Norman Mailer Mistress Sues Mailer Estate, Biographer for Libel

Carole Mallory has led quite the life. Though the 72-year-old woman now lives quietly in Norristown, Pennsylvania, her earlier years were nothing short of exciting.

In addition to being a Pan Am stewardess (back when they were actually called stewardesses), actress (she was in Looking for Mr. Goodbar and The Stepford Wives), scantily clad model (she graced the covers of Newsweek, Cosmopolitan and New York magazine), and, oh, fiancee of Pablo Picasso’s son, she also played the paramour to an impressive roster of famous men.

Mallory’s conquests reportedly included Robert DeNiro, Peter Sellers, Rod Stewart, Warren Beatty, Richard Gere and Norman Mailer, and it is her eight-year affair with Mailer that is the subject of a just-filed lawsuit in Philadelphia’s Federal Court.

Mallory, a Springfield High and Penn State graduate, has filed a libel and defamation suit against Mailer’s estate, the estate of his widow, prominent New York attorney Ivan Fisher, publisher Simon & Schuster, and author and Mailer archivist J. Michael Lennon over statements made in Lennon’s 2013 book, Norman Mailer: A Double Life, which is set to be released in paperback on October 15th.

There are two key passages in the Lennon book that Mallory highlights in her complaint.

First, Fisher, Mailer’s attorney and close friend, says that Mailer’s relationship with Mallory was “100 percent sexual.”

“There wasn’t the teeniest, tiniest nanogram of anything other than sex involved there,” says Fisher in the 960-page book. But Mallory claims that it went well beyond sex. She says that their relationship was also “one of mentor and student” and that the two had a “loving relationship.”

The book also suggests that Mallory taught Mailer about “venality” and quotes Mailer’s widow as saying that Mallory had “gotten the last nickel she was going to get out of Norman.”

In 2008, Harvard University — Mailer’s alma mater — purchased seven boxes from Mallory containing Mailer’s notes, photographs and letters. Also inside the boxes were memoirs and notes written in Mallory’s own hand, dating back to the start of their affair in the early 1980s. “He is hung like a stallion and proud of it,” she wrote of Mailer at the time. Mallory also wrote about their relationship in her 2010 book Loving Mailer.

Mallory, who declined to comment for this article, maintains that Simon & Schuster and Lennon did not properly fact-check the book, and she accuses both of being “negligent and malicious.” She is seeking $3.5 million in damages as well as an injunction preventing the release of the paperback.

Lennon, Simon & Schuster and Fisher were not immediately available for comment.

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