ROY EDROSO

It was a mild shock to see Norman Mailer, erstwhile bad boy of American letters, using a cane. The 79-year-old author moved with difficulty up the steps of the stage at Barnes & Noble Union Square last Tuesday, then sat blinking in the harsh light, his craggy face worried, like that of a monkey mildly disturbed to find himself on display.

Lawrence Schiller, with whom Mailer collaborated on Into the Mirror: The Life of Master Spy Robert P. Hanssen, the book they had come to promote, ascended more easily, which was surprising since, though he is much younger than Mailer, he is Victor Buono fat. Schiller wore a smart black suit and grinned often, revealing large, gapped teeth. This, combined with his beaklike nose, produced an effect at once vulpine and avuncular.

They make an interesting tag team. In 1973, then-photojournalist Schiller enlisted Mailer "to write a preface" for his planned book of Marilyn Monroe pictures. And, Schiller told the crowd, "he turned in 90,000 words," yielding the highbrow coffee-table sensation, Marilyn. In 1977 Schiller interviewed several dozen people connected with the Gary Gilmore case, and discovered that he "did not have the life experience to write that book." Again he called Mailer, who made of his transcripts The Executioner's Song, a conflation of fiction and nonfiction techniques that the two used again--Schiller backgrounding, Mailer writing--on Oswald's Tale in 1995.

One gets the impression that Schiller, the bulk of whose experience is as a TV filmmaker, provides Mailer, who is long past his rowdy, Vidal-punching days, with charges of vulgar energy less evident in Mailer's recent, becalmed solo efforts. When Schiller asked him to write a Hanssen mini-series for CBS last year, based on Schiller's research, Mailer turned out the scripts in a matter of weeks. Of course, it helps a lot, as Mailer told the crowd in his familiar, half-swallowed patrician tones, when "you don't have to describe what the rooms looked like."

His method with Schiller, Mailer explained, "is like climbing a mountain--for the sake of hyperbole, call it Everest. You can't get anywhere without a fabulous base camp. Now, there's something analogous to that in doing this kind of book. You have to get your facts as accurate as you can get them, but from there, the final ascent has to be imaginative. You have to be close enough and good enough that you can dare to say it."

Setting up base camp for Hanssen's story is somewhat comparable to putting one on Everest. Both the spy and his wife are prohibited by the terms of his plea-bargain from discussing the case. Not that Hanssen's testimony would be trustworthy; he is a compulsive and expert concealer. While maintaining an outwardly exemplary life and a successful, if unspectacular, FBI career, he regularly filmed himself having sex with his wife (without her knowledge) and passed the footage on to his best friend. He also took advantage of his G-15 security clearance to access an unprecedented number of top-secret documents from several government agencies and deliver them to the Soviet Union--not occasionally, as spies usually do, but on an almost monthly basis over 12 years.

When, after 9/11, CBS back-pedaled from the TV project, Schiller asked Mailer to turn it into a novel. He demurred, so Schiller did it himself, incorporating "90 percent" of Mailer's dialogue. Now Schiller is the anchor of the tag team, though the lame and aged Mailer clearly supplies the star power.

At Barnes & Noble, Schiller sounded as if he were pitching to network executives. "It's not about spying," he assured the crowd. "Hanssen is not only a man who betrayed his country, but who also betrayed his family...What drove him was the desire to be the best, the desire to succeed."

Mailer's take on Hanssen was, unsurprisingly, at once more precise and more metaphysical. "His case violates most of the canons of psychiatry," he proclaimed. "A shy, ingrown man, six foot four but badly coordinated...he was a fabulous father, and had a very exciting sexual relationship with his wife. He was also a good Catholic, and being a good Catholic is equal in difficulty to being a good magician...He found his health and strength in ways that would make other people go stark raving mad."

When they had finished, Mailer was escorted past the crowd by two serious men in suits, while Schiller stood at the edge of the stage and chatted easily with stragglers about the dramatic qualities of the Hanssen story, which, he maintains, will still be made into a film. An actor asked him where he could send his 8 x 10. Schiller graciously gave him the name of his agent.