Tom Jones built a career on making respectable people blush. Onstage he shimmied in open shirts, mopped sweat with thrown underwear and exuded the swagger of a man who claimed to be sleeping with more partners in a year than most people do in a lifetime.
Yet after the lights went down, the self-styled sex god went home to the same woman he had married as a working class teenager in South Wales. That tension between serial philanderer and steadfast husband to Linda is what makes Tom Jones more interesting than any of the tabloid headlines.
From Pontypridd kid to “Sex Bomb” myth
Born Thomas Woodward in Treforest, Jones clawed his way from paper mills and club gigs to global fame with hits like “It’s Not Unusual” and “Delilah.” In the late 1960s and 70s he became a Vegas fixture, belt buckle gleaming, voice roaring over big bands while women in the audience screamed themselves hoarse.
A Deutsche Welle profile captures how the image was carefully cultivated: chest-baring shirts, fans fainting in the front rows and the now legendary habit of wiping his brow with knickers thrown onstage, all of which earned him the nickname “Tiger.” In the same breath, Jones happily admitted that in his heyday he was bedding up to 250 groupies a year, with much-gossiped-about affairs involving Supremes singer Mary Wilson and former Miss World Marjorie Wallace, even as his wife stayed largely out of sight.
Linda: the girl from the next street
Teen marriage in the shadow of the mines
Long before the Vegas neon, there was Linda from up the road. Jones has often said he fell for Melinda “Linda” Trenchard as a boy, meeting her when they were eight and finally winning her over as teenagers. They married in March 1957 when he was 17 and she was 16 and pregnant with their only child, Mark, while he still clocked shifts in a local glove factory to keep the family afloat. A detailed timeline of their relationship fills out those early years.
The couple were married for 59 years and rode out the full arc of his fame together, even as he later acknowledged countless flings on the road. Linda, a lifelong smoker, survived lung cancer twice before a third diagnosis proved fatal; she died in 2016 at 75 after what Jones described as a brutal but brief final illness. Reeling, he sold their Los Angeles mansion and moved into a flat in London, a move he said fulfilled his wife’s long-standing wish to go home.
A private woman in a very public marriage
If the marriage was the soft-focus story, the sex life was pure hard rock numbers. In a 2012 interview recalled by Entertainment Daily, Jones bragged that at the height of his success he had cheated on Linda “over 250 times” a year, brushed the encounters off as harmless “fun and games” and insisted he had “never hurt anybody” and that their marriage remained “solid.” He later told a TV audience that the couple never discussed his infidelity, while former bandmate Vernon Hopkins suggested Linda was really “caught in an emotional trap” and that life with Tiger Tom was far less idyllic than the public liked to imagine.
Cheating, denial and old-school masculinity
Do the maths on 250 women a year and you land disturbingly close to a different partner almost every day. For many older fans who grew up when male stars were expected to behave badly, Jones embodies a kind of old-school masculinity where virility was currency, and a wife’s job was to tolerate what came with the spotlight.
Biographical accounts add another uncomfortable layer: one of those affairs in the late 1980s resulted in a son with model Katherine Berkery, with a U.S. court confirming paternity in 1989 after DNA testing. Jones publicly acknowledged the child, singer Jonathan Berkery, only in 2008 and has said he has no interest in a relationship, a stark contrast to the fierce loyalty he professed toward Linda and their son Mark.
Viewed from today’s vantage point, that mix of bravado and emotional distance looks far less charming than it did in a smoky 70s nightclub. The numbers and the secrecy sit uneasily alongside the idea of Jones as a harmless rogue, raising hard questions about how much collateral damage his legend left in its wake.
Grief, guilt and the songs that kept him standing
When Linda died, the public script flipped. Five months after her death, Jones told ITV that the loss had hit him so hard he did not know if he would ever sing again, describing how her lung cancer had been discovered so late she had less than two weeks to live and how he had been at her bedside when she died. He said returning to the stage and singing her favourite songs, especially his version of Lonnie Johnson’s “Tomorrow Night,” was what “saved” his life and that he still pictures her every time he performs them.
