Though David Rockefeller and the Aga Khan declined the invitation, the party's approximately two hundred guests included the poet Allen Ginsberg, as well as several "derelicts, cutthroats, and bohemians"-many of them homeless-whom Mailer had recruited off the street [REF].
Fights broke out throughout the course of the night, and tensions ran high-by some accounts, Norman Mailer at one point divided guests "on opposite sides of the room according to whether he considered them 'for' or 'against' him"-with a near-incoherent Mailer eventually leaving the apartment to seek trouble elsewhere.