It is no great revelation that Norman Mailer, the irascible novelist, journalist and playwright who died in November, was a bit of dog.

He had six wives, one of whom he famously stabbed with a penknife (or possibly kitchen scissors) and sired nine children. And now we hear that for nine years until 1992 he was having regular sex with a B-movie actress while married to wife number six.

Nor, in our celebrity preoccupied culture, should we be scandalised to learn that the woman in question, whose life story is also colourful if not quite inspiring, kept careful records of her meetings with Mailer and had it in mind for many years to cash in by selling them to the highest bidder, especially since they include panting descriptions of their carnal excursions together.

We are bidden, however, to salute the woman in question, whose name is Carole Mallory, for concluding a deal not just with anyone. She has sold the pervy papers - a collection of letters, writing tips Mailer gave her, as well as passages of writings of her own - to none other than Harvard University.

Here is where we might start a debate. Why would an institution such as Harvard succumb to the pecuniary ambitions of Ms Mallory, pleasant and persuasive though she may be? This is not an acquisition that has been hailed in America's literary journals. No, most of us became aware of it by glancing through the scandal-mongering column inches of page six in the New York Post.

The source of the page six scoop was, of course, Ms Mallory herself, now 66, retired from her low-altitude modelling and Hollywood careers and living in a small town in Pennsylvania. (Alright, she had a small part in The Stepford Wives and claims to have had more film-star boyfriends than the Queen has had corgis.)

Among the papers now in the hands of Harvard's esteemed curators is what Ms Mallory, who was 19 years younger than the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, described as a 20-page sex scene from an unpublished memoir she wrote called Making Love With Norman. "It's very steamy. Norman was a real man and he knew what he was doing." There is plenty more. In fact, Ms Mallory, who was carrying on her liaisons with Mailer while he was married to Norris Church, managed to put seven boxes of papers together, all now sold to Harvard.

The university says it took possession of the materials last month. It has not disclosed how much it paid for them and nor, so far at least, has she. About her motivation, however, she is not coy. "I knew they were valuable and I wanted to have some more money."

The sessions apparently took on a comfortable routine. "We'd have a writing lesson, we'd make love and then go to lunch in whatever order that would be, and I saved all the writing lessons," she reveals. "I wanted him to teach me to be a writer. He was one of our greatest writers in America."

How successfully he imparted his skills to her we will soon find out since her trove also includes an unpublished novel of her own, edited by Mailer. When I Fall in Love, she says, is about "an Arab with an eye patch who really has 20/20 vision, but wears it to get sympathy. There's a long scene in that which is also based on our sex life. Norman dared me to write a 50-page sex scene, and he lost the bet."