Adele Morales - Life With Norman Mailer

Life With Norman Mailer

In 1951 she moved in with Mailer in an apartment upstairs from Wolf's, on First Avenue near Second Street in Greenwich Village; they were married in 1954 and lived in a "loft on Monroe Street in the shadows of the Manhattan Bridge," which became a "popular salon" for the New York intelligentsia. But after visiting Paris in the summer of 1956 Mailer and Morales decided to leave New York; Mailer wrote "the city was not alive for me. I was on edge. My wife was pregnant. It seemed abruptly too punishing to live at the pace we had been going for several years." In the fall of 1956 they moved to a rented "sprawling white saltbox farmhouse" in Bridgewater, Connecticut, near a literary and artistic community that included Arthur Miller and William Styron in nearby Roxbury.

In March 1957 Adele gave birth to a daughter Danielle, called Dandy. Although Adele was happy at first in the country, there was "a constant low-level hostility between Norman and Adele, which got worse when they drank." They moved back to New York in the fall of 1958, renting an apartment at 73 Perry St. in the Village; Adele bore another daughter, Elizabeth Anne, in 1959. In the summer of 1960, in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Adele danced in a production called "The Pirates of Provincetown," and James Baldwin praised her performance, "though she had no lines beyond one scream, which she delivered with gusto in high 'method' style"; later that summer she had to bail Norman out of jail after a drunken run-in with the police.

Read more about this topic:  Adele Morales

Famous quotes containing the words norman mailer, life, norman and/or mailer:

    The Frenchman Jean-Paul ... Sartre I remember now was his last name had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan.
    Norman Mailer (b. 1923)

    People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal.
    Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)

    I’d horsewhip you if I had a horse.
    S.J. Perelman, U.S. screenwriter, Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, and Norman Z. McLeod. Groucho Marx, Horsefeathers, a wisecrack made to his son Frank (Zeppo Marx)

    Ramses knelt beside Amon ... and He took one end of His skirt and wiped all that was black from the God’s face, kissing the God on the lips even though His own mouth blossomed at once into two great blisters which He wore in combat.
    —Norman Mailer (b. 1923)