Five days before I interviewed Lawrence Schiller, I re-read the last 600 pages of The Executioner’s Song, the “true-life novel” by Norman Mailer. The book spins a 1,072-page yarn about the life and death of Gary Gilmore, a now-infamous criminal who murdered two men in Utah in 1976 and received a death sentence by firing squad in 1977. The outcome effectively reinstated the death penalty after a ten-year moratorium on capital punishment in the US.

Most people are familiar with Gilmore’s story because it was national news, or because they read The Executioner’s Song (which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980) or the 1994 book by Gary Gilmore’s brother (Rolling Stone journalist Mikal Gilmore), Shot in the Heart. A few people may have seen Matthew Barney’s take on the Gary Gilmore story, Cremaster 2, in which Norman Mailer plays Harry Houdini.

I chose to re-read the last 600 pages because Lawrence Schiller is a major character in the second half of the book. What many people don’t know is that Schiller is also the man who chased the story, bought Gilmore’s life rights, and hired Norman Mailer as the writer. Schiller spent hundreds of hours interviewing everyone who appears in the book—but he couldn’t write it, he says, “because of my lack of education and writer’s vocabulary.” A negative review of an earlier book made him doubt that he could effectively intuit the emotional lives and spiritual nuances of the people in his stories. This didn’t stop him from flying out to Utah, pounding around Provo, buying confidence, and witnessing Gilmore’s execution.

Norman Mailer never spoke to or met Gary Gilmore before Gilmore was executed. Instead he worked from more than fifteen thousand pages of transcriptions, and later traveled to Utah to study the landscape and interview the mothers of the victims. As a result of this unorthodox arrangement, Lawrence Schiller holds half the copyright to the book.

The Lawrence Schiller I met in the pages of The Executioner’s Song was a barracuda and a hustler—at least as cast in the “true-life novel,” which was the new genre Norman Mailer settled upon for his book. Would the Real Life Schiller be different?

Schiller was present at Ethel and Julius Rosenberg’s death march, Gary Gilmore’s execution, and Marilyn Monroe’s nude float in the pool. He received advice from Bette Davis and Otto Preminger. He lived across the street from O. J. Simpson. I met the writer-researcher-photographer–film director in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he serves as director of the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, at the home Mailer shared with his wife, Norris.

—Suzanne Snider

I. “I’VE BEEN TOLD...