 Brown said at the age of 19 she married James Glynn Brown, a childhood sweetheart and neighborhood soda jerk, whom she divorced in 1955.She described her husband as a veteran of the United States Marine Corps whose "war experiences had shattered his nerves, and turned him into a hopeless, physically abusive drunkard".Brown said that he "was eventually institutionalized in a veteran's hospital for 'chronic paranoid schizophrenia'".