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NEW YORK – You need a big block of time, and space, to say goodbye to Norman Mailer.

STEPHEN CHERNIN/The Associated Press

A video tribute was part of 'The Time of His Life, a Celebration of the Life of Norman Mailer,' in New York.

More than 2,000 mourners filled Carnegie Hall to near capacity Wednesday for a two-hour-plus memorial, concert, literary tribute, family therapy session and Friars Club roast for the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of The Armies of the Night and The Executioner's Song.

Talk-show host Charlie Rose served as master of ceremonies, while speakers praising Mailer, who died in November at 84, included such names as magazine publisher Tina Brown, fellow authors Joan Didion and Don DeLillo and actor Sean Penn, who read a brief statement from his Blackberry that he had composed.

The warmest drama, and wickedest comedy, came from Mailer's children – nine of them, plus a stepson – all of whom seem to have inherited his storytelling power, if not his booming physical presence.

Daughter Kate Mailer spoke of an especially dangerous mountain pass that she refused to cross as a teenager, pleading that she wanted to survive long enough to have a boyfriend.

Cross it, her father assured her, and she would get a better boyfriend.

Family, friends and peers referred to his courage, his influence, his dedication, his sea-blue eyes, his many wives (six). Son Matthew Mailer remembered a wedding toast from his father that began, "If this marriage works out ... "

The family announced at the end of the memorial that a charitable foundation had been established in Mailer's honor to finance a writer's colony in his longtime hometown, Provincetown, Mass. Board members include Ms. Didion, Nobel laureate Gunter Grass and Pulitzer Prize winners William Kennedy and Doris Kearns Goodwin.

The Associated Press

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