NORMAN MAILER : A DOUBLE LIFE by J. MICHAEL LENNON : MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK REVIEW

The title of the book leads us to know that the man Norman Mailer was complicated, but what stood out for me was author J. Michael Lennon's diminishing of Carole Mallory which held her to sexists double standards - his not Mailer's. Which isn't to say that Mailer wasn't sexist. He seems to use women and to feel as a genius he has the right to. (And so, by the way, did his mother!) The author basically maintains via a quote from a Mailer attorney that Carole and Norman had nothing but sex going on.  Basically he is on the wife Norris Church's side and paints Carole as an exceptionally promiscuous woman while the women who accepted the ultimate bad boy in stride (co-dependent) are admired for being long suffering.

But in Carole Mallory's memoir Loving Mailer she states that Norman had the right to edit what Lennon wrote and did, so be aware that it's possible that Norman dictated what was said about Carole.  Carole also states in her memoir that Mailer warned her that she would be caste as the bad woman if anyone found out about their relationship.  Lots of people knew about it that is certain.  Carole includes wife Norris Church as knowing about the relationship from the early days.

Norman Mailer was an exceptionally promiscuous man and I could argue overall far more of a rogue with women than Carole had been with men; hers was more of a groupie mentality of having sex with a number of celebrities while she herself was a magazine cover model. Yes, she enjoyed using her beauty and sexuality to pick up some Hollywood film stars for sex in her younger life before Mailer and he seemed to be fascinated with this, especially her brief experience with Warren Beatty. She had been engaged to Claude Picasso, the artist's son, as well, and funny but Mailer wrote a book on Picasso and an interview with Warren Beatty.

 ennon writes about Carole being rudely cut off from money, so sex and money or sex for money is implied.  Excuse me!  One does not meet a man for nine years, talk to him weekly, become bicoastal (the New York City and Los Angeles thing) and travel with him, discuss his and her writing and much else, if not in a relationship. The author has the nerve to say that Mallory only knew Mailer "superficially?" It all seemed like an attempt to take from Mallory what she deserves - her own voice, her own truth, and what she earned - the ability to write about it.

If you want to know what made Mailer tick, this book of over 900 pages hardback certainly attempts to explain the man, and other relationships with other women - mostly wives. Mailer even stabbed one of them and a psychiatrist said he needed to give up alcohol.  That wife could have died, but she's almost complimented for not causing him trouble by doing something like having him charged criminally.  Towards what was the beginning of the end of their relationship Mailer also punched Carole i9n the stomach in two episodes she reports. (I know Mailer also attacked a man viciously and got away with it, but if he were not a "literary genius" he probably would have been in and out of prison.)

The total focus of the book is not Carole Mallory nor did I assume it would be, so I culled the pages in which she was mentioned.  And unlike Carole's own book there's some financial information that I know my readers are interested in. But again, Carole is saying Mailer edited this so be aware. Because everyone does want to know the financial aspect of being a mistress. 

In this book it says that Norris Church knew about Carole but seemed to only take the relationship between her husband and the writer seriously when it became public knowledge.  Yes, Norris (named by Norman.  Her name was previously Barbara Davis) was hideously hurt when Norman decided to tell her the whole truth of his inability to be a faithful husband.  He brutally named names, detailed relationships that lasted hours and years, and Carole was not the only woman in his life at any time. She however was seemingly more in the know and accepting of this than Norris. So she too took that in stride. Yet because their breakup happened at a time when Carole seemed to Norris to be the problem, it's like she was blamed for it all.  Norman Mailer hurt Norris. He hurt Carole. He hurt a lot of women.

Carole Mallory was a successful model and on magazine covers.  She also acted in some films. She associated with famous and powerful people throughout her adult life.  She was capable of earning some of her own money. Would it be enough for me or you to live on?

