Series
Marriages and separations reconstructed from filings, decrees and statements the participants made themselves.
18 stories published.
Start here · Part 1
Their love story began on the set of Cleopatra and produced two marriages, two divorces, eleven films and a correspondence that outlived them both. Here is the documented sequence — and what happened after the second divorce.
8 min read
Part 2
One of the most photographed marriages of the 2010s ended in a filing that took twenty-one months to finalise. The court record says what happened; almost everything else said about it does not appear in any document.
6 min read
Part 3
They met on a film set in 1989 and married on Christmas Eve 1990. In February 2001 a publicist announced the separation in a few lines, and neither has ever given a detailed public reason. Here is what the record does say.
5 min read
Part 4
In January 2005 they announced their separation in a statement they wrote together. Twenty years on, the parts of that story that are documented and the parts that were invented are still routinely confused.
5 min read
Part 5
Two marriages inside one group, both ended within three years of each other, and the biggest song of the period was sung by an ex-wife to lyrics written by her ex-husband. The documented sequence.
5 min read
Part 6
Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz built the most successful comedy in television history, owned the studio that made it, and ended their marriage the day after they finished shooting.
5 min read
Part 7
Lauren Bacall had never made a film when she was cast opposite Humphrey Bogart in 1944. What followed is one of the few Old Hollywood romances that the record does not complicate.
6 min read
Part 8
Carole Lombard raised over two million dollars in a single evening in Indianapolis, boarded a plane home, and was killed with her mother and twenty other people on a Nevada mountainside.
6 min read
Part 9
Mike Todd died in a plane crash in March 1958. By September, his widow Elizabeth Taylor was involved with his best friend, Eddie Fisher, who was married to Debbie Reynolds. The public chose a side immediately.
5 min read
Part 10
Tina Turner walked out of a Dallas hotel on 1 July 1976 hours before a show. In the divorce she gave up the royalties, the houses and the recording contracts, and kept the two words she performed under.
6 min read
Part 11
Cher filed for separation in 1974, married Gregg Allman four days after her divorce was final, and then returned to CBS to co-host a variety show with her ex-husband for another two years.
5 min read
Part 12
Madonna and Sean Penn married in August 1985 in front of a press corps in helicopters. The divorce file, the withdrawn 1987 petition and a sworn 2015 declaration are the only parts of this marriage that are documented.
4 min read
Part 13
Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck called off a wedding in 2003, spent seventeen years apart, married in Las Vegas in 2022 — and the divorce petition arrived on their anniversary, to the day.
7 min read
Part 14
The marriage lasted two years. The litigation lasted eight, ran across two countries, survived one disqualified judge, and outlived the divorce itself in a fight over a French vineyard.
7 min read
Part 15
He left a marriage of twelve years, was dropped by his record label and his agency, and won an Academy Award while the marriage was already over. The documented sequence of the most destructive love affair in mid-century Hollywood.
5 min read
Part 16
The photograph taken outside the courthouse on 9 October 1973 is the strangest divorce picture in American celebrity history. Here is the documented sequence that produced it — and what Priscilla Presley did with the next fifty years.
4 min read
Part 17
A joint statement in June 2022, a custody agreement signed in a Barcelona courtroom, and a track that broke streaming records within twenty-four hours. What is on the record about the most-streamed break-up of the decade.
4 min read
Part 18
The wedding at San Francisco City Hall took minutes. The marriage lasted nine months. What DiMaggio did afterwards is the part almost nobody gets right.
3 min read
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