Family, celebrities and New York’s power elite packed Carnegie Hall yesterday in an often raucous but poignant tribute to the late Norman Mailer, the pugilistic Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist.
Son Stephen Mailer, 42, one of Mailer’s nine children and the self-anointed “wild card” of the family, brought down the power-packed house by invoking the spirit of the often foul-mouthed literary titan.
“I am going to channel him for your viewing pleasure,” Stephen said, raising his arms like a revivalist.
“Come on, old man, I’m all yours,” he bellowed, then fell to the ground as if struck by the spirit, staggered up, and began acting like his father – a believer in reincarnation.
Clearing his throat before speaking, as was Mailer’s custom, the son said in the gruff voice of his old man, “Can you hear me in the back? Hmm? Carnegie Hall? Well, why the f – – – not?
“I think it’s the perfect place for my memorial . . . I practiced my ass off,” he said to howls of laughter.
Another son, Michael Mailer, 43, said that in the days before his father died last Nov. 10, the family gathered at the bedside of the cancer-stricken man for one last toast – a rum and orange juice cocktail.
In a somber moment, actor Sean Penn recalled Mailer, whose acclaimed novel “The Naked and the Dead” influenced a generation of writers, as a man who “had a deep and profound respect for what is earned.
“Norman himself was both a natural of the highest order and an earner who left us with a literary legacy that can only be called towering.”
Author Don DeLillo said, “A novelist is supposed to be an individual alone in a room, but Mailer seemed to be everywhere, writing everything.”