I was cuckolded by my wife Faye Dunaway… she even bedded a leading man while I waited: Rock legend’s explosive new memoir

He was the loudmouth lead singer of one of the hottest bands of the moment and knew everyone from Bob Dylan to Andy Warhol, but Peter Wolf’s star power was apparently nothing next to the white-hot wattage of Jack Nicholson.

The frontman of The J Geils Band had been dating Hollywood legend Faye Dunaway for around a year when, in 1973, she landed a role starring alongside Nicholson in Roman Polanski’s noir mystery Chinatown.

Dunaway has always denied that her electric on-screen chemistry with Nicholson spilled over into the bedroom. But now, in Wolf’s new memoir ‘Waiting on the Moon’, he has given his own very different version of events.

Allegedly, not only did Dunaway sleep with Nicholson in his home but she did so in the most emasculating way possible to her then–boyfriend and future husband Wolf – while he unknowingly waited downstairs.

Wolf recounts how Dunaway had been struggling with an upcoming scene and made multiple calls to Nicholson, who eventually invited her over to his house.

When Dunaway and Wolf arrived there were multiple people hanging out at Nicholson’s place and ‘someone had placed an abundant mound of cocaine on the coffee table’.

As the evening wore on, the crowd reportedly melted away until it was just Wolf, Dunaway and Nicholson. That was when, Wolf writes, ‘Jack invited Faye upstairs to work on the script, and Faye asked if I would mind waiting. I answered, “Of course not”.’

More than two hours passed before, increasingly uncomfortable, Wolf decided to call upstairs for his girlfriend, but he got no reply.

With no car to drive home, he says, he continued to wait around in the living room until morning.

‘Finally,’ he writes, ‘as I saw the sun coming up, it occurred to me that what I thought might be happening was definitely happening.’

He was being cuckolded, he believed. And filled with rage, he snapped.

‘I opened the sliding glass doors,’ he writes. ‘Then I picked up the coffee table, laden with books and the large mountain of cocaine, walked over to the pool, and released it all into the water, watching it sink and settle on the bottom.

‘For symmetry, I lowered a chair from the living room into the water, where it landed perfectly at one end of the table. Then I picked up another chair and lowered it at the opposite end.

‘The white powder was dissolving, and a few books floated up to the surface.’

Neither Dunaway’s nor Nicholson’s representatives responded to the Daily Mail’s request for comment. 

It’s quite a story – even by Hollywood standards – but perhaps more surprising is the fact Wolf and Dunaway were able to put it behind them and get married in August 1974.

There was, however, more agony to come for Wolf during his tumultuous five-year marriage to the actress as he was cuckolded for a second time by British celebrity photographer Terry O’Neill, the alleged former beau of Raquel Welch. 

By the autumn of 1979, Boston-born Wolf says he and Dunaway had been living apart for a month – he in his home city and she in their New York apartment. 

The pair were at odds over Dunaway’s desperation for a baby. While she longed for one, Wolf writes, he ‘feared we were not in an environment conducive to raising a child.’

He blames her ’emotional instability’ and drinking for ‘the volatility’ that characterized their relationship.

Dunaway has since been diagnosed with bipolar disorder – a fact she revealed in her 2024 documentary ‘Faye’ – and has blamed the illness for much of her famously erratic past behavior. 

According to Wolf: ‘We agreed that putting a brief pause on our careers and focusing our energy on saving our marriage was the priority. We were planning to begin therapy together in Boston, but as the time for that approached, Faye remained in New York, not wanting to commit.’

But when Wolf was called to New York to see his seriously ill father he decided – after a few stiff drinks – to visit his wife at their Upper West Side apartment unannounced.

He recalls: ‘As I approached the entrance, Billy, the doorman, said, “Mr Wolf, I feel so strange having to say this to you, but we have strict orders from your wife not to let you enter the building”.’

Undeterred, he snuck in the back entrance and took the service elevator up to the apartment, only to find that Dunaway had changed the locks and his key no longer worked.

‘My heart was pounding, and a rush of adrenaline overtook me as I hurled my body full force at the heavy, thick wooden door,’ he writes. 

‘Unbelievably, it came crashing open, hanging by one hinge. I entered to see Faye and photographer Terry O’Neill both frozen, staring in disbelief.’

O’Neill fled to the bedroom, he claims, as Dunaway tried to pacify her husband – bizarrely with the offer of champagne and hors d’oeuvres.

‘I had felt estranged from her for so long that I lapped up her words like a hungry stray, forgetting all about Terry in the bedroom,’ he writes. ‘This was the soothing voice of Dorothy Faye, the woman I loved, the woman I married.’

But as she disappeared to the kitchen to get them some food, he picked up the phone and claims he heard her tell O’Neill: ‘Don’t worry, darling. I’ll be getting rid of him shortly. Just give me a little more time. Stay put and keep quiet, and everything will be okay.’

Once again, Wolf saw red.

‘I was beside myself. I smashed my champagne glass to the floor, where it shattered across the living room. I yelled out to Terry, “Come on outta there! If you don’t, I swear you’re gonna learn what the f***ing Bronx code is”.’

‘What that meant I didn’t know, but it felt good yelling it.’

When his love rival refused to budge, Wolf says he opened the set of camera cases the photographer had left on the floor, and started smashing thousands of dollars worth of cameras, lenses and filters one by one on the floor.

With Dunaway screaming that she would call the cops, he then says he made his escape through the smashed front door, by then dangling by a single hinge.  

Rather than take the elevator, he decided it made more sense to take the stairs.

‘I sped down the 21 flights faster than a marathon runner and was back on the street in no time,’ he writes.

‘I heard sirens and saw the flashing blue lights of police cars, shocked that she had really called the cops.’

Wolf tried to reconcile with Dunaway but the disastrous marriage slid inevitably towards divorce soon after that night. She and O’Neill married in four years later in 1983. 

He reflects: ‘Although their marriage did not last, through this union Faye adopted a baby, fulfilling her dream of becoming a mother.’

With time, Wolf and Dunaway managed to patch together a friendship from the wreckage of their past romance. At one point, he claims, Dunaway even suggested giving their love another shot.

Perhaps understandably, Wolf writes: ‘That was not a road I would go down again.’ 

Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters, and Goddesses by Peter Wolf is published by Little, Brown & Company