To New York, for a benefit gala at Cipriani 42nd Street for the Norman Mailer Centre and Writers Colony. We are there as a team to present British GQ’s first student writing award to a 65-year-old mother of two: Helen Madden, who presented the children’s TV show Romper Room in the early 1970s and still looks about 40. She wrote the winning story, ‘Rod, Roy and Jerry Lee’, while doing a creative writing MA at Queen’s University in Belfast, and its hearty nature appealed to almost everyone on the panel of judges. Tina Brown, Jann Wenner, and the super-cool Gay Talese were all in evidence, along with Taki, Michael Wolff, the irrepressible Larry Schiller and Mailer’s beautiful widow Norris. When I asked Tom Wolfe how his new novel was coming on, he said, ‘If it’s not finished next year I’m going to be spurting blood instead of ink.’
As part of her prize, Helen spent a month this summer in the Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the place that Mailer called home.
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