Intimate secrets: Carole Mallory was Norman Mailer's muse
She graced the covers of countless magazines, slept with a slew of famous men, developed a drug addiction, drank herself into oblivion and now lives quietly in obscurity with her second husband.
So, when the news broke last week that Harvard University had bought her papers - a collection of unpublished memoirs, raunchy manuscripts and a decade's worth of diaries - it raised more than a few eyebrows.
Understandable, perhaps, because the author - who died in November aged 84 - was one of America's leading writers, revered and reviled in almost equal measure.
He made and lost several fortunes with books such as The Naked And The Dead, An American Dream and The Executioner's Song.
But what the Harvard academics ignored, when they announced their purchase, was that six-times-married Mailer had enjoyed a secret nine-year affair with Mallory, 25 years his junior, and her unedited, handwritten notes paint a damning portrait of him.
She charts the affair in explicit detail from the early days of 1983, noting "He is hung like a stallion and proud of it", to the waning months of 1992, by which time she's no longer interested in sleeping with the ageing author and he's content with an unsatisfactory sexual encounter once a week.
At one point during their relationship, Mailer's homosexual fantasies and bizarre sexual preferences became so extreme they led Carole to believe he was having affairs with men.
Now aged 66 and living quietly in Pennsylvania with her husband of the past seven years - whom she describes as "someone who isn't known to anyone" - Mallory was a forerunner of today's celebrity-obsessed culture.
Before she even met Mailer, her life was dictated by the desire to be famous - or at least to live among the famous - and it didn't appear to matter how she achieved it.
Considerable conquests: Robert De Niro asked her out after bumping into her in a liftIndeed, the list is so long that she brings a crib-sheet to our interview so that she doesn't forget any of them.
It reads like a who's who of Hollywood greats, and while some may question its veracity, she has enough photographs of herself with the stars to lend considerable credence to what she says.
Robert De Niro, Richard Gere, Warren Beatty, Robin Williams and Matt Dillon are among the American contingent she claims to have seduced.
And Britain is well-represented by the likes of Peter Sellers, Anthony Hopkins, Rod Stewart and Sean Connery. (Mallory preferred the British stars - "they're so much more fun than the Americans".)
She married the artist Ronald Mallory, was engaged to Picasso's illegitimate son Claude, rejected the sexual advances of Albert Finney and Jack Nicholson, and sent Princess Diana's last lover Dodi Fayed into a jealous, cocaine-fuelled, glass-smashing rage.
She counted The Who's drummer Keith Moon, Dudley Moore and Monty Python's Terry Jones among her closest friends, and freely admits there was a time when she lived on sleeping pills, cocaine, valium and wine.
Mallory was first attracted by wealth and celebrity when she worked as an air stewardess in the 1960s.
"I wanted to see the world. I flew from New York to London to Tehran to Bangkok and back again. The celebrities in the first-class cabin always got free drinks, and I remember thinking: "I want to be famous because you get everything free."
"I stole the mini bottles and used them to knock me out when I had jet lag. Then I became addicted to sleeping pills. It was the start of a long battle with alcoholism and drug abuse.
"I never managed to conquer my air sickness. I'm 5ft 6in tall, but weighed just 7st 7lb because I was constantly throwing up.
"Several people suggested I try modelling, so I went to Paris. Within three months I was on the cover of French Vogue. Before long I was on the covers of Cosmopolitan, Newsweek and Parade. There were parties and dinner invitations every night of the week."
In 1968, aged 27, she married sculptor Ronald Mallory - ditching her maiden name, Wagner.
The Mallorys were a glamorous couple, whose dinner parties made the glossy magazines. But within two years the relationship was on the rocks.
She started acting classes and had a brief fling with fellow student Richard Gere - an affair she resumed years later in Hollywood.
Then she fell in love with Claude Picasso.
"The fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg introduced us at the Hippopotamus club in New York," Carole says.
"I was with my husband, but Claude asked me to dance to Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive. He danced like a bullfighter and I was hooked.
