A Ticket to the Circus (27 page)

“Your hair’s too red. We’ll have to dye it brown. Redheads don’t sell.” That was a shock. I thought my red hair was my biggest asset. I didn’t know what to say. I most certainly didn’t want to dye my hair brown and be like every other girl on the street, but I didn’t want to walk out the door, either.

“Could we wait a little bit on that?” I said. “I really like my red hair, and maybe it will sell. Surely there are other redheads that make money, aren’t there?” She looked at me for another long moment.

“Well, you at least need to get a good haircut. There’s too much of it. It’s too long and shapeless. I’ll call Pierre at Pierre Michel. You go over there right now and tell him… tell him… oh, hell, tell him you’re with us.”

I wanted to grab her and hug her but she was not the kind of woman who invited strangers to hug. I’d never been scared by a woman before in my life, but I was close to it with Willie. She stuck my pictures back into the envelope and handed them to me. “Go back and talk to Kay, get all the paperwork done, then go see Pierre. He’s on Fifty-seventh Street. He’ll be waiting for you.” She handed me a piece of paper with the address on it.

I went back and talked to Kay, a heavyset young woman with a beautiful face, and got all the paperwork done. Then I went down the elevator and ran as fast as I could up Fifth Avenue toward Fifty-seventh Street. The Christmas lights had never looked so bright, the air was clean and cold, and everyone on the street smiled at me when I told them “I’ve just been taken by Wilhelmina!” I couldn’t help it. I wanted everyone to know.

Pierre was French, young, and handsome, and made me feel like I was part of a special club. I didn’t know what kind of haircut Willie wanted for me, and frankly I didn’t want a haircut at all. I had spent two years growing my hair out from a bad short haircut, and I liked it long. I thought long would be more versatile, but apparently not.

“Willie suggested that I should give you a wedge, like Shaun Casey has,” Pierre said, holding up a picture of a girl I had seen in Wilhelmina’s. She was on the cover of
Glamour.
I hated her hair. It was pouffy on top and layered short in the neckline, like a mushroom. It would look stupid on me. My head was too small and this would make it look like a peanut in a Beatle wig. My face must have shown how disappointed I was.

“Uh, Pierre, could we keep it just a little bit longer? I don’t think I look so good in short hair.”

“Okay. I’ll just do layers around your face, some bangs, and not too short in the back.” He went to work, and when he was done, it was a lot shorter than I thought it would be, just a tad longer than a mushroom. It was about chin length, and the ends stuck out all over the place. The top was layered. I really didn’t like it at all. But what did I know? It was chic—at least he said it was—and I would have to learn what was chic and what was not. I went back to the agency. Wilhelmina liked the haircut, and thank God didn’t say anything else about dyeing it brown.
There was only one other little thing we needed to discuss. “So, what name do you think you’d like to use?” she asked. I was a little surprised.

“I guess Barbara Norris. That’s my name.”

“Yes, but that seems so… ordinary somehow. We need a name that people will remember, something that is catchy and exotic. Not so girl-next-door and old-fashioned.”

“Well, when I paint, I sign my paintings with just the name Norris. Maybe I could use that.” I actually liked the way it looked in paint, which was why I did it. Barbara was harder to paint with a brush.

“Norris. Norris. That’s good. Yes, like Twiggy or Apollonia or Pope. Models with only one name are big right now. Okay. Norris. We’ll try that.”

She then introduced me to my booker, who would be the person making all my appointments for me, a girl named Gara. I was to call her several times a day, since new things came in all the time. Gara would be my den mother, the one who would help me get started, the one who answered all my questions. At this point I didn’t even know enough to know what the questions were. I wanted her to like me, and I think for the most part she did. She gave me a chart that showed the numbers and cross streets of Manhattan, and she made a few appointments for the next day. Then she helped me put my pictures into a temporary book, a brown plastic binder that said Wilhelmina on the cover, and she gave me a brown faux leather appointment book, which also had the Wilhelmina logo inside. I would later get a nice leather portfolio with a shoulder strap that I carried to appointments, the book that told everyone on the street that I was a model. I was excited and scared all at the same time.

