lifelastingcouples

[lifelastingcouples]

Patrick Wayne Swayze and Lisa Niemi

Patrick Wayne Swayze was born on the 18ᵗʰ of August 1952 in of Los Angeles, California. When Patrick was 19 y.o. he met Lise Niemi, who, by that time was 15 y.o. at his choreographer mother Patsy's ballet school in Houston. Immediately, he sensed something different about her. "I knew she was the smartest chick I'd ever met in my life". Before Lisa, "I had been meeting girls with names like Mimi and Angel. And for a long time I didn't feel like I deserved her". They married four years afterwars on the 12ᵗʰ of June 1975.

His love for Lisa inspired Patrick –together at the premiere party for Dirty Dancing in 1987– to pen the hit ballad "She's Like the Wind" for the blockbuster movie's soundtrack. Writing that song, "I just felt at that time that I'm very, very lucky to have a woman who thinks I hung the moon". And, though they didn't appear together onscreen, Patrick practiced all his dance routines for the movie with his wife.

The pair had the opportunity to costar in several projects, including 1987's action film Steel Dawn. And Patrick was one of Lisa's biggest fans. When she joined the cast of the Broadway musical The Will Rogers Follies in May 1993, he was there to cheer her on – even surprising her onstage with a cake on opening night, which happened to be her 37ᵗʰ birthday.

A constant visitor to the set of The Beast, Lisa also directed Patrick in the April 9, 2009 episode of the AampE show. "He was fantastic. He had challenges because he was still doing chemo and it wasn't always easy, but he'd suit up and show up. He was always there". "He treated me like he was honored to show up on my set." And it wasn't the first time she'd directed him: She helmed the 1995 drama One Last Dance, in which they costarred.

Besides her beauty, what drew Patrick to Lisa (in 1979) was her sense of honesty. "She was different than anyone I'd known. Like a flower. If I started my macho stuff, she'd cut me off fast". "I'd be dead without her. She helped me break my self-destructive tendencies. I was an insecure little baby. I don't ever see us apart. She's my creative partner."

All throughout Patrick Swayze's battle with pancreatic cancer, his wife of 34 years, Lisa Niemi (with him at a L.A. Lakers-San Antonio Spurs game in May 2008), was by his side to help him soldier on. From helping him keep track of his medication to flying him to chemo treatments (she's a registered pilot), the dancer-actress was his rock. "He looks into her eyes and he sees nothing except, 'Everything is going to be okay,'" Patrick's brother Don told in 2008. Patrick died by the end of that year. Patrick and Lisa had no children.

Four years later, Lisa met the american jeweler Albert DePrisco and married him in 2014 at Palm Beach, Miami.

In 2019 Paramount Network premiered the documentary "I Am Patrick Swayze" at which Lisa unveiled that Patrick had been victim of abuse by his mother, Patsy, who was a very demanding dance teacher running her own business. According to Lisa, it was Patrick's father who put an end to the abuse by threatening Patsy with divorce if she didn't stop it.

[lifelastingcouples]

Horace Joseph Greasley and Rosa Rauchbach

Joseph Horace Greasley was born on the 25ᵗʰ of December 1918 in Ibstock, Leicestershire. When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in Spring 1939, Greasley  was working as a barber. One of his clients offered him a safe, well-paid job as a fireman, but Horace opted to join the army. After seven weeks training with the 2ⁿᵈ/5ᵗʰ Batallion Leicestershire Regiment, he was sent to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force.

On the 25ᵗʰ of May 1940, during the retreat to Dunkirk, Greasley was taken prisoner by the Wehrmacht at Carvin, south of Lille. There followed a 10-week forced march across France and Belgium to Holland and a three-day train journey to prison camps in Polish Silesia, then annexed as part of Germany. Many died on the way.

In the second PoW camp to which he was assigned, near Lamsdorf, Greasley encountered Rosa Rauchbach, the 17 y.o. daughter of the director of the marble quarry to which the camp was attached. Rosa was working as an interpreter for the Germans. But the two were forced apart when Horace was transferred to Freiwaldau, 40 miles away. To see his lover Greasley had to remove the wooden bars from his cell window, crawl under the camp's perimeter fence, and make a break for the chapel that was the location for each rendez-vous.

The only way to carry on the love affair was to break out of his camp. From Silesia, bordered by Germany and German-occupied countries, there was little hope of escaping back to Britain. The nearest neutral country was Sweden, 420 miles to the North. Perhaps for this reason the guards were lax, and the Germans seemed to consider that those trying to escape were effectively attempting suicide.

Greasley reckoned that short absences could be disguised or go unnoticed. Messages between him and Rosa were exchanged via members of outside work parties, who then handed hers on to Greasley, the camp barber, when they came to have their hair cut. When, with the help of friends, he did make it under the wire for an assignation nearby, he would break back into the camp again under cover of darkness to await his next opportunity.

Greasley escaped the camp and made his way back more than 200 times to see Rosa. Sometimes, Greasley reckoned, he made the return journey three or more times a week, depending on whether Rosa's duties among various camps brought her to his vicinity.

Greasley was held prisoner, working for the Germans in quarries and factories, for five years less one day, and was finally liberated on the 24ᵗʰ of May 1945. He still received letters from Rosa after the war's end, and was able to vouch for her when she applied to work as an interpreter for the Americans.

Not long after Greasley got back to Britain, however, he received news that Rosa had died in childbirth, with the infant perishing too. Horace Greasley said he never knew for certain whether or not the child was his.

After demobilisation he returned to Leicestershire, swearing that he would never take orders from anyone again. He ran a hairdressers', a taxi firm and a haulage company in Coalville, where he met his wife, Brenda, at a fancy dress party in 1970. They married in 1975, retiring to the Costa Blanca in Spain in 1988 until Greasly died on the 4 ᵗʰ  of February 2010 at age 91.

Joseph Horace "Jim" Greasley faces Heinrich Himmler demanding more food for prisoners after having taken off his shirt to prove how slim he was. Although this picture is disputed. Guy Walters asserted that the soldier in the picture was not Greasley, stating that the picture is held by the US National Archives and the caption details show it was taken in Minsk (in Belarus) in mid-1941, that it was taken by a photographer for a propaganda film and identifies the soldier as Soviet from his cap.

[lifelastingcouples]

Diane Sawyer and Mike Nichols

Lila Diane Sawyer was born on the 22ⁿᵈ of December 1945 in Kentucky. Daughter of a school teacher and a county judge. he served as an editor-in-chief for her school newspaper, The Arrow, and participated in many artistic activities. She always felt, however, that she was in the shadow of her older sister, Linda.  Insecure and something of a loner as a teen, Diane found happiness, she later said, going off by herself or with a group of friends that called themselves "reincarnated transcendentalist" and read Emerson and Thoreau down by a creek. In 1967, she received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Immediately after her graduation, Sawyer returned to Kentucky and was employed as weather forecaster for WLKY-TV in Louisville. In 1970, Sawyer moved to Washington, D.C., and, unable to find work as a broadcast journalist, she interviewed for positions in government offices. She eventually became an assistant to Jerry Warren, the White House deputy press secretary. Initially, Sawyer wrote press releases and quickly graduated to other tasks like drafting some of President Richard Nixon's public statements. Within a few months, she became an administrative assistant to White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler and eventually rose to become a staff assistant for U.S. President Richard Nixon. During this period Sawyer started a relationship with  Frank Gannon a general factotum and speechwriter of Donald Rumsfeld.  Sawyer continued through Nixon's resignation from the presidency in 1974 and worked on the Nixon-Ford transition team in 1974–1975. When Sawyer came back to Washington, D.C., in 1978, she joined CBS News as a general-assignment reporter. In 1979 Sawyer broke with Gannon and started another relationship with the diplomat Richard Holbrooke. In CBS, she was promoted to political correspondent in February 1980 and featured on the weekday broadcasts of Morning with Charles Kuralt. In 1984, she became the first female correspondent on 60 Minutes, a CBS News investigative-television newsmagazine.

Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky was born on the 6ᵗʰ of November 1931 in Berlin, Germany. His father was born in Vienna, Austria, to a Russian-Jewish immigrant family. Nichols' father's family had been wealthy and lived in Siberia, leaving after the Russian Revolution, and settling in Germany around 1920. In April 1939, when the Nazis were arresting Jews in Berlin, seven-year-old Mikhail and his three-year-old brother Robert were sent alone to the United States to join their father, who had fled months earlier. His mother joined the family by escaping through Italy in 1940. The family moved to New York City on April 28, 1939. In the early 1950s Nichols met Elaine May as students at the University of Chicago. They began their career together at The Compass Players, a predecessor to Chicago's Second City which included Paul Sills, Del Close, and Nancy Ponder. Nichols dropped out of college in 1953 and moved to New York in 1954 to study acting with Lee Strasberg. May remained in Chicago at Compass, and Nichols returned in 1955. In 1957 Nichols married  Patricia Scott  from whom he divorced in 1960. On October 6, 1960, Nichols and May opened on Broadway in An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May at The John Golden Theatre. The show was very successfull and ran for 306 performances, closing on July 1, 1961. Personal idiosyncrasies and tensions eventually drove the duo apart to pursue other projects in 1961. Althought they later reconciled and worked together many times.  In 1963 Nichols married Margo Callas, a former muse of the poet Robert Graves. In 1974 Nichols divorced Callas and the next year he married Annabel Davis-Goff. In between Margo and Annabelle Nichols was linked to the likes of Carrie Fisher, Candace Bergen, Gloria Steinham and Jackie Kennedy - both before and after her second marriage to Aristotle Onasis.