"I couldn't get him out of my mind and a while later I ran into him outside my acting class. We arranged a date for that evening. He bought me daisies and moved in that very night."
Carole's eyes sparkle when she speaks of Claude. He appears to be the big love of her life and the hurt over their break-up four years later - ironically, over Carole's small role in the anti-feminist movie The Stepford Wives - still seems fresh.
After that, Carole threw herself into auditions. When she heard about an erotic movie called The Fan Club, featuring a sex symbol retiring from Hollywood, she sent casting agents a photo of herself in a crocheted bikini.
"Brigitte Bardot and Raquel Welch had turned it down because of the nude scenes," she says.
Hollywood highlights: Warren Beatty was 'a terrific one night stand'"I won the role over 1,500 others due to that shot. I moved to Hollywood on the strength of it, but the movie never got made - it was too filthy. That's when I started dating the stars. I was the new girl in town - everyone wanted to go out with me."
She reconnected with Richard Gere - and was shocked by how much he'd changed.
"In our New York acting class he was a rebel, accused of copying James Dean's style. He was outrageous and defiant. Then he moved to Hollywood and started to play the power game. He was aware of how Hollywood worked and he was no longer the bad boy."
Their affair soon fizzled out. But Carole was hardly short of dates - although even now she seems blind to the way the male stars of Hollywood used young women such as herself.
She spent a night with legendry lothario Warren Beatty, whom she describes as "a terrific one-night stand".
She refused to see him again after he passed on her name to his friend Jack Nicholson.
"Of course, I fancied Jack. Who wouldn't? But he was living with Anjelica Huston and he refused to buy me dinner. I felt that if he couldn't be seen with me, I couldn't be bothered to sneak into his hotel suite."
Carole lived in the Chateau Marmont hotel - then a cheap place for artists and struggling actors.
On her way back from the pool one day, she was chatted up in the lift by what she initially thought was a maintenance man wearing a baseball cap pulled over his face.
"It was Robert De Niro," she says.
"We travelled three floors together in the elevator and by the time he got out, we'd fixed a date.
"He was married to Diahnne Abbott at the time, but we saw each other constantly for two weeks. Then we were at a party and he refused to acknowledge me.
"Ryan O'Neal knew what was going on and told him to at least say hello. He objected. That was it for me. De Niro really didn't respect women very much."
She was introduced to troubled British comic genius Peter Sellers by film director Roman Polanski at a party in 1976.
"We went back to his house, had lots of alcohol and listened to Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe of the Goons on the radio. We laughed and laughed, then fell into bed," she says.
"Peter was wonderful but so troubled. We both suffered from low self-esteem. It's not a good match."
Throughout Carole's promiscuous lifestyle, a good match seemed elusive.
She spent 12 months dating Rod Stewart - while he was still with Britt Ekland - and then made the relationship-wrecking mistake of introducing him to Alana Hamilton, his future wife.
"She actually told me she thought he had a big nose and then they went off into the sunset together."
Carole admits she has always had a penchant for toy-boys - and has had a one-night stand with Matt Dillon - but some were less fun than others.
A cocaine-filled tryst at The Beverly Hills Hotel with the then 22-year-old Dodi Fayed ended violently.
"I'll probably get killed for telling this," she says.
Conquests: Warren Beatty, Richard Gere, Robert De Nero and Peter Sellers"Dodi and a short Iranian friend of his invited me back for cocaine. Dodi made a play for me, but I preferred his friend and we ended up in bed together. Dodi went berserk and started smashing wine glasses into the fireplace."
Albert Finney asked Carole if she'd like to be the second woman in his life.
"He was with Diana Quick at the time and I didn't want to play second fiddle to her," she says.
By then Carole was living in an apartment in Rudolph Valentino's old Hollywood mansion and appearing on American TV shows such as Charlie's Angels, Fantasy Island, All In The Family and Angie Dickinson's Police Woman.
But she kept her flat in New York and returned regularly.
On a visit to Manhattan, a producer friend suggested dinner with James Bond star Sean Connery. Perhaps inevitably, the Scottish actor wheedled an invite back to Carole's.
