Stephen Hawking’s second wife Elaine once raged in front guests that she was his ‘slave’,

Stephen Hawking’s second wife once flew into a rage in front of dinner guests and said she had been his ‘slave for 20 years’, a new book obtained by DailyMail.com claims.

Elaine Hawking felt she was ‘a nothing, a nobody’ because she was eclipsed by her husband’s need to be the ‘center of attention’.

Her marriage to the famed author was ‘stormy’ and she admitted that at times she ‘resented him’.

The claims are made by Leonard Mlodinow in his new book Stephen Hawking: A Memoir of Friendship and Physics, to be released on September 8.

Mlodinow, theoretical physicist and close friend of Hawking, shines new light on Hawking’s marriage to Elaine, who was accused of physically abusing her husband.

The author says the rumored injuries included a black eye and a cut lip, but British police found no evidence of mistreatment.

In the book he also reveals new details about Hawking’s complicated love life, which at one point involved four married people having affairs and trying to act like they were a giant family.

Mlodinow writes that with his first wife Jane, Hawking had always been a ‘completely passive sex partner’ due to the degenerative condition that crippled him in his youth.

Jane thought that ‘sexual activity would kill him’ and became turned off because he had the ‘body of a holocaust victim’.

Hawking’s life was dramatised in the film ‘The Theory of Everything’ starring Eddie Redmayne as the scientist who was widely regarded as the most brilliant mind since Albert Einstein before his death in 2018.

Redmayne won an Oscar for his realistic portrayal of Hawking’s decline due to ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, a motor neurone disease.

The condition left him unable to talk and so he used a computer whose android voice became the trademark of the Cambridge University professor.

Mlodinow and Hawking were close friends for years and worked together on the 2010 book The Grand Design.

He describes how Hawking met Jane in 1963 when he was 20 years old, marrying a few years later.  

By then he was already showing symptoms of ALS and they knew that there would be severe challenges ahead. 

As Mlodinow writes, over the next three decades Jane would ‘eventually feed him, dress him, bathe him and sit with him through his many hospital visits and near-death experiences’.

He writes: ‘In the process, over time, she’d lose her own identity. And with it, her self-worth. ”Who am I?” she’d wonder’.

The couple stayed together until 1985 when Hawking had a tracheotomy, which meant he would need 24/7 care – and fell for his new nurse.

Her name was Elaine Mason who Mlodinow writes had red hair, liked to skateboard and ‘definitely knew how to flirt’.

He writes: ‘Maybe one reason they bonded was that she had the flamboyance he would have exhibited if he’d had the use of his body.

‘For her part, Elaine wasn’t put off by Stephen’s physical condition. Just the opposite: she was drawn to it’.

The fact that Elaine herself was married didn’t stop her, nor did the fact that her husband David was an engineer and self-confessed Hawking super-fan who helped develop Hawking’s speech synthesizer.

Elaine would travel with Hawking whenever he did speeches abroad, the massive effort to transport him was no bother to her.

The book says: ‘She loved his strength. She’d speak and listen to him patiently, appreciative of the time and energy he expended to communicate with her, and she began to confide in him’.

Meanwhile Hawking’s wife Jane had drifted away from him and had begun an affair of her own with Jonathan Hellyer Jones, the choirmaster at her local church in Cambridge.

Hawking’s condition had presented issues with intimacy but they had overcome them to have three children. But now there was a new distance between the couple.

Mlodinow writes: ‘His condition meant that Stephen had always been a completely passive sex partner as well as a fragile one. Over time, his fragility caused Jane to worry that sexual activity might kill him.

‘Making love to him became a frightening and empty experience. Even the thought of sex with him felt unnatural, and her desire for him faded. He had the needs of an infant and ”the body of a holocaust victim”, she said.

‘Their passion for each other extinguished, Jane’s marital relationship with Stephen devolved into that of a carer’.

Jane went to Hawking and explained she was having an affair and he gave his blessing, the book says.

The idea was that the affair would be kept ‘private and discreet’ and the family would ‘evolve to include them all’.

Mlodinow writes: ‘It would be a new arrangement, a kind of extended family. What Jane didn’t expect was that Stephen would extend the family again – to include Elaine.

‘If Stephen and Jane had followed a path from man-and-lover to infant-and-carer, he and Elaine followed the reverse trajectory.

‘This led to a new ”new arrangement”. It was a constellation as complex as any in the night sky, encompassing Stephen, Elaine, Jane, and Jonathan; the three Hawking children; and their various interconnecting relationships’.

