How Doris Day's third husband cost her sanity - and her £66million fortune

11 April 2012
The Weekender

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Doris Day was one of Hollywood's biggest names, starring in more than 40 films during the Fifties and Sixties.

But a compelling new biography reveals that, behind her girl-next-door image, lay a fatal weakness for violent and unsuitable men. In part one of our serialisation we told how one lover planned to shoot her dead. Here, in the concluding part, another man drives her towards mental breakdown...

Married for the third time and aged just 27, Doris Day desperately wanted to be the wholesome housewife she so often portrayed in her movies. But, once again, it wasn't to be.

Abusive: Marty Melcher dominated and defrauded Doris Day

Abusive: Marty Melcher dominated and defrauded Doris Day

Doris Day was one of Hollywood's biggest names, starring in more than 40 films during the Fifties and Sixties. But a compelling new biography reveals that, behind her girl-next-door image, lay a fatal weakness for violent and unsuitable men. In part one of our serialisation at the weekend, we told how one lover planned to shoot her dead.
Here, in the concluding part, another man drives her towards mental breakdown...

Married for the third time and aged just 27, Doris Day desperately wanted to be the wholesome housewife she so often portrayed in her movies. But, once again, it wasn't to be.

On the face of it, everything certainly looked perfect: she and her new husband Marty Melcher bought a beautiful home in Los Angeles, where Doris's son from her first marriage, Terry, then seven, lived with them.

Terry later said what a difficult move this was. Until now, he had effectively had no mother - his grandmother Alma had been his only parent while Doris toured the country and made films. Seeing so much of Doris was rather a shock.

But Marty was also Doris's agent, and there was no way he was ready to allow his money-making wife to give up work. She made movie after movie, while he negotiated higher and higher fees for her, which everybody suspected he was siphoning away for himself.

She refused to listen to anyone who said so, and was determined to show everyone she had a blissful marriage - and that's how it seemed when Marty legally adopted Terry, who took his name, but behind the scenes things were grim.

Marty became jealous and controlling, never allowing Doris out alone and deciding who she was or wasn't allowed to star with. Doris's film career was also taking something of a dip at the box office.

More worryingly, she had started suffering from mental illness. Signs of this started to show while she was shooting the film I'll See You In My Dreams, and broke down during a scene in which she had to cry. Once the cameras stopped rolling she clung to Marty, sobbing uncontrollably.

Unstable and depressed, she seemed to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown when, in 1952, she started working on what was to be her most triumphant film so far - Calamity Jane.

Iconic: Doris Day in Calamity Jane

Iconic: Doris Day in Calamity Jane

'It's DAY-lightful!' the posters proclaimed - and the public agreed. But it was also the most physically taxing film she had ever made. No sooner had shooting ended than the crisis that had been already hovering in the wings hit her with a vengeance.

She began suffering panic attacks with palpitations and breathlessness, and was convinced she was about to have a heart attack. Matters were exacerbated when she discovered a small lump in her breast.

Desperate for comfort, Doris threw herself into religion - she was a follower of Christian Science, which eschews conventional medicine and favours spiritual healing. She also spent a lot of time with two new - and rather unhelpful - friends, musical comedy star Charlotte Greenwood and Judy Garland.

Greenwood and her composer husband Martin Broones were particularly obsessive practitioners of Christian Science. To Doris, their word was law. They strongly advised her not to seek medical help for her problems. Marty Melcher, originally an
Orthodox Jew, was also a follower of Christian Science. Doris had introduced him to it when they first met and, following their marriage, he had become a staunch believer.

However, he was not quite as fundamentalist in his beliefs as Charlotte and Martin, and said that since he suspected his wife was having a mental breakdown, he was going to bend the rules and have her see a doctor.

The doctor said there was nothing wrong with Doris's mental health, that she was suffering from an over-active imagination and 'acute hyperventilation', and should simply breathe in and out of a paper bag when she had another attack.

He also booked her into hospital where the lump in her breast was found to be benign, and prescribed a course of sedatives that Doris took very reluctantly - the founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, would not have approved.

Only days after leaving the clinic, cured but still weak, and convinced the doctors had made the wrong diagnosis and that she was really dying, Doris reluctantly began work on her next film, Lucky Me. On an adjacent lot at Warner Brothers, Judy Garland was shooting A Star Is Born.

Two years older than Doris, Garland was a physical and mental wreck. Addicted to uppers and downers, bloated by medication, her third marriage - to producer Sid Luft - was falling apart.

When Marty Melcher introduced Doris to the Lufts, Sid was cheating on Judy with another man and Judy had been put on a crash diet that made her completely irrational. Nonetheless, she did offer Doris some sound advice: 'Ditch the religion bulls**t!'

