Just 72 days ago, Kim Kardashian wed NBA player Kris Humphries in what was billed—and broadcast on TV—as a “fairytale” wedding. Now the couple is saying “the end,” with Kardashian filing for divorce on Halloween. But in Hollywood, honeymoons don’t come close to lasting forever. From Drew Barrymore to Britney Spears, see who had the shortest marriages in Tinseltown.
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Soon after 12-year-old R&B sensation Aaliyah started recording her debut album, Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number, in the early ’90s, singer-songwriter R. Kelly became her mentor. When the album was released in 1994, rumors started swirling that then-15-year-old Aaliyah and then-27-year-old Kelly were dating or even married. Then Vibe magazine published a copy of their Illinois marriage license—dated Aug. 31, 1994—on which Aaliyah was falsely listed as 18 years old. When her parents found out, they fought to have the marriage annulled. It finally was in February 1995, and both artists denied it ever happened, but it did haunt Kelly during his child-pornography trial, in which he was ultimately acquitted.
The time it took actress Renée Zellweger and country-music star Kenny Chesney to walk down the aisle was about as long as it took them to start dissolving their marriage. The two met in January 2005 and wed in a small beach ceremony on St. John in May of that year. But in mid-September, Zellweger filed to have the marriage annulled, citing “fraud”" as the reason for the split. Rumors swirled about Chesney’s sexuality, but Zellweger shot them down. In 2006, she opened up about the short-lived marriage. “I made the biggest personal mistake of my life,” she told Now magazine. “I felt a fool … I was going through huge life changes at the time. I wanted to stop and be a girl for a while. My marriage came during this time and it was desperately important to me. I don’t want anyone to think I didn’t take it seriously.” Chesney told Oprah with a chuckle in 2010 that he “panicked … The idea of marriage made me feel like I lost my identity.”
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Although Baywatch beauty Pam Anderson called her July 2006 St-Tropez wedding to rocker Kid Rock “the best, most romantic wedding of all time” to People magazine and had two more weddings with him thereafter, it still wasn’t enough to make the marriage last. Just before Thanksgiving of that year, both parties filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. There were rumors that Borat was to blame, with Rock allegedly infuriated and embarrassed over his wife’s performance in the film. The musician then spent the next few years bashing his ex, telling Ellen DeGeneres in 2008, “I touched stove, stove was hot, I think I not touch stove anymore,” and then told David Letterman in 2009, just after Anderson remarried, “I wish somebody would have given me the advice that I’d like to give her husband … Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”
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Elvis’s only offspring, Lisa Marie Presley, had already been divorced twice and broken off an engagement when she met actor Nicolas Cage. Their relationship was shaky from the start, but they wed in Hawaii in August 2002 on the 25th anniversary of Elvis’s death, 10 days after Cage proposed. Their marriage ended around Thanksgiving of that year, with Cage citing irreconcilable differences. “I’m sad about this, but we shouldn’t have been married in the first place,” Presley said in a statement. “It was a big mistake.” Sadly, their divorce proceedings lasted 13 months—four times as long as their marriage—and things were finalized on May 26, 2004. The following year, Presley talked to Oprah and said she and Cage were on better terms. “I have to give him credit, you know. That was not a fun time for either of us. He did redeem himself in the end and we did become very good friends after that,” she explained.
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Despite their enormous height difference, reality star Kim Kardashian and NBA player Kris Humphries seemed to see eye to eye. Kardashian—who had been married for four years to music producer Damon Thomas and was the longtime girlfriend of NFL star Reggie Bush—started seeing Humphries in late 2010. In May 2011, he proposed with a massive 20.5-carat engagement ring. The two wed in an extravagant California wedding in August with a whopping 440 guests for the reported price of $20 million. Since their relationship had been broadcast on E!’s Keeping Up With the Kardashians, it seemed only fitting that their wedding would be as well. But perhaps the spotlight was too much. Amid separation rumors, Kardashian filed for divorce from Humphries on Halloween, just 72 days later, citing irreconcilable differences. “After careful consideration, I have decided to end my marriage,” Kardashian said in a statement to E! “I hope everyone understands this was not an easy decision. I had hoped this marriage was forever, but sometimes things don’t work out as planned. We remain friends and wish each other the best.” But Humphries told Us Weekly that he’s “committed to this marriage and everything this covenant represents … I love my wife and am devastated to learn she filed for divorce. I’m willing to do whatever it takes to make it work.”
Matt Sayles
In March 1994, troubled child star Drew Barrymore was just 19 when she married then-31-year-old bar owner Jeremy Thomas, whom she’d been dating for just six weeks. “We’re going to disappear inside a romantic little bungalow,” Barrymore told People after the ceremony. “I can’t wait to walk along the beach with my husband.” Unfortunately, they may not have gotten too many walks in, since Barrymore filed for divorce a little over a month later, on April 28. Sadly, her second marriage—to comedian Tom Green—fared only slightly better, lasting six months.
