During a November 1960 party celebrating his mayoral candidacy, American public intellectual Norman Mailer twice stabbed his wife Adele Morales with a pen-knife in a drunken altercation, nearly taking her life.
[1] 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—having written of the "courage" of hoodlums in his 1957 essay "The White Negro"—into a voting base that would propel him to office.
[2] 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.
[3][2] This produced an atmosphere characterized by later commentators 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).
[6] While she remained in critical condition, 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".
[6] Mailer appeared the next day in a scheduled interview on The Mike Wallace Show, where he spoke of the knife as a symbol of manhood and continued to plug his mayoral bid.
[11] Nine years later, Mailer launched a second mayoral campaign, received 5% of the votes cast and enjoyed the support of prominent feminists Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem.
[13] Mailer's admission that the stabbing was "the one act I can look back on and regret for the rest of my life" in a 2000 interview, 40 years after the fact, marked his first public expression of remorse.