He was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, on July 14, 1912, 12 days after the Democrats nominated his namesake for the presidency of the United States.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie — “Woody” almost immediately — was Charley Guthrie’s son and like his father ever the optimist. He was Nora’s son too, hers the gift of old songs, and a dreadful fear he would inherit her madness.

Together they raised Woody, his two brothers and two sisters in a middle-class, foredoomed home the neighbors judged one of the finest in that farming community turned oil boom town.

Life in Okemah might have been comfortable, with cotton prices up and beef down, but for the fires.

Fire was to dog Woody, boy and man. A kerosene lamp shattered – the OKEMAH LEDGER reported it as an accident, while folks in town whispered otherwise – and flames consumed his beloved older sister Clara, the one who called him “Woodblock,” when the boy was just months shy of his seventh birthday.

Another blaze leveled the family home, sending the Guthries to live in the weathered London house, high on the weedy hillside overlooking the Fort Smith and Western depot at the foot of Columbia Street.

There were other fires, unexplained. Woody was not yet 15 when his mother hurled a kerosene lamp at a dozing Charley, searing his chest from neck to navel. Members of Charley’s Masonic Lodge arranged to send Nora to the state asylum in Norman.

Years later, and half a continent distant, a short circuit in a newly repaired radio sent flames racing through the child’s bedding, and took the life of Woody’s charming daughter Cathy Ann, “Stackabones,” the youngster who inspired so many of her father’s magical songs for children.

And near the end of his wanderings, Woody splashed gasoline on a Florida campfire; it flared and severely burned his right arm. The puckered scars would leave him unable play guitar. He was left mute, the once restless youth turned rebel now a man resigned to his mother’s fate.

Guthrie was just 42 when he entered the hospital for the last time in 1954. His period of true creativity had spanned no more than eight or nine years, though in that time, he had traveled far, seen wonders and known defeats, and written as many as 1,400 songs. He had traveled Route 66, he boasted, enough to run it up to 6,666, back and forth, across the county as whim and winds took him.

All the while, he never seemed to find what he was looking for.

Marjorie, his second wife, came closest to replacing the mother Woody had lost when Nora was committed to the asylum. But Marjorie put their children first.

Woody sought, needed, so desperately a cause to believe in. Advocating a program of social and economic justice, the Communist Party, USA, offered that and more, but party apparatchiks never asked him to be a member.

Woody reached out to acquaintances – he who knew almost everyone – but could allow close only a bare handful of those he had called upon. There was Huddie Ledbetter, the huge black man pardoned from Louisiana’s dreaded Parchman Farm, and Huddie’s wife, Martha, who opened their Greenwich Village flat to Guthrie. There was Pete Seeger, who would later make Guthrie’s songs so well known; and actor Will Geer, Guthrie’s tutor in Marxist orthodoxy; Jim Longhi, a merchant marine buddy and future lawyer; and Gilbert Houston, stalwart, handsome, the would-be movie star they all called “Cisco.” Those few Woody let in, and damned few others, including the succession of women who sought to mother him and ended up in his bed.

Despite the rich legacy of his songs, still sung four decades after his death from Huntington’s disease, Guthrie was at best an indifferent guitar player, his efforts at Mother Maybelle Carter’s “lick” haphazard.

At the same time, he was a sterling musician. He played harmonica well, if backwards, with the bass notes on the right rather than the left. At other times he played bass fiddle, washboard, spoons, bones, straws, whatever came to hand, rhythmically underpinning other, better players. It bothered him not at all.

He might have been a middling fiddle or mandolin player had he practiced, but he knew he would never be as good as his boyhood friend Matt Jennings. Over the years Matt the butcher would master as many as 600 fiddle tunes. Woody probably never used more than 30 or 40, mostly borrowed melodies, for his 400-plus-recorded songs. Good enough was good enough for Woody Guthrie.

Come spring, an itch came over him, a need to see beyond the next hill, beyond the county line to the next town and the next. He hated riding the rails, fearing railroad bulls and mutilation if he fell beneath a freight car. He preferred instead to travel by thumb, with a handful of paintbrushes shoved in a back pocket. If a song or two didn’t earn a meal in a café or a drink in a bar, he could always paint a few signs or a storefront for 50 cents – enough to last him for a day or two if he didn’t share it with the other hobos camped along a siding just out of town. Mostly he shared it, if he didn’t plain give it away.

He was, like Walt Whitman, whose “swimmy” poetry he disdained, a tangle of unresolved contradictions. And like Whitman, he embraced multitudes.

He was a faithful correspondent, writing, pouring on the page word pictures of startling beauty, letters so compelling that friends kept them for years to read and reread.

