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Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Norman Mailer + Eight Children + Six Wives

Norman Mailer + Eight Children + Six Wives

Famous men with several baby mamas, Out-of-wedlock births are on the rise and parents who are unmarried is a common occurence these days.

Norman Mailer married 6 times, Norman Mailer was married six times and had nine children. He fathered eight children by his various wives and also raised and informally adopted Norris' son from another marriage, Matthew.

Norman's first marriage was in 1944, to Beatrice Silverman, whom he divorced in 1952. They had one child, Susan.

Mailer married his second wife, Adele Morales, in 1954. They had two daughters, Danielle and Elizabeth. Mailer was violent to his wife. He punched her in the stomach when she was six months pregnant, and coerced her to have group sex with his friends. In 1960, Mailer stabbed Adele with a penknife after a party, nearly killing her. He cut through her breast, only just missing her heart. Then he stabbed her in the back. As she lay there, haemorrhaging, one man reached down to help her. He snapped: "Get away from her. Let the bitch die." He was involuntarily committed to Bellevue Hospital for 17 days; his wife would not press charges, and he later pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of assault, and was given a suspended sentence. While in the short term, Morales made a physical recovery, in 1997 she published a memoir of their marriage entitled The Last Party, which recounted the violence and its aftermath. This incident has been a focal point for feminist critics of Mailer, who point to themes of sexual violence in his work.

His third wife, whom he married in 1962, and divorced in 1963, was the British heiress and journalist Lady Jeanne Campbell (1929–2007), the only daughter of Ian Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll and a granddaughter of the press baron Lord Beaverbrook. The couple had a daughter, Kate Mailer, who is an actress.

His fourth marriage, in 1963, was to Beverly Bentley, a former model turned actress. She was the mother of his producer son Michael Mailer and his actor son Stephen Mailer. They divorced in 1980.

His fifth wife was Carol Stevens, a jazz singer whom he married on November 7, 1980, and divorced in Haiti on November 8, 1980, thereby legitimating their daughter Maggie, born in 1971.

His sixth and last wife, whom he married in 1980, was Norris Church Mailer (née Barbara Davis, 1949–2010), an art teacher. In her autobiography A Ticket to the Circus, Norris Church recounts of a rape and a miscarriage. They had one son together, John Buffalo Mailer, a writer and actor, and Mailer informally adopted Matthew Norris, her son by her first husband, Larry Norris. Living in Brooklyn, New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts with Mailer, Church worked as a model, wrote and painted.

Source: wikipedia