nine relationships even worse than yours

I wrote this piece a couple of years ago for the Valentine's Day issue of a magazine that has since gone under. It starts out kind of predictably with your usual suspects like Joey Buttafuoco and John Bobbitt, but stick with it to the end and you'll read about kings and queens and a hot lead butt plug and a little disemboweling between incestuous Roman parents. It's all a good time had in the name of love...

It may be that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, but it is equally true that nothing soothes those scorch marks like the cooling unguent of schadenfreude. In the spirit of making our relationship woes seem like cute little animals by comparison, do allow me to present the top nine worst relationship moments in history.

Love, American Style: These stories are not news to any American with a television, yet they do deserve a retelling.  If only to remind us that no matter how angry our lover has made us, at least we haven’t yet attempted murder. Hopefully.

Without a doubt, the pregnant Laci Peterson’s 2002 murder by husband Scott Peterson is the most tragic of these stories, for it is the only one ending in death. The story is made more tragic by the fact that Peterson killed his pregnant wife on or around Christmas eve, and that he killed her to pursue his sociopathic fantasy life with his girlfriend, the massage therapist Amber Frey. Yet more fantastic, as Peterson sits on San Quentin’s death row, he continues to receive fan mail from scads of women suffering from hybristophilia, or the sexual arousal by people who have committed violent crimes.

During the night of June 23, 1993, John Bobbit woke to realize that something very important, very close and very dear to him was missing: his penis. His wife, Lorena, had severed the sex organ, taken it in hand, gotten in her car and while driving, flung it out the window of the speeding car because she found him selfish, particularly in bed. After a diligent search, the local Manassas, Virginia police found the severed penis, and doctors reattached it to the vastly relieved and, we can imagine, terrifically angry John Bobbit, who then used his notoriety to star in a couple of porn flicks, Frankenpenis and John Wayne Bobbit….Uncut. Interestingly, while husband John was memorialized by porn tapes, wife Lorena was memorialized by biologists who named a species after her: the Bobbit worm, an aquatic sea worm whose female purportedly nips off the sex organ of her partner after copulation and feeds it to her young. The couple divorced in 1995.

Nothing says love like attempted murder, prostitution, and statutory rape, albeit in reverse order. When sixteen year-old Amy Fisher brought her car to Joey Buttafuoco’s body shop in the spring of 1991, she could not have known that she was starting a chain of events that would eventually land her in prison for seven years for shooting her lover’s wife. But that’s what Fisher, known later as the Long Island Lolita, did—first becoming the meaty auto body shop owner’s girlfriend and then his prostitute and then the would-be murderess of his wife, Mary Jo. Of the three main characters in this suburban soap opera, Fisher ends up most happy—a prize-winning journalist, an author, and now a proud amateur porn auteur—Fisher’s  success suggests that sometimes crime does pay.

Artists and Lovers: Oh those crazy-cat artist type and their mad-cap ways! Three cheers for abuse, schizophrenia, neuroses, pederasty, suicides, and taxidermy!

It was no secret that F. Scott Fitzgerald drew on his lively wife Zelda for his deft depictions of jazz-age flappers like Daisy Buchanan in his masterpiece The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald, who married Zelda in 1920, seemed to thrive on the escapades of his jazz-age darling, but what his large reading public didn’t know was that he purloined his wife’s diary for swaths of dialogue and description. If plagiarism isn’t enough, when living in Paris in 1924, Fitzgerald suspected his wife’s affair with French aviator Edouard Jozan, so he locked her in the house for weeks, thereby bringing Zelda in touch with her schizophrenic side. As for Zelda, the author of Save Me the Waltz, her attachment to sanity had always been tenuous, and she was prone to flamboyant acts such as throwing her body in front of Fitzgerald’s moving car, jumping into dark stairwells, making soup out of dinner guests’ jewelry and burning all of her clothes in the bathtub. F. Scott Fitzgerald died from complications of a heart attack in 1940; though separated from her husband for over ten years, Zelda was heartbroken by his death and died in a sanitarium fire while awaiting shock therapy in 1947.

