Mailer’s Nonfiction Legacy: His 1969 Race for Mayor

You could argue, as Herman Badillo did the other day, that Norman Mailer cost him the mayoralty of New York City in 1969.

You could make a case, too, that Mailer’s candidacy assured the re-election of Mayor John V. Lindsay. From Mayor Lindsay, you even draw a wobbly line to the city’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s, to the city’s fall and rise, to a conservative backlash that elected Rudolph W. Giuliani and to a period of post-racial politics.

That is all conjecture, though.

What is indisputable is that long before Stephen Colbert flirted with entering the 2008 presidential campaign, voters had never seen anything quite like the 1969 New York mayoral race.

Mr. Mailer, who died on Nov. 10, was perhaps the greatest writer since Winston Churchill to seek elective office. If that was not disqualification enough, he had also been convicted of stabbing one of his wives. He promised that, if elected, he would at least deliver the bad news couched in “elegant language.” But he also delivered sufficient offense to fill a devil’s dictionary of political incorrectness.

Even his three-word campaign slogan — a vulgarization of “No More Bull” — was unprintable.

“The difference between me and the other candidates,” Mr. Mailer said, “is that I’m no good and I can prove it.”

His running mate for City Council president was the columnist Jimmy Breslin, who suspected the worst from the very beginning: that Mr. Mailer was serious.

The campaign’s inner circle was deadlocked on flipping the two candidates — running Mr. Breslin for mayor and Mr. Mailer for Council president. But as Joe Flaherty, the campaign manager, explained to them: “You just can’t shuffle National Book Award winners around like subservient aldermen.”

The 1969 race had its share of personalities, if you can call them that. But as Mr. Flaherty would later write, it was “a dull campaign in a sad city with a grimace of despair carved into its face. Mailer and Breslin managed, for a short season, to turn that grimace into a grin.”

Mr. Breslin recently recalled Mr. Mailer’s arguing brilliantly at Brooklyn College that the minds of white and black children would grow best if they were together in the same classrooms. One student interrupted: “We had a lot of snow in Queens last year and it didn’t get removed,” he said. “What would you do about it?” To which Mr. Mailer, abruptly dislodged from his lofty oratorical perch, replied that he would melt the snow by urinating on it.

Mr. Mailer’s political nadir was a campaign rally at the Village Gate nightclub where he vilified his own supporters as “spoiled pigs.” Mr. Breslin left the rally early. He later told a friend, “I found out I was running with Ezra Pound.” Mr. Breslin was referring not to Pound’s poetry, but to his insanity.

The campaign was not without substance, though.

Mr. Mailer’s “left-conservative” platform called for a monorail, a ban on private cars in Manhattan and a monthly “Sweet Sunday” on which vehicles would be barred from city streets, rails or airspace altogether.

He championed self-determination — the city itself would secede and become the 51st state. Individual neighborhoods would be empowered to govern according to their own prerogatives, which could range from compulsory free love to mandatory church attendance.

The Democratic front-runners for mayor that year were Mr. Badillo, then the Bronx borough president; Mario A. Procaccino, the comptroller; and former Mayor Robert F. Wagner, who had been urged to return from Spain, where he was the American ambassador, to save the city from Mr. Lindsay.

Mr. Mailer was impressed with Mr. Badillo, but belittled Mr. Wagner as an anachronism and considered Mr. Procaccino buffoonish.

“I can’t get a grasp on a mind this small,” he said.

But Mr. Procaccino rode a law-and-order tide to win the nomination. Mr. Mailer ran fourth, with 41,000 votes, or about 5 percent. Mr. Mailer’s candidacy probably cost Mr. Badillo some of his own liberal constituency.

“I lost by about 38,000 votes, and he got about 42,000 in the most liberal areas,” Mr. Badillo said.

If Mr. Badillo had won, liberals might have split between him and Mr. Lindsay in November, allowing the Republican-Conservative candidate, John J. Marchi, to slip in. As it was, Mr. Procaccino and Mr. Marchi divided the conservative and moderate vote, and Mr. Lindsay was re-elected.

Mr. Breslin came in fifth in a field of six, with more than 75,000 votes, or 11 percent. He would later say he regretted having beaten the only black candidate in the race, Charles B. Rangel. But he was immediately remorseful for another reason. “I am mortified,” he said, “to have taken part in a process that required bars to be closed.” (The prohibition on selling liquor on election days was repealed a few years later.)

Given their subsequent success as writers, wasn’t it lucky that they lost?

“It wasn’t luck,” Mr. Breslin replied.