Tuesday, June 24, 1997 | 6:57 a.m.
NOT EVEN a small cemetery marker will denote the final resting place of Glynn "Scotty" Wolfe, a man who spent many of his 88 years seeking publicity.
Wolfe, who died earlier this month of heart failure at a nursing home near his hometown of Blythe, Calif., has held the title of most-married man in the Guinness Book of Records for 35 years.
He had made it to the altar no fewer than 28 times.
Wolfe, a former boarding-house owner, first approached the altar in 1927. He was 19, and his bride was 20. Since then, there have been 24 others, and three of them married Wolfe twice.
The obituaries noted that Wolfe last made headlines June 20, 1996, when he married Linda Essex-Wolfe, who cannot afford to pay for her late husband's burial.
Essex-Wolfe, who has been married 23 times, holds the record as the world's most-married woman.
What the obituaries didn't report was that the two became engaged four years earlier at the Flamingo Hilton, where the couple stayed courtesy of the hotel -- in separate rooms, of course.
Leave it to Scotty to milk that engagement for all it was worth.
I was one of the reporters who covered the engagement. It was Feb. 12, 1992 -- two days before Valentine's Day. At the time, publicity people were running about the hotel, looking for proper settings for photo shoots and television interviews of the matrimonial darlings.
I remember standing there with my notebook and watching Scotty relax at a table and nibble on some hors d'oeuvres. Then he smiled and chatted with the cocktail waitress.
It was old hat for him. He seemed as interested in marriage as Hugh Hefner during the early Playboy years.
All he would say about his 28th bride-to-be was that "she's afraid to fly on an airplane. Can you imagine that?"
What Scotty liked was attention.
"Do you think the AP will pick the story up?" Scotty asked me after I jotted down a few notes on his views toward women and marriage.
"I don't know, Scotty. They probably will."
"Well write a good story, young man, so they'll notice it," Scotty said between nibbles on a chocolate-covered strawberry. "Everybody likes a good story."
I don't want to speak ill of the dead, but this man made me uneasy.
I remember him talking about marrying teenage girls because he liked to "train them."
Essex-Wolfe seemed to be a nicer person. She also had a sense of pragmatism about personal relationships that, I suppose, one develops after a couple of dozen marriages.
"I think he's a very sweet and loving person," Essex said of her husband-to-be. "But I also think he's a sex maniac. He talks abut sex all the time."
After the interview ended and I filed my story, I didn't think about Wolfe until two weeks later, when I got a call from Christine Herron, the Blythe limousine service owner who had shuttled Scotty from California to Las Vegas free of charge.
It was then I remembered that I had promised to send her a copy of the story.
"Scotty told me I'd have to call you to remind you," Herron said. "He said the reporters always promise to send the articles -- and they always forget."
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