Diane Sawyer and Mike Nichols  met in met in 1986 while they were waiting to take a supersonic Concorde flight from Paris to New York. Yet the encounter almost didn't happen because Sawyer initially tried to avoid Nichols in the airport lounge because she has hadn’t done her hair or something. However, Nichols, who by that time was already a Hollywood Lion, managed to come face to face with the journalist. He told her, "You're my hero," and she responded, "And you're mine. Do you ever have lunch?” Nichols, later recalled : “She wanted to interview me for 60 Minutes. I pretended that I was up for it, and we had about 14 lunches.”

Nichols divorced Annabel Davis-Goff  that same year.

Meryl Streep, a frequent Nichols collaborator said: “He had really hit a wall” “He’d had a sort of breakdown, and then he met Diane, and everything changed. Before, he was always the smartest and most brilliant person in the room – and he could be the meanest, too – but now, that’s just an arrow in his creative arsenal.”

“He loved Diane utterly, immeasurably, magically,” Julia Roberts said in a statement to PEOPLE Magazine.

Nichols and Sawyer married on Martha’s Vineyard on April 29, 1988.

“My husband has said even he doesn’t know my politics,” Sawyer told the Ladies Home Journal for a cover story this past February.

She also said, “I think one of the romantic things is simply the way he reaches for my hand all the time. We rarely fight, and I remember once when we were arguing he stopped in the middle of it and said, ‘Well, this is sort of fun, too.’ And it was!”

Nichols was impressed with his wife’s “utter lack of vanity,” he told Entertainment Weekly in 1996. “She’ll get up in the morning and she’s out of the house in five minutes in my jacket.”

Nichols said, “She is the kindest, smartest, most beautiful woman I’ve known. I love her entirely”. Then perhaps one of the secrets of their marriage was that she was so easily able to return the compliment. As Sawyer once summed up her husband: “He’s generous and adventurous and a little wild and utterly kind. It’s that combination of something you’re completely sure of and something dangerous and interesting. And he’s also the funniest man on the face of the earth.”

After marrying Nichols, Diane continued her career as TV presenter. In 1989, she moved to ABC News to co-anchor Primetime Live newsmagazine with Sam Donaldson. From 1998 to 2000, she co-anchored ABC's 20/20, also a newsmagazine, broadcast on Wednesdays with Donaldson and on Sundays with Barbara Walters. On January 18, 1999, she returned to morning news as the co-anchor of Good Morning America with Charles Gibson. On September 2, 2009, Sawyer was announced as the successor to Gibson, who retired as the anchor of ABC World News. Until 2014 she was the anchor of ABC's flagship broadcast World News and the network's principal anchor for breaking-news coverage, election coverage, and special events.

In 1966, Warner Brothers asked Nichols to direct his first film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. The movie was a hit, and was nominated for 13 Academy Awards, winning five. After Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Nichols directed The Graduate (1967), starring Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft and Katharine Ross. In 1970  he directed Catch-22 big-budget adaptation of Joseph Heller's novel. followed by Carnal Knowledge (1971) starring Jack Nicholson, Ann-Margret, Art Garfunkel and Candice Bergen. In 1983 he directed Silkwood, starring Meryl Streep, Cher and Kurt Russell. In 1990 Postcards from the Edge starring Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine. In 1998 Primary Colors John Travolta and Emma Thompson. In 2004 Closer. In Charlie Wilson’s War starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts. In 2012, Nichols won the Best Direction of a Play Tony Award for Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

Nichols died of a heart attack on November 19, 2014, at his apartment in Manhattan, nearly two weeks after his 83ʳᵈ birthday and 26 years or marriage with Sawyer.

[lifelastingcouples]

Iman and David Bowie

Zara Mohamed Abdulmajid (Iman) was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, on the 25ᵗʰ of July 1955. Her father was a diplomat and a former Somali ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and her mother was a gynecologist. While she was studying at the University of Nairobi, Iman was discovered by American photographer Peter Beard, and she subsequently moved to the United States to begin a modeling career. Her first modeling assignment was for Vogue in 1976. She became a muse for many prominent designers: Halston, Versace, Calvin Klein, Issey Miyake, Donna Karan, Yves Saint-Laurent. She also worked with plenty of notable photographers: Helmut Newton, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and Annie Leibovitz. Iman married her first husband Hassan in 1973 and divorced in 1975, and then married American pro basketballer Spencer Haywood in 1977. The union produced a daughter, Zulekha Haywood born in 1978. Iman and Haywood divorced a decade later. After almost two decades of modeling, Iman started her own cosmetics firm in 1994. Iman was approached in 2007 by the CEO of the Home Shopping Network (HSN) to create the clothing design line Global Chic. Today, her Global Chic collection is one of four best-selling items among more than 200 fashion and jewelry brands on HSN, having evolved into a line of affordable accessories.

David Robert Jones was born on the 8ᵗʰ of January 1947 in London. His mother was worked as a waitress at a cinema in Royal Tunbridge Wells and his father worked as a promotions officer for the children's charity Barnardo's. In 1953, Bowie moved with his family to Bromley. Two years later, he started attending Burnt Ash Junior School. His voice was considered "adequate" by the school choir, and he demonstrated above-average abilities in playing the recorder. At the age of nine, his dancing during the newly-introduced music and movement classes was strikingly imaginative: teachers called his interpretations "vividly artistic" and his poise "astonishing" for a child. Bowie formed his first band, the Konrads, in 1962 at the age of 15. Playing guitar-based rock and roll at local youth gatherings and weddings, but frustrated by his bandmates' limited aspirations, Bowie left the Konrads and joined another band, the King Bees. But again Bowie quit the band less than a month later to join the Manish Boys. Bowie met dancer Lindsay Kemp in 1967 and enrolled in his dance class at the London Dance Centre. In January 1968, Kemp choreographed a dance scene for a BBC play, The Pistol Shot, in the Theatre 625 series, and used Bowie with a dancer, Hermione Farthingale; the pair began dating, and moved into a London flat together. Bowie and Farthingale broke up in early 1969 when she went to Norway to take part in a film, Song of Norway. On the 11 ᵗʰ of  July 1969, Bowie's first album "Space Oddity" was released five days ahead of the Apollo 11 launch, and reached the top five in the UK. Bowie's second album followed in November. In April 1969 Bowie met Angela Barnett, they married within a year. They had an open marriage. Angela described their union as a marriage of convenience so that she could get a permit to work. Their son Duncan, was born on the 30 of May 1971. Bowie moved to the US in 1974, initially staying in New York City before settling in Los Angeles. Bowie and Angela divorced on 8 February 1980 in Switzerland.

Iman and Bowie met in 1990 at a dinner party. Iman had recently retired from modeling and her hairdresser introduced her to the British singer-songwriter. For Bowie, it was love at first meeting. “My attraction to her was immediate and all-encompassing”. Her effect on the usually unflappable and smooth Bowie was intense. “I found her intolerably sexy”. It took a further two weeks before Iman was as on board with the relationship as Bowie. “His actions spoke louder [than words]” she said to The Cut in 2011. owie proposed in Paris and they married on the 24ᵗʰ of April 1992.

Iman and Bowie approached their marriage as a relationship to be shared with each other, not a public eager to hear intimate details about the “Space Oddity” singer and Vogue cover star. Aside from rare occasions, the couple kept the press separate from their home life.

They were rarely photographed together, appearing as a couple only in one Vogue magazine shoot and for a Hello! interview in their New York apartment following the birth of their daughter Alexandria in 2000, which Iman described as one of “the happiest times in my life,” and an event that drew the couple closer than ever before.

Quizzed over the whereabouts of her husband while attending a New York Valentine’s Day event solo in 2011, Iman told The Cut that they never celebrated the annual lovefest in public. “We never do Valentine’s dinner, because everybody, they look,” she said. “On Valentine’s, imagine me and David going to a restaurant! Like everybody’s going to say, ‘Did they talk? Did they hold hands?’ Twenty years. We’ve been married 20 years!”

Home life in New York was routine. Iman revealed to Harper’s Bazaar in 2010 that like many couples with a young child, daily life involved early morning school runs and soccer and music classes. “I vowed to myself when I got married that I would cook every night,” she said. “I find it very therapeutic.” Bowie, who retired from touring in 2004, told ET that “first for me is our marriage and second is career. If there was a choice between one or the other, there’s no question.”

So intense was their desire for privacy, the world was left shocked when Bowie died on the 10 ᵗʰ of January 2016, at age 69 from liver cancer. Even his close musical collaborators had no idea the prolific singer had been sick.

Two years later, Iman opened up about her feelings during an interview with Porter magazine. “Sometimes, I don’t want people to know how sad I am. People say to me, ‘Oh, you’re so strong.’ I’m not strong — I am just trying to keep it together”.

When questioned about whether she would consider entering into a new romantic relationship, the model-turned-entrepreneur was firm in her response: “I will never remarry. I mentioned my husband the other day with someone, and they said to me, ‘You mean your late husband?’ I said, no, he is always going to be my husband.

