Mailer’s Last Wife Suffered, Yet Prospered

I picked up a copy of yesterday’s NY Sunday Times and found a portrait of a gaunt yet attractive woman. She was Norman Mailer’s last wife…and she’s endured a whole lot of tough times besides being cheated on by the famous philanderer. Her name is Norris Church Mailer, and she met him when she was 26, and he was 52. She moved to New York four weeks later, to marry him.

She was later credited for knitting together a close family from the seven different children the author sired, with five other wives.

She was the last wife. Alex Witchell writes about a tender moment when she got sick later in life. She was given slim odds, and had to have much of her intestines removed.

On the first day of her cancer operation, all nine children, all of their spouses and their children, along with Mailer, his sister and her family arrived at her bedside at 6 am to help her rally.  Mailer would be married to her for two decades and make Tiger Woods look like a piker. The writer tended to have sex with people his age and or fatter than him. “He wanted to be the good looking one,” he explained.