Recently deceased character actor William Campbell, best known as “General Trelane, Retired” (the Q like character who dressed like Liberace navy in the Squire of Gothos episode of STAR TREK: TOS) was the ex-husband of Judith Campbell, a one-time actress who became famous for her “famous men I’ve shagged” writings in later years. Judith claimed (perhaps truthfully) to have been the mistress of both JFK and Sam Giancana. Her credibility seemed to descend as her stories escalated, ultimately including an abortion by JFK and a lesbian encounter with Marilyn Monroe and basically stopping just short of being fingercuffed by Castro and Giancana.
Cherie Blair, wife of Michael Sheen alter ego Tony Blair, is the daughter of actor Tony Booth who played Mike Rawlins in Till Death Us Do Part (the character reimagined as Mike Stivic in All in the Family). Booth is a member of the same family of actors as John Wilkes Booth, whose father Junius was a bigamist who abandoned his wife and children in England when he came to America with the mistress he claimed as his wife in the U.S…
Woody married Neil Simon’s daughter on a lark during a vacation he took with her while Cheers was on. They intended to get it annulled but when they went back to the wedding chapel it was closed. Per gossip columns at the time Neil Simon was furious. They ended up divorcing after 10 months, never having lived as husband-wife. (At the time Harrelson was the subject of a lot of gay rumors and this was worked in to them.)
Follow this one:
Orson Scott Card is the descendant of a woman named Zina Huntingdon (1821-1901), an interesting woman in her own right but mostly remembered now for her odd marital history. As a teenager she spurned advances from the married Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith and married a man named Henry Jacobs. A few weeks after the marriage Joseph “revealed” the principle of plural marriage to them and ordered Jacobs to step aside and let Zina be his wife. Jacobs did so. (Zina gave birth to a son conceived during this time that some biographers speculated belonged to Smith; it wasn’t until DNA testing of descendants that it was confirmed he belonged to her husband Jacobs.)*
Zina remained Joseph’s wife until he died, though not openly of course. When he died she went back to her original husband Henry Jacobs and was soon pregnant again. When she was six months pregnant Joseph Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, came a courting and told them- this is so romantic:
So Zina left her husband Henry Jacobs- again- and became one of many wives of a Mormon Prophet- again- and got pregnant- again, though this time with a daughter, Zina Jr.. Orson Scott Card is a great-grandson of Young and Zina. (Zina’s first husband remained in love with her and wrote her letters for the rest of his life alternately telling her how much he cried for her and their children but assuring her he accepted the divine wisdom that God’s Chosen should consecutively shag his wife.)
I find this ironic because Card, a devout Mormon who accepts his step-ancestor Smith (Zina is sealed to him for eternity) and his bio ancestor Young as Prophets and Seers and Revelators and all that jazz and thus the volleyballing of his great-great-grandmother as divinely mandated (he also wrote a novel based on his g-g-grandmother), writes about the ungodly and unnatural nature of gay marriage.
Another very important figure in the history of the Mormon Church, Parley Pratt (martyred in Arkansas), is an ancestor of Mitt Romney. The Mountain Meadows Massacre was in part fueled by the rumor that some of the members of the wagon train were from Arkansas and boasted of having participated in his murder. (Pratt was killed by a man whose wife God had ordered Pratt to take.)
*Zina’s was far from the only marriage that Smith annulled- he took the wives of future Mormon Prophet John Taylor and of Parley Pratt’s brother Orson among others. He also ordered Heber Kimball (who would become Brigham Young’s heir apparent in Utah) to bring him his wife Vilate, but when Heber finally brought her after soul searching Smith told him “Just a loyalty test, you passed, yea you!”; later he asked for Heber and Vilate’s 14 year old daughter Helen and they brought her over, and that one he didn’t give back. (Young’s wife was probably spared because she was a very plain and stout woman; Young did have a teenaged daughter but Joe apparently didn’t ask for her [must have been ugly].) Heber Kimball became the only man in Utah to have more “active” (as opposed to platonic/name only) wives than Brigham Young, fathering 65 children with 17 of them by the time he died in a buggy accident.)
Kurt’s first wife Jane (Mark’s mother) married Adam Yarmolinsky (one of McNamara’s Whiz Kids who served in many governmental capacities over the years) after divorcing Kurt.
Jane also wrote a book Angels Without Wings, about how she and Kurt took in Kurt’s four nephews after their parents died. Their father was on a commuter train that went off an open drawbridge into the Hudson River, and his wife (Kurt’s sister) was in the hospital, dying of cancer. This was before Kurt was rich and famous.
Mytery writers Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark are mother and daughter, and mystry writer Mary Jane Clark is their ex-daughter/sister-in-law.
