CAROLE MALLORY, born Carole Wagner in about 1941, was one of very many women that the author Norman Mailer, said to be one of America's best literary writers, had a variety of relationships with. Some of these relationships were enduring but infrequently sexual. Some were very. There were wives. Affairs. And a long term Mistress: Carole. Carole came to call Norman "a world class professional philanderer."
Mailer was seductive and as a literary author wrote sex. He seems to have never thought marriage required faithfulness. He was not especially physically attractive or even in excellent health in his older years when he was sexual with Mistress Carole Mallory. That he was not so handsome or physically beautiful himself didn't stop them from having a mutual attraction or exciting relationship that wasn't only about sex.
He had chemistry.
Mailer had six wives and nine children in his lifetime. He seemed to use a pregnancy as a way out of one and into another marriage. He was married to his last wife, Norris Church (original name Barbara Davis) when he started an eight year relationship with Carole Mallory, a model whose image graced many a magazine cover, an actress who you might have seen in Stepford Wives (1975), and a writer who hoped to learn from a master. The relationship occurred between 1983 and 1992. Previously, she had graduated from Penn State and also earned a Masters at Temple. She had been a Pan Am stewardess. The relationship happened mostly in New York City and Los Angeles but sometimes required travel. When not in the same time and place, Mailer called Mallory weekly for all those years.
He had told her that he and Norris were friends, not in love and no longer romantic and that his marriage was boring. He also said that if Norris found out, he would never speak to Carole again. So she agreed to be discreet though over time their relationship was known in the literary circles they traveled and by many others. She realized later this was his exit strategy from the beginning. As worldly as she had become it took heartbreak to realize. He used the phone to break with her. Their last rendezvous happened at the Bel Air Hotel in June of 1991 and he called her on September 16, 1991 to break with her saying Norris had found out about them. She cried and vomited. She was forty-nine.
The much older Mailer had also held his cards close to his chest before revealing he had a heart condition.
Mailer clearly acted as Mallory's writing mentor through the years as she strove to develop her own talent and skills. An intelligent woman, Carole also took writing classes at Columbia and NYU.
She succeeded in writing articles and interviews of famous people that were published in magazines and this brought her some income; these opportunities seemed to vanish once the two of them broke up. She also wrote sexy fiction, a book called Flash. Mallory also wrote the memoir, Loving Mailer, which is pictured above and which I'm using as my prime reference for this months posts. From the winter of 1985 and six winters after that Carole saw Norman about five hours a week and the rest of the week she would write.
There is some point where for some people an affair becomes something more. There are the emotional and intellectual aspects of a relationship. Then there are the financial. According to Carole, Mailer did supplement her income but his promises of paying half her rent for life, of buying a life insurance policy with her as the recipient, and remembering her in his will never manifested. He may have used her as a tax deduction to lower the amount he owed the IRS.
How does a married man finance having more than one woman in his life and when it is a long term relationship like this one and the woman is like a second or third wife, what financial promises can he make and keep? ( I know that some of my readers who wish to Keep someone else also wonder what they can do. Well, you can do as Mailer suggested - and follow through.)
During those years when the couple frequently discussed writing in general and Mailer acted as Carole's teacher he also wanted to play sexual games in which he was the Director who can make an actress do anything. He thought of these games as adding variety. He may have just been testing his power. The games he wanted to play became uninteresting and then a turn off.
Through this month I will excerpt some important aspects of Carole's memoir as she did tell her story so well in her book Loving Mailer. I'd like to mention that through her book Carole recognizes herself as an alcoholic in recovery who realized how horrible sex drunk had been. She also recognized Mailer as an alcoholic, an unapologetic one.
As well as her memoir, I also scanned through the book by Michael Lennon, called Norman Mailer - A Double Life. I read it before I learned she had sued over what the book said. In it there are a few paragraphs covering his relationship with Carole Mallory. This book is for the Mailer fanatic who can deal with a fat hardback packed with information on the writer's career. The book is not focused on his personal life though it's woven in. What Lennon wrote of Carole is dismissive of her. Like other women in these pages who were muses to artistic men and these men's mistresses, the focus is often on the genius. It's assumed she is the lesser talent and that her motivation for being with him is his genius - his fame - his wealth. Many women have had their own ambitions and she many of us wish we could be half as successful as Carole was on her own. Some give up what it is they wanted for themselves while meeting the demands of a narcissistic man.
Those of you with writer ambitions might want to read Loving Mailer just to get Norman Mailer's personal advice on writing.
When you read Mallory's short memoir you will find it has admirable literary qualities. It is fast paced, non essentials are edited out, and you learn what went wrong in their relationship. Her sense of being manipulated and used developed slowly. The book begins with a sexual encounter with actor Warren Beatty when she was a cover model. She did go through some years a playgirl, a huntress, addicted to sex, especially with some famous actors and they with her. She drank and also fueled her sex addiction with cocaine and Valium.
Mallory sold her papers and letters between herself and the author to Mailer's college, Harvard, about a year after he died in 2007.
For those of you who think that being a Mistress means never being married, you'll be relieved to know that Carole Mallory married years after her relationship with Mailer to a much younger man who she says was just his opposite, a giving, hands on co-caregiver to her elderly mother, as well as a member of the same group for alcoholics that she attended in a small Pennsylvania town. As a recent article mentioned she had been married twice and I know she took her first husband's surname, Mallory, I'm not sure if she is still married to this second husband or not.
In 1975 she had been engaged to be married to Claude Picasso, the artist Pablo Picasso's son. She notes Mailer's interest in her relationship with Claude and eventually writing his own book on Picasso. She wrote Picasso's Ghost about that relationship, which occurred during the period in which she appeared on magazine covers.
In 2014, Carole, then 72 years old, sued the estate of Norman Mailer for 3.5 million dollars. As of 2018 she was appealing a verdict.
Enjoy this month as the interesting Mistress of the Month, Carole Mallory, is slowly revealed.
Missy
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