Los Angeles
Broadway legend Carol Channing is seeking a divorce claiming her domineering husband brutally beat her, squandered her fortune and had sex with her only twice in 41 years of marriage.
The 77-year-old star of such classic musicals as Hello Dolly made the charges in her divorce petition against 86-year-old Charles Lowe.
In the 20-page petition, filed in Los Angeles District Court, Channing asks that all her bank accounts and holdings be immediately frozen.
The star says she fears she will soon be bankrupt because her husband is spending her money like a ''drunken sailor'' - having spent #300,000 in the past year.
Channing claims in the petition that Loew told her shortly after they were married in 1956 that he was impotent.
''We had sexual relations only once or twice during our 41 year marriage and that was 41 years ago. We have never been intimate again to the present day,'' she says.
Despite the lack of lovemaking, she said, ''I have always been loyal to him...and never during the course of our 41-year marriage had any affairs or been intimate with anyone else.'' Channing's lawyer, Raoul Felder, says the star suffered continuous abuse at the hands of her husband.
He told the New York Post today: She always looked so happy, but she was really hiding a great tragedy.''
Channing says in court papers she was ''humiliated regularly by my husband in public and regularly physically assaulted by him.''
She claims: ''To my knowledge, my husband has spent his entire life living off of my earnings. I now find myself, at the age of 77, not knowing the true value of my assets and indeed truly believe that those assets have been dissipated.''
She says she recently finished a three-year tour of ''Hello Dolly'' that made her more than #3m, but her accountants told her she had less than #1.8m in the bank.
''I have been advised by my accountants that my husband is spending money like a 'drunken sailor'.''
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