"I Had Cheated Before, But This Was Something Different": 9 Affairs That Ruined Old Hollywood Stars' Reputations

By this point, celebrity scandals — especially affairs — are nothing new. One news cycle and the drama is usually put on the back burner. But, in Old Hollywood, even the rumors of an affair could ruin a career...

However, that doesn't mean Tinseltown's brightest stars never fooled around with someone else's dame or fella — it just meant they were a little more discreet about it. From Greta Garbo to Humphrey Bogart, here are 9 of Old Hollywood's most scandalous love triangles:

1. Greta Garbo, Salka Viertel, and Mercedes de Acosta:

In the late 1920s, Greta Garbo had recently broken up with her boyfriend, co-star, and acting coach, John Gilbert. Thankfully, Gilbert's replacement came when Garbo attended a party at director Ernst Lubitsch’s home. This was where she met Salka Viertel—an actor 16 years her senior—and the pair struck up a fast friendship.

Salka emigrated from Berlin to Hollywood in 1928 with her husband, Berthold — a screenwriter — and their three sons. Berthold was hired by Fox Studios as a writer, and although Salka tried her hand at acting, she was told she was “too old” and “not beautiful enough.” However, thanks to her newfound friendship with Garbo, Salka would soon make her own splash in the writing department.

After reading a biography of Queen Christina of Sweden, Salka suggested that Garbo should play Christina in a film. Garbo, a native Swede, was instantly onboard and wanted Salka to write the screenplay. Although Salka wasn't a writer by trade, Garbo ensured she was paired with MGM's best screenwriter. Therefore, Salka secured a spot among Hollywood's greats.

During this time, Salka introduced Garbo to Mercedes de Acosta, a prominent member of the LGTBQ+ community, who had come to Hollywood for two reasons: To write a screenplay and seduce the one and only Greta Garbo.

2. Rita Hayworth, Aly Khan, and Orson Welles:

Rita Hayworth was dubbed "The Love Goddess" by the press — although her off-screen love life was anything but a fairytale.

In 1943, much to the media's surprise, Hayworth married legendary director Orson Welles in a courthouse ceremony during their lunch break. The Associated Press was rather skeptical of the circumstances surrounding the couple's nuptials, “The marriage of Orson Welles, star of stage, screen and radio, to Rita Hayworth, one of filmdom’s leading glamour gals, came as a surprise, especially in view of the fact that until recently Miss Hayworth had been reportedly engaged to Victor Mature, now in the Coast Guard.”

However, by 1946, the couple's spark fizzled out, and they officially separated. It was during this time that Hayworth vacationed to the Riveria, where she attracted the attention of prince, playboy, and spiritual leader Aly Khan. When Khan heard of Hayworth's arrival, he told gossip columnist Elsa Maxwell how much he desired to meet the Affair in Trinidad actor.

Luck proved to be on Khan's side: Although Hayworth had plans to end her vacation early, Maxwell persuaded her to stay and attend a party that Khan was set to attend. Hayworth was charmed by Khan, and despite both of them being technically married, they began dating. Hollywood — as well as the media— was livid.

Columbia Studios president Harry Cohn sued Hayworth for 1.2 million dollars when she decided to quit acting to spend time with her new beau. Tabloids expressed their dismay, with London's The People writing, ”The extravagant expeditions of this colored prince and his ‘friend’ have become an insult to decent-minded women the world over.”

Despite the negative press, Hayworth and Khan were wed in a simple ceremony in Vallauris, France, on May 27, 1949, and seven months later, the newlyweds welcomed their first child, Princess Yasmin.

By 1951, Hayworth had grown tired of her husband's infidelities and filed for divorce — which resulted in a bitter custody battle. The divorce proceedings dragged on for almost a decade and only ended when Khan died in a car accident in 1960.

3. Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini, and Petter Lindström:

In 1937, Ingrid Bergman married future neurosurgeon Petter Lindström. By 1939, the newlyweds were a continent apart, as Bergman had moved to California to advance her acting career, while Lindström received his medical degree from the University of Rochester. The couple officially reunited on the West Coast in 1943, the same year Bergman became an unstoppable force in Tinseltown, thanks to her starring role in Casablanca. 

