Wife warned Tom Jones she’d cut off his b**** if he didn’t stop cheating
EXCLUSIVE: Book reveals extent of Voice judge's womanising ways
A DECADES-long battle by Tom Jones’ wife to stop the singing legend’s serial cheating was laid bare in the book Tom Jones: The Life.
Long-suffering late wife Linda was always thought to have turned a blind eye to The Voice star’s repeated philandering but now the sensational truth has been
revealed.
The mum, who passed away in 2016, did not stand idly by and once declared that unless Sir Tom changed his ways he might find himself “without his balls”.
And the biography makes clear just what Linda put up with during their 59-year-long marriage.
Acclaimed writer Sean Smith has discovered how:
— WOMEN were delivered to Tom by an assistant who would stand guard outside his trailer while they romped.
— TOM played his own music to get himself in the mood for lovemaking.
— LINDA used to throw things at the TV when one of his lovers appeared on screen.
— JEWELLERY worth thousands of pounds was hurled out of a limo by Linda during a fight about his flings.
The book, called Tom Jones: The Life, reveals that Linda refused to sit idly when she learnt about his flings.
It tells how on one occasion she rumbled him when she searched his apartment looking for signs he had been entertaining a woman — and found a romantic dinner in the oven.
The singer, also 74, tried to blame his assistant but finally had to confess he had been seeing Sixties singer Mary Wilson of The Supremes.
Their affair had begun in 1968, when Tom was touring the US.
When Tom returned to the UK to perform at Bournemouth’s Winter Gardens, Mary flew over to see him.
But Linda was suspicious and when she found out Mary was here, she called Tom’s then-publicist Chris Hutchins and told him she was going to Bournemouth “to sort him out”.
Tom got wind of this and he and his personal assistant Chris Ellis swung into action at the flat.
In the book Hutchins recalls: “They got Mary out and then went around and removed every trace of her.
“Linda came in and said, ‘Where is that woman?’ and Tom said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’. And she said, ‘Mary Wilson, she’s been here’.
And he said, ‘No, she hasn’t’. But Linda carried on checking the wardrobes, everything.
“Finally she opened the oven, the one place the boys had forgotten.
“Now Mary Wilson was a great cook and had prepared a meal the previous evening, which they hadn’t yet eaten. Linda says, ‘Oh yeah! And who cooked this?’
“And Tom said, quick as a flash, ‘Chris Ellis’. But Chris couldn’t do beans on toast. So Tom said, ‘He’s been taking cooking lessons’.”
But the singer finally owned up.
It was then she gave him the ultimatum: “You’d better straighten it out, because you won’t be able to do anything without your balls.”
Hutchins added: “He told me next day that they were lying there and they had just made love and Linda started crying. And she said, ‘When I think that b***h has been lying on these sheets . . . ’”
As the years and the flings went on Linda’s self-esteem plummeted.
Smith writes: “Her self-confidence was so low that she would never answer the door without first putting on her make-up.”
Linda and Tom met aged 15 in the village of Treforest near Pontypridd in South Wales. She became pregnant soon after and they married at 16.
And Smith reveals that coal miner’s son Tom owes his career to Linda. After son Mark was born in 1957 and Tom’s first attempt at stardom failed, he was so broke he considered throwing himself in front of a train.
But Linda, who had by then learnt she could not have any more children, believed in him.
So she got a job working evenings in a sewing factory, meaning Tom could afford another shot at singing.
Finally in 1965 — 50 years ago next week — Tom had his first No1, It’s Not Unusual. It made him world famous, but the first blow soon fell for Linda when his record label put out a statement saying he was single.
The idea was to make Tom seem more of an eligible heart-throb.
Jo Mills, wife of Tom’s manager Gordon, said Linda was made to feel like she must not exist. Linda told her: “I never felt good enough to be Tom’s wife.”
Tom became an instant sex symbol — dubbed “Sockd**k by new pal Elvis Presley — and took full advantage.
While filming a TV series at Elstree, he used a luxury caravan for his romps.
Smith writes: “If Tom had spotted someone he liked the look of in the audience, Chris Ellis would be dispatched to invite her back for Dom
Perignon in the caravan.
“Chris would then stand guard outside the door for the duration of her visit.”
Comic Jimmy Tarbuck joked the caravan had had “six new sets of tyres but hasn’t moved three feet”.
Finally, one day when Linda and Tom were in a limo in New York, she told him she “wished he had never become so famous”.
She added: “We could have been happy in Pontypridd.”
When Tom pointed to her jewellery and said, “You’ve not done too badly on it”,
Linda opened the window and began hurling bracelets, rings and necklaces on to the road.
But Smith says Tom laughed when Linda couldn’t get a £50,000 diamond ring off her finger, later telling pals: “You had to see the funny side”.
In the early Seventies, when Tom was 33, he had a fling with Miss World Marji Wallace, 19, who also had an affair with football legend George Best.
Smith writes: “She reportedly gave lovers marks out of ten. Tom was a nine, while poor George was a three.”
When Tom ended the relationship, Marji apparently attempted suicide by taking sleeping pills.
Smith writes: “Linda did not take the Marji Wallace affair lying down.
Whenever she spotted Marji on television she threw something at the screen.” Tom refused to change his ways though.
Singer Darlene Love has told of an orgy she witnessed at one of his parties in
New York while on tour with Tom. She said: “Naked men were chasing naked women everywhere”.
But somehow the couple’s marriage survived — even when it was revealed Tom had fathered a love child during a four-day fling in 1987.
The mum was part-time model Katherine Berkery, who revealed Tom kept a tape recorder in a silver briefcase and played his own songs to get in the mood for romps.
But Tom’s pal Chris Hutchins added: “He would never, ever, ever have left Linda, no matter how much trouble he got into.
“Linda is the great love of his life, but he did have genuine affection for
certain women — because he is a genuine man.”
Author Smith, however, estimates Linda and Tom only spent ten years in one another’s company as Tom has spent so much time away touring.
Linda did not speak of Tom for 40 years but Smith believes she knew he was coming home to her.
And Tom has paid tribute to her, saying: “We still have the same basic feelings and values and we are both Welsh. We come from the same place, so I
can’t bulls**t my wife. She won’t have it, which is great. I love that.”
© Sean Smith. Tom Jones: The Life by Sean Smith is published by Harper Collins at £18.99. To buy it for £14.99 with free P&P call 0845 271 2136 or see thesunbookshop.co.uk.