Norris Church Mailer (January 31, 1949 - November 21, 2010) was a 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.
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. 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.
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 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.
In addition to sons John Buffalo and Matthew, survivors include her stepchildren, Susan, Danielle, Elizabeth, Kate, Michael, Stephen and Maggie Mailer; and her mother, Gaynell Davis.
(source: NY Times)
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