Norris Church Mailer: The Last Wife

By ALEX WITCHEL
NYT

Imagine this: It is 1975, and you are a 26-year-old high-school art teacher, the divorced mother of a 3-year-old boy, living in Russellville, Ark. You hear that a world-famous novelist is in town for one night, so you wangle an invitation to the party in his honor, hoping he’ll autograph your book. You find yourself smitten with this 52-year-old man — as he is with you — and at the end of the evening you go home together. After he leaves, you pour out your heart in a love poem and mail it to him. He mails it back — copy-edited, in red pencil. Do you:

a) Hop a plane to New York and strangle him with your bare hands?

b) Quit your job, move to New York with your son and become the guy’s sixth wife?

Reader, she married him. Not only that, she became stepmother to the seven children he fathered with his five other wives and had another son with him. Still with me? That makes nine children and Norman Mailer for a husband. As she has said herself: “Well, I bought a ticket to the circus. I don’t know why I was surprised to see elephants.”

How Barbara Jean Davis, a former pickle-factory worker and the only child of Free Will Baptists, with legs so long an old beau called her High Pockets, became Norris Church Mailer, a Wilhelmina model, a novelist, a painter, an actress and a ringmaster extraordinaire, is the subject of her new memoir, titled, aptly enough, “A Ticket to the Circus.” That she managed to stay with Mailer — self-obsessed, self-aggrandizing, perennially womanizing to the point of even his own humiliation — for almost 33 years until his death in 2007 was a feat most women would not have attempted. When people asked, “Which wife are you?” her answer was, “The last one.”

(More here.)