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Who would have guessed that a marriage that started with an online search for a “sex-starved man” would end in divorce after only 18 days? Despite that start to Sinead O’Connor and Barry Herridge’s relationship, O’Connor announced on her website on Dec. 26 that the marriage was over. O’Connor said the marriage had been “ruined by certain people in my husband’s life” within “three hours of the ceremony being over” and these people caused her husband to become “enormously wounded and very badly effected [sic].” As a result, she wrote that she had “set him free.” This was O’Connor’s fourth marriage, and she has four kids from prior relationships as well.
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Just two weeks after Saved by the Bell star Mario Lopez and Doritos girl Ali Landry wed in April 2004, the couple split over his alleged infidelity. Though he didn’t comment on the allegations at the time, in February 2011 the now-committed (though not married) father told Howard Stern that it was true—he “messed around” with another woman at his bachelor weekend in Mexico. “At that point, I was not ready to settle down. I wasn’t man enough to know how to go about handling it,” Lopez confessed. “There was nothing glaringly wrong on paper: I thought, ‘She’s beautiful, she’s a good girl, she comes from a great family, she’d make a great mom ... I confused cold feet with not being ready.”
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What happened in Vegas almost stayed in Vegas for Carmen Electra and eccentric basketball star Dennis Rodman. The couple, who’d been dating for eight months, married at the Little Chapel of the Flowers before 8 a.m. in Sin City on Nov. 14, 1998. But just over a week later, Rodman filed for an annulment, claiming he was inebriated at the time they said their “I do”s. “It’s easy to get caught up in a moment,” Electra told People. “You think it’s romantic, but then you realize, ‘God, we did it in Vegas?’ It's like getting a cheeseburger at a fast-food restaurant.”
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Easy Rider hellraiser Dennis Hopper and Mamas and the Papas singer Michelle Phillips married in Taos, N.M., on Halloween in 1970. They spent a week together before Hopper’s erratic behavior drove Phillips back to L.A., where she filed for divorce on Nov. 8, upon her father’s request. Phillips described the short-lived marriage in a 2007 issue of Vanity Fair, saying it was “excruciating” and adding, “I was so overloaded emotionally by this point in my life, I didn’t know what I was doing.” Hopper seems to have had a grand old time, however. He told The New York Times in 1994, “Seven of those days were pretty good. The eighth was the bad one.”
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Before she ever went bald or drove with a baby in her lap, Britney Spears was shocking the world with her shotgun marriage to childhood friend Jason Alexander (not to be confused with the Seinfeld star). The two married on Jan. 3, 2004, in Las Vegas and were wed for a meager 55 hours before Spears’s lawyers filed for an annulment. Alexander told Access Hollywood about what was running through the young couple’s minds in the minutes before the marriage, saying, “We were just looking at each other and said, ‘Let’s do something wild, crazy. Let’s go get married, just for the hell of it.’ ” They both soon realized, however, that they had made a “mistake” that quickly needed to be fixed. Spears’s lawyers also added that the whole thing had been “a joke that had gone too far.”
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Zsa Zsa Gabor had been a bride seven times over before she hopped on a yacht and tried for No. 8 with Mexican actor and playboy Felipe de Alba. The two married in the waters off Puerto Vallarta in April 1982. However, the union lasted but a single day before Gabor decided to call it off, saying the two never made it far enough into international waters to make it legal anyway. Add to that the facts that Gabor was still legally married to husband No. 7, hotel magnate Conrad Hilton, and that the marriage was officiated only by the ship’s captain, and one can begin to see why she decided to just pretend it never happened. “I always marry bad men,” she told People magazine in 1986. “It’s a sickness, my sickness. The more bad they tell me they are, the more I am attracted. That’s my tragedy. Then I’m surprised later at how bad they are.”
PAT ALISAU
Robin Givens has quite the high-powered list of ex-beaux: she once dated funnyman Eddie Murphy, a pre-fame Brad Pitt, and shock jock Howard Stern, and she was half of a highly publicized (and criticized) marriage to boxing legend Mike Tyson. None of these loves were as fleeting, however, as that with her Yugoslavia-born tennis instructor, Svetozar Marinkovic. The two married on Aug. 22, 1997, and separated on the same day. Marinkovic reportedly said the marriage lasted seven minutes, though it actually endured for eight hours. Obviously, there was no love for that match.
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Whether it was legal or not still remains a mystery, but Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Brandi Glanville tweeted on New Year’s Eve that she and a longtime friend, Darin Harvey, had gotten married in Las Vegas. Glanville, who previously was married to Eddie Cibrian before he left her for LeAnn Rimes, sent a series of giddy tweets and photos on New Year’s Eve, only to tweet on New Year’s Day “@darinharvey don’t worry I think we can get it annauld! If not I will take the ferrari! Luvu J” By Monday morning, Harvey tweeted they were getting the marriage annulled, and the pair were “still BFFs” while Glenville tweeted “It[‘s] not legal! We were just having fun.”
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