Tom Jones’ wild love life – hundreds of affairs, love child and doting wife

Welsh superstar Sir Tom Jones celebrated his 84th birthday this week, without the love of his life.

The singer lost his beloved ‘Lady Linda’ to lung cancer back in 2015. And while his appetite for affairs during their marriage is well documented, he never considered leaving his first love.

“I still love my wife,” he told the Telegraph in 2012. “The longer you’re married, it changes. It’s no longer a sex thing. There’s got to be more than that for it to last. We both came from a working-class background, we both came from the same place, so we’re not like two foreign people having to explain to the other what their childhood was like. We grew up together. To walk away from that would be terrible.”

Here, we look at Sir Tom’s complicated love life over the years, including the devastating moment his late wife found out about his infidelity…

Love of his life

Despite his womanising ways Sir Tom always maintained his wife of 59 years was ‘the love of my life’, saying he had ‘never had that feeling for anyone else, I don’t think you can fall in love more than once’. Linda died from lung cancer in 2016, aged 75, a time the singer described as the ‘lowest part of my life’.

The couple met when they were 12, the year the Sexbomb singer was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent two years recuperating in his bed. Linda, Tom revealed in his 2015 autobiography Over the Top and Back, would smile at him as she walked to school in Treforest, South Glamorgan, and when he turned 15 she agreed to go on a date.

Linda later fell pregnant and the couple married shortly after her 16th birthday at Pontypridd register office, in 1957. She remained in the background throughout Tom’s career, which began with his manager claiming he was a 22-year-old single Welsh coal miner rather than 24 and married, with a seven-year-old son called Mark. The performer had never been down a coal mine either, although his dad had worked at the local colliery.

It isn’t known how much Linda knew about the true extent of her husband’s philandering but she did find out about several of his affairs, including her husband’s relationship with Miss World Marjorie Wallace. “I stood there and took it,” said Sir Tom speaking of his wife’s reaction after he was pictured on a Barbados beach with 19-year-old Marjorie in 1976. “She chinned me. I said ‘Go ahead’. She punched and shouted.”

The singer hinted the couple had come to an arrangement in the late 1960s, when his wife stopped going on the road with him. “She doesn’t ask,” he said. After conceiving their son, Linda was left infertile after a miscarriage so it must have been painful when it emerged her husband had fathered a child with US model Katherine Berkery in 1987. She moved back to Wales but later returned to their home in Los Angeles.

Tom denied parentage of his son Jonathan for two decades and later blamed Katherine for his conception, saying “I was tricked, really. I just fell for it.” He went onto pay a £50,000 out of court settlement.

Tom and Linda spent the majority of their marriage in Los Angeles after moving there in 1987. But biographer Sean Smith said while the couple had been married more than 50 years, they had probably only spent 10 years in each other’s company.

“Linda has her housekeeper and gardener and sees more of them than anyone else,” he said. “She hasn’t flown in years and is unlikely to come back to the UK again. When Tom’s in LA they are a retired couple in their 70s, having gentle drives and enjoying reading in the sun and TV, like a million other pensioners.”

In later years, Sir Tom revealed his wife had suffered depression for most of her life and had recently ‘lost her spark’. He told how she had emphysema and used a stairlift and hinted that she had become agoraphobic too. Linda, who enjoyed watching TV and drinking champagne, once reportedly told a pal she ‘never felt good enough to be Tom’s wife’.

Despite their unconventional marriage filled with lengthy amounts of time spent apart, he was heartbroken when she died. “I honestly didn’t think I was going to get through it,” the singer told the Observer magazine in 2021. “Now every time I step on stage, Linda is with me. Before she died, she said: ‘Don’t think of me dying, think of me laughing’. That’s how I remember her.”

Significant relationships

Quizzed on US TV why his affairs were left out of his memoirs, Sir Tom said: “I don’t think it’s important. It’s not what has made me. It’s not what got you there.”

Sir Tom met Miss World Marjorie Wallace in 1973 when she was invited backstage at his gig at the London Palladium. He was instantly smitten and with Marjorie’s birthday days apart from his wife Linda’s, a month later he went shopping for two bracelets.

When the singer and Marjorie were pictured kissing on a Barbados beach in 1974 she was stripped of her pageant crown. Just two weeks later her fiancé, racing driver Peter Revson, was killed at 35 during a practice run for the 1974 South African Grand Prix. Marjorie turned to Tom for comfort but they were soon caught by photographers by the ­poolside at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas and Tom, fearing Linda’s ­reaction, ended the relationship.

“This one could really get to me” Sir Tom had told a pal of his fling with Marjorie, who went onto date footballer George Best and tennis star Jimmy Connors. “We stayed friends and we are often in touch,” Marjorie told the Sunday Mirror in 2012. “It is great to speak to him on the telephone once in a while. I always follow his career and I am really pleased he is going to be coaching up-and-coming ­singers. He has such a beautiful voice.”

The It’s Not Unusual singer had previously enjoyed a two-year relationship with Mary Wilson, singer with The Supremes. Their affair began when Sir Tom toured the States in 1968 and his wife Linda later became suspicious when she learned Mary had flown over to the UK for a performance in Bournemouth.

The singer and his manager smuggled Mary out of his flat in the town and removed any trace of his mistress – but forgot about the meal she had cooked for him, which was in the oven. “You’d better straighten it out, because you won’t be able to do anything without your balls,” his livid wife told him when she arrived.

“I was in love with Tom Jones, I will say that, I cannot not say that, because it is very true,” said Mary, who died in 2021. “But you know, after a while I realised that he was a married man and that I needed not to be involved. That didn’t stop me from caring for him at all, but he broke up the relationship and it was good that that happened. And for years I was like devastated because he was one of the loves of my life.”

Sir Tom was also linked to TV host Charlotte Law and Cassandra Peterson, better known as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, who claimed she lost her virginity to the singer.

Endless flings

Despite his clear adoration for his wife, Sir Tom’s affairs are well known – he once claimed to have slept with up to 250 women a year at the height of his fame. Admirers would famously throw their knickers on stage in a bid to attract the singer’s attention. Sir Tom even had two dressing rooms on tour – the second was known as the ‘workbench’, for flings with his groupies.

In a 2015 interview with The Big Issue, the singer bizarrely confessed to dipping his genitals in Listerine to ‘make everything down there sterile’ before sex. “I say that mouthwash is not only for gargling,” he joked.