20 Old Hollywood Stars Who Married In Secret To Dodge Scandal

Clark Gable, MGM’s top male star, and Carole Lombard, a comedy actress from rival studio Paramount, wed in Kingman, Arizona, on March 29, 1939, three weeks after Gable’s divorce was final, slipping away during a break in Gable’s filming schedule. The only witnesses were a publicist and a friend. The couple drove the 300 miles back to Los Angeles that night and held a press conference the following morning on Lombard’s lawn. A favorite legend is that the pair spent their honeymoon in a hotel in nearby Oatman, but records show they went straight home.

Swedish-born Hollywood star Ingrid Bergman, still married to her husband, embarked upon an affair with Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini. They had a son in Rome in February 1950 and then, four months later, had their proxy marriage, without either of them present, in Juarez, Mexico. A US senator had already condemned her on the floor of the Senate, and US movie theaters would no longer screen her pictures. She did not return to Hollywood for another six years.

In the late 1950s, Sammy Davis Jr., the Black entertainer of the Rat Pack, was in a relationship with Kim Novak, a white star at Columbia Pictures. When Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia, learned of the relationship, biographers and people close to the singer have said Cohn reportedly got in touch with his mob friends and pushed Davis to get married. Davis paid nightclub dancer Loray White a cash settlement reported at $10,000 to $25,000 to wed him, and the two married in Las Vegas in early 1958. They never lived together, and their marriage ended within six months.

The silent film star Charlie Chaplin, 35, was a major draw in his day, and Lita Grey, 16, was his co-star in The Gold Rush. But once she became pregnant, Chaplin faced a grim choice, because under California law, he shouldn’t have been having relations with her. To avoid criminal prosecution, he arranged a secret wedding aboard a railway car in Empalme, Mexico, in November 1924, but the story came out almost immediately, and the two divorced in acrimony in 1927.

Lucille Ball was 29 and working as an RKO contract actress at the time of her wedding. Her husband, 23-year-old Desi Arnaz, was a Cuban-born bandleader and actor. Because of their difference in age and backgrounds, studio executives and friends opposed the union, so the couple left New York City and married before a judge in Greenwich, Connecticut, after purchasing a ring at a Woolworth’s department store in November 1940.

Judy Garland had fallen for David Rose, a composer and orchestra leader years older than her. Her mother and studio boss Louis B. Mayer were against it. They wanted Garland’s image to be kept pure. Garland and Rose drove to Nevada in the wee hours and wed in front of a justice of the peace in July 1941. Upon hearing of the nuptials, Mayer suspended Garland immediately.

The day Lana Turner, the MGM actress, went on her first date with the bandleader Artie Shaw, he told her at some point in the evening that they should fly down to Nevada and get married immediately. They did, hiring a plane and tying the knot before a justice of the peace just before dawn in February 1940. None of those involved, the studio chiefs, Turner’s family, or her friends, knew beforehand. The marriage made national news the next day and ended within four months.

At age 45, Humphrey Bogart was an Oscar-winning actor whose divorce, his fourth, was finalized in Nevada 11 days before he wed Lauren Bacall, a 20-year-old up-and-coming Hollywood actress. To avoid the paparazzi circus created by their divorce, the pair caught a train to Malabar Farm, the remote Ohio property of writer Louis Bromfield, and married there in May 1945, with only close friends in attendance.

Mae West, later hailed as a sex symbol of stage and screen, wed vaudevillian Frank Wallace in Milwaukee in April 1911. At 17, she falsified her age on the marriage certificate, kept the union secret to preserve her status as an unmarried woman, and split from Wallace within weeks. In April 1935, more than two decades after the wedding, a government researcher going through old registry records came across the certificate. West publicly denied its existence until she divorced Wallace in the early 1940s.

Italian-born star of The Sheik, Rudolph Valentino, wed film designer Natacha Rambova in Mexicali, Mexico, in May 1922, in order to avoid California’s one-year waiting period following his divorce from his first wife. Back in Los Angeles, he was arrested for bigamy and served some time behind bars until he posted $10,000 bail. They were separated for a year and legally remarried in Palm Springs in 1923.

