Executed next to a mistress and a daughter arranging affairs. This isn’t
drama tv. The secret’s now out! These are famous men and their last moments with their lover.
Félix Faure was president of France from 1895 to 1899,
a term which notably included the controversial Dreyfus Affair. His
time in office was cut short when he died suddenly in salacious circumstances.
His mistress, the married socialite Marguerite Steinheil, was with him at
the Palace Elysée when he suffered a stroke, allegedly while in the middle of a sex act.
He was significantly older than her, 58 to her 29. In 1913,
it reported as if it was common knowledge that Steinheil gave Faure an aphrodisiac in his wine,
and that after drinking, they made love and he died.
In her memoirs, Steinheil admitted that she'd been with Faure when he began feeling unwell
but insisted that she'd left the presidential palace hours before he died. But within a day,
she was receiving death threats, and newspapers were insinuating that she'd poisoned him.
The affair between Franklin Roosevelt and Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd was a betrayal of
his wife Eleanor on multiple levels. Lucy met Franklin through Eleanor
when the latter hired her as her social secretary.
Four years later, Eleanor discovered that her husband and her secretary
were having a relationship behind her back when
she was unpacking his suitcase and discovered love letters from Lucy.
Eleanor wasn't going to stand for the affair, and since Franklin wasn't going
to risk his political career or his inheritance, he ended things with Lucy.
The two then went their separate ways for decades,
with Lucy marrying and having children while Franklin went on to the presidency.
But when Lucy was widowed in 1944, the former lovers got back in touch.
Since he'd promised Eleanor never to see Lucy again way back in 1918,
he kept this reunion quiet. However, the affair couldn't be hidden from everyone in his life,
considering he was the president at the time, and his meetups with
Lucy were arranged by none other than Franklin and Eleanor's daughter Anna.
"When he asked my mother to do so, she was very upset."
Franklin and Lucy's final meeting was at the Roosevelts' holiday home
in Georgia in 1945. She was there when he collapsed from a cerebral hemorrhage,
though she fled the house before Eleanor arrived later that night.
Bruce Lee was a legendary actor and martial artist,
but his life was tragically cut short in 1973 when he was just 32.
According to the book Bruce Lee: A Life, he was in Hong Kong on business,
and in the middle of the day, he visited the apartment of fellow actor Betty Ting
Pei. She later admitted that they'd been having an affair for a year.
Lee died suddenly at Pei's house after getting a headache, taking a pill,
and lying down. But the immediate issue was covering up the fact that he was with his
mistress when he died. There's evidence that Lee's body was at least partially redressed and
there may have been attempts to move it from Pei's house before paramedics were called.
The official announcement of his death claimed that he'd been at home with his
wife Linda when he passed. As of 2008, Pei wasn't willing to go into details
about exactly what happened, as she told the South China Morning Post,
However, in a 1983 interview, she did make it clear that whatever else happened,
they were not in the middle of having sex when he died,
although in 2013 she admitted that they did have sex sometime that day.
Nelson Rockefeller had the sort of privileged life you'd expect of the grandson of the
richest American ever. He went to an Ivy League school, then worked for a bank,
a family company, and an oil conglomerate, before finally entering politics as a Republican.
Rockefeller's political career was a mix of extreme highs and lows. He was
governor of New York from 1959 to 1973 and vice president under Gerald Ford.
He also ran for president three times but never secured the Republican nomination.
In New York, he spearheaded the expansion of the State University system, but he was
also responsible for the disastrous response to the Attica Prison Riots.
Rockefeller's death in 1979 was no less confusing than his political life. As The
New York Times reported at the time, the first story released by his representatives was that
he'd died while at his office, working alone with just a security guard. But then they soon
released another version: he'd actually been at a home office with a guard and a chauffeur.
The official story then changed again, as the 70-year-old Rockefeller had been
with a 31-year-old woman named Megan Ruth Marshack in a townhouse late at
night when he had a heart attack, and no one called 911 for an hour.
"Unfortunately for a whole generation, it came to define him, and in many ways, to diminish him."
Plenty of English kings had mistresses, but Edward VII took it to another level,
both while he was the Prince of Wales and when he was on the throne from
1901 to 1910. During his later years, he seems to have slowed down a bit,
and his main mistress for the last decade of his life was a woman named Alice Keppel. The two
spent so much time together that she considered herself more important to him than his wife.
According to the book Edward VII: The Prince of Wales and the Women he Loved, Edward and
Keppel shared many hobbies, like hunting and gossiping about their rich and powerful friends.
She was also discreet, and it helped that her husband didn't make a fuss
about his wife's infidelity. A servant who wrote down some of the conversations she
heard between Keppel and Edward noted that she was constantly making the king laugh.
