When the writer Norman Mailer was drunk at a party, he stabbed his wife Adele twice—once in the back, then in the chest, narrowly missing her heart. When other guests tried to help her, he spat out: “Don’t help her. Let that witch die. ” Adele never pressed charges, for the sake of their children.
Two years later, she divorced him anyway. Many of Mailer’s intellectual friends defended the attack as an extension of his art. Old Hollywood had its share of scandalous breakups, but few matched Gary Cooper’s violent split with Lupe Velez. Velez was hot-headed and jealous, and Cooper’s many affairs gave her good reason.
When their relationship finally ended, she tried to shoot him as he boarded a train. A reconciliation seemed unlikely after that. Elizabeth Taylor may have played Cleopatra on screen, but in real life she was the queen of the breakup. In 1959, she committed what many saw as an ultimate betrayal: she broke up her best friend Debbie Reynolds’ marriage to Eddie Fisher.
It was the 1950s version of Brad Pitt leaving Jennifer Aniston for Angelina Jolie. At first it looked like Fisher and Taylor might last. But three years later, she dumped him for Richard Burton. She married and divorced Burton twice, and later admitted she would have married him a third time if he hadn’t died at 58.
Ava Gardner and Mickey Rooney had a notoriously troubled marriage. When Gardner came home after a long hospital stay, she discovered Rooney had used her absence to seduce multiple women in their marital bed. Edvard Munch painted one of history’s most haunting images of existential dread, but his own life was even more tormented. In 1898, he began an affair with an artist’s model named Tulla Larsen.
She was strong-willed and opinionated; he was more of a pushover. She kept pressing him to marry; he kept avoiding it. One night, during a heated argument, Munch shot off part of his own finger. The injury affected him for the rest of his life, and he made sure everyone knew it.
After all that drama, Larsen ended the relationship and married another man shortly after. Lord George Byron was the bad-boy poet of the 19th century, so he had no problem taking up with the beautiful and very married Lady Caroline Lamb—or leaving her. But Lamb’s response to their split was utterly disturbing. When things went south, she cut off a lock of hair, though not from her head, and sent it to him.
That wasn’t the only bizarre thing she did. Lamb wanted a particular painting of Byron to remember him by, knowing he’d never give it to her. So she forged a very accurate letter of permission, brought it to his publisher, and took the painting herself. Byron spent months trying to get it back.
Then, to his surprise, she finally agreed to return it—on one creepy condition: a lock of his hair in exchange. Byron decided to forge something of his own. He sent over a lock of his new girlfriend’s hair. Lamb was the one who famously called Byron “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
” It seems an accurate description. Emperor Nero wasn’t known for rational decisions. From allegedly killing his own mother to playing his lute as Rome burned, he was far from stable, and his love life was no better. Nero had his first wife killed so he could marry his new crush, Poppaea Sabina.
That marriage didn’t end well either: Poppaea died, most likely at Nero’s hands, while pregnant. Instead of simply moving on, Nero hired a 14-year-old boy, renamed him Sabina, and made him dress as a woman and act as empress of Rome—even in public. Queen Isabella earned her nickname the She-Wolf of France. Her husband, King Edward II, was inattentive in the bedroom, likely because he spent most of his time with his handsome favorite, Piers Gaveston.
Isabella tolerated it for a while, but when Gaveston died and Edward quickly found another favorite, she had had enough. Isabella took a lover of her own, Roger Mortimer, and the two deposed Edward. Soon after, while in her custody, Edward died in a mysterious fatal accident. Some scholars believe Isabella may have killed him.
Either way, she didn’t seem too bothered. Lucrezia Borgia came from one of the most infamous families of the Italian Renaissance. They arranged her marriage to the politically useful Giovanni Sforza—but quickly changed their minds when his value dropped. For most people, that would mean a rough divorce.
For Lucrezia’s devious family, it meant violently disposing of their ex-son-in-law. Lucrezia got wind of the plan and warned Giovanni, who escaped with his life. The furious Giovanni, unable to have his revenge through blood, got it through words instead. When the Borgias tried to force an annulment, he refused and then accused his ex-wife of a chilling crime: a physical relationship with her own father.
The Borgias finally got him to agree by returning Lucrezia’s considerable dowry, but the family has been associated with inappropriate familial ties ever since. Eleanor of Aquitaine wasn’t a fan of her royal husband, King Henry II. By 1173, the marriage was so damaged that she helped her sons plan a revolt against their own father. Unfortunately for Eleanor, Henry won.
He punished his sons and imprisoned his devious queen for over a decade, keeping a close eye on her until he died in 1189. King Henry VIII had a difficult time with matters of the heart. He had six wives and a poor survival rate among them. He also had a type—all of his wives were related, all tracing their ancestry back to Edward I.
