Raymond Burr, who was gay, invented not one but two wives, according to this superb encyclopedia of gay culture. Burr claimed that one wife, an actress, had died in the World War II plane crash that killed Leslie Howard. A decade later, Burr claimed another wife died of cancer. Neither woman seems to have existed. He also concocted an imaginary 10-year-old son, who also "died" of cancer. Gossip columnists usually played along with such facades. Louella Parsons, for example, reported the (hetero) romances of Liberace with an almost straight face.

The studios also concocted romances to protect their stars from other undesirable publicity. According Sam Kashner and Jennifer MacNair's The Bad and the Beautiful: Hollywood in the Fifties, Columbia boss Harry Cohn broke up the interracial romance between Sammy Davis Jr. and Columbia icon Kim Novak in 1958. Davis, threatened by mobsters, agreed to squelch the potential controversy by marrying a black chorus girl, Loray White. She got $25,000 for less than a year of faking it as Mrs. Davis.