Beverly Bentley, the actress and theater director who was Norman Mailer’s fourth wife and the mother of Michael and Stephen Mailer, died in Provincetown in September 2018. She was 88. “She acted for half a century on stage, screen and film,” J. Michael Lennon told the Cape Cod Times. “She was well-known in New York. She was well-known on Cape Cod.”
Born Beverly Rentz in Atlanta on February 26, 1930, she came to New York in her teens and made her way through television, commercials, and the stage, debuting on Broadway in 1956 in Romanoff and Juliet. Her screen work ranged from Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd to Naked City, Route 66, and The Twilight Zone, and a small role in The Manchurian Candidate (1962).
With Mailer
Bentley met Mailer in New York on March 10, 1963, and they married that December 29 at his apartment at 142 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn Heights. Mailer had already put her at the head of the dedication of The Presidential Papers, published that November: “Beverly Rentz Sugarfoot Bentley.” Their sons were born in 1964 and 1966—Michael Burks Mailer, Mailer’s first son after four daughters, and Stephen McLeod Mailer.
These were the most public years of Mailer’s life, and Bentley was in the middle of them. She performed in The Deer Park: A Play at the Theatre de Lys in 1967 and appeared in all three of Mailer’s experimental films, Wild 90, Beyond the Law, and Maidstone. In Provincetown, where the family summered from 1966, she co-founded the ACT IV theater company, whose early casts included the then-unknown Al Pacino, John Cazale, and Jill Clayburgh.
The Mailers separated at the end of the decade and divorced in 1980. Bentley raised her sons in Provincetown through most of the 1970s, then returned to the New York stage, and in later years acted to acclaim in Provincetown productions including The Lion in Winter and Love Letters. At her request there was no funeral; she was celebrated at the Provincetown Theater that November.
Her son Michael Mailer wrote a moving remembrance of her life, “A Memory by Michael Mailer,” which tells much of this story in his own words.
In Works and Days
- Beverly Bentley — her meeting and marriage with Mailer, their sons, and her work in his films and plays.
- Michael Mailer and Stephen Mailer
- The Presidential Papers (1963), with its dedication
- The year 1963 in Mailer’s life