23 Little Known Facts About Wives Behind Popular Men

Even though Johnny Cash's first wife (Vivian Cash) was Italian-American, black and white photos in the 1960s misled some people into believing that she was black, which led to protests, death threats, and canceled shows.

Margaret Grubb, L. Ron Hubbard’s first wife once discovered two love letters the Scientology founder had written, to two different women, in the couple’s outgoing mail. She switched the envelopes and sent them.

During the Watergate scandal, Martha Mitchell (then wife of Nixon's Attorney General) was kidnapped, beaten and forcibly sedated by her husband's security detail to keep her from speaking to reporters.

Billie Paulette Montgomery, Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry's wife didn't know who he or Aerosmith was when they met. He didn't even talk about it and she only discovered it a few years later after finding gold records in some old boxes. This was after songs like Walk This Way, Dream On, and Back in the Saddle.

Buddy Holly's wife María Elena Holly found out about his death while watching TV and suffered a miscarriage the next day due to “psychological trauma.” His mother heard the news on the radio and collapsed. Soon after, authorities adopted a policy of notifying a victim’s family before their name was released.

Corazon Aquino was the wife of Benigno Aquino Jr., a staunch political opponent against the dictator of the Philippines. Upon the assassination of her husband by the dictator, she ran for president against him, winning and restoring democracy to the Philippines.

In 1914, the wife of the French Prime Minister, Henriette Caillaux, assassinated a newspaper editor to prevent him from leaking that she and her husband had been dating while still married to their previous spouses. She was acquitted for ‘uncontrollable female emotions.’

Stephen Hawking's wife Jane Hawking was given the option to take him off of life support after he was placed in a medically induced coma in 1985. She refused, and upon recovering Stephen Hawking finished writing ‘A Brief History of Time.’

Sara Northrup Hollister, the wife of L. Ron Hubbard consulted doctors who recommended he "be committed to a private sanatorium for psychiatric observation and treatment of a mental ailment known as paranoid schizophrenia." Thereafter, Hubbard criticized psychiatry as a "barbaric and corrupt profession."

Willie Nelson's ex-wife Martha Matthews once sewed him up in a sheet and beat him with a broomstick. He commented: “She was a very classy, ingenious, brilliant lady, and I was a problem at times.”