March 31, 1996
Clint Eastwood & Dina Ruiz

Today in wedding history Clint Eastwood married Dina Ruiz. Clint, the famous actor and director met Dina, a reporter & news anchor, when she interviewed him in 1993.

The two married three years later in a surprise ceremony at the Shadow Creek Golf Course in Las Vegas, planned by Eastwood himself!

As quoted in his biography, Clint said,  ”Dina keeps me on my toes, let’s put it that way. We both enjoy family a lot, we both enjoy pets and we love to play golf. To me, as I said, life is like the back nine in golf. Sometimes you play better on the back nine. You may not be stronger, but hopefully you’re wiser.”

The couple have been married for 14 years and have one daughter together. Congratulations from us at Proposal!

March 30, 1940

Walter Cronkite & Mary Elizabeth “Betsy” Maxwell

Today in wedding history news anchor Walter Cronkite married his sweetheart Betsy Maxwell.

They met one day in 1936, while both working at the KCMO radio station in Kansas City, Missouri. Cronkite has been quoted as saying he fell in love with her the first moment he saw her! It only took a few months of dating and the two became engaged. They married in the Grace and Holy Trinity Episcopal Church.

The two stayed strong through 64 years of marriage. Walter has said, “Meeting such a bright and supportive woman brought me a lifetime of joy and tenderness. And for me, that was key.” Walter and Betsy, had three children and even more grandchildren.

March 29, 1939
Clark Gable & Carole Lombard

Clark Gable and Carole Lombard met several times throughout their lives, and with each meeting they’d only become closer. They starred in the 1932 film No Man of Her Own, but both were married at the time and were cordial with one another.

In 1936, during the celebration of screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart’s wife’s release from a sanitarium, Lombard came riding in an ambulance, in a nightgown, and on a stretcher. Gable found it in poor taste. After an argument, they decided to settle it with a tennis match, and played until it became so dark that they couldn’t see.

Their next meeting was at the annual Mayfair Ball a couple of months later, and they danced all night. Accounts from that night afterward differ, however. One is that as they danced, Gable discovered Lombard wasn’t wearing any underwear. He proposed they go back to his hotel. Her response? “Who do you think you are, Clark Gable?” Another account states that they disappeared but only ended up driving around for a couple of hours.

Either way, he left angry, but she made it up to him the next morning when he found birds in his bedroom, birds she had sent and asked the hotel staff to put in. One carried a note that said “How about it? -Carole” That sparked their famous relationship.

Gable eventually divorced Ria Langham on March 7, 1939, and proposed to Lombard at a phone booth at the famous Brown Derby restaurant. Doing their best to avoid the press. they headed for Kingman, Arizona at dawn. Once they got there, they immediately got their license at the courthouse and to the church to be married. They drove back to Beverly Hills, only to receive the press in the morning with only a few hours of sleep. You can view the newsreel here.

Their marriage unfortunately ended in 1942, when Lombard’s plane crashed in Las Vegas. Though he married twice after,  it has been stated that their time together were the happiest years of his life, and that he was never the same after her death.

March 28th, 1987
Nora Ephron & Carl Bernstein

It was on this day in 1987 that Nora Ephron made her happiness official. After a painful breakup from previous husband Carl Bernstein (and writing a novel based on his affair), she married screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi. This would be her third marriage.

They are still married to this day. So what kind of advice can Ephron give us in order to maintain a happy marriage? She says: “One is marry a man who was unhappily married to someone else for 17 years; one is marry an Italian, that’s a very good secret; and one is never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from. Those are my three secrets of marriage.”

Not convinced? Ephron has claimed that her husband is also very romantic. “He used to bring me bags of subway tokens because I was always losing them in my handbag – I can’t tell you how romantic that was. I don’t think Italian men are more romantic, but I have done better being married to an Italian man than to the two who came before, who weren’t Italian.”

Happy (and hopefully very romantic) anniversary to you both!

March 27, 1979
Eric Clapton & Pattie Boyd

Boyd & Clapton on their wedding day

It’s not often when an ex-husband is invited to his former wife’s wedding ceremony. But in the case of Pattie Boyd, not only was her ex George Harrison present, he also performed at the reception.

Legendary guitarist Eric Clapton fell in love with Boyd when she was married to the former Beatle. He wrote the song “Layla” confessing his love for her and asking her to “please don’t say we’ll never find a way and tell me all my love’s in vain.”

Despite Clapton’s advances, Boyd remained faithful to Harrison, who had immortalized her in the song “Something” (read about their marriage here). As their marriage was falling apart, Clapton and her became good friends.

The story goes that Clapton went to Harrison (a longtime friend of his) and revealed that he and Boyd were in love. In response, Harrison told Clapton that he could have her.

Two years later, they married in Tuscon, Arizona in a ceremony that was conducted entirely in Spanish. Along with Harrison, their guests included Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Mick Jagger and Elton John, just to name a few.

Unfortunately, their marriage was full of problems including drug addiction and infidelity, and the couple divorced in 1988.

Even though their love wasn’t destined to last forever, it did produce the song “Wonderful Tonight”, a wedding dance favorite, which Clapton wrote for Boyd. To this day, the couple remain close friends.

March 26, 1994

Ricki Lake & Rob Sussman

Love can be scary. For Ricki Lake, however, it was really easy to take the plunge, even during the scariest time of the year.

Lake met artist, illustrator, bartender, and future-husband Rob Sussman at a Halloween party in 1993. She claimed that “I never believed in love at first site until I met him”. She was enamored with him, especially since he had no clue who she was, despite the fact that her talk show was already in full force. They hit it off so well that they forgot the dinner date they had planned for after the party and went straight to the hotel room!

While neither could remember where exactly Sussman proposed, the marriage talks began after only three days of knowing each other. Two weeks later, Sussman moved in with Lake. The couple eventually married in Las Vegas on this day in 1994. They remained married for nine years and had two children.