Doris chose to ignore her. A 'cure' was therefore effected for her mental turmoil by reading the works of Mary Baker Eddy and drinking with Judy - which, though just as detrimental to Doris's health as her imaginary illnesses, certainly enabled her to forget all about them until the next morning's hangover.

In fact, thanks to her Christian Science beliefs, Doris's depression was not addressed properly until she finally started seeing a mental health specialist in 1971, who treated her for at least four years.

Meanwhile, away from the studio, Doris became edgy and anti-social. The success of Calamity Jane brought a flood of requests for receptions and interviews, every one of which she turned down.

During the filming of Young At Heart, in which she starred opposite Frank Sinatra, she showed more signs of strain.

The elderly American actress Ethel Barrymore was also in the movie, and on her 75th birthday the cast threw her a surprise party. Seeing how weak the old lady looked when being helped out of her wheelchair was too much for Doris. All her own health insecurities welled up and she broke down.

To make matters worse, a technician tossed her a box of tissues that accidentally hit her in the face. Sinatra promptly started laying into the technician until he was dragged off by security men.

Meanwhile, all of Doris's considerable earnings were being handed over to Melcher and his lawyer and business partner Jerry Rosenthal without question. Doris never really knew what she was paid. Her husband signed the deals and looked after the books and she said she had no reason not to trust him.

Clawing her way back to something like equilibrium, Doris publicly admitted she'd had a breakdown and was widely praised for her honesty.

She went on to star in Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much, which included her singing 'Que Sera, Sera' - a lullaby that became her new signature tune and her most popular recording ever.

Working flat-out, she then started making the movie Julie, opposite the suave French actor Louis Jourdan. Doris always denied having an affair with Jourdan, who was charming and compassionate - a welcome change from her uncouth, unkind husband.

She clearly adored Louis, and he later insisted they'd had a brief, passionate relationship. From day one of the shooting schedule, it seems that Doris leaned on him for moral support against Melcher - and, inevitably, one thing led to another.

In her memoirs, Doris denies that Marty Melcher was physically violent towards her, claiming the nearest he ever got to this was slamming his fist into the wall or door, but friends such as Rock Hudson said that he did hit her.

Wiith Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk: Hudson revealed Day was beaten

Wiith Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk: Hudson revealed Day was beaten

He certainly hit her son Terry, and often humiliated him in public, calling him a 'sissy'. When Doris complained that he was being too hard on the boy, Melcher's response was that, as the man of the household, he alone was responsible for discipline.

He pointed out that it was against the edicts of Christian Science to have parents pulling in opposite directions.

Christian Science was also the excuse he used when Doris started haemorrhaging badly on set - he refused to let her be examined by a doctor. This went on for several weeks until Doris was in such agony that she could hardly walk.

Eventually, he allowed her to check herself into hospital where surgeons discovered a huge intestinal tumour. Removing it involved a hysterectomy.

Doris had said that she would rather have died on the operating table than face the prospect of never being able to conceive again, though she also made it clear that had there been another child, she would not have wanted Marty Melcher to be the father.

The after-effects of her operation sent her into another downward spiral of depression. Her career was going brilliantly, but her marriage was crumbling.

Over the next few years she starred opposite Clark Gable ('as masculine as any man I've ever known, and as much a little boy as a grown man could be'), Jack Lemmon, David Niven and Cary Grant.

But she couldn't have been more miserable. Doris was beginning to find life with her husband unbearable because of his near-psychotic treatment of their son.

Convinced Terry would grow up to be gay, delinquent - or both - and without even discussing this with his wife, Melcher dragged him away from the Christian Science school that Doris had put him into and installed him at the Harvard Military Academy, declaring this would make a man of him.

However, it only succeeded in making the boy hate him. When Terry was on his school holidays, Doris would take him to their beach house as a refuge. When she told a newspaper this was her favourite place on earth, Melcher made her sell it, unable to cope with her being happy.

Then, finally, she discovered that Marty had been beating Terry for years. Plenty of people knew but had been too scared to tell her, for fear of being rejected from the Doris Day 'inner circle'.

Similarly, several of her closest allies were terrified to tell her that Melcher and his business partner Rosenthal were almost certainly embezzling money from her bank accounts and transferring this to tax-free accounts in Switzerland.

Terry, aged 20, begged his mother to leave Melcher, but every time she threatened to do so, Melcher told her that if she divorced him, she would become bankrupt.

She was naive enough to swallow the story but decided they would 'live separate lives while living together'. Melcher was relegated to the spare room and Doris told him if he wanted to take a mistress, it was fine by her.

