Last week it emerged that one of Norman Mailer’s mistresses, former actress and model Carole Mallory, sold her personal papers to Harvard’s Houghton Library. On Friday they gave the UK’s Times OnLine an exclusive preview.
Harvard? Why Harvard?
Leslie Morris, the Harvard library’s curator, said the main reason the university had been interested in so seemingly unacademic an archive was that Mailer’s hand-written amendments appeared on several manuscripts.
“The edits to me were the important things,” said Morris, who lost the biggest Mailer prize when the author sold his manuscripts to the University of Texas for $2.5m three years ago. “We don’t have that kind of money,” she said.
She declined to reveal how much Mallory was paid, but Mailer scholars may conclude it was worth every penny to read some of Norman’s amendments.
If you’re not going to clickthrough to read the lurid and steamy details, the headline claim is that Mallory “suspected him of having an affair with a male friend, was worried that he might contract Aids and refused to indulge his fantasy of three-way sex with a gay man.”
Yawn.