He was an unfaithful husband, flitting from lover to lover as easily and as often as he pawned his Sears Roebuck guitar.

He fathered eight children by three wives, and perhaps a ninth, unacknowledged. He left the raising of the first three to his first wife, doted on the next four with Marjorie, and, lost in illness, ignored the last of the children by a third wife. Yet he had such regard for his “manly seed” that he refused to pay for a hotel-room abortion when one of his on-again lovers discovered herself pregnant. His singing companion Cisco Houston secretly gave the frightened girl the $500.

Unconcerned about money, he was generous – to a fault. Guthrie would give away his day’s wages to a migrant family when his own children had to rely on an aunt for dinner. He was just as likely to give his jacket to a shivering fruit picker, his meal to a gaunt mother, or his last pennies to a grimy kid who had never eaten a Tootsie Roll, or drunk a Delaware Punch.

A radio-wise professional by the time he landed in New York City, he played the country boy just off the turnip truck. Well read – particularly in psychology and Eastern religions – he drawled terse comments and aphorisms seemingly sprung from the wind-whipped soil of the Dust Bowl, but more often his own droll wordplay.

Guthrie walked out on a weekly CBS radio show — and its lavish salary — because a sponsor wanted to tell him what to sing on the air. Yet he would meekly accept Communist Party censorship of his unpaid articles for THE DAILY WORKER.

He knew drifters and movie stars, migrant workers and Skid Row barflies, Martha Graham dancers and dance hall floozies, abstract expressionists Jackson Pollack and Robert Motherwell, as well as their wives, girl-friends, and lovers.

And he wrote about them all – in diaries, on random sheets of wrapping paper, on paper bags laid open to catch his torrent of words, his cascade of images, metaphors, allusions, and illusions. He put his name to his autobiography, but shared his royalties with the editor who transformed his bulky manuscript into a rambling narrative. The book was largely fiction – an “autobiographical novel,” Guthrie called it – while his unpublished fiction was real, the stuff of his own life and times.

He was Woody in all his contradictions and complexities – the man you see and hear in Peter Frumkin’s sterling documentary.
– Ed Cray

A professor of journalism at the University of Southern California, Ed Cray is the author of RAMBLIN’ MAN: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF WOODY GUTHRIE.

Among our major living writers, Norman Mailer is perhaps the most well-known, both in the United States and internationally. No career in our literature has been at once so brilliant, varied, controversial, public, prolific and misunderstood. Few American writers have had their careers on the anvil of public inspection for such a lengthy period; none (excepting Edgar Allan Poe) has been so regularly and simultaneously celebrated and reviled.

Mailer has not only published 39 books (including 11 novels), he has written plays (and staged them), screenplays (and directed and acted in them),poems (in THE NEW YORKER and underground journals), and attempted every sort of narrative form, including some he invented. No record of “new journalism” is complete without mention of his 1960s ESQUIRE columns, essays and political reportage. He has reported on six sets of political conventions (1960, 1964, 1968, 1972, 1992, 1996), participated in scores of symposia, appeared and debated hundreds of times on college campuses, boxed (and fought) in several venues and led a vigorous public life in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts, his current home. His passions, feuds, imbroglios, litigations and loyalities are numerous, notorious and complex. Happily married for nearly a quarter of a century to Norris Church, he was wed five times previously and has nine children all told. A stalwart on radio and television talk shows, he may have been interviewed more times than any writer who has ever lived. Without being paid for his pains, he has given advice to several presidents, has run for office himself (mayor of New York),served as president of the American chapter of the writers organization, P.E.N., and won most of the major literary awards, but for the Nobel. Co-founder of THE VILLAGE VOICE, he also named it, and has been the equivalent of a decathalon athlete in the effort to break down barriers between popular, elite and underground publications. He has written for at least 75 different magazines and journals.

Born in Long Branch, New Jersey in 1923, but raised in Brooklyn, Mailer graduated from Boys High School in 1939. He entered Harvard in the fall of that year as the German army marched into Poland. Mailer received his S.B. degree, with honors, in engineering in 1943, and was drafted in early 1944. He served as a rifleman in the South Pacific and wrote the huge best-seller, THE NAKED AND THE DEAD (1948) based on his experiences. Catapaulted into instant fame, he has been at the center of our national cultural consciousness ever since. Mailer is, among other things, an unfrocked prophet full of foreboding about contemporary life; he celebrates the intuitional and instinctive and castigates corporate greed, plastic and the rape of nature. His disagreements with feminists are, of course, legendary. But Mailer is also, in the words of Joan Didion, ” a great and obsessed stylist, a writer to whom the shape of the sentence is the story.”

