Adele Mailer: Painter and actress who found unwanted fame when she was stabbed by her husband, Norman Mailer

Her romantic inspiration was Carmen. She dressed in gypsy outfits

Adele and Norman Mailer at the court house in New York in 1960 where he was convicted of assault after stabbing her (AP)

Adele Mailer wanted to be remembered as a talented painter and actress, part of the fizzing New York literary and art scene of the 1950s and 1960s. That she was – but she would be best and forever known as the second wife of Norman Mailer, whom the celebrated author stabbed and critically wounded at a drunken party at their apartment.

The incident took place in the early hours of 20 November 1960, when the couple had been married six years, as Mailer was about to announce a quixotic run for New York City mayor. As the alcohol flowed, the atmosphere grew wilder, insults flew and fights broke out among the guests.

Then the Mailers, who had a history of quarrels and extra-marital affairs, got into a furious fight of their own. When she taunted him about the shortcomings of both his virility and his literary talents her husband blew up, stabbing her twice with a penknife, in the abdomen and the back.

Adele was taken to hospital, and first claimed to have fallen on broken glass. But in the intensive care unit she told detectives Mailer had stabbed her. He was charged with felonious assault and placed under psychiatric observation. Anxious above all, however, to protect her two young daughters, she declined to press charges. In the end Mailer pleaded guilty to third-degree assault and received only a suspended sentence. A year later, they divorced.

If the stabbing helped seal Mailer’s reputation as a misogynist and pugnacious hard drinker, ever on the look-out for a fight, it also cemented hers as the fiery Latin beauty, emanating sexuality – “that beautiful temptress who ate men alive, flossed her teeth and spit out the bones,” as she put it in her 1997 memoir The Last Party: Scenes from My Life with Norman Mailer.

Adele Morales’ mother was Spanish, her father a Peruvian immigrant and decent lightweight boxer who taught some of those pugilistic skills to his son-in-law. She took art classes and threw herself into Greenwich Village bohemian life, hanging out in its bars, dating the likes of Jack Kerouac and having a serious affair with Edwin Fancher, a co-founder with Mailer of The Village Voice.

Her romantic inspiration was Carmen. She dressed in gypsy outfits – indeed Mailer, ever besotted by her exotic persona, was wearing a matador’s elaborate vest at the November 1960 party. Like the central character in Bizet’s opera, “You lived from crisis to crisis, sang love duets and had screaming fights,” she wrote in the memoir. And so it was.

But the stabbing embittered her permanently. She accepted a modest settlement from Mailer, whose career then was in the doldrums, and that support fell further after their daughters had completed college. Thereafter his fortunes soared, with his political writings and two Pulitzer Prizes, one for The Executioner’s Song, about the 1976 execution by firing squad of the murderer Gary Gilmore.

Adele, though, did not financially benefit. Later she attended Alcoholics Anonymous, and spent her declining years in a Manhattan tenement. As she told a New York Times reporter in a walk around the neighbourhood in 2007, “This is Norman Mailer’s wife. It’s riches to rags, honey.”

RUPERT CORNWELL

Adele Carolyn Morales, painter and actress: born Brooklyn, New York 12 June 1925; married 1954 Norman Mailer (divorced 1962; two daughters); died Manhattan, New York 22 November 2015