In March 1957, in a plain register office in Pontypridd that smelled of polish rather than flowers, seventeen-year-old Tommy Woodward married the girl he had loved since he was twelve. There was no white dress, no photographers. The bride, Melinda Trenchard, was sixteen and pregnant with their first child. Sixty years later, the world would remember their marriage as one of popular music’s great love stories, an enduring romance between a mining town boy and the girl who stayed with him through everything.
Tommy Woodward and Melinda Trenchard had grown up only a few streets apart in Treforest, outside Pontypridd. He first remembered noticing her as he walked to school. Neither family owned a telephone, so the young couple met at a phone box on his street to arrange their dates. Decades later, long after fame had carried them to Los Angeles, Jones had that exact phone box shipped across the Atlantic and installed at his new home, as if the marriage’s beginning was something worth keeping close after everything else had changed.
The transformation came in 1963, when Tommy Woodward became Tom Jones. His single It’s Not Unusual hit number one in the United Kingdom in 1965, and within two years he was headlining Las Vegas showrooms, playing to audiences made up mostly of women, six nights a week, months at a stretch, nearly four thousand miles from the quiet house in Wales where Linda raised their son. The marriage’s terms began to bend almost immediately, in ways a teenager in that register office could never have predicted. Jones never denied what happened next.
Across five decades of interviews, he acknowledged near constant infidelity with fans, backup singers, actresses, and women he met once and never again. At the height of his fame, he told journalists he did not keep count, at one point floating the claim of roughly two hundred and fifty women a year. He repeated that number more than once, and it was a performer’s own mythology about himself, a self-reported boast, not an audited fact. Linda knew.
Not vaguely, but specifically and repeatedly, for most of her adult life. The loyalty the public postcard version of the marriage promised was asymmetric from the very beginning. One person built a reputation as one of music’s most famous womanizers. The other stayed.
One documented incident in 1968 makes the pattern concrete. During a United States tour, Jones began an affair with Mary Wilson of the Supremes. This one was not hidden the way most of his relationships were. Wilson flew to the United Kingdom while Jones was performing in Bournemouth, and Linda found out, not through a tabloid, but through the ordinary mechanics of a marriage in which someone notices when someone else is somewhere they should not be.
There was a confrontation. By some accounts, Wilson had to be hurried out of Jones’s flat before Linda arrived to sort him out. Decades later, after Mary Wilson died in 2021, Jones gave an interview reflecting on the affair. We did get close, I must admit, he said.
I can’t deny that. In the same breath, he described Linda meeting Wilson afterward, the two women becoming friendly, and Wilson staying part of the family’s orbit for the rest of her life. He described it essentially as an affair that quietly turned into a friendship everyone kept. The danger in this marriage was never that the affairs were hidden.
It was that they were not, and somehow that became the normal shape of things. Linda did not simply tolerate infidelity in the abstract. She was expected to make peace with the specific women involved, sometimes inside her own home. Nineteen years later, the story took a harder turn in a New York courtroom, over a child Linda never asked for.
In October 1987, while on tour in the United States, Jones spent three days with a twenty-four-year-old model named Catherine Berkery. Ten months later, she gave birth to a son, Jonathan. When she named Jones as the father, his team denied it publicly. In 1989, the case reached Manhattan Family Court, presided over by Judge Judith Sheindlin, the same woman who would later become famous as Judge Judy.
The court ordered DNA testing. The results came back at 99. 76 percent certainty. Jones was the father.
Even with genetic proof sitting in a court file, Jones did not build a relationship with the boy. He agreed to pay child support, reportedly around $2,500 a month until Jonathan turned eighteen, and that was the entire extent of his involvement. Berkery told reporters afterward that she thought he was a disgusting human being. Jones described the encounter years later with a shrug built into the language itself.
It wasn’t something I had planned, he said. I was tricked, really. I just fell for it. Not an apology, not quite a denial, just a man minimizing his own role in something a judge had already settled with a DNA test.
Jonathan grew up in New Jersey knowing who his father was and never once meeting him. This was not a rumor Linda had to decide whether to believe. It was a legally adjudicated paternity case, decided by a judge, confirmed by DNA, covered by newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, all while Linda was still, by every account, fully married to him, and still, by his own later description, the most important thing in his life. The pattern that had always stayed backstage began reaching into Linda’s own life.
By the account of people close to the family, she had never been comfortable with fame, not the attention, not the photographers, not the assumption that being married to Tom Jones made her life public property too. In later interviews, she spoke about agoraphobia, an anxiety condition that made leaving the house genuinely difficult. Friends described her as protective of her privacy to the point of near total withdrawal, avoiding events, avoiding cameras, avoiding as much as she could the gossip that came with her husband’s name. The marriage became two people walking the same road at different paces.
One moved toward stages holding forty thousand people. The other moved toward a house she rarely left. Jones never claimed Linda’s withdrawal was caused by any single event. The record does not support a tidy explanation.
What it supports is a pattern running for most of a fifty-nine-year marriage, his life getting louder and more exposed, hers getting quieter and more closed. Years after Linda’s death, in a BBC documentary, Jones did something he had rarely done in nearly six decades of interviews. He connected his own behavior directly to her decline without hedging. He talked about recording a cover of Bob Dylan’s “What Good Am I” in 2010, six years before she died.
“I was thinking of my wife,” he said. “Her health wasn’t good, and mentally she wasn’t in a good place, and I felt partly responsible for it. ” He tied a specific song from a specific year to a specific admission that he believed his own choices had contributed to what was happening to her. The darker reading of the marriage is not an accusation made against Tom Jones.
It is a confession he made about himself, sitting in front of a camera years after it was too late to change anything. The affairs were public record. The paternity case was a matter of law. But the guilt, the specific named guilt over what his life did to hers, only exists because he said it out loud.
After everything, the question remains why the fifty-nine years never once ended in divorce. In a 2009 interview, Jones described the marriage in almost matter-of-fact terms, saying it had overcome everything else. Not avoided everything else. Survived everything else.
The distinction matters. This was not a marriage without damage. It was a marriage that kept absorbing damage and staying intact anyway, for reasons never fully explained to the public and probably not fully explained between the two of them either. Linda died on April 10, 2016, at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, after a short fight with lung cancer that followed years of declining health.
Jones said that before she died, she told him not to think of her dying, but to think of her laughing instead. He said losing her was the lowest point of his life, that he saw a grief therapist afterward, that for months he kept asking himself whether he had missed something, whether he had been paying close enough attention. He could not stay in the Los Angeles house they had shared. He sold it and moved back to Britain because, in his own words, she had decorated every room of it, and he did not feel comfortable there without her.
The register office in Pontypridd is still there. The childhood romance was real, and so were the fifty-nine years. What was missing from the postcard version was the cost, paid almost entirely by one person for decades, in public humiliation, private isolation, and a husband who has since admitted in his own words that he understood exactly what he was doing to her while he was doing it.