Throughout the rest of the '40s, Bergman was on top of the cinematic world. She won an Oscar for her role in the 1944 psychological thriller Gaslight and starred in 3 Hitchcock movies. However, things came crashing down when she met director Roberto Rossellini while they were filming the 1950 drama Stromboli.

Rossellini and Bergman began an affair that rocked the nation and ruined her illustrious career. Bergman soon left Lindström and became pregnant with Rossellini's child (their son, Renato Rossellini, was born mere days before Bergman and Lindström's divorce was finalized).

The public vitriol for Bergman was so strong that her films were boycotted, she was banned from The Ed Sullivan Show, and she received endless amounts of hate mail. The biggest blow to her career came when she was publicly shamed on the Senate floor. Colorado Senator Edwin C. "Big Ed" Johnson called the Academy Award winner “one of the most powerful women on Earth—I regret to say, a powerful influence for evil.” He also cruely described her and the aforementioned Rita Hayworth as “apostles of degradation.”

After these verbal attacks, Bergman was forced to flee to Europe to escape the negative press. During this time, she and Rossellini welcomed twin daughters — one of whom is acclaimed actor Isabella Rossellini. Bergman returned to Hollywood in 1956, and she and Rossellini ended their scandalous marriage in 1957. Surprisingly, her career recovered rather quickly, and she went on to win two more Oscars.

4. Ava Gardner, Frank Sinatra, and Nancy Barbato:

Frank Sinatra and Nancy Barbato met as teenagers at the Jersey Shore. The couple tied the knot in 1939 and soon welcomed three children. Although Sinatra was known to cheat, Barbato stuck by his side and was publicly praised for withstanding the indignity of her husband's transgressions.

In James Kaplan's Sinatra biography, Frank: The Voice, he wrote about Barbato, “She did everything she could to hold him — cooked him spaghetti just the way he liked it, baked him lemon-meringue pies. He loved her meals, and he loved her, but he was elusive.”

When Sinatra's career expanded to acting in the 1940s, the family moved to California, where Sinatra began attracting the romantic attention of other notable figures. The "My Way" singer was not discreet in his extra-marital affairs, either. Kaplan wrote, “The more famous Frank Sinatra got, the more women there were who wanted to go to bed with him, and he saw no reason not to oblige as many of them as possible. Covering up the evidence was rarely his first priority.”

Later in the decade, Sinatra and Ava Gardner met on an MGM film set, where it was reported that upon first glance, Sinatra told a friend, “I’m going to marry that girl."

Barbato and Sinatra officially divorced in November 1951, and he and Gardner married 72 hours later. The singer and actor had a tumultuous marriage until the spark finally flickered out in October 1953, when they officially separated. Their divorce was not finalized until 1957. Despite the tenuous nature of their relationship, the exes remained friends until Gardner’s passing in 1990.

Barbato, on the other hand, never remarried. In the late 1960s, Gay Talese revisited the state of Barbato and Sinatra's post-divorce relationship, "There is no bitterness, only great respect and affection between Sinatra and his first wife. And he has long been welcome in her home and has even been known to wander in at odd hours, stoke the fire, lie on the sofa and fall asleep."

Sinatra and Me author Tony Oppedisano later revealed, "Nancy cared for Frank very, very deeply. After a while, I actually felt comfortable enough asking her some sensitive questions and she didn’t balk. I asked, ‘When you first learned about Frank and Ava, why wouldn’t you give him a divorce initially?’

"She said, ‘Well, because that was just one aspect of his life. At the end of the day, he always came home to me. He was always a tremendous father. He was always there for the kids, no matter what. The only reason I did eventually decide to grant him a divorce was because back in those days, if you were a public figure, like he was, and fooling around with someone, and it was known that you were married and had children, it would really damage your career.’"

Another one of her reasons for staying married to the "New York, New York" singer? "And [over the years] I thought about it. And I realized, once you’ve married Frank Sinatra, how the hell am I going to top that one?’"

5. Debbie Reynolds, Eddie Fisher, and Elizabeth Taylor:

After meeting at the MGM studio lot high school when they were 17, Hollywood legends Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor quickly became friends. The pair were inseparable — except for a brief period of time when they, indeed, were not.

In 1955, Reynolds married crooner Eddie Fisher, and two years later, Taylor married her third husband, producer Mike Todd. The couples maintained a friendship until 1958, when Mike Todd tragically passed away in a private plane crash.

