Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [221]
Schiller and Mailer’s contribution was also immense, and even more unexpected. In 1977, when Schiller was conducting and compiling interviews and research material for Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, he contacted me on a few occasions, requesting that I sit for an interview with himself and the author. I always declined those requests—and not always politely. In part, I did so for reasons already discussed elsewhere in this book: Larry and I had some bad communications in Utah in the week prior to Gary’s death, and the simple truth is, I chose to hold a grudge. Also, I questioned the merits of an exhaustive look at my brother’s pathology (in fact, I wasn’t yet ready to face examining the sources of all that tragedy). Later, when I read the finished book, I was greatly impressed. Mailer had told a complex and troubling story without imposing a voice or judgment of his own, and Schiller had done a scrupulous job of research. Later, when Schiller’s film version of the book was finished, he offered me an early glimpse of it, and granted me an interview for an article I was writing about the movie for Rolling Stone. In a way, I regretted my earlier decision not to give him an interview for The Executioner’s Song—given his helpfulness, I felt churlish about withholding what I knew about my brother’s life. At the same time, I came to respect Schiller in ways I had not expected to respect him—he served his material truthfully and honorably, and he and Mailer created something monumental from that effort.
In the autumn of 1991, I was discussing with Schiller some of the problems of trying to find the more hidden aspects of my family’s story, when Larry made a remarkable and unsolicited offer: He proposed to let me borrow the original interview tapes of the discussions that he had recorded with both Gary and my mother. He thought such a listening experience might expand my emotional sense of the story, plus it might explain a few of the more bothersome puzzles. Obviously, I was somewhat embarrassed by this offer—after all, I had once declined all of his and Mailer’s requests for help—but I wasn’t so embarrassed that I didn’t jump on the chance. Merely hearing my mother’s and brother’s voices again after so many years, like hearing Frank’s astonishing stories, not only changed how I thought and felt about the people I was trying to rediscover, it also deepened my relationship to them. Additionally, of course, I gathered many significant details and accounts from the tapes, and I have tried to acknowledge those boons at several points in the course of this text. (As much as possible, I have tried not to cover the same ground that Mailer covered in his work, though some shared stories were unavoidable. At the same time, if you want a meticulous and revealing examination of Gary’s misadventures in Utah, The Executioner’s Song is the place to go; it tells a different story than I have told, and it tells it remarkably.)
In addition, both Schiller and Mailer—as well as Mailer’s personal assistant, Judith McNally—remained patient when I wrote and called them at various points, asking if they could help me figure out some of the various perplexing mysteries of my parents’ past. They helped when they could, but sometimes they were as stumped as I was. “Your questions were once my questions,” Mailer replied at one point, and in the end, many of those questions could not be answered. My father and my mother had done a good job of covering their tracks. Whatever Frank and Bessie Gilmore’s best or worst secrets were, they managed to keep them hidden long past their own deaths. I doubt I’ll ever be so lucky.
SEVERAL OTHERS HELPED IN THE HARD AND TEDIOUS WORK of researching this history of lost lives. The following people spent hours helping me dig through