Terry left the family home, which turned out to be an excellent move because it marked the start of his musical career as a singer, songwriter and, most notably, producer of The Byrds' hits Mr Tambourine Man and Turn, Turn, Turn.

Then, when Doris was filming a movie called With Six You Get Eggroll, Marty Melcher fell ill. He complained of pain in his bowel and was rapidly losing weight.

Despite their relationship being in tatters, Doris insisted on nursing him. Even when his condition became desperate, Melcher refused to see a doctor because of his Christian Science beliefs.

During this mysterious final illness, he still exercised the same control over Doris as he had throughout their 17-year marriage. She was not permitted to go out alone or even leave the room without his permission. If she talked to male friends on the phone, he suspected her of having an affair.

She is said to have wanted to have affairs, and there were rumours of an involvement with baseball star Maury Wills and country singer Glen Campbell. Doris fervently denied both.

Eventually, Melcher agreed to see a specialist at hospital. For two weeks she stayed with him throughout the day, returning each night to Terry's house.

On April 19, 1968, Doris was contacted by the hospital director. Melcher had fallen out of bed - quite possibly he had suffered a stroke - and she was urged to go there at once. At 3am the next morning, Marty Melcher died in his sleep of a heart attack, aged 52.

Doris bowed out of the movie scene, aged just 44, rejecting every role that came her way after his death.

The truth is, she simply could not function without the steering hand of a svengali, and the only one she had ever wanted had been Marty Melcher. She mourned him with all her heart and told the world how much she had genuinely loved him. Then came a nasty shock.

When Doris received an unexpected tax demand for more than $500,000, an investigation revealed her coffers were empty: aside from personal possessions, her husband had left her broke.

It subsequently emerged that his crony Rosenthal had been milking her fortune for up to 15 years.

Marty had also duped his stepson, urging Terry to hand over royalties from his own compositions and production deals to Rosenthal for safe investment.

It took almost ten years of investigation before Rosenthal was found guilty of embezzling not just Doris's money, but that of other stars including Zsa Zsa Gabor and Kirk Douglas. The judge estimated that Doris was owed £66million.

It came as a big surprise when, around this time, Doris announced she was going to marry husband number four, Barry Comden, a restaurant manager who was 11 years her junior.

Doris befriended him when, on her way out of his Palm Springs restaurant, he gave her a bag of meat scraps for her beloved dogs. The ceremony took place at a friend's house on April 14, 1976.  'At last I'm romantically fulfilled,' she said 'Barry's a beautiful person, and we have a marvellous relationship, the most marvellous I've ever had!' But the 'marvellous' relationship proved short lived. By the end of 1979, they had drifted apart and by 1981 they were divorced.

Nor did things go well with regards to the money she was owed. Rosenthal's lawyers appealed against the judge's decision to give Doris such a huge sum, and the case dragged on until August 1985, when she ended up with but a fraction of the initial figure.

Beloved son: Terry Melcher died in 2004

Beloved son: Terry Melcher died in 2004

The exact amount was not made public, but is thought to have been no more than $3million.

The trial proved to be her last public performance, and with her debts finally settled (and still aged only 50) she made it clear outside the courthouse that there would be no more films.

On the final day of the trial she cut a dowdy figure: wearing horn-rimmed spectacles and with her hair up under a tweed hat, looking ten years older than she was.

From now on, fans would have to make do with a handful of half-hearted chat show appearances. Time and again she was asked to sing; always she declined - and not always politely when the demands became too over-zealous.

She all but disappeared, turning her attentions to supporting animal welfare charities and living quietly on her 11-acre estate in Carmel, California.

In 1988, she and Terry bought the Cypress Inn, a Spanish-style hotel in the centre of Carmel, simply because she had heard of clients complaining about its strict 'no animals' policy and she wanted to change the rules. In November 2004, the bottom dropped out of her world when, following a long battle against skin melanoma, Terry died, aged 62. It is something she has never spoken about.

Her last public appearance of sorts took place in May last year, aged 83, but still improbably beautiful, when she established an annual vets' scholarship in Terry's memory.

Over the last few years, there have been numerous reports of a figure, looking like a little old bag lady, stealing through the streets of Carmel in the middle of the night, rounding up stray dogs and emaciated cats and putting them into her car. She is Doris Day, finally doing something that makes her truly happy.

  • Adapted from Doris Day: Reluctant Star by David Bret, published by JR Books on June 25 at  £17.99. © David Bret 2008. To order a copy at £16.20 (p&p free), call 0845 606 4206.

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