Carole Mallory, sold Mailer’s love letters to Harvard

Carole Mallory, long-terms mistress of late Norman Mailer, have sold letters and other documents to Harvard university. These documents consist of love letters, books and paper that Carole has collected during their nine year long love affair. Among the treasure trove, there is also an unpublished novel Mallory wrote and Mailer edited, titled When I Fall in Love - about an Arab man with an eye patch who really has 20/20 vision, but wears it to get sympathy. “There’s a long scene in that which is also based on our sex life. Norman dared me to write a 50-page sex scene, and he lost the bet.” Mallory - a model and actress who appeared in The Stepford Wives and Looking for Mr Goodbar - was Mailer’s mistress from 1983 to 1992.

She has reportedly sold this archive to the Harvard university of texas for $2.5m. Carole Mallory said she is “a little ticked” by the media’s focus on the collection’s sexual content. Though she mentioned “There’s a 20-page sex scene from an unpublished memoir I wrote called ‘Making Love With Norman’, ” Mallory told the New York Post. “It’s very steamy. Norman was a real man and he knew what he was doing.”
Harvard, she added, did not purchase the collection solely for its explicit material.

Norman Mailer was seeing Mallory since his marriage to his sixth wife, Norris Church. Some feel it would have been more respectful, certainly less tacky, to have held off selling the artefacts until his widow had also died.

Norman Mailer was an undergraduate at the Ivy League establishment back in the Forties and Harvard is indeed pleased to have something on his life. Harvard library’s communications director Beth Brainard said the curators of the Library found the papers in Mallory’s collection significant not because of their sexual content but because Mailer was a graduate of Harvard and an influential American writer.

“It’s always an extraordinarily important thing for any large resource center to get a hold of the literary remains of anybody of that stature,” said Robert Scanlan, professor of English and Mailer’s acquaintance in the early 1970s. Scanlan added that he had a “rollicking” time with Mailer—“a pleasantly truculent guy, sort of like a barroom companion”—who loved to project the “macho image.”

Though Scanlan said he did not know the details of Mailer’s sex life, the English professor said any explicit description of the writer’s sexuality would shed light on Mailer’s fiction, which often directly explores sex. “Sexual content, racy language, obscene language are definitely a major part of his career as an author,” He spoke.

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