American model, actress, artist and writer with her first book published in mid-2000, “Windchill Summer.” The wife of writer Norman Mailer for 20 years, she resisted his offer of editing and let him read it after publication.
The only child of a heavy equipment operator and a beautician, Barbara was an adorable child, learning her center-stage role early in life by winning a title at age three of Little Miss Arkansas. In school she excelled in writing classes and majored in art and literature in college.
At 20, she married her college sweetheart Larry Norris. Their one son later became a film director. Barbara taught high school art, and she and Larry divorced in 1973. In 1975, Barbara went to a lecture given by Norman Mailer. He was 25 years older, renowned for booze and womanizing, married to his fourth wife and living with the woman who would become his fifth wife. None of it mattered; she fell hard. She moved to New York to be near Norman, changed her name to Norris Church and began modeling. As a painter, she had nine one-woman shows. She also gave birth to Mailer’s ninth child, John Buffalo, in 1978, and became Mailer’s sixth – and last – wife. They lived on beachfront property in Provincetown, RI.
She died from gastrointestinal cancer on November 21, 2010 at her Brooklyn Heights, NY home.
Link to Wikipedia biography