Mailer’s mistress sells love letters to Harvard

Harvard University has brought an archive of letters, books and papers that throw light on the torrid love life of the late Norman Mailer.

The seller is Mailer's long-term mistress Carole Mallory, who accumulated the material in the course of their nine-year love affair.

Says Mallory: "There's a 20-page sex scene from an unpublished memoir I wrote called 'Making Love With Norman', " Mallory told the New York Post. "It's very steamy. Norman was a real man and he knew what he was doing."

Among the treasure trove, there is also an unpublished novel Mallory wrote and Mailer edited, titled When I Fall in Love - about an Arab man with an eye patch who really has 20/20 vision, but wears it to get sympathy. "There's a long scene in that which is also based on our sex life. Norman dared me to write a 50-page sex scene, and he lost the bet." Mallory - a model and actress who appeared in The Stepford Wives and Looking for Mr Goodbar - was Mailer's mistress from 1983 to 1992.

Mailer, who died last year, was seeing Mallory - 19 years his junior - during his marriage to his sixth wife, Norris Church. Some feel it would have been more respectful, certainly less tacky, to have held off selling the artefacts until his widow had also died.

However, Harvard will be pleased to have something of Mailer's – he was an undergraduate at the Ivy League establishment back in the Forties. Three years ago the Pulitzer-winning prize author snubbed them by selling his own archives to the University of Texas for $2.5m.