His first breakup came when, frustrated by the lack of a male heir, he divorced Catherine of Aragon and took up with Anne Boleyn. To do it, he triggered the English Reformation, essentially inventing a new religion just to get a divorce. Be careful what you wish for. When word came that Catherine had finally died, Henry and Anne reportedly both wore bright yellow in celebration.
But things went south fast. When Anne also failed to give him an heir, he sentenced her to death for treason and adultery. On May 19, 1536, she faced her executioner. In a final act of rage or guilt, Henry destroyed all likenesses of her.
Later, Henry decided to marry Anne of Cleves after seeing only her portrait. A bad idea. When he finally met her in person, he allegedly thought she was unthinkably ugly and demanded an annulment. Historians suggest a deeper reason: Henry had already met Anne once before, in disguise.
He snuck into her room at an inn, expecting her to recognize him. She didn’t, and she reacted coldly. Some believe Henry rejected her publicly first to avoid the embarrassment of being rejected himself. Henry’s second-to-last wife, Catherine Howard, apparently learned nothing from Anne Boleyn.
If anything, she was more reckless. While Anne’s charges of adultery were likely exaggerated, Catherine probably was actually involved with Thomas Culpepper while married to the aging king. Henry made it clear the marriage was over when he sentenced both Catherine and Culpepper to death. The night before her execution, Catherine reportedly spent hours practicing how to place her neck on the block.
In the 17th century, Hortense Mancini was one of the most eligible women in Europe—a court beauty with a great fortune. When she married the equally wealthy Duke of Mazarin, Armand Charles, it seemed like a match made in noble heaven. It was a disaster. Armand was an absolute tyrant.
He searched Hortense’s rooms for hidden lovers, refused to allow female servants to milk cows because it was too provocative, and sometimes disfigured his servants to make them less attractive. Hortense was miserable, so she devised an escape. In 1668, she ran away, tragically leaving her children behind. The scandal made her notorious throughout Europe—she was often called the runaway duchess.
It didn’t help that she loved drinking and dressing like a man. Armand had the last laugh. After Hortense died with considerable gambling debts, her debtors began selling off her remains. Armand purchased his ex-wife’s corpse and paraded it around France for months.
Percy Bysshe Shelley might have been a romantic genius, but he struggled in his own relationships. He and Mary Shelley had a dark gothic romance, complete with secret meetings next to her mother’s grave. But that version leaves out a crucial detail: when he met Mary, Shelley was already married to Harriet Westbrook. Rather than stay faithful, he abandoned his pregnant wife and ran away with Mary to Switzerland.
Harriet, heartbroken, took her own life soon after. Napoleon Bonaparte adored his wife Josephine, but few remember the dark end of their love affair. Josephine couldn’t have children, and Bonaparte desperately wanted an heir, so he divorced her and took up with Marie Louise of Austria. He reportedly told his new bride: “It is a womb that I am marrying.
”
Anne Lister, known as Gentleman Jack, was considered the first modern lesbian. She was also something of a rake. While in school, she fell in love with a girl named Eliza, and they swore they’d be together forever. But Lister soon began a series of relationships with other schoolgirls.
Eliza was so devastated that she eventually had to be committed to a sanatorium. The love story of Heloise and Abelard is one of history’s greatest tales of star-crossed lovers—and one of the most violent. The two met when Heloise was a brilliant young scholar and Abelard her tutor. Her uncle didn’t take kindly to the match.
After the two married in secret, he and his friends broke into Abelard’s room one night and castrated him. There wasn’t much hope for the relationship after that. Anne Bonny and Calico Jack roamed the seas as fearsome pirate lovers, but eventually their luck—and their love—ran out. When authorities captured their ship, Bonny stayed on deck to fight while Jack ran below.
After he was sentenced to hang, Bonny spat out: “Had you fought like a man, you need not have been hanged like a dog. ”
When Abraham Lincoln was young, his friend Elizabeth Owens kept trying to set him up with her sister Mary, even though they lived in different states and had never met. One day, just to get Elizabeth off his back, Lincoln joked that he’d marry Mary if she moved to Illinois. It was a huge mistake.
Mary took the offer seriously. Lincoln had to send a series of frantic letters explaining he was only joking, while trying to convince her she’d be better off without him. Victorian art critic John Ruskin knew a lot about painting, but he was no Casanova. On the night he married his 19-year-old wife Effie Gray, he was reportedly so disgusted at the sight of an actual female body that he never consummated the union.
After six unhappy years, Effie left him for his protégé, John Everett Millais, who presumably wasted no time making the relationship physical. They went on to have eight children together. Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron, and she inherited more than a few of his traits—not all of them good. She had a brilliant mind, often called the world’s first computer programmer, and a serious gambling problem.
She also knew how to ignite a dramatic breakup. On her deathbed, she made a mysterious confession to her husband. He walked out of the room and never came back.
To this day, no one knows what she said.