"We saw each other a few times, but he was married and I hated having to sneak around," Carole says.
"The affair fizzled out. Sean had no respect for women, but at least I got a meal on him."
Ask Carole who was her best lover and her blue eyes flash cheekily.
"I'd hate to hurt anyone's feelings by saying who was the best," she says.
"You can't do that to men. They're so insecure. But I'll tell you who was the worst in bed. It was Sean Connery. Let's just say he didn't leave a very big impression."
But the defining relationship of her life began in 1983 when she met Norman Mailer at New York's literary watering hole Elaine's.
He was with his last wife, Norris, but his reputation for abusing women preceded him.
The Pulitzer Prize winner had been briefly locked up in a psychiatric hospital for attacking his second wife, Adele, with a penknife and his bad-boy reputation was legendary.
"Actually, I thought he was thoroughly charming," Carole says.
"I invited him out for a cheeseburger because I wanted him to read the manuscript of my memoirs.
"I'd taken writing classes, but I was struggling. I fell in love over that cheeseburger because he actually took time to read some chapters.
"A few weeks later I was back in Hollywood and he called to say he was, too. He invited me to his hotel and told me to bring the manuscript. He had a way of reading by simply throwing the book open at a random page and just doing so.
"The manuscript fell open at the Warren Beatty chapter. He read it aloud and we both got turned on. The next thing you know, we were in bed having sex."
Carole pauses as she considers her affair with Mailer.
"Actually, don't say sex. We were making love," she says.
She jokes that she wasn't merely Mailer's lover, she considers herself his unofficial seventh wife, and she believes Norris knew all about it.
Despite a life defined almost exclusively by sexual encounters, Carole insists that their affair was as much a meeting of minds as bodies.
"Of course, the sex was important at the beginning," she says.
"But he loved to read my words. He told me to forget acting and to become a writer. He taught me so much. He made me keep a Roget's Thesaurus in the glove compartment of my car and taught me to use new words. He dared me to write a 50-page sex scene - that's in the Harvard papers - and got turned on reading it."
In 1988, she published a novel, Flash, about a young woman seeking fame, who sleeps with a dizzying array of men. Autobiographical? No, she insists, it was fiction.
Mailer wrote a blurb for the book cover, describing it as wickedly funny. The critics didn't agree and slated it.
Hardly surprising that she has not had a book published since.
Carole doesn't believe Mailer was faithful to her during their nine-year affair, claiming the abrasive chauvinist had a "polygamist's heart".
"He was not the sort of man I wanted to marry," she says.
"And I'm sure he had other relationships. Towards the end, he became monstrous and controlling."
By then, she says, he was acting like a dirty old man and asking her to fulfill a number of bizarre fantasies.
In extracts from her diaries, she wrote: "He does sexually to me what he likes done to him."
She named a gay man Mailer wanted to join them in bed for a threesome and a married male friend she thought he was sleeping with.
Once, Carole wrote in her journal: "He is so ashamed of what he likes."
Despite their deteriorating relationship, Carole said she was heartbroken when Mailer abruptly ended it.
"It wasn't the sex," she says.
"It was our friendship I missed. I was his muse, he was my mentor."
In conversation, Carole, who is still beautiful and could pass for a woman 20 years younger, constantly mentions her low self-esteem.
But when I ask if she was looking for love in all the wrong places by embarking on one-night stands and brief flings with famous men who would surely hurt her, she insists it was she who was seeking the thrills.
"When a famous man sleeps with lots of women that's OK. So why can't a starlet do the same? Do I have any regrets about all the men I was with? No. I had lots of fun."
"I learned a lot about men, that was good. It helped me select my current husband, who's the most wonderful man ever."
She met 40-year-old electrician Kenneth Gambone when she moved back to her home state of Pennsylvania to nurse her ailing mother. They were introduced by mutual friends.
The irony is that Mallory has at last found love - but nowhere near the world of fame and celebrity, where she had sought it for so long.
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