"Cowards need alcohol to make love": Norman Mailer's Mistress Confesses
Carole Mallory, a former actress-model who was late pugilistic writer Norman Mailer's mistress, has granted an interview to... Harvard University's student paper, The Crimson. "Three weeks ago, Harvard received Mallory's collection of materials documenting her nine-year relationship with Mailer." She spills the shocking (yet totally expected) details: Mailer taught her how to write, was weird about sex, and threatened to haunt her in the afterlife.
1. Mailer taught her writing, which is probably how she came up with this simile: "I was a bit like an empty vessel going to sea with a pirate, with a pen who was going to teach me to weather the storms. Instead, we ran across some rough seas." He also mentioned that he'd "haunt her from the grave" if she wrote about him.
2. Mailer was "tempermental, jealous, and controlling." We already knew that! But: "Mallory said the couple broke up in 1992 over a dispute concerning an edit of one of Mallory's pieces." (Was it over semi-colon usage? Those can be tricky.)
3. He wrote great sex scenes, but was weird about actual sex: "Cowards need alcohol to make love. They might as well make love to the bottle."
The real question: is there a Norman Mailer sex tape?