By PAUL SCOTT

Last updated at 00:33 26 January 2008

Late morning in the gaudy splendour of a mock colonial mansion on a gated Beverly Hills estate, a sturdy woman in an oversized T-shirt and sporting a strawberry blonde time-warp perm is doggedly steering a vacuum cleaner over a wall-to-wall fake leopardskin carpet.

She is marked out from the other domestic staff in these New Money surroundings only by the fact that, as she sets about her chores, she takes occasional sips from a flute of chilled Dom Perignon champagne.

This, in her somewhat unlikely "Mrs Mop" guise, is Lady Melinda Woodward - better known, perhaps, as the wife for 51 years of singer Sir Tom Jones. (The star changed his name from Woodward before finding fame.)

Hidden behind the walls of her luxurious home, this is her daily ritual. Though a cook and maid arrive daily, "Lady Linda," as she prefers to be known, refuses to relinquish the task of running the vacuum cleaner over the shag pile, or polishing the acres of brass that vie for space in these showy confines.

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She breaks off only to lunch on a tinned steak and kidney pie - bought from a Los Angeles shop that specialises in British staples such as baked beans and rich tea biscuits for Hollywood's expat contingent. It is served to her on a goldplated tray as she settles down in front of the TV to watch BBC America.

The 67-year-old grandmother-of-two rarely, however, ventures as far as the swimming pool and patio, with its million-dollar views from Mulholland Drive over the San Fernando Valley.

In recent years, her palace in this celebrity enclave (Robbie Williams lives a couple of doors away) has become little more than a gilded prison for the wife of the Welsh-born superstar.

Stricken by agoraphobia and a terror of having to meet people, she has become her own jailer.

"She doesn't like to go out," Tom's cousin Dorothy Woodward, who has been a recent visitor to the house, revealed this week. "I've seen for myself the way she is. She will go out occasionally if Tom is there, but, of course, Tom is away such a lot. It's a great shame."

Indeed, so infrequently has Linda left the house, that last week, when the couple were photographed together leaving a DVD rental store in Los Angeles, it was the first time anyone could recall seeing a picture of her in years.

She cut a distinctly drab figure. Wearing baggy black trousers and T-shirt, and carrying a "Big Shopper" style bag, her mottled green fleece was more Matalan than Malibu. It is an image a million miles from the type of Hollywood wife one might imagine seeing on the arm of a man who is reputed to have amassed a £190 million fortune.

But even this low-key appearance away from the house is being seen as something of a minor triumph by those close to the couple, who have become increasingly concerned about Linda's state of mind.

She is said to live in irrational terror of falling victim to gun crime. She insisted they sell their 16-room home, once owned by Dean Martin, in exclusive - and tranquil - Bel Air, because she had become obsessed that she was going to be gunned down on her doorstep.

Reluctantly, Tom sold the house they had lived in since the Seventies to actor Nicolas Cage.

But even though their new home is protected by 24-hour armed guards, Linda still will not venture out alone and refuses to learn to drive - which in itself is tantamount to pulling up the drawbridge in car-obsessed LA.

Family members say she is also cripplingly self-conscious and hates being seen in public. She will only ever consider going out, they say, if Tom parks the car at the kerb and she can rush into a shop.

"Even then, she is in and out," said one relative. "She gets panicky if she is out for more than a few minutes.

"It's got steadily worse, and she can go months without going out the door. It's dreadful, because Tom is away most of the time on tour and she gets very lonely. But she is just too terrified to go out and meet people."

The situation has become so bad that the 67-year-old Sex Bomb singer has tried to persuade his wife, whom he married when they were both 16, to return to Britain.

Sources say he has viewed a series of flats in London, as well as a country house in Oxfordshire, near the Henley-on-Thames home of their only son Mark Woodward, who is his father's manager.

Family members say Tom would be happier if Linda could be near Mark and his wife Donna, who have two grown-up children, while he is on the road.

However, Linda has refused to fly since the 9/11 attacks on New York, and the star has now become resigned to the fact he may never again be able to persuade her to board a flight home to Britain.

When Tom was knighted by the Queen in 2006, there were raised eyebrows when Linda failed to accompany her husband to Buckingham Palace. She watched the ceremony alone on TV in the U.S., while Tom, his son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter Emma went on to a 12-hour celebration at London's Berkeley Hotel.

But missing out on the sort of glamorous lifestyle her husband's celebrity offers is - excuse the play on words - not unusual.

Since the Sixties, Linda has refused to watch her husband perform live after she became upset by his female fans' habit of throwing their underwear on stage.

Friends say she has also come to dread going out in public because she fears she is being gossiped and sniggered about because of Tom's formidable reputation as an unreconstructed Lothario.

