.

In the Chattanooga Room of the Opryland Hotel (z8oo Opryland Drive, Nashville, Tennessee), Governor and Mrs Reagan hosted a $25o-a-plate fund-raising dinner. Ronnie, Nancy and half-a-dozen local dignitaries sat on a raised dais in front of metallic blue drapes. Over c.o.c.ktails, the entire company swore allegiance to the flag, then listened with heads bowed to the pre-prandial prayer: 'Help us, G.o.d, to resolve our economic difficulties', and so on.

In the foyer restroom of the Holiday Inn, Midland, Texas, the muzak was playing 'My Way'. As I came out into the hall, where Reagan would soon delight an expectant crowd, the Robert E. Lee High School Bra.s.s Band was playing 'Hot Stuff". When the applause died after Reagan's speech, the band played 'I Wish I Was in Dixie'.

As the campaign Braniff jet took off from El Paso, Nancy Reagan rolled an orange down the aisle from the first-cla.s.s section (where, I imagined, Ronnie was either asleep or completing a course of vitamin injections) to the back of the plane, where the news-cameramen shouted and laughed. Their laughter, like so much American laughter, did not express high spirits or amus.e.m.e.nt but a willed raucousness. As the plane landed in Dallas, the news-cameramen rolled the orange back to Nancy in the nose. It was a ritual. Half-way through the flight, Nancy1 came by with some chocolates, including one for your reporter. She still looked moist and trusting, even though a violent lightning storm coruscated the evening sky, and Ronnie was at least thirty feet from her side.

Reagan's stump speech is by now as pat and unvarying as his story about the twelve-year-old boy - an intro which alternates with the tale of how Ronald and Nancy were once mistaken for Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. Both anecdotes serve to mellow the audience for the honest sagacities to come.

Make America strong again. We don't want our soldiers on food stamps. 'Carter wants to preserve the status quo - that's Latin for the mess we're in.' Tackle inflation by 30 per cent tax cuts over three years (an idea which, incidentally, alarms even the most reactionary economists). Cut federal spending. Less government! We are not energy-profligate: we are an energy-rich nation. Sc.r.a.p the Department of Energy. Nukes are good. Abortion-on-demand is bad (reagan is pro-life, say several hand-held posters). 'Just because you can't keep guns from criminals, why keep them from honest people?' Able-bodied people on welfare should be put to work on 'useful' community projects. He did it in California - he can do it here. No more Taiwans! No more Vietnams! Carter is afraid that n.o.body will like us. Reagan doesn't care whether people will like us. He just wants people to respect us!