Norman was thrilled when I got home and told him all about it. His Henry Higgins strategy was paying off. He liked the idea of the name change. He was always big on funny nicknames. If I did something stupid or clumsy like, say, slip on a banana peel, he would say, “I’m going to call you Slipsy from now on. Slipsy McNorris, how ya doin’?” Or whatever it would be for the moment. He never remembered the nicknames more than a few minutes, and there was always a new one for every occasion. He had funny pet names for the girls, too. Maggie was Magatroid Magoonspoons, Sue was Susu McGoosoo, Danielle was
Goosey Patako, and Betsy was Fats Svengado. Kate was Katie Katoosh. He loved playing with names and words, and spouted silly doggerel and bad wordplay jokes that made us all laugh. He loved limericks. (There was a young lady named Alice… Uh, you’ve probably heard that one.) He even wrote a nonsense poem called “Cousins” that was included in a book called
Wonders
, and I did a little illustration for it.

My favorite things he did, which went on for many years, were the twat poems. Every morning when we woke up, he would sing a version of the same silly little song, sort of to the tune of “Bill” from
Show Boat.
It started out “She’s just my twat…” and then he went on with some kind of funny verse that always ended with “She’s just my twat. I love her an awful lot.” So we started our days with giggles.

I didn’t mind that Wilhelmina wanted me to change my name, but I told Norman, “If I use just the one name, Norris, for my modeling name, that’s great. But I think I need a second name. A person can’t go through life with just one name. What about driver’s licenses and stuff? I can’t use the name Davis. There’s too many
s
’s: Norrissss Davissss. Not good.” He thought about it.

“How about Church? You’re a good Christian; you spent half your life in church. It’s a solid English name, and that’s where your family is from. How about Norris Church?”

And that was it, with about that much thought put into it. So I began to use my ex-husband’s last name for my first name, which was weird, to say the least. I called Larry and asked if he minded, and he didn’t mind at all. I think he rather liked the fact I was going to use his name. It would prove to be even more weird down the road, when I took Norman’s name after we were married. I realized that my identity was composed of my two husbands’ names with me nowhere in it, but by then it was too late. (Plus, Norris is usually a man’s name, and that has caused endless confusion. Once someone looked me straight in the face and called me Mr. Mailer. I said, “Do I look like a man to you?” He was befuddled and nervously apologized, but somehow it was easier for him to call me Mr. than to wrap his head around the fact that Norris was a woman. What an idiot.) If I had it to do over, I would be Barbara Davis, then Barbara Mailer, no matter how boring the fashion world thought it was, but now it’s too late.

J
ust before Christmas, we went to Arkansas to get Matt. Norman called Fig and asked if we could stay with them because my parents wouldn’t let us sleep in the same bed, and Norman wasn’t about to sleep on the couch. Fig and Ecey were still a little sore that we had deceived them and sneaked off together, as they saw it, but they said yes. What else could they do? I dreaded confronting my parents, but it turned out they were so happy to see me that nothing else mattered. They met us at the airport, and Matthew came running up to me and hugged my legs. “I knew you would come to get me!” he said. Poor little guy. I’m sure there were moments when he wasn’t sure I was going to come back, but we were together again, and he stuck to me like a cocklebur all the way home in the car.

Norman was cordial to my parents, as they were to him. He told them we were in love and were going to be married when he could get his personal life straightened out, but it was complicated. I’m not sure if they knew exactly what the complicated personal life entailed, and he didn’t go into details, but they knew he was married and had seven children.

My father had a man-to-man talk with him alone, along the lines of, “She’s a lot younger than you are. She might get up there and meet someone younger and leave you.” And then he had a talk with me and said, “Norman is even older than I am. One of these days he will be an old man and you will have to be his nurse. Are you prepared for that?” I don’t think either Norman or I were thinking much past bedtime then, but many years later, as I was nursing my elderly husband, my father’s words kept creeping back into my head. At the time, I said, “Daddy, we love each other, and yes, there’s a big age difference, but do we pass up twenty or thirty years of happiness just because he is going to get old? I might die first. You never know.” When I was diagnosed with cancer twenty-five years later, those words came back to haunt me as well.

