20 Not-So-Glorious Facts About Famous Personalities

Nobel Prize winning physiologist Ivan Pavlov is known as the father of classical conditioning, but he wasn't the friendly, bell-ringing dog-lover everyone thinks he was. He surgically implanted spigots in the dog’s jaws to measure their saliva and fed them under very restrictive conditions (strapping them down, etc.). He did the same things on human children. Believed to be street urchins, these children had spigots surgically added to their cheeks and were strapped down with a chute leading directly to their mouth. Pavlov would ring a bell and drop a cookie/biscuit down the chute into the child's mouth. There's even film footage of these experiments on children.

Jackie Chan cheated on his wife with ex-Miss Asia 1990 Elaine Ng Yi Lei and got her pregnant. She gave birth to a girl. He has never admitted to having a daughter with her, though he has acknowledged their affair. He is a staunch supporter of China's communist party and thinks that Taiwanese democracy is “the biggest joke in the world,” and believes Chinese citizens need to be “controlled” through censorship, “otherwise they’ll do whatever they want.”

The books of Theodor Seuss Geisel a.k.a Dr. Seuss were always moral and quasi-political exercises. His value as an analyst of the psychology of his time, the late 1950s, is readily appreciated. Transgression and hypocrisy are the principal themes of ‘The Cat in the Hat’. Though there was a moral to all of his stories, he never managed to write a book to address the private anguish he went through when his once-happy marriage floundered in middle age. Dr. Seuss had an affair while his wife suffered from cancer and depression. She killed herself when she found out about the affair and he married his mistress a few months later.

President Lyndon B. Johnson was not your average president. Though he was constantly occupied by the fate of the free world, quite prominently he was very concerned about the state of his penis. He was not hesitant to show it off in public. If anyone walked in when he was at a urinal, he would swing around still holding his member, which he liked to call "Jumbo," hooting once, “Have you ever seen anything as big as this?” There is even an actual recording of Lyndon Johnson ordering pants while he was the President. He gave explicit details on how he needed his pants to accommodate his nuts and bunghole better (his words).

For Pablo Picasso, his complicated relationship with women provided inspiration for countless paintings, drawings, and sculptures. He thought women were “either goddesses or doormats”. Dora Maar, one of his lovers, called him “an extraordinary artist but morally worthless.” He once said, “Women are machines for suffering.” He had several mistresses and he demanded that they be submissive and shorter than him. One of his mistresses killed herself and two of them became emotionally traumatized and insane. He was also horrid to his wife. He once he made his ex-wife divorce her husband so she can re-marry him again, but he proceeded to marry another woman 6 years younger than her (who was already 40 years younger than Picasso), as a revenge.

Thomas Edison invented very few of the things people think he made. He had a small team of people he would pay next to nothing to come up with ideas which he would then patent and take credit for. He did not invent the light bulb. Electric lights had already existed for more than 70 years before he filed his patent in 1878. He once waged a negative press campaign on Nikola Tesla in order to sell his DC system and undermine Tesla. In fact, he electrocuted and killed an elephant called Topsy to prove that AC electrical system was dangerous. He once offered Nikola Tesla $50,000 to improve his DC motor. Upon completion, Edison failed to pay and scoffed, “You don't understand American humor.” In spite of all this, he should be credited with making most of “his inventions” commercially viable.

Grover Cleveland is known to be the only American president to have served two non-consecutive terms in office and he's remembered as a courageous and honest statesman. But before he became President, he sexually assaulted a married woman “by use of force and violence and without my consent.” She became pregnant, and in order to cover up the scandal he had her committed to an insane asylum and had her child sent to an orphanage. His wife, Frances Clara Folsom, was also the youngest first lady, who married him at the age of 21. She was the daughter of Oscar Folsom. Oscar was a longtime close friend of Grover Cleveland. Cleveland met Frances Clara Folsom at the age of 27, shortly after she was born. When Oscar Folsom, died in an accident, Grover Cleveland was made the trustee of his estate and oversaw the upbringing of Frances Clara Folsom.

Composer Beethoven had a terrible relationship with his sister in law, calling her “The Queen of the Night” and spent 10 years of his life trying to take her son Karl away from her. Eventually, he was able to tarnish her reputation to the point where he got custody of Karl. He was a terrible and abusive father to the kid. When Karl had to wear a truss for a testicular hernia, Beethoven confessed to having once pulled him by it when he was mad.

Rock-n-roll pioneer Chuck Berry bought a restaurant in Missouri in 1990 and shortly after that he was sued by several women who claimed that he had installed a video camera in the ladies' bathroom to film them. He opted for a class action settlement with 59 women and it cost Berry over $1.2 million. When police raided his house they found videotapes of women using the restroom, and one of them was a minor.

English singer Boy George was hired by BBC for The Voice as a mentor, ignoring his criminal history. In 2008, George was convicted of the assault and false imprisonment of Audun Carlsen, a Norwegian model who initially stood for a photography session with George, but on their next meeting George handcuffed him to a wall, beat him with a chain and threatened him with sex toys. Audun Carlsen managed to free himself and ran to a police station in his underwear for help. George was sentenced to 15 months of imprisonment for these offenses.