Fisher began comforting the recently widowed Taylor, and the pair fell in love. In the documentary Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, Taylor opened up about their circumstances: "I was keeping Mike alive by talking about him because Eddie was a great friend of Mike's. That was the only thing we had in common, was Mike. I never loved Eddie. I liked him. I felt sorry for him. And I liked talking [to him]. But he was not Mike. As a matter of fact, I don't remember too much about my marriage to him, except it was one big, friggin' awful mistake. I knew it before we were married and didn't know how to get out of it." A newsreel played during the documentary alleges that Fisher and Taylor married a mere three hours after his and Reynolds' divorce was finalized.

Reynolds later revealed her point of view during the debacle: “We were friends for years and years [she and Taylor], but we had a lapse of time when she took Eddie to live with her because she liked him, too. She liked him well enough to take him without an invitation!”

By this point, the stars were embroiled in a national scandal, with Reynolds being portrayed as the "good girl" who was left behind with two children for the "bad girl" (aka Elizabeth Taylor). The actors' longstanding friendship was left in tatters and not repaired for several decades.

Taylor and Fisher divorced in 1964 when she first fell in love with and married Cleopatra co-star Richard Burton. Around this time, it was reported that Reynolds and Taylor found themselves together on a ship and began passing notes to each other, eventually leading to their reconciliation.

By 2001, the icons were once again friends (at least friendly enough) and starred in The Old Broads, a made-for-TV film written by none other than Reynolds' daughter, Carrie Fisher.

6. Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and Jill Esmond:

Laurence Olivier first noticed Vivien Leigh in 1936 after watching her performance in the play The Mask of Virtue. According to Vivien Leigh: A Biography, upon their initial meeting, Leigh told a friend, “That's the man I'm going to marry." The only hold-up to their romance? They were both married.

At the time, Leigh was married to a barrister, Herbert Leigh Holman, who was 13 years her senior and only humored her passion for the stage. Olivier was married to Jill Esmond, the daughter of two popular British actors. In his 1982 autobiography, Confessions of an Actor, the Wuthering Heights actor confessed that he only married Esmond because he "wasn't likely to do any better at my age and with my undistinguished track record." (Ouch.)

In 1937, Olivier was cast as the lead in Hamlet. Leigh's calendar shows that she visited Olivier on several occasions. A short time later, the duo starred opposite one another in the movie Fire Over England and then traveled to Denmark for more performances of Hamlet, as Leigh had since been cast as Ophelia.

Olivier later said, "I couldn't help myself with Vivien. No man could. I hated myself for cheating on Jill, but then I had cheated before, but this was something different. This wasn't just out of lust. This was love that I really didn't ask for but was drawn into."

Upon returning to England, the acclaimed actors separated from their respective partners and moved in together, even though their divorces were not finalized until February 1940. Six months later, in August 1940, Olivier and Leigh wed in Santa Barbara, California. Sources close to the couple said the marriage began falling apart almost immediately because of Leigh's alcohol addiction.

The beginning of the end truly occurred during an Australian theater tour in 1948. It was during this time that Leigh met Australian actor Peter Finch and began a years-long affair, which, according to Olivier, was when he "lost Vivien."

The couple stuck together through infidelity, mental health struggles, and miscarriages and fought to make their marriage work until they officially called it quits in May 1960. Although they never rekindled the flame, Olivier and Leigh stayed in contact. He wrote to Leigh shortly after the finalization of their divorce, "I want to say thank you for understanding it all for my sake. You did nobly and bravely and beautifully and I am very oh so sorry, very sorry, that it must have been much hell for you."

7. Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, and Louise Treadwell:

Spencer Tracy and Louise Treadwell first met when they were both performers in a stock company. They married in 1923 and stayed together until Tracy died in 1967...even though the State of the Union actor and Katharine Hepburn had been having an affair since 1942.

Hepburn and Tracy met on the set of the 1942 romantic-comedy Woman of the Year. Hepburn, who had a major hand in producing her own films, had her heart set on casting Tracy as her romantic interest. Friend and biographer Christopher Andersen later told Closer, “It was one of those love-at-first-sight things. I don’t think it hurt that she admired him tremendously as an actor… [but] there was an instant attraction on her part.”

