The late Henry Ford (the founder of FORD Motor Co,) had an illegitimate son , whom he never (publicly) acknowledged. This man wound up becoming an executive at FORD, and retired after a lifelong career at FORD. I don’t think he ever complained, or published any memoirs.
This got me to thinking-how DO famous people handle the issue of bastard children? Rev. Jesse Jackson has one (he paid the mother $120,000 plus child support) to shut her mouth. And, there are persisyent rumors that both John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton have fathered children out of wedlock- what did they do to hush things up?
What is your legal position as a bastard child-are you entitled to inherit?
There was such a perfect example of this re Benjamin Franklin and the way he took care of his out of wedlock kids, contrasted with the way his son handled his by ignoring them. There was a great story about how Franklin took care of this son’s out of wedlock son (his grandson in England) that his son ignored.
Franklin brought the grandson over, and got him started in the colonies. The grandson eventually made something susbstantial of himself, but I forgot what it was exactly. Franklin was pretty pissed at his son for this behavior and the fact that he was a Royalist.
I think Grover Cleveland acknowledged an illegitimate child during one of his Presidential campaigns.
Thomas Jefferson had a bunch with his slave, Sally Hemmings, didn’t he?
Was that the one with the negative ad “Ma, ma, where’s my Pa? Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!”?
In recent memory, there’s Strom Thurmond’s illegitimate black child, who he took care of and whose existence was an open secret. I suspect many of the illegitimate children of powerful people are like that - it’s widely known among Certain People but not by you and me.
Marion Davies (by William Randolph Hearst, of course) had a daughter in the mid-1920s; Harold Lloyd had an “illegitimate” daughter whom he supported and kept in touch with; Jayne Mansfield’s famous daughter Mariska Hargitay is the biological daughter of producer/actor Nelson Sardelli, though she considers Mickey Hargitay her real father, as he raised her. And of course Clark Gable and Loretta Young had a daughter conceived while filming, ironically, The Call of the Wild. And there was that little Ingrid Bergman scandal . . .
Was it ever concluded that it was him or his brother, or is it still unknown?
Not conclusively proven, AFAIK. Jennings had children by some close relation of the Jefferson family after Jefferson’s wife had died.
In modern life, there’s quite a lot. Actor Daniel Day Lewis has two children by his former mistress who’s name I can’t recall right now.
Hemmings, with an H. Sorry about that.
Isn’t there some abmbiguity about Sean Astin’s (Sam from LotR) father. Like, he was raised to believe that Gomez Ada… er, John Astin, was his dad, but it was really someone else.
Or am I confused? 
Grover Cleveland never formally acknowledged that the child was his, but did provide for it.
Warren G. Harding’s daughter with Nan Britton is still alive and lives in Oregon.
Sean’s mother, Patty Duke, was briefly married for a month in 1970 to Michael Tell. She quickly left him for actor John Astin (Gomez Adams) and little Sean was raised believing Astin was his father. Years later, as an adult, Sean had a DNA test done proving Michael Tell was his biological father.
Famous striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee tried to launch a film career in the 1940s that went bust. A collaboration of a different sort with director Otto Preminger, however, produced her only child, Erik. As the story goes, Preminger called Lee when he heard she was in the hospital, thinking she’d had an accident. She said cheerfully that nothing was wrong, but “we had a son today”. That son didn’t learn about his true paternity until he was an adult, and now goes by Erik Lee Preminger.
Jack Nicholson has an illegitimate son named Caleb, born in 1970 to one Susan Anspach, whom I’m not sure he ever acknowledged. His three other (acknowledged) children are Jennifer Nicholson (b. 1964) to Susan Knight, and Lorraine (b.1990) and Raymond (b.1992) Broussard to Rebecca Broussard.
Doesn’t Patty Duke still deny to this day that Michael Tell is Sean’s father?
Liv Tyler grew up believing that Todd Rundgren was her father, until she met her half-sister Mia, Steven Tyler’s daughter, who apparently looks very much like her, causing Liv to put 2 and 2 together.
Yep. Duke insists the DNA is wrong and the relationship was not consummated. She had the marriage to Tell annulled on those groups.
Duke was suffering severe stress and manic-depression in those days, so I doubt she knows what happened. The child was alleged to be Desi Arnaz Jr’s, who she was having an affair with, but she insists she was also having an affair with then-married John Astin, and that he is Sean’s biological father.
After reading Goldman’s book on John Lennon, it seems to me that the Beatles must have fathered hundreds of children.
And what’s with all this FORD stuff? It’s “Ford.”
Well, the King of Belgium has a daughter with - if I recall well - a French woman.
She was “discovered” by the press shortly after he became king and a bit “hunted” by tabloids because she happened to live in the UK at the time (In Belgium you don’t have such a “tabloid culture”. Maybe there are few, but as far as I can tell there is not a large audience for this sort of “media”).
So Belgium “discovered” a hidden child of the king, the “normal” press wrote a few articles about it and the public’s comments were along the lines of: " He is human, no? His marriage did not go well at the time, so what. This is between him and the queen and the mother of the child and the daughter herself".
And that was it.
She seems to be in her twenties or something and is an artist (painter). She recently seems to have done a few expositions of her works in Belgium.
Salaam. A
Or as my grandfather calls it, “Ford Motor Company”.
Or as I call it, festering den of racist a-holes who don’t build very good cars.