In a candid AARP interview, Jones recalled being on tour in the Philippines when a Los Angeles doctor first suggested Linda’s cancer was treatable, only to call back and say it was in fact aggressive and terminal. Jones cancelled the tour and rushed to the hospital, where Linda calmly told him he had to keep singing, that he and their son Mark must “mentor one another” and that he should move back to London to be closer to family. She warned him not to “fall” with her, advice he later wove directly into his recording of “I Won’t Crumble With You If You Fall” and into his decision to rebuild a life in Britain rather than disappear into grief.
The bravado did not survive her absence. In a later interview reported by Business Standard, Jones admitted he sometimes blamed himself for Linda’s death, agonising over whether he should have forced his reluctant wife to see doctors sooner. He said that after losing her he found fresh anguish in the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “What Good Am I?”, asking himself if he had stood by and “let things happen” that he might have changed.
A more recent account of a BBC documentary goes further: Jones explains that when he first recorded “What Good Am I?” in 2010, around the time Linda’s health and mental state were deteriorating, he was thinking directly of her and felt partly responsible. He describes the song as an outlet for guilt and recalls that Linda herself urged him, in her final days, to keep going as a singer and not let grief destroy him.
All of that sits behind the most famous quote of his later years. On The Joe Wicks Podcast, Jones was asked if he could ever fall in love again and answered bluntly, “No, I’ll never love again. There was one love of my life, and that was Linda,” adding that he is glad they had a life together but wishes they were growing old side by side.
Journalist Kate Mossman offered a striking image of the man behind those words when she interviewed him over Zoom for a book on ageing rock stars. She describes Jones living alone in a London flat and at one point showing her the container that holds Linda’s ashes, a small, almost domestic gesture that undercuts decades of chest-thumping machismo more effectively than any confession.
Ladies’ man or family man – which story wins?
So what are we left with: the serial cheat or the devoted husband who cannot let go of his late wife? The uncomfortable answer is both. Jones spent decades leaning into the “Sex Bomb” persona, monetising his magnetism and joking about numbers that, if accurate, would make even fellow rock lotharios blush.
At the same time, he never left Linda, never publicly tried to recast her as an obstacle to his freedom and still frames his current life, musically and personally, as an extended conversation with her memory. For an older audience that remembers when marital vows and male misbehaviour often coexisted without comment, that paradox feels familiar rather than shocking.
| Onstage Tom | Offstage Tom |
|---|---|
| Open shirts, knickers on the mic stand, “Tiger” nicknames and 250 women a year. | Teen husband from a mining town, supporting a pregnant wife by working factory jobs. |
| Affairs treated as a joke, bragging he “never hurt anybody” and that it was just fun. | Fifty nine year marriage to his childhood sweetheart, still talking to her after she is gone. |
| Embodiment of 60s male fantasy: loud, unapologetic, always ready for the next conquest. | Elderly widower in a London flat, relying on songs and memories to stop himself collapsing. |
Would a young Tom Jones survive today’s cancel culture untouched? Probably not. The power imbalance between a married megastar and endless lines of adoring fans looks different in a post MeToo world than it did under the neon of old Las Vegas, and the trail of hurt behind the legend is clearer now than ever.
Yet his enduring grief for Linda also cuts against the stereotype of the shallow, unfeeling womaniser. The same man who boasted about hundreds of lovers now cannot imagine loving anyone else, and builds late career albums around songs that wrestle openly with guilt, loss and the limits of what love can fix.
So who was the real Tom Jones?
If you want a neat moral, you will not find one here. Tom Jones is simultaneously the swaggering frontman throwing towels to screaming crowds and the old widower asking a Dylan song whether he failed the only person who truly mattered to him.
For listeners who grew up with his records, that tension is precisely the point. The story of Tom and Linda is not a fairy tale that cancels out the cheating, and the cheating does not erase a lifetime of shared history. Instead it leaves us with a messy, very human picture: a man who treated fidelity casually, discovered too late what it cost, and has been trying to sing his way through the consequences ever since.