Barbara Stanwyck, age 21, had just moved out of Broadway and into Hollywood. Frank Fay, 36, was a vaudeville comedy headliner. As they toured back and forth between New York and California, the couple wanted to avoid the gossip columns, so in August 1928 they had themselves quietly married in a judge’s office in St. Louis and hid their nuptials from the press for several weeks. The tempestuous marriage that ensued would be a partial basis for the film A Star Is Born.

For many years, Mary Pickford, America’s Sweetheart and co-founder of United Artists, had carried on a clandestine affair with silent-screen action star Douglas Fairbanks, both of them married to other people. Pickford’s divorce was granted in Nevada in March 1920, and 26 days later she and Fairbanks married in secret at a private house in Los Angeles, carefully evading public notice or any contest about Pickford’s residence in Nevada.

In Paris in January 1925, while shooting a picture there, Gloria Swanson, then one of the biggest moneymakers in the silent-film world at the box office, married the Marquis Henri de La Falaise, a French film translator and nobleman. To keep the wedding from interfering with production, she concealed it from both the European and American press until she returned to New York that spring, when the news made her the first Hollywood star to marry into European nobility.

Errol Flynn, 25, had just been cast in the leading role in Captain Blood. Lili Damita, 30, was a French screen siren. Warner Bros. publicists were eager to market Flynn as an available bachelor, so the couple skipped town and married in front of a justice of the peace in Yuma, Arizona, in May 1935. It wasn’t until he returned to California that Flynn informed his own studio.

Buster Keaton, the great silent-film comedian, was a heavy drinker in his later years. His second marriage was over by then, and he had moved to Ensenada, Mexico, where he began drinking again. According to Keaton’s memoirs, in January 1933, after a lengthy drinking bout in Ensenada, he entered an unannounced civil ceremony to marry a nurse named Mae Scriven. He later said he barely remembered the ceremony. Hollywood gossip columnists reported the marriage a few days later, and it ended in divorce in 1936.

Joan Crawford was 24 and an MGM star. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was 19, and the son of silent-film star Douglas Fairbanks Sr. MGM boss Louis B. Mayer was against it. So were Fairbanks’ father and stepmother, Mary Pickford. They went on the lam and tied the knot in a surprise early morning wedding in a New York City church in June 1929. When the word came out, it sent Hollywood reeling.

Stan Laurel, one-half of the famous Laurel and Hardy comedy team, was facing a lawsuit from a former domestic partner seeking support payments in a California courtroom. To avoid the process server and any premature publicity, Laurel and Virginia Ruth Rogers ran away to Florence, Arizona, where they married before a justice of the peace in April 1935. Neither the press nor the lawyers for Laurel’s former domestic partner knew about the secret ceremony, which led to more court fights.

Lupe Velez, the Mexican screen siren, and Johnny Weissmuller, the swimming Olympian who became the first Tarzan, had a stormy romance before making a sudden decision to drive across the desert and marry before a Nevada judge at 5:00 a.m. in October 1933. Neither had told anyone about their plans, and the news came as a shock to reporters who had written that the romance was cooling off. The union proved just as volatile as the courtship, and they divorced in 1939.

In 1937, Hedy Lamarr, an Austrian-born star for MGM who would later co-invent frequency-hopping radio technology, escaped an abusive marriage to an Austrian arms dealer. In March 1939, after slipping over the border into Mexicali, Mexico, Lamarr and Hollywood screenwriter Gene Markey had a hasty wedding, hoping to stay under the radar and keep studio bosses out of her personal affairs. The bosses found out about the marriage after the newlyweds came back.

Bette Davis, then 24, was on the verge of stardom as a Warner Bros. contract player when she wed her high school boyfriend, Harmon Nelson, a man who played in orchestras, in a private wedding ceremony in Yuma, Arizona, in August 1932. Jack Warner didn’t think his female talent should marry, believing it was bad for box office business, and was enraged to learn what she’d done. But she kept her job and continued to defy Warner’s attempts to control her career for years to come.

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