Hugh Hefner & first wife Mildred Williams on their wedding day, 1949
Hefner has stated that before their wedding, Mildred confessed that she had had an affair during the two years he spent away in the army. He called the admission “the most devastating moment of my life.” in a 2006 E! True Hollywood Story profile of Hefner he commented that Mildred allowed him to sleep with other women, out of guilt for her infidelity and in the hopes that it would preserve their marriage. (wikipedia)
Judy Garland & Frank Sinatra
Sinatra and Judy Garland remained good friends up until her death in 1969, but on only two occasions were the two legendary singers romantically involved. The first was in 1949, when Garland was recovering from a nervous breakdown and the two went on a romantic rendezvous in the Hamptons (Garland was still married to director Vincente Minnelli). The second was during one of Garland’s many separations from her third husband Sid Luft in 1955. Sinatra had just come off his messy separation from Ava Gardner and was spotted in Garland’s company until Luft found out.
Jack Dunphy & Truman Capote lying on the Palatine Hill in Rome, 1949
Lena Horne & Joe Louis, 1949
Ingrid Bergman & Roberto Rossellini
Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman, 34, w. her lover, movie dir. Roberto Rossellini, traveling in boat from Stromboli Island, the location for their movie Stromboli, to Messina to meet w. her husband about getting a divorce.
In one of the biggest scandals of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Oscar winner Ingrid Bergman, married at the time to a dentist, began an affair with and got pregnant by director Roberto Rossellini while making Stromboli in 1949 (their son Renato was born in February 1950). Fleeing the fallout back in the U.S. — she was blackballed by Ed Sullivan and even denounced on the floor of the Senate — Bergman left her husband and their young daughter Pia to be with Rossellini in Italy, where they married in May 1950 and later welcomed twin girls. Her heroic characters, Bergman later said, made audiences put unsurmountable expectations on her: “People saw me in Joan of Arc and declared me a saint. I’m not. I’m just a woman, another human being.”