On his wedding night in 1848, John Ruskin, artist, critic, poet, and architect of Victorian and Edwardian aesthetic theory, took one look at his wife Effie’s pubic hair and freaked out. That would be the short story. The longer story is this: they never consummated the marriage, and it was annulled six years later (Effie subsequently married Ruskin’s protégé John Everett Millais). Ruskin’s horror was not reserved for female genitals; he also had a deep fear of babies. However, he had a strong attachment to prepubescent girls, falling in love with the nine year-old Rose la Touche, eventually asking her to marry him when she turned seventeen. He was fifty. Her parents, mercifully, did not say yes.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painter, poet and member of  the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood didn’t let a little thing like having buried a packet of poems with his wife’s body stand in his way of publication. Elizabeth Siddal, Rossetti’s wife and a poet in her own right, died in 1862 from an overdose of laudanum following the stillbirth of her and Rossetti’s second child. Seven years later, Rossetti, addicted to drugs and alcohol, and worried that he could no longer paint, returned in the dead of night, exhumed his wife’s coffin, removed his packet of manuscripts, and later reported that Siddal’s body was in unusually pristine condition. The manuscripts, however damaged by a rather large wormhole, were readable; he published them in 1871. Oddly, critics, including John Ruskin, did not receive them well; they found them really rather too erotic.

Eighteenth-century playwright William Congreve’s bawdy comedies like 1700’s The Way of the World may have been blamed for the descent of British morality by critics like Jeremy Collier, but at least he could rely on the patronage of his lover Henrietta, the Duchess of Montague—even after death. Congreve may have retired from the stage twenty years before his death in 1729, but Henrietta remained steadfastly his champion, and no more so than when upon Congreve’s death, she had his body taxidermied in a sitting position so that Congreve could attend her at table and watch over her while she slept. Apparently even dead, Congreve’s company was preferred by the Duchess over that of her husband. When Henrietta died in 1733, Congreve was interred at Westminster Abbey. It’s not reported if his body remained seated.

The Ruling Passions of Kings, Queens, Courts, and Goats:  Oh, sure, everyone knows about how Henry VII offed Anne Boleyn’s head so that he could marry the toothsome Jane Seymour and how Nero fiddled with young boys as Rome fell. But what about those lesser known—and possibly more egregious—political precursors? Power, they say, tends to corrupt, but absolute power tends to corrupt sexually.

By 1327 King Edward II of England knew his marriage had hit bottom, rather literally, in his case. His wife Isabella of France had aligned herself with one of his more power-hungry ministers, managed a small coup, come out on top, and ensconced her husband in a tower in Gloucestershire. As if this indignity wasn’t quite bad enough for poor Edward, Isabella further exhibited her unhappiness with their marriage by bringing Edward’s lover to him and castrating the young man in front of him, afterwards setting fire to his testicles. She drove the point home, as it were, by having minions hold Edward down, insert a funnel into his rectum and fill it with molten lead. Though the veracity of this historical account remains debatable, it’s such a fantastic story—and by “fantastic” I mean “horrifying”—it has to be treated as truth.  So that’s what happened. Really.

Tiberius Caesar Augustus, Roman Emperor from 14 to 37 A.D.., knew how to par-tay. He did not, however, like his second wife, Julia, taking the same liberties. In 12 A.D., Tiberia banished Julia was for having had multiple affairs. He placed her and her mother on a remote island just 1.54 km2 as a punishment, though it’s historically clear that as much as Julia may have been enjoying a backdoor Roman or two, Tiberius also banished her to clear the way toward naming his successor, a son outside of her political line. In any case, after her death either by malnourishment or suicide, depending on the historian, Tiberius retreated to the island of Capri, where he staged elaborate sex scenes with locals and royals, boys and girls, willing and not. He was kind of like the Hugh Hefner of the ancient world, only without the silicone but with goats. And the right to murder. Tiberius died at the age of 79; happily his line continued with Caligula, his grandson.

What should you take away from today’s little sybaritic history lesson? No matter how bad it gets between you and yours, as long as you have your life and all your limbs, you’re better off than some princes and poets, journalists or prostitutes. Just don’t get any ideas; sometimes it’s better to live vicariously.

Comments

[Z]

I'd throw Modigliani into the mix, too - a man who literally drove women insane.

[Maggie]

Reminds me of Catherine the Great, whose husband spent their wedding night drunkenly passed out next to her and brought his toy soldiers into bed with them for years. It's now known for sure if he was impotent or simply not interested, but by the time they actually consummated the marriage several years later Catherine was 3 months pregnant by someone else. Ah, the sordid lives of the European monarchs!

[Karl Friedrich Gauss]

I notice that your relationship with Donny didn't figure in the nine worst of all time. Or was that because you wrote this article some time ago? Anyway, great concept and wonderful execution. I know someone who used to refer to this kind of lore as "relationshit".

[Jack]

Once Tiberius and Caligula get mentioned you really need to discuss Messalina...

[badinfluencegirl]

dude seriously, her relationship with donny was lovely and ended not so well... i don't think it matches molten lead in the ass.

ouch

thanks for this, it's freaking awesome... maybe my favourite vd-day post of all time.