[lifelastingcouples]

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera

Frida Kahlo was born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón in Coyoacán, Mexico, on the 6ᵗʰ of July 1907. She was daughter of a German father and a mestiza. Frida was disabled by polio at the age of six which made her right leg shorter and thinner than the left, and suffered a bus accident at the age of eighteen which caused her lifelong pain and medical problems. Kahlo had been a promising student for medical school but during her recovery from the accident she returned to her childhood hobby of art with the idea of becoming an artist. Kahlo later described the atmosphere in her childhood home as often "very, very sad". Both parents were often sick, and their marriage was devoid of love. Her relationship with her mother, Matilde, was extremely tense. Kahlo described her mother as "kind, active and intelligent, but also calculating, cruel and fanatically religious". Although Kahlo claimed that her father Guillermo was Jewish, he was in fact a Lutheran.

Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez was born in Guanajuato, Mexico, on the 8ᵗʰ of December 1886. The family were said to have converso ancestry. Rivera wrote in 1935: "My Jewishness is the dominant element in my life." Diego was born as one of twin boys in Guanajuato but his twin brother Carlos died at the age of two. Rivera began drawing at the age of three. When he was caught drawing on the walls of the house, his parents installed chalkboards and canvas on the walls to encourage him. After moving to Paris, Diego met Angelina Beloff, an artist from the pre-Revolutionary Russian Empire. They married in 1911 and had a son who died young at the age of two. During this time, Rivera also had a relationship with painter Maria Vorobieff-Stebelska, who gave birth to a daughter in 1918 or 1919. Rivera divorced Beloff and married Guadalupe Marín in June 1922, after having returned to Mexico. They had two daughters together: Ruth and Guadalupe.

Frida joined the Mexican Communist Party in 1927 through which she met Diego who was 21 years senior and still married to Guadalupe Marín. Frida and Diego married in 1929 despite Frida’s parents disapproval of the marriage nicknaming the couple «the elephant and the dove» because of their size difference.

Soon after the marriage, Kahlo and Rivera moved to Cuernavaca in the rural state of Morelos, where he had been commissioned to paint murals for the Palace of Cortés. Around the same time, she resigned her membership of the PCM in support of Rivera, who had been expelled shortly before the marriage for his support of the leftist opposition movement within the Third International.

After Rivera had completed the commission in Cuernavaca, the couple moved to San Francisco, where he painted murals for the Luncheon Club of the San Francisco Stock Exchange and the California School of Fine Arts. Frida's long love affair with Hungarian-American photographer Nickolas Muray most likely began around this time.

Kahlo and Rivera returned to Mexico for the summer of 1931, and in the fall traveled to New York City for the opening of Rivera's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). By that time, Kahlo also had an affair with Georgia O'Keeffe who was married photographer Alfred Stieglitz. O'Keeffe and Kahlo did stay in each other's lives. In 1938, O'Keeffe was among the attendees when Kahlo's work was exhibited at a gallery in New York City.

In April 1932, they headed to Detroit, where Rivera had been commissioned to paint murals for the Detroit Institute of Arts. The year spent in Detroit was a difficult time for Kahlo. Although she had enjoyed visiting San Francisco and New York City, she disliked aspects of American society, which she regarded as colonialist, as well as most Americans, whom she found "boring". She disliked having to socialize with capitalists such as Henry and Edsel Ford, and was angered that many of the hotels in Detroit refused to accept Jewish guests. Kahlo's time in Detroit was also complicated by a pregnancy. Her doctor agreed to perform an abortion, but the medication used was ineffective. Kahlo was deeply ambivalent about having a child and had already undergone an abortion earlier in her marriage to Rivera. She reluctantly agreed to continue with the pregnancy, but miscarried in July.

Kahlo and Rivera returned to New York in March 1933, for he had been commissioned to paint a mural for the Rockefeller Center.

Frida and Diego returned to Mexico City. She was again experiencing health problems –undergoing an appendectomy, two abortions, and the amputation of gangrenous toes– and her marriage to Rivera had become strained. He was not happy to be back in Mexico and blamed Kahlo for their return. While he had been unfaithful to her before, he now embarked on an affair with her younger sister Cristina, which deeply hurt Kahlo's feelings. After discovering it in early 1935, she moved to an apartment in central Mexico City and considered divorcing him. She also had an affair of her own with American artist Isamu Noguchi. Kahlo reconciled with Rivera and Cristina later in 1935 and moved back to San Ángel.

Kahlo and Rivera successfully petitioned the Mexican government to grant asylum to former Soviet leader Leon Trotsky and offered a house for him and his wife Natalia Sedova as a residence. The couple lived there from January 1937 until April 1939, with Kahlo and Trotsky not only becoming good friends but also having a brief affair.

After opening an exhibition in Paris and having an affair with Parisian nightclub sensation Josephine Baker, Kahlo sailed back to New York. She was eager to be reunited with Muray, but he decided to end their affair, as he had met another woman whom he was planning to marry. Kahlo traveled back to Mexico City, where Rivera requested a divorce from her. The exact reasons for his decision are unknown, but he stated publicly that it was merely a "matter of legal convenience in the style of modern times, there are no sentimental, artistic, or economic reasons." According to their friends, the divorce was mainly caused by their mutual infidelities.

On 21 August 1940, Trotsky was assassinated in Coyoacán. Kahlo was briefly suspected of being involved and was arrested and held for two days with her sister Cristina. The following month, Kahlo traveled to San Francisco for medical treatment for back pain and a fungal infection. Her continuously fragile health had increasingly declined since her divorce and was exacerbated by her heavy consumption of alcohol.

Rivera was also in San Francisco after he fled Mexico City with the help of actress Paulette Goddard following Trotsky's murder and accepted a commission. Although Kahlo had a relationship with art dealer Heinz Berggruen during her visit to San Francisco, she and Rivera reconciled. They remarried in a simple civil ceremony on the 8ᵗʰ of December 1940. Kahlo and Rivera returned to Mexico soon after their wedding. The union was less turbulent than before for its first five years. Both were more independent.  Both continued having extramarital affairs, Kahlo with both men and women.

Despite the medical treatment she had received in San Francisco, Kahlo's health problems continued throughout the 1940s. Due to her spinal problems, she wore twenty-eight separate supportive corsets, varying from steel and leather to plaster, between 1940 and 1954. She experienced pain in her legs, the infection on her hand had become chronic, and she was also treated for syphilis. The death of her father in April 1941 plunged her into a depression. Her ill health made her increasingly confined at home.

Kahlo's right leg was amputated at the knee due to gangrene in August 1953. She became severely depressed and anxious, and her dependency on painkillers escalated. When Rivera began yet another affair, she attempted suicide by overdose. She wrote in her diary in February 1954, "They amputated my leg six months ago, they have given me centuries of torture and at moments I almost lost my reason. I keep on wanting to kill myself. Diego is what keeps me from it, through my vain idea that he would miss me. But never in my life have I suffered more." In her last days, Kahlo was mostly bedridden with bronchopneumonia, on the 13ᵗʰ of July 1954 her nurse found her dead in her bed. She was 47.

[lifelastingcouples]

Salvador Dalí and Gala

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1ˢᵗ Marquess of Dalí de Púbol, was born in Figueres, Catalonia on the 11ᵗʰ of May 1904. Dalí's older brother, who had also been named Salvador (born 12ᵗʰ October 1901), had died nine months earlier, on August 1903. Dalí was haunted by the idea of his dead brother throughout his life, mythologizing him in his writings and art. Dalí also had a sister who was three years younger. Dalí's father, was a middle-class lawyer and notary, an anti-clerical atheist and Catalan federalist, whose strict disciplinary approach was tempered by his wife, who encouraged her son's artistic endeavors.

In 1922, Dalí moved to Madrid and studied at San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts. There he became close friend with Pepín Bello, Luis Buñuel, Federico García Lorca, and others associated with the Madrid avant-garde group Ultra. The friendship with Lorca had a strong element of mutual passion, but Dalí said he rejected the poet's sexual orientation. Lorca was killed by Spanish Nationalist militia on August 1936.

In the mid-1920s Dalí grew a neatly trimmed moustache. In later decades he cultivated a more flamboyant one in the manner of 17th-century Spanish master painter Diego Velázquez, and this moustache became a well known Dalí icon.

In April 1926 Dalí made his first trip to Paris where he met Pablo Picasso, whom he revered. Picasso had already heard favorable reports about Dalí from Joan Miró, a fellow Catalan who later introduced him to many Surrealist friends.

From 1927 Dalí's work became increasingly influenced by Surrealism. Influenced by his reading of Freud, Dalí increasingly introduced suggestive sexual imagery and symbolism into his work.

Elena Ivanovna Diakonova (Gala) was born in Kazan, Russia, on the 7ᵗʰ of September 1894. Coming from a family of intellectuals, among her childhood friends was the poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Gala was the second of four children born to Ivan and Antonine Diakonoff. When Gala was ten years old her father disappeared prospecting gold in Siberia. This left the family, (her sister Lidia and her two brothers, Nikola and Vadim) destitute. According to the law of the Russian Orthodox Church, Gala’s mother could not remarry but Antonine defied normal practice by choosing to live with a wealthy lawyer.

Ill from tuberculosis, in 1912 she was sent to a sanatorium at Clavadel, near Davos in Switzerland. There she met Paul Éluard and fell in love with him. They were both seventeen. In 1916, during World War I, she traveled from Russia to Paris to reunite with him; they were married one year later. Their daughter, Cécile, was born in 1918. Gala detested motherhood, mistreating and ignoring her child.

Gala was an inspiration for many artists including Éluard, Louis Aragon, Max Ernst, and André Breton. Breton later despised her, claiming she was a destructive influence on the artists she befriended. Gala, Éluard, and Ernst spent three years in a ménage à trois, from 1924 to 1927.

