Norris Church Mailer, the former model who married Norman Mailer and managed his career and his family life over three decades while carving out her own niche as a writer, died on Sunday at her home in Brooklyn Heights. She was 61.
The cause was the gastrointestinal cancer that she had battled for 11 years, said her son John Buffalo Mailer.
Ms. Mailer, who had grown up as Barbara Jean Davis in rural Arkansas, was a high school art teacher, former pickle-factory worker and divorced mother when Mr. Mailer came to Russellville, Ark., in 1975 to plug his book-length reflection on Marilyn Monroe. Brooklyn-bred, Harvard-educated, with the first of two Pulitzer Prizes to his credit, he was almost as celebrated for his brawling egocentrism and intellectual provocations as he was for his novels. He was also twice her age and by that point had been married four times.
But as a Book-of-the-Month Club member, she was eager that he sign her copy of “Marilyn.” After a few moments of conversation, he was enchanted by the auburn-haired beauty. She found him “easily the most interesting man I had ever met.” She was to give another motive for their magnetic attraction.
“Sex was the cord that bound us together,” she wrote.
Within months, she moved to New York where, as she wrote in “A Ticket to the Circus,” the memoir she published this year, Mr. Mailer became “the Henry Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle.” She worked for Wilhelmina Models and changed her name. Norris echoed her first husband’s surname, but it was Mr. Mailer, who died in 2007 at 84, who dreamed up Church because he was struck by her having attended Free Will Baptist services three times a week as a child.
She gave birth to John Buffalo in 1978 and spent much of her time taking care of him; her first child, Matthew; and several of Mr. Mailer’s seven other children. Mr. Mailer, whom she married in 1980, was by all accounts an attentive father, and at one point seven people were squeezed into the Mailers’ apartment on the Brooklyn Heights promenade. All nine children were rounded up for summers in Maine and later Provincetown, Mass.
She was able to enter into her husband’s potentially daunting orbit of the famous and accomplished — people like Woody Allen, Bob Dylan and Jackie Onassis. She also organized her husband’s social and family life and defended him against antagonists, like feminists offended by his 1971 volume, “The Prisoner of Sex.”
“To me, the humor and irony was inherent,” she later wrote. “But you can’t transfer the twinkle in the eye to the page, so a lot of people treated everything he said as perfectly serious, like his famous comment that women should be kept in cages. Who would think he was serious about that?”
At one point the two nearly split over Mr. Mailer’s infidelities (one mistress, Carole Mallory, recently wrote a memoir of her eight-year affair), but he pleaded with her to stay, and she did, wanting to hold the family together. She also confided in a recent interview that she could not think of a single person she would rather have been with.
She worked hard at making her own cultural mark. She had nine one-woman art shows and, according to John Buffalo, appeared in several plays. Early in their relationship she showed Mr. Mailer 100 pages of a novel; his response, she recalled, was “It’s not as bad as I thought it would be.” She put it away, but it came out in 2000 as “Windchill Summer,” a story about coming of age in Arkansas during the Vietnam War. In 2007 she published a sequel, “Cheap Diamonds,” about an aspiring model from Arkansas who arrives in New York in the 1970s.
Whatever her own achievements, friends said she seldom lost her open-hearted, down-to-earth sensibility.
“I’m not an intellectual,” she said in an interview this year with Alex Witchel in The New York Times. “I pick up People magazine instead of The New York Review of Books and read it first. That’s just a fact. I tried very hard to make myself more literate, and I’m not a stupid woman, but some things interest me and some things don’t.”
Although her parents were from Arkansas, she was born on Jan. 31, 1949, in the state of Washington, where her father, James Davis, took a job building a dam while putting his family up in a trailer. By the time she was 2 they had returned to Arkansas, and she grew up in Atkins in a home that had an outhouse.
At the age of 3 she won the title of Little Miss Little Rock. At 20 she married her high school sweetheart, Larry Norris, but they divorced after five years. In addition to John Buffalo and Matthew, survivors include her stepchildren, Susan, Danielle, Elizabeth, Kate, Michael, Stephen and Maggie Mailer; and her mother, Gaynell Davis.
Before she met Mr. Mailer, she claimed, she had a fling with the then-unmarried Bill Clinton. In her memoir she told the story of that affair with characteristic wit. A friend who was in politics told her when Clinton was president, “I guess he slept with every woman in Arkansas except you.”
“Sorry,” she replied. “I’m afraid he got us all.”