Front Row Dress Circle

Divorce in Hollywood is as common as dieting but the one thing about modern day marriage breakups between the stars is that all the juiciest details tend to be kept under wraps. Libel laws…remember? but when the stars divorced back in the twenties, thirties and forties there was always a certain amount of scandal involved and some of the details were so juicy that they still make great reading even today!

* Charlie Chaplin Vs Mildred Harris (1920 )was a divorce scandal involving certain details that both delighted and shocked the public. Chaplin had married Mildred Harris, a young starlet, when she was just 16 and he was 29 years old and she had supposedly fallen pregnant to him. Almost 9 months to the day after the marriage Mildred gave birth to an extremely deformed baby who only lived for 3 days and was buried with a headstone marked ‘The little mouse’. Chaplin quickly tired of his child-bride; she had very little education and was not given to intellectual conversation. The marriage last one year and during the divorce proceedings each made a series of scurilous accusations against each other with Mildred making the most sensational one of all: she charged that her husband forced her to perform a certain sex act beginning with ‘f’ which had most of the population running for their dictionaries.

* Mary Astor Vs Franklin Thorpe was a divorce that went pretty straightforward in 1935 until the famed actress sued for custody of their young daughter. Then came The Diary! Mary Astor had previously enjoyed a passionate affair with playwright George Kaufman and wrote about it, and him, in her diary in extremely graphic detail. Her husband found the diary and used it in the case against her. The details titillated most of America!

* Debbie Reynolds Vs Eddie Fisher was legendary in that the named mistress was goddess Elizabeth Taylor. Reynolds and Fisher were the darling young couple of Hollywood with two very young children, the essence of happy wedlock, until the death of producer Mike Todd, husband of Taylor, in a plane crash in 1958. Todd had been Fisher’s mentor and closest friend and the resulting grief drew Fisher and the widow Taylor together into a passionate affair. Fishers and Reynold’s marriage folded with Debbie getting miles of sympathetic publicity from the papers and Taylor being painted and reviled as a homewrecker. Reynolds often was photographed speaking to reporters at the door of her home with a nappy pinned to her blouse and a babies bottle in her hand. She milked it for all it was worth.

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