In early August 1929, Éluard and Gala visited Salvador Dalí in Costa Brava, Spain. An affair quickly developed between Gala and Dalí, who was about ten years younger than Gala. It was a love at first sight. In his Secret Life, Dalí wrote:

«She was destined to be my Gradiva, the one who moves forward, my victory, my wife».

The name Gradiva comes from the title of a novel by W. Jensen, the main character of which was Sigmund Freud. Gradiva was the book’s heroine and it was her who brought psychological healing to the main character.

After living together since 1929, Dalí and Gala married in a civil ceremony in 1934, and remarried in a Catholic ceremony in 1958 in the Pyrenean hamlet of Montrejic. They needed to receive a special dispensation by the Pope because Gala had been previously married and she was a believer (not Catholic ✝ but was an Orthodox Christian ☦︎). Due to his purported phobia of female genitalia, Dalí was said to have been a virgin when they met in 1929. Around that time Gala was found to have uterine fibroids, for which she underwent a hysterectomy in 1936.

The start of their cohabitation was much of a challenge. Dalí was then far from being a top-earning artist, and Gala had no income of her own. In the early 1930s, Dalí started to sign his paintings with his and her name. He stated that Gala acted as his agent, and aided in redirecting his focus. To top it all, there was a public outcry about the inscription Dalí had made on one of his pictures: ‘Sometimes I spit with pleasure on the portrait of my mother.' This made his father shun connection with the son and cut off his allowance. And many in the neighbourhood did side the notary of so high a reputation, and refused Salvador residence or tenancy. Only a fisherman’s widow, some Lidia Sabana de Costa, who had known him since his childhood, and always believed in his talent, — only she sold the couple for a song a solitary shack off Cadaqués, in Port Lligat, used for storing fishing tackle. And Salvador and Gala’s love made the shack a castle.

The room of sixteen square metres in area was the front parlour, the bedroom, and the studio — all in one. For lunch, they sometimes had one fruit for the two of them. This period of her and Dalí's living below the breadline hardly fits the popular idea of Gala as an avaricious, money-minded woman, though, when with Paul Éluard, she had had a far better-off lifestyle in well-furnished Parisian apartments. n that period, the peak of their success was Dalí's solo exhibition held in June, 1931, in the Pierre Colle Gallery.

During 1937 Gala assumed more power in the position of Dalí’s business manager and agent and procurer of artistic contracts. They travelled widely in the United States during the eight years spent there in exile, with winters spent conducting business at the St Regis Hotel in New York, summers in California. In 1948 the pair returned to Europe. Upon returning to Spain, From this date they would spend summers in Spain in Port Lligat and winters in New York or Paris.

Gala had a strong libido and throughout her life had numerous extramarital affairs, which Dalí encouraged, since he was a practitioner of candaulism. In the end of the sixties their relationships started to fade away, and the rest of their life it was just smouldering pieces of their bygone passion. In 1968, Dalí bought Gala the Castle of Púbol, Girona, where she would spend time every summer from 1971 to 1980. He also agreed not to visit there without getting advance permission from her in writing.

In 1980, at the age of 76, Dali was forced to retire due to palsy. The motor disorder left him unable to hold a brush, and as his condition worsened, he became less tolerant of Gala’s continued affairs. Gala was also using the income from Dali’s art to lavish money and gifts on her lovers, who were mostly young male artists. One day, the artist had enough. He beat Gala so badly, he broke two of her ribs.

In her late seventies, Gala had a relationship with millionaire multi-platinum rock singer Jeff Fenholt, former lead vocalist of Jesus Christ Superstar. Gala died the 10 of June 1982, at the age of 87 after suffering from a severe case of influenza. She was interred in the Castle of Púbol, in a crypt with a chessboard style pattern.

In 1982, King Juan Carlos I bestowed on Dalí the title of  Marquess of Dalí of Púbol in the nobility of Spain, Púbol being where Dalí then lived.

Dalí died of heart failure on the 23 of January at the age of 84.

Gala and Dalí lived together for 53 years.

[lifelastingcouples]

Ann Clare Boothe and Henry Luce

Ann Clare Boothe was born in New York City on March 10, 1903. Her parents were not married and would separate in 1912. Her father, a sophisticated man and a brilliant violinist, instilled in his daughter a love of literature but had trouble holding a job and spent years as a travelling salesman. Her ambitious mother's initial plan for her was to become an actress.

After a tour of Europe with her mother and stepfather, Dr. Albert E. Austin, whom Ann Boothe married in 1919, she became interested in the women's suffrage movement, and she was hired by Alva Belmont to work for the National Woman's Party in Washington, D.C. and Seneca Falls, New York.

Highly intelligent, ambitious, and blessed with a deceptively fragile blonde beauty, the young Clare soon abandoned ideological feminism to pursue other interests. She wed George Tuttle Brokaw, millionaire heir to a New York clothing fortune, on August 10, 1923, at the age of 20. They had one daughter. According to Boothe, Brokaw was a hopeless alcoholic, and the marriage ended in divorce in 1929.

At this stage Clare Boothe Brokaw clearly placed immense value on being known for her style. Her dining room, which overlooked the city, Lerman remembered, “was covered with silver tea paper painted over with a panorama of the New York skyline in Matisse colors.” The table, which seated twenty, was smoky mirror glass, reflecting the mural of New York and Clare’s own skyscraper ambitions. Her living room was also very much à la mode, a study in Chinese red, black, and white. Clare had the money and nerve to prop up her ambitions; she met Condé Nast at a party and demanded a job. When he said no, she showed up anyway—she just sat down at a desk at Vogue and wrote captions until he relented. She was quickly moved to Vanity Fair, a man’s world editorially and more her style than the frivolous world of Vogue in 1930. In those days Vanity Fair was quartered in three semi-partitioned rooms between the elevators and the airy, scented suites of Vogue. Clare started off writing captions for the Hall of Fame. One of her first was about Henry Luce, the founder of Time Inc.

On November 23, 1935, Ann Clare married Henry Luce, who was publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines. And the cornerstone of what is known today as Time-Warner.

Henry Robinson Luce was born in Dengzhou, China, in April 1898, Henry Luce traveled extensively throughout his life and was comfortable anywhere in the world.

The marriage between Clare and Henry was difficult. Henry was by any standard extremely successful, but his physical awkwardness, lack of humor, and newsman's discomfort with any conversation that was not strictly factual put him in awe of his beautiful wife's social poise, wit, and fertile imagination. Clare's years as managing editor of Vanity Fair left her with an avid interest in journalism (she suggested the idea of Life magazine to her husband before it was developed internally). Henry himself was generous in encouraging her to write for Life, but the question of how much coverage she should be accorded in Time, as she grew more famous, was always a careful balancing act for Henry since he did not want to be accused of nepotism.

In 1942, Ann Clare won a Republican seat in the United States House of Representatives representing Fairfield County, Connecticut, the 4th Congressional District. She based her platform on three goals: "One, to win the war. Two, to prosecute that war as loyally and effectively as we can as Republicans. Three, to bring about a better world and a durable peace, with special attention to post-war security and employment here at home." During her second term at office, Luce was instrumental in the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission.

On January 11, 1944, her only daughter from her former marriage with George Tuttle Brokaw died at age 19 in an automobile accident. As a result of the tragedy, Luce explored psychotherapy and religion She was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1946. She became an ardent essayist and lecturer in celebration of her faith, and she was ultimately honored by being named a Dame of Malta. As a memorial to her daughter, beginning in 1949 she funded the construction of a Catholic church in Palo Alto for use by the Stanford campus ministry.

Ann Clare returned to politics during the 1952 presidential election and she campaigned on behalf of Republican candidate Dwight Eisenhower. For her contributions Luce was rewarded with an appointment as Ambassador to Italy, a post that oversaw 1150 employees, 8 consulates, and 9 information centers. She was no stranger to Pope Pius XII, who welcomed her as a friend and faithful acolyte. Her principal achievement as ambassador was to play a vital role in negotiating a peaceful solution to the Trieste Crisis of 1953–1954.

Their marriage was sexually open. Clare Luce's lovers included Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, Randolph Churchill, General Lucian K. Truscott, Jr. and General Charles Willoughby.

The Luces stayed together until Henry's death from a heart attack in 1967. As one of the great "power couples" in American history, they were bonded by their mutual interests and complementary, if contrasting, characters. They treated each other with unfailing respect in public, never more so than when he willingly acted as his wife's consort during her years as Ambassador to Italy. Ann Clare was never able to convert Henry to Catholicism (he was the son of a Presbyterian missionary) but he did not question the sincerity of her faith, often attended Mass with her, and defended her when she was criticized by his fellow Protestants.

In the early years of her widowhood, she retired to the luxurious beach house that she and her husband had planned in Honolulu, but boredom with life in what she called "this fur-lined rut" brought her back to Washington, D.C. for increasingly long periods. She made her final home there in 1983.

Clare and Henry Luce at the Premier of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 1935. Henry R. Luce Papers, MS 3014, New-York Historical Society.

[lifelastingcouples]

Bonnie Elizabeth Parker and Clyde Champion Barrow

Bonnie Elizabeth Parker was born in 1910 in Rowena, Texas, the second of three children. Her father was a bricklayer who died when Bonnie was four years old. Her widowed mother moved her family back to her parents' home in Cement City, an industrial suburb in West Dallas where she worked as a seamstress.

