Stabbing of Adele Morales

Early in the morning of November 20, 1960, the American writer, novelist, and filmmaker Norman Mailer stabbed his second wife, artist and actress Adele Morales, in the abdomen and then in the back with a penknife, nearly taking her life.^[1] The assault happened at the end of a party the couple hosted the night before to informally announce Mailer’s mayoral candidacy.^[2] Mailer spent several days in Bellevue Hospital due to a court-order and was charged with felonious assault.^[3] Morales, however, did not press charges, which allowed Mailer to plead guilty to third-degree assault^[4] and a suspended sentence.

Background

In 1940, Adele Morales moved to Greenwich Village, a neighborhood in Manhattan, New York^[5] known for its association with art, music, political activism, sexuality,^[6] and drug use.^[7] A single woman active in the local art and literary scene, she worked as a painter, studied under Hans Hofmann, and performed at the Actors Studio.^[5]

Through a friend, she met Norman Mailer in 1951. As a couple, Morales and Mailer were known for their frequent public disputes, as well as their presence at social gatherings, and their involvement in countercultural activities, such as drug use and nontraditional relationships.^[5] Their peers have cited their relationship dynamic as contributing factors to the volatile circumstances that led to the stabbing. ^[5][6][7]

Frank Corsaro, a director at the Actors Studio who worked with both individuals, recalled that "between the two of them they used to abuse each other endlessly."^[5] In Mailer: His Life and Time,^[5] Peter Manso's biography of Norman Mailer, Mailer's sister Barbara explained the Village culture during the 1960s:

"It was the fashion to push things to their ultimate extreme--all kinds of sexual and drug experimentation ... It was the beginning of the Sixties, really ... it was all very violent ... I did not like being part of it ... but one sensed that it was all getting out of hand."^[5]

Despite their frequent disputes, Morales and Mailer married in 1954 and had two children, Danielle "Dandy" Mailer (born 1957), and Elizabeth Anne "Betsy" Mailer (born 1959).^[5] Mailer and Morales were prominent figures in the art and literary scene, specifically within Greenwich Village in 1960.^[2]

Incident

On the night of November 19, 1960, Mailer and his wife, Adele Morales, hosted a party intended to celebrate Roger Donoghue's 30th birthday and launch Mailer's proposed New York mayoral campaign, at their apartment at 250 West 94th Street on the Upper West Side.^[2][4] According to Mailer: A Biography, Mailer wanted to run for mayor of New York City and informally announce his candidacy at the party, using it as a venue to showcase his political strategy to "meld the dispossessed" with "social, political, and artistic elite[s]." Mailer had enlisted his well-connected friend, journalist George Plimpton, to attract figures from the city's "power structure". He hoped to unite at his party this elite echelon with the "disenfranchised" population he saw as his natural constituency into a voting base that would propel him to office – having written of the "courage" of hoodlums in his 1957 essay "The White Negro".^[8]

Though David Rockefeller and the Aga Khan declined the invitation, the party's approximately 200 guests included the poet Allen Ginsberg as well as several "derelicts, cut-throats and bohemians" – many of them homeless – whom Mailer had recruited on the street.^[9][8] Rather than facilitating connections between the groups, the gathering became volatile, dominated by intoxicated and disruptive guests.^[10] As the atmosphere darkened into violence, Mailer became physically confrontational and challenged multiple individuals to fights.^[10] The atmosphere deteriorated to the point that guests began leaving, reportedly fearing both general violence and Mailer’s behavior.^[10] Later commentators characterized the atmosphere as, at best, "legendarily tetchy" and, at worst, "the most dangerous evening I've ever spent in my life" (from publisher Barney Rosset, a guest at the party).^[11][12]

By around 3:00 a.m., about twenty people remained.^[13] Mailer, reportedly intoxicated,^[8] was described as dividing guests "on opposite sides of the room according to if he considered them 'for' or 'against' him," placing Morales among those he viewed as opposed to him."^[13] Later, almost incoherent, Mailer left the apartment to seek trouble elsewhere and began fighting people in the street. ^[14] Morales recalled that "he was down in the street punching people...He didn't know what his name was. He was so out of it".^[12][11]

When Mailer returned around 4:30 a.m. with a black eye and a torn shirt to find all the guests departed (except the "five or six" who remained in the dining room).^[13] Morales was getting ready for bed and an altercation broke out. The enraged Mailer burst into the room, and Morales taunted his heterosexual masculinity and made a disparaging reference to his mistress.^[8][12] She further went on to yell "Toro, Toro" as if taunting his bull fighting fetish.

