By Lucie M. Winborne, ReMIND Magazine
“Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience,” opined Oscar Wilde. A look at some celebrity couples might well have convinced the literary wit he was right … or that he left just one thing out.
Zsa Zsa Gabor has been around the marital block a few times — nine, in fact. The Hungarian-born socialite and actress, known more for her glamorous lifestyle than her thespian achievements, said “I do” for the first time at 15, piling up seven divorces and one annulment along the way. She put her experience on paper in 1970 with a book titled, unsurprisingly, How to Catch a Man, How to Keep a Man, and How to Get Rid of a Man.
Rocker Jerry Lee Lewis also knew something about serial wedlock … and child brides. Married three times by age 22, his union with 13-year-old cousin Myra Gale Brown ended his first tour of the U.K. and nearly his career, though “The Killer” never understood what the fuss was about. While he found his groove again in the ’60s as a country performer, marital success eluded him, yet in the spring of 2012 he gave it another try, wedding for the seventh time at age 76.
May-December relationships provide some of the richest gossip fodder, sometimes even decades after a marriage has ended. When Frank Sinatra, age 50, put a ring on the finger of 21-year-old Mia Farrow, perhaps few were surprised when their union lasted less than two years, but the couple remained friends to the end of Sinatra’s life, with Farrow claiming they “never really split up” after admitting in 2013 that her son Ronan, who bears a startling resemblance to Frank, might be Sinatra’s son. “Sinatra was the love of her life,” said biographer Darwin Porter. “She never stopped loving him.”
“Opposites attract,” goes the old saying, and in 1988 few pairings seemed odder than that of actress Robin Givens and boxer Mike Tyson. After a whirlwind courtship in which Givens later claimed “the highs were so high and the lows were so low,” the union quickly disintegrated. Tyson accused his former wife of being a gold digger and faking pregnancy to get him to the altar, yet more than a decade after their divorce Givens told Oprah Winfrey, “The love that I felt for Michael I still feel now. It’s a love that doesn’t go away.”
One celebrity who got it right … for 64 years … was Charlton Heston, who told a reporter in 1997 that the secret to a successful marriage was to never forget three little words: “I was wrong.” Although his long career separated him for months at a time from wife Lydia, she revealed to an interviewer that while she never considered divorce, “murder” was not necessarily off the table. And Heston added, “You’ve got to find the right girl. If you do that, it should work out, no matter what.”
Take that, Mr. Wilde.