In her second year in high school, Parker met Roy Thornton. The couple dropped out of school and were married on the 25ᵗʰ of September 1926, six days before her 16ᵗʰ birthday. Their marriage proved to be short-lived. They never divorced, but their paths never crossed again after January 1929. She was still wearing his wedding ring when she died. Thornton was in prison when he heard of her death. He commented, "I'm glad they went out like they did. It's much better than being caught".

Clyde Champion Barrow was born in 1909 into a poor farming family in Ellis County, Texas, southeast of Dallas. He was the fifth of seven children. The family moved to Dallas in the early 1920s, part of a migration pattern from rural areas to the city where many settled in the urban slum of West Dallas. The Barrows spent their first months in West Dallas living under their wagon until they got enough money to buy a tent.

Clyde was first arrested in late 1926, at age 17, after running when police confronted him over a rental car that he had failed to return on time. His second arrest was with brother Ivan M. “Buck” Barrow soon after for possession of stolen turkeys. Clyde had some legitimate jobs during 1927 through 1929, but he also cracked safes, robbed stores, and stole cars.

Bonnie met Clyde on the 5ᵗʰ of January 1930 at the home of Clyde's friend. Clyde was 20 years old, and Bonnie was 19. Both were smitten immediately. But their romance was interrupted when Clyde was arrested and convicted of auto theft in April 1930 at the age of 21.

Clyde  escaped the prison shortly after his incarceration using a weapon Bonnie smuggled to him. He was recaptured shortly after and sent back to prison. Clyde was repeatedly sexually assaulted while in prison, and he retaliated by attacking and killing his tormentor with a lead pipe, crushing his skull. This was his first killing. Another inmate, who was already serving a life sentence, claimed responsibility.

In order to avoid hard labor in the fields, Clyde purposely had his two toes chopped off by either him or another inmate in late January 1932. Because of this, he walked with a limp for the rest of his life. However, Clyde was set free six days after his intentional injury because without his knowledge, his mother had successfully petitioned for his release.

After his release from prison in 1932 Clyde formed a gang and robbed grocery stores and gas stations. In February 1932, he and Fults began a series of robberies, primarily of stores and gas stations. Their goal was to collect enough money and firepower to launch a raid against Eastham prison. On April 19, Parker and Fults were captured in a failed hardware store burglary in Kaufman in which they had intended to steal firearms. Parker was released from jail in a few months, after the grand jury failed to indict her; Fults was tried, convicted, and served time. He never rejoined the gang.

On April 30, Clyde was the getaway driver in a robbery in Hillsboro during which store owner J.N. Bucher was shot and killed. Bucher's wife identified Clyde from police photographs as one of the shooters, although he had stayed outside in the car.

Later in 1932, Bonnie and Clyde began traveling with Raymond Hamilton, a young gunman. Hamilton left them several months later and was replaced by William Daniel Jones in November 1932.

On August 5, Barrow was drinking alcohol with Hamilton, at a country dance in Stringtown, Oklahoma when Sheriff C.G. Maxwell and Deputy Eugene C. Moore approached them in the parking lot. Clyde and Raymond opened fire, killing Moore and gravely wounding Maxwell. Moore was the first law officer that Barrow and his gang had killed; they eventually murdered nine. Hamilton left them several months later and was replaced by William Daniel Jones in November 1932.

Ivan M. “Buck” Barrow, brother of Clyde, was released from the Texas State Prison on the 23ʳᵈ of March 1933, having been granted a full pardon by the governor. He quickly joined Clyde, bringing his wife, Blanche, so the group now numbered five persons. This gang embarked upon a series of bold robberies which made headlines across the country. They escaped capture in various encounters with the law. However, their activities made law enforcement efforts to apprehend them even more intense.

Barrow did not see warning signs at a bridge under construction on June 10, while driving with Jones and Parker near Wellington, Texas, and the car flipped into a ravine. Clyde sustained third-degree burns to her right leg. In July 1933, the gang checked in to the Red Crown Tourist Court south of Platte City, Missouri. Bonnie and William Daniel went into town to purchase bandages and atropine sulfate to treat Parker's leg. The druggist contacted Sheriff Holt Coffey, who put the cabins under surveillance. The sheriff contacted Captain Baxter, who called for reinforcements from Kansas City, including an armored car. Sheriff Coffey led a group of officers toward the cabins at 11 p.m., armed with Thompson submachine guns.  But in the gunfight which ensued, the .45 caliber Thompsons proved no match for Clydes's .30 caliber BAR, stolen on July 7 from the National Guard armory. The gang had evaded the law once again, but Buck Barrow had sustained a bullet wound that blasted a large hole in his forehead skull bone and exposed his injured brain, and Blanche was nearly blinded by glass fragments in both her eyes. On another fire exchange on July 24, Buck was shot again nd Blanche was captured.

On the 28ᵗʰ of November 1933 a Dallas grand jury delivered a murder indictment against Bonnie and Clyde for the killing – in January of that year, nearly ten months earlier – of Tarrant County Deputy Malcolm Davis. it was Clyde's first warrant for murder.

On the 16ᵗʰ of January 16 1934, Clyde orchestrated the escape of Hamilton, Methvin, and several others inmates in the “Eastham Prison Breakout”. During his escape, Clyde's Gang member Joe Palmer fatally wounded Major Joe Crowson. This attack attracted the full power of the Texas and federal government to the manhunt for Bonnie and Clyde. The Texas Department of Corrections contacted former Texas Ranger Captain Frank Hamer and persuaded him to hunt down the gang. He was retired, but his commission had not expired. He accepted the assignment as a Texas Highway Patrol officer, secondarily assigned to the prison system as a special investigator, and given the specific task of taking down Bonnie and Clyde. For 20 years, Frank Hamer had acquired a formidable reputation as a result of several spectacular captures and the shooting of a number of Texas criminals. He was officially credited with 53 kills, and suffered seventeen wounds. Prison boss Simmons said publicly that Hamer had been his first choice, but the other rangers contacted declined because they were reluctant to shoot a woman.

On the 1ˢᵗ of April 1934, Bonnie and Clyde encountered two young highway patrolmen near Grapevine, Texas. Before the officers could draw their guns, they were shot. On April 6, 1934, a constable at Miami, Oklahoma fell mortally wounded by Bonnie and Clyde, who also abducted a police chief, whom they wounded.

On the 13ᵗʰ April 1934, an FBI agent, through investigation in the vicinity of Ruston, Louisiana, obtained information which definitely placed Bonnie and Clyde in a remote section southwest of that community.

On the evening of the 21ˢᵗ of May 1934, a police posse comprised of six members from Texas and Louisiana police departments including Frank Hamer set up an ambush on the main road into Bienville Parish. The posse waited for Bonnie and Clyde for the entire night, and the next day and night. Then, as they were nearly giving up, the duo arrived driving a stolen Ford V8 at a high speed. Police used Methvin's gather as a bait planting him with his truck on the side of the road to distract Clyde and force him into the lane closer to the posse. Before Bonnie or Clyde had time even to exit the car, the police opened fire. Clyde was killed instantly by a shot to the head, and one of the officers recounted hearing Bonnie scream as she realized he was dead. The officers emptied their entire supply of ammunition into the car, firing 130 rounds in all. The coroner’s report detailed 17 holes in Clyde’s body and 26 holes in Bonnie’s body. Unofficially, there may have been many more.

Bonnie and Clyde

[lifelastingcouples]

Alicia Lardé Lopez-Harrison and John Forbes Nash Jr.

Alicia Lardé Lopez-Harrison was born January 1, 1933, in El Salvador, Both of her parents came from socially prominent, well travelled families who spoke several languages. When Lardé was a child, her father traveled to the United States a few times before deciding to move the family there permanently in 1944.Lardé was accepted to the Marymount School with the help of a letter of recommendation from El Salvador's Ambassador to the United States. Following graduation from Marymount, Lardé was accepted into Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to study physics. She was one of very few women studying at MIT in the 1950s. It was there she met her future husband, John Forbes Nash, Jr.

John Forbes Nash Jr. was born on June 13, 1928 in West Virginia. His father was an electrical engineer. His mother Margaret Virginia had been a schoolteacher before she was married. After graduating in 1948 (at age 19) with both a B.S. and M.S. in mathematics, Nash accepted a scholarship to Princeton University, where he pursued further graduate studies in mathematics. Nash's adviser and former Carnegie professor Richard Duffin wrote a letter of recommendation for Nash's entrance to Princeton stating, "He is a mathematical genius".

John obtained his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton in 1950 and joined the faculty at MIT in 1951. For a time he had anaffair with a nurse, Eleanor Stier, and together they had a child,John Stier, although they never married. Instead he became captivated by a beautiful and gifted young woman who was one of his graduate students, Alicia de Larde, who had recently graduated from MIT with a degree in physics. Despite signs of Nash's mental illness had emerged in the early 1950s, the couple married in 1957. Alicia soon became pregnant and gave birth to a son.

During the pregnancy John began to show signs of full-blown paranoia and cognitive disorganization. In 1959, Alicia, John's mother and his sister Martha made the difficult decision to have him involuntarily hospitalized at McLean Hospital. He was treated for several months, and after his discharge he went to Europe with a plan to renounce his U.S. citizenship and avoid future commitments. Alicia retrieved him and sent him back to the United States. She and his sister had him admitted to hospitals in New Jersey, where he was treated with insulin coma and psychotropic medications.