The lines between fiction and reality blurred for the duo, and their attraction toward one another soon developed into a full-fledged affair despite Tracy's volatile moods. Andersen claimed that Tracy “could occasionally blow up at [Katharine] around others” and that despite his temper, Hepburn stayed devoted, “On set, she was a mother hen to Tracy — getting him pills, milk for his ulcer, fetching coffee, sitting at his feet and gazing at him adoringly, praising him to the skies.”

However, the affair posed a major problem for Tracy, who was a devout Catholic. Although by this time, he was no longer living with Treadwell, the actor's faith barred him from obtaining a divorce. Treadwell, who by then had devoted her life to founding the John Tracy Clinic, had often turned a blind eye to her husband's infidelities and was quoted as saying, "I will be Mrs Spencer Tracy until the day I die." Hepburn insisted she was fine with her and Tracy's unusual arrangement and that she had never desired marriage or children anyway.

By the early 1960s, Tracy was battling multiple health conditions. When he was officially diagnosed with diabetes and heart disease, Hepburn abandoned her acting career for five years and, for the first time in their nearly three-decades-long relationship, moved in with her lover to be his caretaker.

Their final role as co-stars came in 1967 with Look Who's Coming to Dinner. Tracy had a fatal heart attack two weeks after the film wrapped. Hepburn wrote in her autobiography, Me: Stories of My Life, "Just as I was about to give [the door] a push, there was a sound of a cup smashing to the floor — then clump — a loud clump." She entered the room and found Tracy deceased on the floor.

The Philadelphia Story actress did not attend her longtime partner's funeral out of respect for his wife and adult children. However, “She went to the mortuary…She watched while they took the coffin out of the mortuary and put it into the hearse,” Andersen said. “She said goodbye to him there.”

8. Lauren Bacall, Humprey Bogart, and Mayo Methot:

Volatile lovers Humphrey Bogart and Mayo Methot met while shooting the 1937 film A Marked Woman. (Methot, often considered a footnote in Bogart's story, was an extremely accomplished actor on Broadway and the silver screen. She was performing onstage before she could read, with the Oregonian dubbing her “the youngest leading lady in the world.”) Both actors had been married twice before but fell head over heels for each other, nonetheless. Roy Widing, who authored a biography about Methot, wrote, “One of the things that attract Bogart to Mayo instantly was the fact that she could make him laugh. And he loved to laugh. They had a lot of good times together. Whenever you saw them, they were clearly enjoying themselves.”

However, their relationship wasn't fit for the screen, with both halves of the couple inflicting violence upon the other, “There was no denying that the pressures of their jobs, of being in the spotlight took a toll on them individually, as well as their relationship. Documents suggested that Humphrey hit Mayo. But she hit him back. [Bogart's nickname for Methot was 'Sluggy'] I think the alcohol clearly fed into their frustrations, their passions in a negative way. And she knew how to push people’s buttons,” Widing claimed.

The press began calling the couple "The Battling Bogarts." One of their most dangerous encounters happened while on a World War II USO tour in 1944 when the pair began "drunkenly firing guns" at each other in a fit of rage.

However, the toxic relationship between the "Battling Bogarts" ended in 1945 when Humphrey met Lauren Bacall on the To Have and To Have Not set and made quite the first impression.

One night, the still-married Bogart stopped by Bacall's trailer to wish her a good night but suddenly leaned over, lifted her chin, and swooped in with a kiss. Bacall later recalled, “he was the man who meant everything in the world to me; I couldn’t believe my luck.” While it might seem like a fairytale ending, Bogart returned to Methot's waiting arms several times before he and Bacall tied the knot on May 21, 1945.

Bacall's career suffered a series of setbacks after her marriage. In 1996, she told the New York Times that had she not married Bogart, her career would have continued its upward trajectory. But despite everything, the Murder on the Orient Express actor never regretted their marriage, “I would not have had a better life, but a better career. Howard Hawks was like a Svengali; he was molding me the way he wanted. I was his creation, and I would have had a great career had he been in control of it. But the minute Bogie was around, Hawks knew he couldn’t control me, so he sold my contract to Warner Bros. And that was the end.”

As for Methot, neither she nor her career ever recovered from her and Bogart's divorce. She passed away from complications due to acute alcoholism in 1951 after spending several years away from the spotlight in her native Oregon.

Which one of these scandalous love triangles surprised you the most? Do you know of any other "forbidden" Old Hollywood romances? Let us know in the comments!

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