4

Norman Mailer Tried To Murder His Wife (In Public!)

Norman Mailer was one of the world's preeminent journalists, the winner of two Pulitzers and a co-founder of "New Journalism" -- a style he shares with the likes of Truman Capote and Hunter S. Thompson. He's a giant in the 20th century literary canon. He also tried to stab his wife to death in full view of dozens of horrified witnesses.

See, Mailer had a slight problem with alcohol. We know: A writer? Alcohol?! Say it ain't so!

PBS

On November 19, 1960, Mailer threw a party to announce that he was running for mayor of New York City. In an attempt to set up a dialog between the rich and the poor, he invited all of the city's most elite citizens, as well as a whole bunch of homeless people. He got a bit upset when, for some reason, most of the rich people canceled. It turns out that it's not easy to get Rockefellers, Hearsts, du Ponts, or even Trumps to attend a party where the well liquor is Mad Dog 20/20. Purple flavor, of course. We're talking about high society here.

As the night wore on, Mailer started getting mean drunk. Eventually, his mortified wife, Adele, stepped in to subdue him, and this escalated into a full-scale screaming match, which ended when Mailer pulled out a two-and-a-half-inch pen knife and stabbed her several times in the chest. Hopefully he had some sort of quip about pens and knives at the ready, but honestly, it was probably all rage-screaming at that point.

New York Daily News

3

J. Robert Oppenheimer Was A Murderous Lunatic (Well Before He Worked On The A-Bomb)

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, may have been responsible for some violence. We know, we court controversy. But Oppenheimer is remembered as the guy who regretted his role in the Manhattan Project, so much so that he spent the rest of his life trying to stop people from doing it again. You probably think of him as a gentle pacifist who sold his soul to science, and then tried to buy it back with good deeds.

US Govt. Defense Threat Reduction Agency

But actually, Oppenheimer was kind of a violent, unhinged maniac -- at least in his youth, before he settled down for a respectable career of building weapons of mass destruction. In 1925, while aboard a train traveling to Cambridge, he tried to make a move on a woman who rejected his advances. According to a close friend of Oppenheimer's, Francis Fergusson, he later spotted the woman standing underneath a staircase he was standing on and tried to drop his suitcase on her head.

Later, as a grad student, Oppenheimer had an opportunity (Oppentunity?) to work for future Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Patrick Blackett. However, Oppenheimer's strength was in theoretical physics, and he struggled with the hands-on laboratory work Blackett required. Once again, he had a coping mechanism for this stress: He injected an apple with toxic chemicals from his lab and left it on Blackett's desk. To be fair, maybe he'd seen a Disney movie and assumed Blackett would just take a long nap afterward.

Panoptik~commonswik/Wiki Commons

2

Harry Potter Actor Jamie Waylett Wasn't In The Last Two Movies Because He Was In Prison For Rioting And Looting

Jamie Waylett is better known as Vincent Crabbe, the dumb bully stereotype who serves as Draco Malfoy's sidekick in the Harry Potter movies. Crabbe didn't appear in the last two films, though, and for good reason: Waylett had been fired for, uh ... "method acting."

Warner Bros.

In 2011, protests over a suspicious London police shooting boiled over into violence, and after the ensuing riots, authorities pored through massive amounts of CCTV footage to find the people responsible. That's when they saw this:

via Hampstead & Highgate Express

That's Waylett carrying a goddamn Molotov cocktail. Look, you can shoot fireballs out of a wand or you can huck them in a bottle. It's really the same thing.

After being arrested and charged, Waylett argued that he had no intention of throwing the firebomb. He just liked holding it. It felt good in his hand. Warm, most likely. Even if they bought that, though, the court also saw evidence that Waylett had "participated" in the looting of a nearby liquor store, and sentenced him to two years in prison. In a later interview, Tom Felton, who played Draco Malfoy, commented: "He's let himself down hugely really, and it's a disappointment for him and the franchise."

Warner Bros.

1

Isaac Newton Oversaw Dozens Of Executions

Sir Isaac Newton was the father of modern physics, and is still synonymous with both that field and science in general. But science was only his secondary passion. His first was ensuring the security of England's currency, and he was deadly serious about it. Literally.

Godfrey Kneller

After completing all of his most important work on math and physics, Newton suffered a nervous breakdown and decided to quit science for good. He took up a new career with the British Mint, rising through the ranks until he wound up running the whole show for the last 30 years of his life. By the time he got the job, England was going through a counterfeiting crisis, and Newton was precisely the hardass to fix it.

James Thornhill

For one thing, he reinstituted the death penalty for counterfeiting, which these days seems ... a little on the harsh side? And this was the 1600s, so the "death penalty" often meant drawing and quartering. In his time as Master of the Mint, Newton completely revised and standardized the British currency, modernized the minting process ... and personally oversaw the brutal execution of dozens of counterfeiters. He even took a role in investigating potential leads, occasionally mingling with the rabble in local bars and taverns in order to suss out information. In short, Isaac Newton was basically a 17th-century Eliot Ness, only if the bootleggers got chopped into fractions at the end. Hey, there's still math involved! Way to tie it all together, Newton.

Wiki Commons

Also check out 5 Beloved Celebrities Who Were Nothing Like You Think and 5 Beloved Celebrities Everyone Forgets Did Terrible Things.

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Check out Robert Evans' A Brief History of Vice: How Bad Behavior Built Civilization, a celebration of the brave, drunken pioneers who built our civilization one seemingly bad decision at a time.