After his discharge later that year, Princeton colleagues secured him a research position, but he soon left for Europe again, this time alone, sending cryptic letters home. Alicia, after three years of turmoil, divorced him in 1962. His math colleagues came to his rescue again, landing him a position at Brandeis University in Boston and arranging for him to meet with a psychiatrist, who prescribed anti-psychotic medication. Nash's condition improved. He began spending time with Eleanor and his first son, John David.

In 1970 Alicia Nash, believing she had made a mistake by originally committing her husband, took him in again, this time as her "boarder," a move that might have prevented his homelessness. In the years following, Nash wandered the Princeton campus, leaving cryptic formulas on blackboards. Princeton students dubbed him "The Phantom”.

Then, in the 1980s, Nash slowly began to get better -- his delusions diminished and he became more engaged with the world around him. Although it is unclear how it happens, a portion of people with schizophrenia do recover as they age. In 1994, at the age of 66, John Nash received the Nobel Prize in Economics in Stockholm, Sweden, for his work on game theory. Thirty-eight years after their divorce, Alicia and John remarried.

On May 23, 2015, John and Alicia Nash were killed in a collision on the New Jersey Turnpike near Monroe Township. They were on their way home after a visit to Norway, where Nash had received the Abel Prize. They were 86 and 82.

John and Alicia Nash

[lifelastingcouples]

Lou Andreas-Salome and Carl Friedrich Andreas

Lou Andreas-Salome was born in St. Petersburg in 1861. She was a writer and psychoanalyst among the best circles of intellectuals of XIX Century.

Lou was the daughter of a Russian army general at the service of the Romanov family. At 17 she met her first mentor, Henrik Gillot, who was a teacher for the sons of tzar Alexander III. Gillot was married by then with children but he quickly fell in love for Lou and asked her marriage, which she refused.

In 1890 Lou travelled to Zurich with her mother where she studied history and religion. Two years later she moved to Rome where she met Paul Ree and became his lover. In Rome she also met Friedrich Nietzsche, and with both she set up an intellectual triangle.

In 1887 she met Carl Friedrich Andreas and married him but their marriage was never consumated at bed. It is said that she married him because he blackmailed her with suicide if she didn't marry, but they never lived together and she had other lovers until Carl died in 1930. Andreas, on his side, had a daughter with their maid, who was very close to Lou when she died.

In 1897 (already married with Carl) Lou met Rainer Maria Rilke with whom she began a long-term romantic relationship. Rilke was fifteen years younger than her but still fell in in love and at the begining was rejected by her. After Rilke enough pestering her, she accepted him in a relationship which varied from love to friendship and admiration. Among other things, she taught Russian to Rilke so that he could read Tolstoi and Pushkin.

In 1902, Paul Ree commited suicide and Lou fell into a deep crisis out of which she came with the help of doctor Friedrich Pineles. She then started a love relationship with Pineles out of which she even had a voluntary abortion.

In 1911, Lou met Sigmund Freud and started practising  psychoanalisys being the only woman accepted in Freud's circle.

Lou remained financially independent from her husband, writing articles and books. She was the first to publish about Nietzsche's legacy, six years after his death, and it is clear that at some time Nietzsche also fell in love with her and proposed marriage which she declined. Some people claim that the seed of the philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra is Lou.

Lou Andreas died in 1937, at 76. Her legacy blended psychonalisys with Nietzsche's philosophy. And her studies were based mostly on narcisism and female sexuality. On one of her writtings she said she liked the Volga river and she wanted to be like it: "Calmly embrace all the banks and not belong to any of them".

Paul Ree, Lou Andreas-Salome and Friedrich Nietzsche.

[lifelastingcouples]

Marie and Pierre Curie

Maria Salomea Skłodowska was born on the 7ᵗʰ of November 1867 in Warsaw. Both her parents were teachers who believed deeply in the importance of education. Marie had her first lessons in physics and chemistry from her father. Maria spent some impoverished years as a teacher and governess before at the age of 24 she joined her sister Bronia in Paris in order to study mathematics and physics at the Sorbonne, earning degrees in both subjects in 1893. In the spring 1894 she met the physicist Pierre Curie. They married in 1985, and Marie subsequently gave birth to two daughters, Irene (1897) and Eve (1904).

Pierre Curie, born on the 15 ᵗʰ of May 18959 obtained his doctorate in the year of he married Maria, but he had already distinguished himself (along with his brother Jacques) in the study of the properties of crystals. He discovered the phenomenon of piezoelectricity, whereby changes in the volume of certain crystals excite small electric potentials.

Since 1882, Pierre had headed the laboratory at the Ecole de Physique et de Chimie Industrielle in Paris, and it was here that both Marie and Pierre continued to work after their marriage. For her doctoral thesis, Madame Curie decided to study the mysterious radiation that had been discovered in 1896 by Henri Becquerel.

Pierre immediately understood the importance of this supposition and joined his wife's work. In the course of their research over the next year, they discovered two new spontaneously radiating elements, which they named polonium (after Marie's native country) and radium. A third element, actinium, was discovered by their colleague Andre Debierne. They now began the tedious and monumental task of isolating these elements so that their chemical properties could be determined.

On the 19ᵗʰ of April 1906, Pierre was run over by a horse-drawn wagon near the Pont Neuf in Paris and killed. Now Marie was left alone with two daughters, Irène aged 9 and Ève aged 2. Shock broke her down totally to begin with. But even now she could draw on the toughness and perseverance that were fundamental aspects of her character. When she was offered a pension, she refused it: I am 38 and able to support myself, was her answer. She was appointed to succeed Pierre as the head of the laboratory and to be responsible for his teaching duties. She thus became the first woman ever appointed to teach at the Sorbonne.

Her daughter Irène was now 9 years old. Marie had definite ideas about the upbringing and education of children that she now wanted to put into practice. Her circle of friends consisted of a small group of professors with children of school age. Marie organized a private school with the parents themselves acting as teachers. A group of some ten children were accordingly taught only by prominent professors: Jean Perrin, Paul Langevin, Édouard Chavannes, a professor of Chinese, Henri Mouton from the Pasteur Institute, a sculptor was engaged for modeling and drawing. Marie took the view that scientific subjects should be taught at an early age but not according to a too rigid curriculum. It was important for children to be able to develop freely. Games and physical activities took up much of the time.

Marie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in 1903, the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice, again in 1911, and the only person ever to win the Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields. She was part of the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes.

Despite the second Nobel Prize and an invitation to the first Solvay Conference with the world’s leading physicists, including Einstein, Poincaré and Planck, 1911 became a dark year in Marie’s life. In two smear campaigns she was to experience the inconstancy of the French press. The first was started on 16 November 1910, when, by an article in Le Figaro, it became known that she was willing to be nominated for election to l’Académie des Sciences. Notwithstanding, it turned out that it was not merit that was decisive. The dark underlying currents of anti-Semitism, prejudice against women, xenophobia and even anti-science attitudes that existed in French society came welling up to the surface. The most rabid paper was the ultra-nationalistic and anti-Semitic L’Action Française. Jokes in bad taste alternated with outrageous accusations. She came from Poland, though admittedly she was formally a Catholic but her name Sklodowska indicated that she might be of Jewish origin, and so on. The vote on January 23, 1911 was taken in the presence of journalists and a tumultuous atmosphere. Marie, lost the election, a Nobel Prize in 1903 and support from prominent researchers such as Jean Perrin, Henri Poincaré, Paul Appell and the permanent secretary of the Académie, Gaston Darboux, were not sufficient to make the Académie open its doors.

However, Marie’s tribulations were not at an end. When, at the beginning of November 1911, Marie went to Belgium, being invited with the world’s most eminent physicists to attend the first Solvay Conference, she received a message that a new campaign had started in the press. Now it was a matter of her private life and her relations with her colleague Paul Langevin, who had also been invited to the conference. He had had marital problems for several years and had moved from his suburban home to a small apartment in Paris. Marie was depicted as the reason. Both were described in slanderous terms. The scandal developed dramatically.

During World War I, Madame Curie dedicated herself entirely to the development of the use of X rays in medicine. In 1918 she took upon herself the direction of the scientific department of the Radium Institute, which she had planned with her husband, and where her daughter Irene Joliot-Curie worked with her husband Frederic Joliot. Marie's research for the rest of her life was dedicated to the chemistry of radioactive materials and their medical applications. She frequently lectured abroad, and she labored to establish international scholarships for scientists.

Marie Curie died on the 4ᵗʰ of July 1934, aged 66, at a sanatorium in Sancellemoz (Haute-Savoie), France, of aplastic anaemia from exposure to radiation in the course of her scientific research and in the course of her radiological work at field hospitals during World War I.

[lifelastingcouples]

María Eva Duarte and Juan Perón

María Eva Duarte was born May 7, 1919 in Los Toldos, Argentina. She was descendant of Basque inmigrants. Eva Peron was from a poor family of four children, her parents were not married, his father had a wife and another family and moreover he died in a car accident. So Eva was raised by a single mother.

To pursue a career in acting, she moved to Buenos Aires when she was 15 years old. Eva established her entertainment company named, Company of the Theater of the Air that produced radio programs.

Eva attracted the attention of a rising star of the new government, Col. Juan Perón. The couple met at the fundraiser's gala at Luna Park Stadium. The fundraising was for the earthquake victim of San Juan, Argentina where more than 10,000 people died. Juan divorced his former wife and married Eva in 1945. Eva was 25 and Juan 49 then. Later that year he was ousted by a coup of rival army and navy officers and briefly taken into custody. After his release, Juan entered the presidential race. He was elected and took office in June 1946.