After a stint in Hollywood writing screenplays, Mailer wrote two more novels, BARBARY SHORE (1951), a novel of the Cold War, and THE DEER PARK (1955), a Hollywood novel about artistic integrity. In 1959 he published ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF, a showcase of all his previous work and his ambitious pans for the future, which uses his personality as the volume’s armature. Its huge influence on a generation also seeking to achieve creativity and self-realization gave Mailer a new audience and set the stage for the sixties, Mailer’s happiest, most tumultuous, and productive years. He published 17 books between 1962 and 1972, including five books nominated for the National Book Award in four different categories. THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT (1968) a non-fiction narrative of the anti-Vietnam War March on the Pentagon, won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize and a Polk Award. He followed with OF A FIRE ON THE MOON (1971), a careful study of the Apollo 11 moon shot, and THE PRISONER OF SEX (1971), a response to the women’s liberation movement. The pace of his writing slowed in the mid-seventies as he worked on his novel set in the Egypt of three thousand years ago, ANCIENT EVENINGS, which appeared after a decade of work in 1983. He won a second Pulitzer for his critically acclaimed 1979 best-seller, THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG, a 1,000-page “true life novel” which chronicled the life and death of Utah murderer Gary Gilmore. In the nineties Mailer published the best-selling HARLOT’S GHOST, the first part of a CIA novel, nonfiction narratives on Pablo Picasso and Lee Harvey Oswald, and THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE SON, a first-person retelling of the four gospels. He closed the decade out with a massive retrospective of his entire career, THE TIME OF OUR TIME (1998). Perhaps he best summed up his protean abilities when he said in ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF, “I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.” He is now at work on another long narrative, the subject of which is secret.

American Masters’ “Norman Mailer: Mailer on Mailer” is a co-production with Reciprocal Films and Films d’Ici in France. The program was originally produced for French television as three, one-hour programs and broadcast on successive nights. Below is a discussion between Tamar Hacker, Sr. Producer for the American Masters series, and Christine Le Goff of Films d’Ici about the nature of this international co-production, and the challenge of reversioning films for different audiences.

Interview

When Susan: Lacy, Executive Producer of American Masters first asked me to take a look at the original three-hour film I had no idea what to expect. I was familiar with Norman Mailer, and his reputation (which he acknowledges he earned) for being less than sympathetic to women’s issues. So I was prepared to reject a lot of his ideas. As soon as he came on camera, I was hooked. I was unprepared for how riveted I would be by his ideas and how strong a presence he is on camera. I had watched nearly two hours before he said something that caused me to rewind, so I could hear a statement again. At last! — I disagreed with something he said! — but I had to concede, he said it very well.

Christine Le Goff: The three hour film was taken from a much longer interview. Jean-Pierre Catherine and Michael Seiler, the authors of the film came to see Yves Jeanneau and I at Films d’Ici in Paris with a project about Mailer’s views on American post-war history, and we immediately liked the idea. It was unusual and provocative and very much the kind of filmmaking adventure we like to dive into.The recording of Mailer’s interview lasted a week. We began in Cape Cod and finished in Brooklyn in Norman’s home. We filmed over 20 hours of material, working each day from morning to night. This was a highly unusual experience. We had worked with Norman extensively before-hand to define themes and a structure to the film. So Norman was not only the subject of our film but its author and partner as well. Norman Mailer is considered in Europe as one of the most important American writers of the 20th century. He is a paradoxical writer and a man of opinion and action. Having access to him was an opportunity we couldn’t pass on. But we also knew that producing such a film would be difficult: not quite biography, nor history, the program was going to be – by choice- immensely subjective, something that is more accepted by European broadcasters than American ones, but still very hard to sell to any televisison. But France 2, France’s main public broadcaster, saw the potential for a TV event and became our first co-producer for a 3-part series “Mailer’s America”. With Richard Copans, the director, and with Norman Mailer, Jean-Pierre and Michael spent about a year preparing for the series, searching and organizing relationships between Mailer’s books, articles, and US historical events. The heart of the production was to be an extensive interview with Norman Mailer which would then be intercut with archival newreel footage as a counterpoint to Mailer’s stories and opinions. There would be no narrator, no other interviewees.

TH: The program as originally presented on French television was very strong, but it was produced with a different audience in mind. The original contained a lot of archival footage illustrating various events in the last fifty years of American history. There were long, uninterrupted clips of Vietnam war protests, and civil rights marches, etc. — a lot of material that American audiences have seen many times before about events we are all familiar with. While I can understand that it would be desirable to have this kind of extensive explanation of events for an audience outside the US, it did not seem necessary for a PBS audience. What we did want to include in the PBS version was more about Norman Mailer as a writer, how he approaches the process of writing, and his literary influences. While that hadn’t been the main thrust of the original interview, in the course of such an extensive interview with such a prolific writer, it certainly came up.