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CAROLE MALLORY SUES - ONGOING

THE INQUIRER : PHILADELPHIA DAILY: OCTOBER 2014: NORMAL MAILER MISTRESS SUES HIS ESTATE  by Victor Fiorillo 

EXCERPT: Mallory, a Springfield High and Penn State graduate, has filed a libel and defamation suit against Mailer’s estate, the estate of his widow, prominent New York attorney Ivan Fisher, publisher Simon & Schuster, and author and Mailer archivist J. Michael Lennon over statements made in Lennon’s 2013 book, Norman Mailer: A Double Life, which is set to be released in paperback on October 15th.

There are two key passages in the Lennon book that Mallory highlights in her complaint.

First, Fisher, Mailer’s attorney and close friend, says that Mailer’s relationship with Mallory was “100 percent sexual.”

“There wasn’t the teeniest, tiniest nanogram of anything other than sex involved there,” says Fisher in the 960-page book. But Mallory claims that it went well beyond sex. She says that their relationship was also “one of mentor and student” and that the two had a “loving relationship.”

The book also suggests that Mallory taught Mailer about “venality” and quotes Mailer’s widow as saying that Mallory had “gotten the last nickel she was going to get out of Norman.”

LEAGLE on DECISION and DETAILS of MALLORY VERSUS PUBLISHERS

NATIONAL POST - MALLORY LOOSES

EXCERPT: One of Norman Mailer's lovers loses lawsuit over biography painting her as a 'venal harlot'

THE INQUIRER PHILADELPHIA DAILY: CAROLE MALLORY APPEALS in 2018  by Stu Bukofsky

 

CAROLE MALLORY ON A REASSESSMENT OF HER RELATIONSHIP WITH NORMAN MAILER

"Still, I was being foolish to live in the now and not look to the future.  How Norman had treated his ex wives was an indication of how he would treat me when it ended.  But I was so into my obsession with him that I was wearing blinders on my heart.  I loved him and knew that to keep him in my life I could not put pressure on him.  He need a long leash, like a wild animal. Wild he was and a part of me loved the excitement so much that I made few demands of him.  He would have a temper tantrum when confronted by my financial needs.  In the beginning of our relationship I learned to do without any support from him.  I couldn't risk being thought of as a former wife pulling on him financially.  After all I wasn't a former wife.  I was only his new lover.  (Page 101)


How many Mistresses are proud that they are NOT HIS WIFE?!  I think MOST!  Missy

CAROLE MALLORY and NORMAN MAILER

CAROLE MALLORY AS A MODEL AND ACTRESS and WRITER and AUTHOR

During her modeling career in the 1970's, Carole Mallory was on the covers of Newsweek, Cosmopolitan, New York, Esquire and GQ, and French Vougu.  She was in television ads for Tigress perfume as well as doing print ads for Tabu perfume   She did an English Leather men's cologne television ad that went on for a decade. It was the ad that went "All my  men wear English Leather or they wear nothing at all!"

Carole Mallory also developed a career as a magazine article writer, in particular interviews of famous people.  She made up to $20,000 for one article she wrote for Esquire.

COVER GIRL MODEL CAROLE MALLORY

CAROLE MALLORY - HER FEELINGS EARLY IN HER DAYS AS MISTRESS TO NORMAN MAILER

"No, Norman would not divorce; never the less,I was grateful that he gave a part of his life to me and that I had a portion of has love. If five hours a week were all he could afford to share with me, I would cherish those hours. I would accept these as being all the time a man who had six wives, nine children, an agent, a lawyer, a secretary, several publishers and grandchildren, was physically able to share with me.  Norman Mailer had a hectic, dramatic, and chaotic lifestyle that he thrived on.  I felt respect for him.  I was especially grateful that he was healthy, reasonably healthy. ... "Page 41)


Carole Mallory about the early start of her nine years as a mistress to literary genius Norman Mailer from her memoir Loving Mailer.

CAROLE MALLORY: MODEL, ACTRESS, WRITER - NINE YEARS A MISTRESS OF FAMED LITERARY AUTHOR NORMAN MAILER

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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