The title reference here belongs to the Warren Zevon song, "The French Inhaler". Zevon never copped to it, but the song slams Mailer, who died November 10, who added the voluminous posthumous meditations of the meaning of Marilyn Monroe. "Your pretty face," sang Zevon, "It looked so wasted. Another pretty face. Devastated. The French Inhaler, he stamped and mailed her. She said, 'So long Norman.'" Although Warren seemed to chicken shit to admit, afraid that Mailer might hurt him, eventually Zevon's son Jordan set the record straight.

    Mailer had as much to say about JFK as he did about Marilyn, of course. In fact, in the 1970s he funded one of the original parapolitical study groups on the subject, before and leading up to the House Select Committee on Assassination. So it could argued that Mailer became one of the most effective Warren Commission critics because he knew enough where to put his money that it created enough citizen pressure to change the official government view of the assassination.

    Yet, when it came down to applying his artistic and critical skills to portraying Oswald in the non-fiction novel Oswald's Tale, it became an occasion, as with Marilyn, to psychoanalyze false assumptions rather than deal with reality. As John Judge once put it: "Harlot's Ghost, Mailer's previous book, takes the other tack, that Oswald may have been a lone assassin but he was at least connected enough to the ! intelligence community that he was upsetting all the apple carts.

    "Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery is the last book in a four book contract. He's basically edged into a position where he won't come all the way and say that Oswald did it because he knows it's not true. He can't base it on the evidence. He says you can't get in to the miasma of the evidence; we have to get to the other questions, which is why did Oswald choose Kennedy as his victim? Well, if you can't prove that Oswald shot Kennedy, it's useless to discuss why he chose Kennedy."

    Useless, in point, of fact for harvesting any new information, but Mailer had already invested in that. Oswald's Tale took on the topic from a creative and speculative angle, much like the well-worn Rolling Stone invocation: "I shouted out 'Who killed the Kennedys?' when after all it was you and me." Mailer gets his props for his imaginary Oswald and his rumination about what would have motivated an individual at that American time and ! place to set of the event that shaped the cultural and political landscape for the next forty years.

    The issue came up with Judge as we discussed the then current Harlot's Ghost, which was based on KGB files recently shared with Mailer by Lawrence Schiller, and how this turn must have been the product of some serious connections with the CIA or the KGB itself. Schiller has an investigator credit on Albert Goldman's condescending biography of Lenny Bruce and Goldman in turn wrote another nasty book on Elvis. Partnership between Schiller and Mailer did little to establish any credibility with me. Judge pointed out that Schiller was the source of one of the earliest attacks on the JFK parapolitical research community. Warren Lewis 1967 book Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Commission also carried the sub-credit "Based on an Investigation by Lawrence Schiller."

    Finally, at the time I met Mailer in 1993, at the ! ASK symposium in Dallas, I was working on the edition of Lincoln Lawrence's Were We Controlled, which AUP eventually published as Mind Control, Oswald & JFK (Steamshovel still has a few copies left to sell), which also had a pretty hard-to-accept premise. I asked Mailer, "Did you hear about the theory that Oswald got an electrode implanted in his brain during a hospital stay for an adenoid operation in Minsk?" Even though his upcoming Oswald biography was in large part supposed to be about Oswald's time in Minsk, and Were We Controlled was a classic of the assassination literature, the writer just looked at me as if I was crazy and said no, he had not heard the theory. At that point I lost any expectation I might have had about Mailer as researcher.

    I still gave him a wide berth on the subject, however. He was a writer, after all, not an investigator, not even an investigator of Lawrence Schiller, the person he partnered with as an investigator. Sherman Skolnick used to make the "bus" analogy: that he was to! o busy getting his own investigations out to the public--on the bus, in the analogy--that he had no time to investigate the bus company. Mailer was too busy presenting his vision to deal with the evidence. (Gore Vidal remarked that Norman Mailer would not be remembered in the "United States of Amnesia" because no one ever remembers anybody in America.) He had also claimed kinship to my mentors, the Beats, especially as spelled out in his essay "White Negro", and even though that didn't seem quite exact, for everything else about his work, including the prosody of Oswald's Tale, he remains in the pantheon.

    Zevon might have looked at it similarly, weirdly preceding Mailer into eternity with a critique that now becomes the only thing left to be said about the passing of a great creative presence.