One person who didn't find the affair enjoyable was Edward's wife,
Queen Alexandra. By 1910, it was obvious that the king was seriously unwell.
In preparation for the worst, he'd given his mistress a letter that all but ordered
Alexandra to allow Keppel come see him if he was dying. When the time came, Alexandra relented,
but the second Edward lost consciousness, she ordered a courtier to remove Keppel.
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini's mistress Claretta Petacci was not only there when he died,
she also died right alongside him, executed by a firing squad.
Petacci reportedly became his mistress when she was around 19 or 20 years old.
This came with plenty of perks, including housing and bodyguards,
but she also knew that she was far from the only woman in Mussolini's life.
Obviously, there was his wife Rachele, the mother of his five children. But Mussolini
was also known as a sex addict. As he reportedly once told Petacci,
But Petacci would nevertheless remain faithful, all the way to the violent end. In 1945, with the
war going badly for the Axis powers, Mussolini and his mistress tried to flee to neutral Switzerland.
But they were caught, lined up against a wall together,
and shot. Their bodies were then hung from lampposts in Milan,
where they were reportedly kicked and spat on by thousands of Italians.
There was once a time when the papacy was better known for sex and corruption
than guiding the religious education of its flock. But even within that context,
Pope John XII stands out among his colleagues.
He was either in his late teens or early 20s when he became pope thanks to his
powerful father. He then proceeded to use his new money and position to his advantage.
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, in 963 AD 50 bishops got together to accuse the
pope of a variety of crimes, including perjury, murder, adultery, and incest.
That would be an astonishing list of charges against anyone,
let alone the head of a major religion. John refused to show up in person and told them
that if they tried to replace him as pope, their eternal souls would be in trouble.
The bishops' problems ended shortly thereafter when John died in 964. The contemporary
historian Liutprand of Cremona wrote that he was on vacation with his mistress when:
This is usually interpreted either as a stroke or him being hit in the head by the woman's husband.
F. Scott Fitzgerald faced more than enough tragedy for one person in his too-short life.
Before he ever published a novel, he flunked out of Princeton University and was dumped by his
first love. During World War I, he joined the Army and met his future wife Zelda while stationed in
Alabama. After a few good years and one daughter, things started to go south. Scott abused alcohol
and Zelda had a couple of mental breakdowns, leading to permanent institutionalization.
In 1937, Scott took up with a journalist named Sheilah
Graham. She remained his mistress until his death three years later,
although she didn't exactly like that word. As she wrote in one of her memoirs,
Writer and critic Edmund Wilson chimed in in her memoir, responding:
In another book, Graham recounted being there during Scott's death.
The two were having a quiet day together in her home when he suddenly jumped up
from his chair and collapsed. She ran for help, but there was nothing to be done.
The presence of Charles Dickens' mistress during his death is a theory that has been debated by
scholars for over three decades, ever since the publication of the 1991 book The Invisible Woman:
The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. This work laid out the reasons why the official
story might've been fudged to remove Ternan from the scene and protect Dickens' reputation.
The affair between Dickens and Ternan, an actor, began in 1857,
when he was 45 and she was 18. He bought her a house so that he could visit her without
drawing attention. Eventually, he separated from his wife, although they never divorced.
"What is it, Charles?! What is it that we are?"
The official story of Dickens' death is that he was having dinner at his home
in Kent in 1870 when he felt unwell, then collapsed, became unconscious,
and died the next day. However, The Invisible Woman lays out evidence from eyewitnesses that
Dickens was traveling across London the day before he died, towards Ternan's home.
He also withdrew a large amount of money, which wasn't found on his person or in his house when he
died, and may have been for Ternan. This theory posits that he collapsed at Ternan's home and,
while barely clinging to life, was escorted by her in a carriage to his own home to avoid scandal.
Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria, was the son
of the infamous Empress Sisi and was first in line to the throne.
As a royal, he had to marry whom he was told to, and in his case, that was Princess Stephanie of
Belgium, who was 15 when they wed in 1881. The two tolerated each other, but not much more.
Unhappy at home, Rudolf had multiple affairs, until he finally met Baroness Mary Vetsera. Or
rather, she was thrust forcefully into his path by her social-climbing mother,
according to the book Twilight of Empire by Greg King and Penny Wilson.
Just three months after their affair began, the two died together at the royal family's hunting
lodge, in an apparent suicide pact. She was 17, and he was 30. Afterwards, rumors spread quickly.
Even the ambassador from the Vatican was telling people that the gun wasn't one of
the crown prince's and that too many bullets had been fired for it to be suicide. Other
conspiracies claimed that Mary had really killed Rudolf because he was leaving her, or that they
both had serious defensive wounds that indicated an assassination by a third party. However,
there's no evidence that it was anything other than two people killing themselves.