Mailer rushed at her, with Mailer biographer Hilary Mills writing:

"He took out a two-and-a-half-inch-long penknife and went at his wife, stabbing her in the upper abdomen and back. One stab wound was later described as three inches deep and three quarters of an inch wide, a 'thrust near the heart'."^[15]

The stab to the back was a superficial wound but the stab to her abdomen punctured her cardiac sac and narrowly missing her heart. ^[2] Mailer addressed the guests: "Don't touch her. Let the bitch die".^[12] Morales was rushed downstairs to the apartment of novelist Doc Humes, who phoned her mother and Mailer's sister, Barbara.^[5] Once they arrived, an ambulance transported Morales to University Hospital, where she was admitted around 8:00 a.m.^[2][16]

Mailer remained in the couple's apartment with their then-fifteen-month-old daughter Elizabeth, and refused to let anyone enter, including relatives and private psychiatric help, until Barbara explained the severity of the situation via telephone. By the time Morales's mother arrived to collect the child, Mailer had vacated the premises.^[2]

Aftermath

While she remained in critical condition, convinced by Doc Humes, Morales initially told doctors that she "had fallen on some glass", denying any wrongdoing on the part of Mailer, who had come to the hospital later that night to "lecture Adele's surgeon on the likely dimensions of her wound".^{[12][16][2][17]} Mailer appeared the next day in a scheduled interview on The Mike Wallace Show, where he described the knife as a symbol of manhood and campaign for mayor, stating that the incident did not disqualify him from candidacy.^[2][14]

On November 21,1960, in the hospital's intensive care unit, Morales admitted to police that Mailer had stabbed her.^[17] He was arrested at the hospital later that night when he arrived at the hospital to visit her.^[17] The following day, on November 22, Mailer was in court facing a felonious assault charge for the stabbing.^[3] Mailer told the reporters he loved Morales.^[2] During the hearing, a medical report written by Dr. Rosenberg pronounced Mailer "both homicidal and suicidal."^[2] Mailer maintained his sanity, responding, "It is very important to me not to be sent to some mental institution. I'm a sane man. If this happens, for the rest of my life, my work will be considered as the work of a man with a disordered mind".^[18] Despite Mailer's insistence on his sanity, Magistrate Levy stated that Mailer could not "distinguish fiction from reality" and committed him to Bellevue Hospital for observation, where he remained for 17 days. ^{[3][9][3][18]}

Morales accompanied Mailer during a later court appearance in 1961. During the appearance, she testified that "my husband and I are perfectly happy together" and that she was too drunk to have seen the penknife. She also declined to sign a complaint against Mailer. Despite this, a reporter later told Mailer that a grand jury had indicted him on charges of felony assault.^[2] Morales's refusal to press charges allowed Mailer to plead guilty to third-degree assault and receive a suspended sentence.^[19] He continued to receive critical acclaim after the incident, including winning two Pulitzer Prizes.^[20][21]

Mailer continued to assert his sanity long after the incident. In a 1979 interview published in High Times magazine, he explained that his commitment to Bellevue Hospital had been a strategic decision made by his attorney to avoid incarceration, particularly in the event that his wife did not survive her injuries.^[22] In a 2008 interview with Lawrence Grobel, Mailer was questioned about a medical assessment conducted at the time of the incident, in which a doctor declared he was a danger to himself and others.^[23] He responded by stating, “Well, since I didn't kill anybody after that and I didn't commit suicide nor have a mental breakdown, my guess is that he wasn't too accurate.”^[23]

