Tuesday, November 24, 2015

The Obit of the Day...

...(heck, of the Week or even Month!), has to be that of Adele Mailer, Norman Mailer's second wife.

Adele Mailer, an artist and actress who made headlines in 1960 when her husband, the novelist Norman Mailer, stabbed and seriously wounded her at a drunken party in their apartment, died on Sunday in Manhattan.

The relationship, marked by heavy drinking and ancillary love affairs on both sides, was stormy.

Yep, a marriage in which you get stabbed by your husband would definitely qualify as "stormy."

“I decided I was going to be that beautiful temptress who ate men alive, flossed her teeth and spit out the bones, wearing an endless supply of costumes by Frederick’s of Hollywood,” she wrote in her memoir.

Wow. 

On the verge of announcing his improbable candidacy for mayor of New York, Mailer decided to celebrate with a party at their apartment on the Upper West Side.

With the liquor flowing, it all made for a volatile mix. Ginsberg and Podhoretz got into a fight and had to be separated. Drunk and belligerent, Mailer, wearing a ruffled matador shirt, repeatedly tangled with his guests. Around 4 a.m., he confronted his wife in an incoherent rage.

Ruffled matador shirt?

In her memoir, Mrs. Mailer recalled having taunted her husband, bluntly deriding his manhood, and making an ugly reference to his mistress. Some guests recalled that the point of no return came when she told her husband that he was not as good as Dostoyevsky.

Well that oughta do it!

Anything else?

“After he died,” she said in a telephone interview, “all she could say was, ‘He was a monster.’ ”

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