Norris Church Mailer, writer Norman Mailer's 6th wife, dies

Norris Church Mailer, the sixth and final wife of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer, was half his age when they first met and fell in love. But she would enjoy and endure the ride of her life during her marriage to Mailer.

An actress, model, author and painter, Mailer died at her home in Brooklyn Sunday. She was 61. Her passing was announced on the website of the Norman Mailer Society, which said she passed away "after a long and valiant struggle with cancer." A longtime family friend and assistant, Dwayne Raymond, said he, her two children and some close friends were at her home when she died.

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 years old, at a 1975 cocktail party in Russellville, Ark. Their attraction was immediate, even if he was breaking up with his fourth wife and seeing the one who would become his fifth. Norris Church became No. 6 in 1980. Their son, John Buffalo, was born two years earlier.

But even as the author rhapsodized over her beauty, he discouraged his wife's work, avoided her when he learned she had cancer and had affairs with several women. "I knew I was going to be with him for the rest of my life, and I think he felt the same way," she wrote. When the author died in 2007, she was at his side.

She was born Barbara Jean Davis in Arkansas. She married childhood acquaintance Larry Norris in 1969, and had a son, Matthew, two years later.

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

She also wrote two novels, "Windchill Summer" and "Cheap Diamonds."