Being the first Argentinan First Lady to parcipate in political life ever, in 1947, Eva embarked on a much-publicized "Rainbow Tour" of Europe, meeting with numerous dignitaries and heads of state, such as Francisco Franco Bahamonde, António Salazar, Charles de Gaulle and Pope Pius XII. Eva's European tour was featured in a cover story for Time magazine. After returning to Argentina from Europe, Evita never again appeared in public with the complicated hairdos of her movie-star days. The brilliant gold color became more subdued in tone and even the style changed, her hair being pulled back severely into a heavy braided chignon.

Although she never held any government post, Eva acted as de facto minister of health and labour, awarding generous wage increases to the unions, who responded with political support for Perón. After cutting off government subsidies to the traditional Sociedad de Beneficencia (Spanish: “Aid Society”), thereby making more enemies among the traditional elite, she replaced it with her own Eva Perón Foundation, which was supported by “voluntary” union and business contributions. These resources were used to establish thousands of hospitals, schools, orphanages, homes for the aged, and other charitable institutions. Eva was largely responsible for the passage of the woman suffrage law and formed the Peronista Feminist Party in 1949. Also during Eva's time, children born to unmarried parents did not have the same legal rights as those born to married parents. Eva's influenced a change in the law changed so that illegitimate children would henceforth be referred to as natural children .

On 9 January 1950, Evita fainted in public and underwent surgery three days later diagnosted with advanced cervical cancer.

In 1951, already dying of cancer, Eva set her sights on earning a place on the ballot as candidate for vice-president. This move angered many military leaders who despised Eva and her increasing powers within the government in the event of Juan Perón's death. On 22 August 1951, the unions held a mass rally of two million people called "Cabildo Abierto". At the mass rally, the crowd demanded that Eva publicly announce her candidacy as vice president. She pleaded for more time to make her decision. Eventually, she declined the invitation to run for vice-president. She said her only ambition was that in the large chapter of history to be written about her husband.

On 7 May 1952, Evita's 33rd birthday, she was given the official title of "Spiritual Leader of the Nation" by the Argentine Congress.

On 4 June 1952, Evita rode with Juan Perón in a parade through Buenos Aires in celebration of his re-election as President of Argentina.

Eva had an hysterectomy, but her cancer had metastasized and returned rapidly. She was the first Argentine to undergo chemotherapy, a novel treatment at that time. Eva died on the 26ᵗʰ of July 1952.

Immediately after Eva's death, the government suspended all official activities for two days and ordered that all flags be flown at half-staff for ten days. It soon became apparent that these measures fell short of reflecting popular grief. The crowd outside of the presidential residence, where Evita died, grew dense, congesting the streets for ten blocks in each direction. The morning after her death, while Evita's body was being moved to the Ministry of Labour Building, eight people were crushed to death in the throngs. In the following 24 hours, over 2,000 people were treated in city hospitals for injuries sustained in the rush to be near Evita as her body was being transported, and thousands more were treated on the spot. For the following two weeks, lines stretched for many city blocks with mourners waiting hours to see Evita's body lie in state at the Ministry of Labour. The streets of Buenos Aires overflowed with huge piles of flowers. Within a day of Perón's death, all flower shops in Buenos Aires had run out of stock. Flowers were flown in from all over the country, and as far away as Chile. Despite the fact that Eva Perón never held a political office, she was eventually given a state funeral usually reserved for a head of state.

Eva’s legacy is controversial. Some people say that actually she was cold blooded, calculating everything, striving for wealth and power only. And that at the end she was so wealthy that she can’t considered as a person who was fighting for poor people. Perón once  said:  "The only jewel I ever gave my wife was an engagement ring. She acquired everything else”.  But the social changes for the better of the masses in Argentina enabled by Evita are undeniable.

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Christine Jorgensen and Howard J. Knox

Christine Jorgensen was born George William Jorgensen, Jr., in 1926. She graduated from Christopher Columbus High School in 1945 and was soon drafted into the U.S. Army at the age of 19. Returning to New York after military service, and increasingly concerned over a lack of male physical development, she began taking estrogen and started researching surgery. She obtained special permission from the Danish Minister of Justice to undergo a series of operations in that country. On the 24ᵗʰ of September 1951 she had her first of a series of operations. The New York Daily News ran a front-page story on the 1ˢᵗ of December 1952, under the headline "Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty". Jorgensen was an instant celebrity when she returned to New York in February 1953. Soon after her arrival, she launched a successful nightclub act and appeared on TV, radio, and theatrical productions. The publicity following her transition became a model for other transsexuals for decades. She was a tireless lecturer on the subject of transsexuality, pleading for understanding from a public that all too often wanted to see transsexuals as freaks or perverts. In 1959 she announced her engagement to typist Howard J. Knox in Massapequa Park, New York. However, the couple were unable to obtain a marriage license because Jorgensen's birth certificate listed her as male. In a report about the broken engagement, The New York Times reported that Knox had lost his job in Washington, D.C., when his engagement to Jorgensen became known. Jorgensen continued her act, performing at Freddy's Supper Club on the Upper East Side of Manhattan until 1982. She died of cancer in 1989 our weeks short of her 63ʳᵈ birthday.

Knox and Jorgensen after being denied a marriage license, April 1959

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Elton John and David Furnish

Sir Elton Hercules John was born on the 25 of March 1947. ohn learned to play piano at an early age, and by 1962 had formed Bluesology, an R&B band with whom he played until 1967. John has sold more than 300 million records and His tribute single "Candle in the Wind 1997", rewritten in dedication to Diana, Princess of Wales, sold over 33 million copies worldwide and is the best-selling single in the history of the UK and US singles charts.

In the late 1960s, John was engaged to be married to his first lover, secretary Linda Woodrow. In 1970, he started his first gay relationship with John Reid, the Tamla Motown label manager for the UK. The relationship ended five years later. He then married German recording engineer Renate Blauel on the 14ᵗʰ of February 1984, with speculation that the marriage was a cover for his homosexuality. John had come out as bisexual in a 1976 interview with Rolling Stone, but, after his divorce from Blauel in 1988, he told the magazine in 1992 that he was "quite comfortable about being gay".

In 1993, sober for three years following more than a decade of substance abuse, John was learning to live life without drugs or alcohol. Having returned to his estate in Windsor, John decided to expand his social circle so he rang a friend and asked him to rattle some new people together for dinner . David Furnish, an advertisement executive based in London, agreed to accompany John's friend to the meal but was prepared for a dull evening. It proved to be anything but boring as the host and guest soon became acquainted.

“I was attracted to David immediately”, John told. “He had a real job, his own apartment, a car. He was independent. I didn’t need to take care of him. I thought, ‘God, this is new territory for me — someone wants to be with me just because he likes me.’ I knew he was the one because he is not afraid of me. He always tells me exactly what he thinks.”

That initial attraction was mutual, with Furnish returning to John’s home the very next evening for a more relaxed one-on-one dinner of Chinese takeout (from the trendy London restaurant Mr. Chow’s).

On the 21ˢᵗ of December 2005 (the day the Civil Partnership Act came into force), John and Furnish were among the first couples to form a civil partnership in the United Kingdom. In 2008, John said he preferred civil partnerships to marriage for gay people, but by 2012 he had changed his position and become a staunch supporter of same-sex marriage in the United Kingdom. After gay marriage became legal in the United Kingdom in March 2014, John and Furnish married in Windsor, on the 21ˢᵗ of December 2014, on the ninth anniversary of their civil partnership.

They have two sons born in 2010 and 2013 from the same surrogate woman.

Elton John and David Furnish Family

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June Carter and Johnny Cash

June Carter was Born in Maces Springs, Virginia on June 23rd, 1929, her mother Valerie was a musician.

In the 1940s June, along with her mother and her two sisters, formed The Carter Sisters band, playing eventually joining the cast of the national country music showcase the Grand Ole Opry. It was at the the Opry where June met honky-tonk singer Carl Smith, whom she married in 1952. Together had one daughter, Carlene, who would become a successful country musician.

In Grand Ole Opry 1956 Johnny Cash made his debut. He had recently released the song "I Walk the Line" which had become a then-rare crossover hit with fans of both pop and country. Carl Smith welcomed Cash to the show, but it was a backstage introduction that would make the biggest impact on Smith's wife, June. “I can’t remember anything else we talked about, except his eyes,” June Carter wrote in the notes on Cash’s 2000 box set, Love, God, Murder.

By the early 1960s, Carter was touring with Cash regularly as a backup singer, duet partner, and entertainer. She had by that time divorced from Carl Smith, but was now married to a police officer named Edwin Nix, with whom she would have another daughter, Rosie, who also became a country musician. Both Carter and Cash would remain married to their spouses until 1966 and 1967 respectively.

Thought the 1960s, Cash famously dealt with a serious addiction to drugs and alcohol. His marriage was crumbling under his frequent absences, infidelities, and addictions and he was known to cancel or simply miss concert appearances. Cash was arrested seven times on offenses related to drugs or alcohol, including a 1965 arrest after Cash crossed the border from Texas to Juarez, Mexico and was caught returning with over 1,000 amphetamine tablets in his possession. Cash proposed to Carter onstage at the London Ice House in front of a crowd of 7,000 in February 1968. They married just a few weeks later.

Together the two continued in fruitful musical careers for many years, sharing grammy awards in 1967 and 1970 in addition to their individual awards (2 solo Grammys for Carter and 11 for Cash, including a lifetime achievement award.) They also helmed The Johnny Cash Show, a TV variety show featuring musical guests like Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson between 1969-1971.