You never know what life is going to hand you, but if I had it all to
do over, I would do it all again. Norman would have, too. I know that because just weeks before he passed away, I asked him if he would do it all again, and he said yes. He reached out and got my hand; with a little difficulty, he took my ring off and then put it on my finger again, saying, “With this ring, I thee wed.” A lot had happened in the almost thirty-three years we had spent together, but for better or for worse, the love was real, and it was always there.

When we got back to New York after the Christmas visit, Matthew took one look at Norman’s apartment with big eyes, then ran and climbed up the ladder as fast as he could, like a little monkey. The ropes and ladders and the small upstairs rooms were a perfect little boy’s playhouse, once I got over the fear he was going to fall.

Almost as soon as we got back home, Norman left for Stockbridge, to spend Christmas with Carol and face the difficult task of telling her he was leaving her. He took my Italian photographs to show her, which I thought was not necessarily the best thing to do, but he did it. Norman was a young fifty-two, vigorous, full of ideas and energy. He was setting fires and jumping across roofs to escape the flames, and he needed someone young and a little wild to hold his hand and jump across with him. I wasn’t as wild as I let him think I was, but I was young and ready to jump.

Beverly was so far back in his history that I hardly thought of her as his wife at all, even though they were still legally married. I think part of her was secretly glad when he left Carol for me, as they understandably weren’t friends, and I’m sure Beverly thought I was just one more girlfriend who would soon be gone. The other wives were buried even deeper in the layers of paleontology, and it was hard to even think of them as having been married to Norman, it had been such a long time ago. That was a different man from the one I knew.

As far as Annette went, I never met her, but Norman had told me stories about her, how tough she was, how she fancied herself as his bodyguard, and she had once gotten into a fight with Elaine Kaufman in Elaine’s restaurant. When the six months of their separation were up, he told her he had met someone totally new that he was living with and he wouldn’t be seeing her again. In answer, she sent him a message through his then secretary, Molly, that she had a gun and was going to kill us both. He took her seriously enough to change the locks on the
apartment door, as she had keys. I can’t imagine why it was such a shock to her. If a man tells you he wants six months of no contact with you, that is a clue he doesn’t want to be with you. Or at least it would have been to me.

I did take Matt to FAO Schwarz for Christmas and loaded up on toys. Norman got him a complicated Erector set that was way too advanced for a four-year-old, but Matt kept it under his bed, and years later he put it together. Fanny took a liking to Matt as she had to me, and didn’t mind babysitting him. He was a good little boy, inventive and quiet, with a full life going on inside his head.

From the time he was small, he imagined complete scenarios, lined up his little soldiers in rows, and played all the parts of both sides in a war. It was entertaining to watch him obliviously talking and moving his soldiers around, crashing planes and rushing ambulances to the crash sites. It was almost as if he had been in a real war in a past life and was reenacting it. He could draw really well, too, precocious for his age, and he drew German soldiers with insignia on their uniforms that looked remarkably like the real ones I looked up in books. I always believed he had been either a German soldier or a Jew in the last war; sometimes he had nightmares about things he would or should never have known about. He would wake up screaming, saying he was being put into an oven. I’m a total believer in reincarnation, and often young children still retain remnants of memories of their last lives. I was in awe of him, and so glad he was here with me, safe. I enrolled him in nursery school at Open House, not far from our apartment, and every day when we walked home, we would stop and get an ice cream cone at Baskin-Robbins or a small toy at the drugstore. He particularly liked Boney Benny, a rubber skeleton, and had several of those. If anything, I worried at his enthusiasm for horror movies—he loved Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman, as well as all the superheroes. From the time he was able to think in those terms, he wanted to make movies.

Norman came home to Brooklyn on New Year’s eve. It was snowing, and we went to Gage and Tollner on Fulton Street in Brooklyn—a restaurant that had opened at the turn of the century and still retained its Victorian flavor—to celebrate, just the two of us. Although I had never been happier, and he seemed to be just as happy and relieved to have finally made the decision, it must have been a little bittersweet for
him. Now Maggie would begin the ritual of coming to visit, just as the other children did. He had left them all, the wives and the seven children. I should have been worried that I, too, would be next in line for heartbreak, but I wasn’t. He so totally convinced me that I was the love of his life, that I was the one he wanted to be with, that it never entered my mind he would do the same thing to me.