Adele Morales was an American artist and memoirist. She is best known for an infamous incident with her former husband, an American author-playwright Norman Mailer.
Background
Ethnicity:
Morales was born to a Spanish mother and Native Peruvian father.
Adele Morales was born on June 12, 1925, in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, United States to the family of a typesetter for The Daily News Albert Morales and Consuela Rodriguez, known as Mae. She grew up in Bensonhurst but moved to Manhattan, where she studied painting.
Education
Adele Morales studied at Washington Irving High School. She took art classes with Hans Hofmann, studied literature at the New School for Social Research and threw herself into downtown cultural life, frequenting artists’ hangouts like the San Remo and the Cedar Tavern. Morales also studied at the Actors Studio.
After graduating from Washington Irving High School in Manhattan, Adele Morales moved to a cold-water flat in Manhattan and earned a living making papier-mâché models for department store windows. She threw herself into downtown cultural life, frequenting artists’ hangouts like the San Remo and the Cedar Tavern. Adele Morales was an aspiring painter in 1951 when she met Mailer, the author of “The Naked and the Dead,” who was on his way to becoming recognized as one of the pre-eminent postwar American novelists. The two began living together and married three years later. It was Norman Mailer’s second marriage.
On November 19, 1960, at a party at their apartment on the Upper West Side Mailer stabbed Morales in the stomach and back with a penknife, puncturing her cardiac sac. Morales initially told doctors that she had fallen on broken glass. Later, in the intensive care unit of University Hospital, she told the police that her husband had stabbed her. Mailer was charged with felonious assault and committed to Bellevue Hospital for psychiatric observation.
Mailer was released from Bellevue after 17 days and in November 1961, after pleading guilty to a reduced charge of third-degree assault, received a suspended sentence. The couple divorced the next year.
After the divorce, Morales-Mailer appeared in several Off-Broadway productions, including Mailer’s theatrical adaptation of his novel “The Deer Park” in 1967. She also appeared in a small role in his 1970 film “Maidstone.” She continued to paint in an abstract expressionist style and in later years made box assemblages reminiscent of Joseph Cornell. After their two daughters went to college, payments from her ex-husband were reduced sharply, and she lived precariously in a rent-stabilized one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side.
Morales died in New York City on November 22, 2015, from pneumonia, at the age of 90.
(A full account of Adele Mailer's volatile marriage to Nor...)
1997
Personality
In her memoir, Adele Morales was sketchy about her life after the break-up of her marriage to Mailer. She spent many years drinking, until she eventually plucked up the courage to become teetotal.
Connections
Adele Morales was married to Norman Mailer in 1954-1962. They had two daughters: Danielle "Dandy" and Elizabeth Anne "Betsy" Mailer.