Their only child together, John Carter Cash, was born in 1970. He would go on to become a musician and music producer in his own right.

Cash’s love letter to Carter for her 65ᵗʰ birthday is now considered to be one of the best love letters of all time.

The couple remained together for the rest of their lives, passing away a scant four months apart: Carter in May 2003, Cash that September. Throughout that time they remained an iconic music love story who inspired 2018 A Star Is Born movie with Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga.

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Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski

Sharon Marie Tate born on the 24ᵗʰ of January 1943, being the eldest daughter of US Army Colonel Paul James Tate. At six months of age, Tate won the “Miss Tiny Tot of Dallas Pageant”, but her parents had no show business ambitions for their daughter. Paul Tate was promoted and transferred several times. By the age of 16, Tate had lived in six cities . As she matured, people commented on Tate's beauty; she began entering beauty pageants, winning the title of Miss Richland in Washington in 1959.

The family returned to the United States in 1962 and Tate moved to Los Angeles, where she contacted Richard Beymer's agent, Harold Gefsky. After their first meeting, Gefsky agreed to represent her, and secured work for her in television and magazine advertisements.  During this time, Tate met the French actor Philippe Forquet and began a relationship with him in 1963. They became engaged, but their relationship was volatile and they frequently quarreled.

In 1964 she met Jay Sebring, a former sailor who had established himself as a leading hair stylist in Hollywood. Tate later said that Sebring's nature was especially gentle, but when he proposed marriage, she declined. She said she would retire from acting as soon as she married, and at that time she intended to focus on her career.

In 1965, the producer Martin Ransohoff gave Tate her first major role in a motion picture in the film Eye of the Devil, costarring David Niven, Deborah Kerr, Donald Pleasence, and David Hemmings. Tate and Sebring traveled to London to prepare for filming. Much of the filming took place in France, and Sebring returned to Los Angeles to fulfill his business obligations. After filming, Tate remained in London, where she met Roman Polanski.

Tate and Polanski later agreed that neither of them had been impressed by the other when they first met. Tate returned to the United States to film Don't Make Waves with Tony Curtis, leaving Polanski in London.

In late 1967, Tate and Polanski returned to London and were frequent subjects of newspaper and magazine articles. She was depicted as being untraditional and modern, and was quoted as saying that couples should live together before marrying. They were married in Chelsea, London on January 20, 1968. Polanski was dressed in Edwardian finery, while Tate was attired in a white minidress. Photographer Peter Evans described them as "The imperfect couple. Cool, nomadic, talented, and nicely shocking". Tate reportedly wanted a traditional marriage, but Polanski remained promiscuous and described her attitude to his infidelity as “Sharon's big hang-up”. He reminded her that she had promised not to change him. Tate accepted his conditions, though she confided to friends that she hoped that he would change. Peter Evans quoted Tate as saying, "We have a good arrangement. Roman lies to me and I pretend to believe him".

Polanski urged Tate to end her association with Martin Ransohoff, and she began to place less importance on her career until Polanski told her that he wanted to be married to "a hippie, not a housewife". The couple returned to Los Angeles and quickly became part of a social group that included some of the most successful young people in the film industry, including Warren Beatty, Jacqueline Bisset, Leslie Caron, Joan Collins, Mia Farrow, Jane Fonda, Peter Fonda, Laurence Harvey, Steve McQueen, Joanna Pettet, and Peter Sellers; older film stars such as Yul Brynner, Kirk Douglas, Henry Fonda, and Danny Kaye.

Sharon became pregnant near the end of 1968, and she and Polanski moved to 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles on the 15 ᵗʰ of February 1969.

On the 8ᵗʰ of August 1969 Tate entertained actress Joanna Pettet and singer Barbara Lewis for lunch at her home, confiding in them her disappointment at Polanski's delay in returning from London. That evening, she dined with her former fiancé Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, and Abigail Folger, returning all to 10050 Cielo Drive at about 10:30 p.m. Soon afterwards, members of Charles Manson's “Family” broke into the house and murdered Tate, Sebring, Frykowski and Folger shortly after midnight. Their bodies were discovered the following morning by Tate's housekeeper Winifred Chapman. Police arrived at the scene to find a young man shot dead in his car in the driveway, later identified as Steven Parent. Inside the house, the bodies of Tate and Sebring were found in the living room. Tate was interred in the Holy Cross Cemetery of Culver City with her son Paul Richard Polanski in her arms.

In September 1969, members of “The Manson Family” were arrested, eventually leading authorities to a breakthrough on the Tate case. The Manson murder trial was the longest murder trial in American history when it occurred, lasting nine and a half months. On January 25, 1971, the jury found James Manson, Patricia Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins and Leslie Van Houten guilty of murder. During the penalty phase of the trial, each of the three female defendants, Atkins, Van Houten, and Krenwinkel  provided graphic details of the murders and testified that Manson was not involved. According to the female defendants, they had committed the crimes in order to help fellow Manson Family member Bobby Beausoleil get out of jail, where he was being held for the murder of Gary Hinman. The female defendants testified that the Tate-LaBianca murders were intended to be “copycat” crimes, similar to the Hinman killing.

Manson was admitted to state prison from Los Angeles County on the 22ⁿᵈ of April 1971, for seven counts of first-degree murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder. When the death penalty was ruled out in 1972, Manson was resentenced to lifetime imprisonment on the 2ⁿᵈ of February 1977.

Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski on their wedding day in January 1968.

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Yoko Ono and John Lennon

Yoko Ono was born in Tokyo in 1933. Yoko's father, Eisuke came from a long line of aristocratic samurai warrior-scholars. Two weeks before Ono's birth, Eisuke was transferred to San Francisco by his employer, the Yokohama Specie Bank. The rest of the family followed two years after, with Ono meeting her father for her first time when she was two. The family moved to New York City in 1940. The next year, Eisuke was transferred from New York City to Hanoi, and the family returned to Japan. Starvation was rampant in the destruction that followed the Tokyo bombings; the Ono family was forced to beg for food while pulling their belongings with them in a wheelbarrow.

Yoko moved back again to US, this time to New York city in 1953 to pursue her career as painter, singer and songwriter. In 1956, Ono married the Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, but they filled for divorce in 1962. Ono returned home to live with her parents and was suffering from clinical depression when she was placed into a mental institution. Later that year, on November 28, 1962, Ono married Anthony Cox, an American jazz musician, film producer, and art promoter, who was instrumental in securing her release from the mental institution. She gave birth to their daughter Kyoko Chan on August 8, 1963.

Yoko met John Lennon in November 1966 at the Indica Art Gallery in London, where Ono was preparing for an exhibition of her work. By that time, Yoko was still married to Anthony Cox However, Yoko and John, instantaneously connected and began a whirlwind romance. Yoko divorced Anthony Cox and married John on March 20, 1969 in Gibraltar and they spent their honeymoon in Amsterdam. Lennon changed his name by deed poll on April 22, 1969, switching out Winston for Ono as a middle name. Although he used the name John Ono Lennon thereafter, official documents referred to him as John Winston Ono Lennon, since he was not permitted to revoke a name given at birth.

Soon after, the couple embarked on their “bagism” period which included creating a series of lithographs that depicted the pair on their honeymoon. This was one of many collaborations that Lennon and Ono would ultimately undertake. Famously, the duo staged a series of unforgettable “bed-ins,” which were akin to the sit-in form of protest popular at the time.

Ono influenced Lennon to produce more "autobiographical" output and, after "The Ballad of John and Yoko", they decided it would be better to form their own band rather than put the material out under the Beatles name. In 1969, the Plastic Ono Band's first album, Live Peace in Toronto 1969, was recorded during the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival festival. This first incarnation of the group also consisted of guitarist Eric Clapton, bass player Klaus Voormann, and drummer Alan White.

After the Beatles disbanded in 1970, Ono and Lennon lived together in London and then moved permanently to Manhattan to escape perceived tabloid racism towards Ono. Their relationship became strained because Lennon was facing the threat of deportation due to drug charges that had been filed against him in England, and because of Ono's separation from her daughter. In 2015 Yoko declared that she had a lesbian affair with Hillary Clinton when Yoko I living with John in Manhattan and Hillary was studying at Yale. Yoko and John separated in July 1973, with Ono pursuing her career and Lennon living between Los Angeles and New York with had personal assistant May Pang (Ono had given her blessing to Lennon and Pang's relationship).

By December 1974, Lennon and Pang considered buying a house together, and he refused to accept Ono's phone calls. The next month, Lennon agreed to meet with Ono, who claimed to have found a cure for smoking. After the meeting, Lennon failed to return home or call Pang. When she telephoned the next day, Ono told her Lennon was unavailable, because he was exhausted after a hypnotherapy session. Two days later, Lennon reappeared at a joint dental appointment with Pang; he was stupefied and confused to such an extent that Pang believed he had been brainwashed. He told her his separation from Ono was now over, though Ono would allow him to continue seeing her as his mistress.

On 1975, Yoko and John had a son, Sean, and John took a hiatus from the music industry and became a stay-at-home dad to care for his infant.

On the morning of of 8 December 1980 Annie Leibovitz took a portrait of Lennon and Ono. That evening Lennon was shot dead in New York City at close distance from Yoko. The perpetrator was a recently unemployed resident of Hawaii who stated that he was incensed by Lennon's lifestyle and public statements, especially his much-publicized remark about the Beatles being "more popular than Jesus".