Indeed, their marriage - one of the most enduring in showbiz - is notable for the apparent ease with which she has been able to turn a blind eye to his numerous infidelities.

Jones admits that at the height of his womanising, he was sleeping with up to 250 girls a year. Such was his voracious appetite for sex that, for much of his career, he insisted on having two dressing rooms.

One was for entertaining guests; the other - euphemistically called the "workbench" - was where he would entertain a carousel of willing groupies.

Lady Linda's ostrich-like approach to Tom's unfaithfulness extends, say associates, to her refusing for years to allow newspapers in the house, as well as employing a self-protective form of double-think.

"When he is away, he is Tom Jones, the singer; but when he is at home, Linda has always thought of him as Tommy Woodward, her husband," Tom's cousin Dorothy told me. "It's the way she deals with it."

Nonetheless, Jones admitted a year ago on a U.S. chat show that when his wife was confronted with evidence of one dalliance in a newspaper, she reacted by beating him black and blue.

Likewise, during her husband's twoyear affair with Mary Wilson of The Supremes in the Seventies, she is said to have tracked them down to a Bournemouth love-nest and screamed at him: "You get that cow out of there now."

But she was forced to endure him carrying on with a succession of women, including Miss World Marjorie Wallace, who took an overdose (from which she eventually recovered) after Linda discovered the affair and demanded the singer put a stop to it.

The only time, say family members, that their marriage has been seriously threatened was in 1989, when a 24-year-old U.S. model called Katherine Berkery announced she was pregnant with Jones's child after spending a weekend with the star in a suite at New York's Ritz Carlton Hotel.

Jones denied he was the father, and in a rare public appearance, Linda opened the bedroom window of their mansion in her nightie to tell reporters she believed her husband was innocent.

Later, however, after a DNA test proved there was a 99.7 per cent chance that he was, indeed, the father, the star quietly agreed to pay £2,000-a-month maintenance for the baby, called Jonathan.

And ten years ago, he reached a £50,000 out-of-court settlement after Miss Berkery again went to court to seek a bigger allowance for the boy, now 19, whom Jones has never met.

After being faced with such tangible proof of his faithlessness, Linda announced she was heading home to South Wales, and

Jones put her up in Cardiff's Holiday Inn while work was being carried out on a ten-acre property he bought her in the Vale of Glamorgan.

But a lonely Linda, who was eight months pregnant when she married Jones, then a humble factory worker, at Pontypridd register office in March 1957, ventured out only to queue every day for lunch at the local fish and chip shop. Within months, she was back in Los Angeles with Tom.

After his first hit, It's Not Unusual, propelled him to international stardom in 1965, Linda enjoyed a lavish lifestyle of shopping for designer clothes and accompanying her husband to a never-ending round of parties. But friends say she gradually became more and more reclusive.

She is said to have reacted with fury and hurled empty bottles at him when Jones once arrived home unannounced with a couple of friends to play snooker.

In a rare insight into their problems, the singer last year admitted he was unable to build close friendships with fellow stars because he felt unable to invite them back to his home.

"Linda's a shy person," he told an interviewer. "If I said Jack Nicholson will be coming over, she'd get in a state. When Robbie Williams came round, she hid in the bathroom. It hasn't been easy.

"She knows she has a depression problem if she doesn't watch herself. She says it runs in her family. Her father was a bit like that, apparently, and her grandmother. Sometimes she can't get out or doesn't want to meet people."

Last March, when they celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, Linda refused the lavish party Tom wanted to organise and insisted they spend the evening quietly at home.

Friends say she spends much of her time alone while her husband tours. Tom's sister Sheila, who also lives in Los Angeles, occasionally visits, but mostly her only contact is with her cook and maid.

"But even though she has the hired help, she still insists on doing the housework and is obsessive about keeping the place pristine,' one family friend said. 'She always drinks a glass of champagne while she's doing it. Sadly, it's one of her few pleasures.

"I think she would like to come home to Britain to be near her son, but I don't think she would be able to make the trip - by land or sea. It would be too terrifying for her, given that she's an agoraphobic.

"Tom has been talking about coming back for a while, because he says that, under Californian law, Linda will have to pay 50 per cent tax on his estate when he dies.

"He's working as hard as ever and is away a lot, so he worries about her.

"Despite all the affairs, he has never loved anyone else; and she loves him. She still lights up when he is around.

"Tom keeps gently trying to persuade her to leave the house - and occasionally she will, but only if he goes with her.'

For the rest of the time, it seems, the lonely and troubled Lady Linda will continue to remain imprisoned in her lavish, gilded cage.