Amanda Mannen
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Being a celebrity is, like, so hard, you guys. You have to be a role model, but you’re also incredibly hot, so you’re constantly attacked with opportunities to not be that, and those opportunities sometimes become babies. Heck, maybe you just don’t want the piece of your heart that’s walking around outside your body to be followed by photographers 24 hours a day. Whatever the case, it occasionally becomes necessary to “I don’t know her” your child, but when the public’s nose is firmly shoved into your business, such things are bound to come out eventually.
Drake’s son from a brief fling with a model wasn’t known to the public until Pusha T rapped about the situation in a diss track in 2018. Moral of the story: Don’t piss off rappers.
The father of yellow journalism was also father to a daughter with Marion Davies who was passed off as Davies’s niece her whole life because having a movie star mistress was one thing, but an illegitimate child was another. There’s no official proof, but it was an open secret at the time, and Hearst was certainly way too involved in his mistress’s niece’s life.
Schwarzenegger didn’t realize the son of a housekeeper who worked for the family for 20 years was his for seven or eight years, but it took another half-dozen or so for the world to find out -- because his wife did. That sort of thing doesn’t tend to end well for marriages.
After an (apparently non-consensual) encounter with a married Clark Gable during the filming of Call of the Wild, costar Loretta Young was left pregnant and concocted a wild scheme to hide the pregnancy and birth and then “adopt” her own daughter. She even had the child’s unmistakably Gablian ears surgically altered to throw people off the scent.
Even Clint Eastwood may or may not know how many children he has, but one of them, born in the ‘50s, didn’t appear in public with him until 2018, at least 15 years after he definitely knew of her existence. Even some of the successful ones aren’t legally recognized as his.
Clapton famously immortalized Pattie Boyd in song and then treated her horribly, leading to their divorce in 1988 after she found out one of his affairs resulted in a son. What she (and everyone else) didn’t know until his son’s tragic death in 1991 was that he’d also had another child two years earlier.
Rossdale had a five-year relationship with artist Pearl Lowe in the ‘80s but still claims he somehow didn’t know her daughter, who was officially his goddaughter and whose “school parents’ evenings” he attended, was also his until 2004. He even told Lowe he’d never speak to her again if she let the child take a DNA test “and he’s kept his word,” apparently because it made Gwen Stefani mad, which is fair. She’s way too perky not to be secretly terrifying.
Louis Armstrong was officially childless because, according to his wife, he was sterile, but he at least was convinced he’d fathered a child with a dancer in the ‘50s who wasn’t known to the public until 2012. In fact, in letters to his business manager, he wrote that he believed he knew the exact moment "that cute little baby girl was made." Unprofesh, Louis.
In his “Thong Song” heyday, Sisqo reportedly fathered a child with a 14-year-old Swiss girl. She says he’s refused to take a DNA test, but her claim is good enough that the courts legally declared him her son’s father and ordered him to pay tens of thousands of dollars in child support. Switzerland doesn’t fuck around.
In 2013, the New York Post broke the news that a married Marino had fathered a child with a production assistant eight years earlier. It’s a testament to just how well liked Marino still is in sports circles that everyone got mad at the Post instead of him.
In 2001, a married Jackson was forced to admit he had a nearly two-year-old daughter with a staffer after tabloids threatened to admit it for him. He was ironically serving as “spiritual adviser” for Bill Clinton at the time, probably advising him to wrap it up.
The late rapper had at least four children his wife didn’t know about when they divorced in 2010, but the grand total is somewhere between 15 and 17, some of whom didn’t come forward until after his 2021 death. Apparently, that’s how Ruff Ryders roll.
By all accounts, Norris truly didn’t know a 1963 affair had produced a daughter until she wrote to him in 1990. He also didn’t tell anyone until 2004, when he published his autobiography, because some celebrities tell all, but Chuck Norris drops bombshells.
Famed Beatles and Rolling Stones documenter Michael Lindsay-Hogg won’t ever know for sure that Orson Welles was his biological father. DNA testing has proved inconclusive, but friends of his mother, actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, have confirmed it for him, as well as his own face in the mirror.
Dylan hid an entire six-year marriage that wasn’t made public until 1998, when his daughter with his secret ex-wife, a former backup singer, was 15 years old. To be fair, it was the ‘80s. We were all making a concerted effort not to notice Bob Dylan.
Top image: The Come Up Show/Wikimedia Commons
