Norris Church Mailer | Author's wife, model, 61

Norris Church Mailer, 61, a model, actress, author, and painter who was the sixth and final wife of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer, died Sunday at her home in Brooklyn, N.Y.

The Norman Mailer Society said she died after a long battle with cancer.

As Norris Mailer wrote in her 2010 memoir, A Ticket to the Circus, she was a single mother in her mid-20s when she met Norman Mailer, then 52, at a 1975 cocktail party in his honor in Russellville, Ark. Their attraction was immediate, even if he was breaking up with his fourth wife and seeing the woman who would become his fifth. Norris Church became No. 6 in 1980, two years after their son, John Buffalo, was born.

The author discouraged his wife's work, avoided her when he learned she had cancer, and had affairs with several women, some of whom were referenced in his books and even showed up at social functions, at his invitation.

The tension became public by the early 1990s. She threatened to leave. He resisted. She stayed. "I knew I was going to be with him for the rest of my life," she wrote. When he died, in 2007, she was at his side.

Norris Mailer, born Barbara Jean Davis, was a road worker's daughter raised in Little Rock and Atkins, Ark., and by age 3 she'd won a contest as Miss Little Rock. Her 1969 marriage to a childhood acquaintance, Larry Norris, produced a son and ended in divorce.

As she began a modeling career, she changed her name to Norris Church, the last name suggested by Mailer because she attended church often as a child. - AP