Morales and Mailer divorced in 1962.^[20] According to Morales, Mailer resumed his prior pattern of erratic behavior shortly after being released from Bellevue Hospital, including heavy drinking, partying, and displaying what she perceived as a lack of remorse or recognition of the gravity of the assault. Morales maintained that Mailer never offered a formal apology or accepted responsibility for the attack. Morales stated that the only instance resembling an apology occurred in 1988, more than two decades later, when Mailer made a brief, offhand remark about the incident during a conversation at their daughter Elizabeth's wedding reception.^[24]

Morales refused to press charges, citing a desire to protect their children.^[19] However, the incident had more lasting effects for Morales than Mailer. Morales's daughter said she "remained scarred and angry for decades."^[1] Morales later wrote that during her recovery none of her friends visited her contrasting it with the public attention Mailer received in the aftermath.^[25] Following Morales passing, her daughter, Elizabeth, stated in a telephone interview, “After he died, all she could say was, ‘He was a monster.’”^[26]

In her memoir, Morales provides a detailed account of the deterioration of her relationship with Norman Mailer in the period leading up to the stabbing. She cites a pattern of escalating conflict, marked by Mailer's frequent infidelities, excessive drinking, late-night partying, and volatile behavior.^[7] She describes these actions as part of a broader pattern of disregard and emotional instability that strained their marriage, including instances of physical and emotional abuse.^[7] Morales also felt she enabled Mailer's behavior due to her own struggles with alcoholism and anger issues, writing “I was not helping him or myself by accepting his behavior and that, too, was part of my alcoholic sickness.”^[7]

Public and critical reaction

Many in Mailer's social circle believed the incident would end his career, but it ultimately increased his notoriety. Two years following the incident, Mailer published a book of poems called Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters), which included certain passages that seemed to reference the stabbing and Morales.^[27] The work was received with some acclaim. In his article "Mailer: The Jew as Existentialist", writer Paul B. Newman points out that Mailer "cries out" that sex seems to harm men, and one of Mailer's "most moving cries" is a passage Newman felt was directed at Morales, where Mailer called her a "greedy bitch."^[28]

The response to the stabbing in the literary community to which Mailer and Morales belonged was, according to some critics, notably restrained. In a 1983 interview with New York Magazine, Mailer reflected that his friends “closed ranks” behind him and described their response as "five degrees less warmth than I was accustomed to. Not fifteen degrees less — five."^[29] Lennon writes that Mailer's friends believed that Morales contributed to the incident by "goading him into" the stabbing, being "a lousy wife", and that Mailer "finally did to Morales what should've been done years earlier."^[2]

Some contemporaries interpreted the assault as an artistic or literary act. Others argued that the attack was consistent with Mailer’s cultivated public image, which often emphasized hypermasculinity and a willingness to defy social norms.^[30] James Baldwin, a writer and friend of Mailer, described it as an attempt to escape from "the spiritual prison he had created with his fantasies of becoming a politician," comparing it to “burning down the house in order to, at last, be free of it.”^[31] Diana Trilling later recalled being told by her husband, critic Lionel Trilling, that the stabbing was a "Dostoyevskian ploy," allowing Mailer to "test the limits of evil in himself."^[16] At the time, some of Mailer's friends considered him to be on the verge of dementia. Mailer later claimed that he had stabbed Morales "to relieve her of cancer," a statement critics cited as further evidence of his unstable state.^[32]

The incident also drew criticism from feminist writers, particularly Kate Millett in her 1970 work Sexual Politics, who paralleled the attack with themes of sexual violence found throughout Mailer's work.^[33] Despite this criticism, Mailer launched a second mayoral campaign in 1969, received 5% of the vote and gained support from prominent some feminists, including Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem.^[34]

In a 1971 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show, Mailer remarked, "We all know that I stabbed my wife many years ago. We all know that"^[35] He did not publicly express remorse until a 2000 interview, in which he called the stabbing “the one act I can look back on and regret for the rest of my life.”^[36]

Related pages

• Adele Morales
• The Last Party
• Norman Mailer