But the arrangement didn’t last long and within five years Stephen had moved in with Elaine – they married in 1995.

Elaine told Mlodinow that she didn’t want to be Hawking’s nurse anymore but she loved cooking for him and prepared curries and roast dinners, his favorite foods.

Mlodinow writes Elaine ‘loved to hold his hand’ and even though they couldn’t sleep in the same bed, she would come down in the night just to look at him and touch him.

Elaine told Mlodinow: ‘I helped Stephen but he helped me. I came from a dysfunctional family. My parents didn’t look after us very much. I loved (my ex-husband), but we weren’t in love. I married him because I was twenty-five and he was the first man who asked me, and that’s what you did. So the feeling of being loved was special.

‘And I was in love with Stephen and he was in love with me. He accepted me and loved me for who I am inside’.

Not everyone was happy that Elaine had become the central figure of Hawking’s life and his son Tim and daughter Lucy were highly suspicious of her.

In 2000 police in the UK began an investigation after claims Elaine had slammed Hawking’s wrist on his wheelchair.

She allegedly refused to let him use his urine bottle so he wet himself, she also allegedly let him slip beneath the water while in the bath, causing water to enter the tracheotomy site in his throat.

Other alleged abuse included leaving him alone in the backyard on the hottest day of the year, causing him to suffer a heat stroke and severe sunburn.

All the allegations were strongly denied by Hawking and his assistant Judith Croadsell, and the police concluded their investigation in 2004 without charge.

Mlodinow writes: ‘Whatever happened or didn’t happen, one thing everyone did agree upon was that Elaine and Stephen had always had a stormy relationship.

‘One moment it was: ”You’re crazy, I hate you, and never want to see you again”; the next it was ”I love you more than anything and could never live without you”.’

Mlodinow got his clearest insight yet into the tensions between the couple one evening when he came to dinner at Hawking’s house and Elaine answered the door.

She glared at Hawking and said: ‘Who is he?’

Mlodinow explained he was working with Hawking on a book but Elaine cut him off. She said indignantly to Hawking: ‘You brought him for dinner?

‘It might have been nice to let me know. You never do, do you?! Because you’re Stephen Hawking, and you don’t need to! Well, there’s not enough food!’

Hawking asked him to stay and once he had been taken away to the toilet by a carer, Elaine apologized.

She said: ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve been his slave for twenty years, and it’s enough’.

Later after they sat down for dinner, Elaine suddenly grabbed her plate and stood up.

She said ‘I can’t handle this’ and walked off, plate in hand.

It reminded Mlodinow of the first time he had met Elaine in Frankfurt when he asked to take her picture.

She shrieked: ‘No! I’m a nothing, a nobody!

‘I just don’t want my picture taken. I’m nothing. I’m invisible – like the air’.

It would be years later, after Hawking’s death, that Elaine was able to explain herself.

She told him: ‘Stephen was like an actor. He needed to be the center of attention, the center of the universe. He loved it. It gave him energy. He loved people.

‘He had a very tough life but he was an incredibly brave man. He never, ever complained, ever, but he needed to be the center of attention.

‘And, yes, I probably resented that. Not all the time, but when I was tired or one of the carers was flirting with him, or whatever it was. But it would be temporary. The resentment would pass. Deep down, he was my only love’.

Elaine and Hawking divorced in 2006 and he fell for Diana King, another of his carers.

She was 39 years younger than him and suffered from manic depression but Hawking wasn’t put off.

Speaking of Elaine, he once told Mlodinow: ‘She’s mixed up. But it’s time I helped someone else. All my adult life people have been helping me’. 

Mlodinow adds: ‘Was he attracted to troubled women? I wasn’t sure. I thought Diana was intelligent and well read. Nice to chat with; I learned stuff. But that was when she was on her meds.’

Mlodinow speculates that ‘physical desire’ was what drove their connection or it could have been something deeper, a connection between two souls.

Diana once told Mlodinow that Hawking had ‘the most expressive face in the world’ and she could tell what he was thinking by the way his mouth twitched.

On another occasion she said she wished she could ‘trade places’ with him and wanted to give him the gift of her health and become the quadriplegic.

They chose a ring but Hawking feared more tension with his children so he backed out.

Diana was ‘devastated’ and still has the ring as a memento of their time together. 

Leonard Mlodinow’s new book Stephen Hawking: A Memoir of Friendship and Physics will be released on September 8.