CL: We always knew we would have to revision the film for a US audience. Our series was first aimed at a European audience and as such needed to allow for some chronology of historical events which were not necessary for American understanding. We also knew that American Masters was a biographical series. Biography had not been the focus of our film. So the original authors, directors, producers and Norman Mailer himself, all agreed to help this reversionning process to its full extent. I have to admit that it was a first for us. Cutting down a film to fit international TV distribution is a process that we, as producers, are all confronted to at one point or another. But such an extensive reworking of the material is not common. Because I am French-born but have lived in America for the past 20 years, and go back and forth between France and the US to produces documentaries, we decided I was the ideal candidate to collaborate with the American Masters staff in this process as a bit of a go-between.

TH: There were two other versions of the program. One was made for Finnish television and was two-hours long, and the other was made by the BBC. Both of these versions were cut down from the original program. After looking at these two versions and discussing them with Susan we decided that in order to best serve our audience, we would go back to the original 20 hours of interview with Mr. Mailer, and craft a whole new program. The original film was called “Mailer’s America.” The original interview dealt to a great degree with Mr. Mailer’s political views — which are formidable. We knew that our version of the program would also put a lot of focus on his politics, but we also wanted to bring in as much biographical information and discussion about the writing process as possible. We liked the idea of scheduling the program shortly before the presidential elections. We had no idea at the time that the program would premiere right between the first presidential and vice presidential debates. Perfect timing.

CL: France 2 was our main partner. But we also had gotten the support of Nordic public TV (Finland, Denmark, Sweden), Belgium, Dutch, Canadian and Australian TV. From the onset, we felt strongly that film had to find its place on American public television. American Masters as one of its most prestigious series was our preferred home for a Norman Mailer special. So we came and met Susan Lacy, American Masters Executive Producer, very early on in the production. We spoke for the next 3 years to figure out how we could make this program part of the Series. We were aware our film was far from the usual format and we knew that Susan would be taking risks in producing it. And yet it felt right. When Susan Lacy finally called us to let us know she wanted to go ahead with it, we knew it would be hard work but it was well worth it! In deference to both Susan’s vision and courage, we wanted it to be the best program possible for her Series.

TH: I hadn’t met Christine before the day she arrived in the edit room. We’d spoken many time over the phone and had exchanged a great many emails, but I have to admit that I was a bit apprehensive about how she would feel about some of the changes we wanted to make. How receptive would she be? Christine was amazing. She carried all of the materials over from France with her (over 60 tapes, and a lot of paperwork). She was going back and forth to Paris — where she was shooting another program — the whole time. She is tireless! At the beginning we talked a lot about Mailer and what topics we definitely wanted to cover for the American audience. Beyond her intellect and now extensive knowledge of all things having to do with Norman Mailer, Christine had so much valuable information at her fingertips. She knew all of the research that had been done, and had brought a lot of these resources with her. She knew exactly where to find everything we needed, and was sympathetic to our desire to make changes. We really worked very well together. It was a true pleasure.

CL: I think that the apprehension was mutual! I had never worked with American Masters, so I didn’t quite know what to expect. My exact role had to be defined. I was both protective of the film we had spent three years making, but was also very open to the idea of revisiting it again in a new way. As a matter of fact I was even fascinated with looking at all the material again and shaping it once more. Tamar and I had spoken a number of times over the phone and exchanged thoughts while she was reading the transcripts. So I knew she was engrossed by what she read and more importantly that she had respect for Mailer’s ideas. During the original production, none of us had ever fully agreed with everything that Norman had to say on all the subjects we had covered. Norman is a catalyst and a provocateur as well as a great commentator and writer. We had immense respect for him, and we knew he had given us his respect and his trust. More than anything else I didn’t want to betray that trust. But the process turned out to be exhilarating, frustrating and fun all at once … very much as it had been the first time around. I was quite impressed at how quickly Tamar had mastered the 20 hours of material. We did work very well together, probably because she was so sympathetic and respectful of my feelings. My only regret … the lack of time pressure. The broadcast was set much earlier than anticipated. Perfect timing in terms of scheduling, but an immense pressure in the editing room. So the film has an interesting sense of lasting immediacy and urgency! This is something I like.

TH: There are many more stories and topics addressed in the original interview that didn’t find their way into either of the versions. This is always the heartache of any film. Our choices were partly based on keeping a throughline going in the program, creating a logical progression of time and ideas, and always integrating Mr. Mailer’s work. I think we ultimately accomplished this.