Legs McNeil details the raucous, star-studded bash at Mailer’s Brooklyn Heights home in his new memoir of punk’s rise and fall, “Resident Punk.”

Why Woody Allen ‘hid in the bathroom all night’ during a party at Norman Mailer’s house, according to a punk legend

Legs McNeil details the raucous, star-studded bash at Mailer’s Brooklyn Heights home in his new memoir of punk’s rise and fall, “Resident Punk.”

By Ryan Coleman

Ryan Coleman

Ryan Coleman is a news writer for with previous work in MUBI Notebook, Slant, and the LA Review of Books.

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September 15, 2026 6:53 p.m. ET

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Woody Allen in 1980 and Norman Mailer around 1975. Credit:

Nancy R. Schiff/Getty; Arthur Schatz/Getty

- Punk legend Legs McNeil looks back on a star-studded party at Norman Mailer’s Brooklyn home in his new memoir, *Resident Punk.*

- Mailer and McNeil, the co-founder of the influential magazine *Punk*, became associated because of a 1978 *Village Voice* article Mailer read that quoted McNeil.

- McNeil recalls a 1980 party attended by the likes of Shelley Winters and Kurt Vonnegut, in which Woody Allen “hid in the bathroom all night.”

New York City’s punk scene of the 1970s birthed a galaxy of new stars, from Debbie Harry and Patti Smith to Joey Ramone and Richard Hell. The scene possessed a star power so immense that by 1980, even the unlikeliest public figures began to find themselves at the same parties as the city’s finest rock and rollers.

In his new memoir, *Resident Punk: How I Smoked, Drank, and Stumbled My Way Through the ’70s Punk Scene (and Beyond)* — out Tuesday from BenBella Books — punk legend Legs McNeil recalls one particular party that made strange bedfellows of himself, literary superstar Norman Mailer, and fêted filmmaker Woody Allen.

In his characteristically coarse and uncompromising style, McNeil, who co-founded the influential magazine *Punk *in 1975, tells the story of a raucous party at Mailer’s Brooklyn Heights home that left Allen desperate for a breather.

Mia Farrow and Woody Allen in 1989.

ARNAL/Gamma-Rapho via Getty

Mailer and McNeill met at the height of their respective powers as chroniclers of momentous events. In 1978, Mailer was readying the publication of his landmark work of long-form journalism, *The Executioner’s Song*, while McNeil was helping catapult musicians like Sid Vicious and Joan Jett from local heroes to national stars.

McNeill published an interview with Mailer in a 1979 issue of *High Times*, and soon afterward he “became a pretty regular fixture in the Mailer household, hanging out with Norman’s sons and watching *Gilligan’s Island* reruns.”

Making it into the Mailer inner circle also meant receiving invites to wild parties at his home in Brooklyn Heights. “The guests at a party in April 1980 included Woody Allen, Shelley Winters, Kurt Vonnegut, Arturo Vega, Glen Buxton from Alice Cooper, as well as former light heavyweight champion of the world José Torres,” McNeill writes.

What stood out to McNeil, however, isn’t who showed up to hobnob, but who showed up and resolutely refused to hobnob. “Woody Allen hid in the bathroom all night, and people kept knocking on the door because they had to pee or do coke or whatever, but Woody wouldn’t open the door,” he recalls in *Resident Punk*. “Finally, he opened the door a little and peeked out, and [graphic designer Arturo Vega] opened the bathroom door all the way and said to Woody, ‘Boy, you really are shy, aren’t you?’ Then Arturo closed the bathroom door on him, in disgust.”

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* *has reached out to a representative for Allen for comment.

McNeil was never able to solve the mystery of why Allen hid out in Mailer’s bathroom all night, but it didn’t impact his friendship with the notorious novelist whatsoever.

The punk mainstay remembered Mailer as “one of the most generous guys I’d ever met” and the only person who “had the power to drag me out of my alcoholic self-obsessions.” Often, McNeil writes, Mailer would drag him out of his own spirals and into Mailer’s, but McNeil seemed to prefer Mailer’s company to his own.

Legs McNeill in 1979.

Roberta Bayley/Redferns/Getty

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McNeil wasn’t content to simply enter Mailer’s rarefied literary world — he pulled Mailer into the his own edgy scene. He writes of the “sensation” he caused by inviting Mailer and his sixth and last wife, Norris Church, to a Ramones show at the legendary nightclub CBGB.

“Everyone wanted to sit next to Norman. Linda Stein, the ex-wife of record company mogul Seymour Stein and co-manager of the Ramones, was saying, ‘I wanna sit next to Norman! I wanna sit next to Norman!’” he writes. In Mailer’s later conversation with McNeil for *High Times*, Mailer reflects on the show, telling his newfound friend, “Seeing the Ramones felt like I was an old car and I was being taken out for a ride at 100 miles an hour and I kind of liked it because I was really getting rid of a lot of rust.”

*Resident Punk *is currently available in bookstores.

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