Doris Day, the screen legend, has died at age 97. She was not married at the time she died, and, thus, she did not have a current husband. Although Doris Day was known for her innocence on screen and became an American sweetheart, her personal life was more complicated. Throughout her lifetime, Doris Day was married four times. What was the cause of death? Day’s foundation told the Associated Press that Doris Day “had been in excellent physical health for her age, until recently contracting a serious case of pneumonia.” Her four husbands were Al Jorden (married in 1941 and divorced two years later); George Weidler (married in 1946 and divorced three years later); Martin Melcher (married in 1951 and he died in 1968); and Barry Comden (married in 1976 and divorced in 1981). One of those marriages – the first, to Al Jorden – produced Day’s son, Terry Melcher. Here’s what you need to know about Doris Day’s family: Martin Melcher Was Accused of Squandering Doris Day’s Earnings According to Fox 19, although it was the longest lived, Day’s marriage to Martin Melcher, who was a film producer, was a troubled one, at least at the end. Their marriage ended with his death in 1968. “Day was shocked to learn that he and his business partner, Jerome Bernard Rosenthal, had squandered her earnings for 17 years,” Fox 19 reported. She sued Rosenthal, won damages, and “soon learned her late husband had committed her to appear in a TV series,” the news site reports. That show was “The Doris Day Show.” Melcher was Day’s agent and “pulled her out of her Warner Brothers contract and revamped her as a freelance actress for hire,” UK Telegraph reports. Al Jorden Was a Trombonist Once Called a ‘Creep’ by Doris Day But Gave Her a Son Doris Day met Al Jorden, a trombonist, when she was only 16 and was known as Doris Kappelhoff, according to UK Standard. He asked her to the movies. Jorden was older – 23 – and Day told her mother, Standard recalled, “He’s a creep and I wouldn’t go out with him if they were giving away gold nuggets at the movie!” They had things in common, though. They were in the same band in Evanstown, Cincinnati, where Day grew up. “He cheated on Doris, knocked her around and humiliated her in public,” Standard reports, but he also fathered her child, Terry Melcher. She was only 18. They eventually divorced. Tragically, her only child, Terry Melcher, died in 2004 of melanoma. Doris Day’s Marriage to Husband George Weidler Fell Apart as Her Career Took Off According to IMDB, Day’s marriage to George Weidler was similarly short-lived. “In 1946, Doris married George Weidler, but this union lasted less than a year,” IMDB reported. Daily Mail reports that Weidler was a saxophonist. Her career was starting to take off: “Day’s agent talked her into taking a screen test at Warner Bros.,” the site reports. The marriage failed, reports UK Telegraph, because Weidler “thought that his wife was now too big a star for the marriage to work.” Barry Comden Felt That Doris Day’s Dogs Came First Grandes amores DORIS DAY y BARRY COMDEN pic.twitter.com/kC0TUB3lfg — María José Acuña (@mariajo_abel) February 13, 2016 Doris Day was a well-known lover of animals. Some of her husbands felt they played second fiddle to them. Barry Comden’s obituary in SFGate describes him as a “maitre d’ at a Beverly Hills restaurant.” He “complained that he took second place to her many dogs,” the newspaper reported. He was younger than Doris Day when they met at the restaurant – where she was a customer – according to SFGate. Day once said the couple, who divorced, was “just incompatible,” reported SFGate, which quoted her as saying, “She had 14 dogs, and the final straw was when I was kicked out of bed to make way for Tiger, a poodle.”<doc-sep>Doris Day arrived in Hollywood in the late 1940s already a celebrity, a big-band singer on her way to becoming a movie star. She had early success in light musicals, but as they fell out of fashion she modernized herself in a way that probably confused mid-20th century America: With a bubbly screen presence and a blinding smile, Day was the rare movie heroine who held a great job while having the requisite romance. Women wanted to be her and men wanted to marry someone like her. The equation proved to be box office gold. Day died of pneumonia Monday at her Carmel Valley, Calif., home. She was 97. She had been “in excellent physical health for her age” until recently, the Doris Day Animal Foundation said in an emailed statement. Advertisement In the early 1970s, Day walked away from Hollywood, spending most of the ensuing decades in her beloved Carmel, where she was an outspoken animal rights activist. 1 / 15 Doris Day in 1962. (Associated Press) 2 / 15 Doris Day on a red Schwinn bicycle, late 1950s. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images) 3 / 15 Doris Day leaves her name, foot- and hand-prints in wet concrete at Grauman’s theater, Jan. 19, 1961. (Bruce Cox / Los Angeles Times) 4 / 15 1953 publicity photo of Doris Day. (Warner Bros) 5 / 15 Doris Day poses with her husband and agent Martin Melcher at their hotel after arriving in London in April 1955. (Bob Dear / Associated Press) 6 / 15 Mickey Mantle, Doris Day and Cary Grant in a press still from the 1962 movie “A Touch of Mink.” (1962). (File Photo / File Photo) 7 / 15 Doris Day in a publicity photo for the 1957 movie “Pajama Game.” (Corbis) 8 / 15 Actress-singer Doris Day, shown in this 1968 photo, was a recording star in the 1940s and a popular film star from the early 1950s through the early 1960s. (Associated Press / Associated Press) 9 / 15 An undated Doris Day publicity still. (Unknown Photographer / Handout) 10 / 15 A 1949 portrait of Day. For a decade, starting in 1948, the singer had 30 top-20 singles. She recorded almost 30 albums. (Pictorial Parade / Getty Images) 11 / 15 Doris Day in a cashmere sweater with pearls, 1952. (Bert Six /Los Angeles Times archive) 12 / 15 Doris Day and Rock Hudson in “Lover Come Back” (1961), directed by Delbert Mann. (Handout) 13 / 15 Doris Day in “Love Me or Leave Me” (1955), directed by Charles Vidor. (Handout) 14 / 15 Doris Day in a photo from the book “The Bad and the Beautiful,” by Ellen Graham, in 1973. (Ellen Graham / Harry N. Abrams/Stewart, Tabori) 15 / 15 Doris Day joined Rock Hudson at a July 18, 1985, news conference in Monterey. Day’s frequent film costar died later that year. (Chris Hunter / Associated Press) Doris Day dies: Reactions as Hollywood icon remembered as ‘glorious and inimitable’ » On screen, she effectively traded barbs with leading men and marched into the workplace in such lighthearted movies as “Pillow Talk” (1959) and “Lover Come Back” (1961), two of the three films she made with Rock Hudson. She received her only Academy Award nomination for “Pillow Talk.” “Her persona hit a cultural mother lode, tapping into what the average postwar woman was about,” Drew Casper, a USC film professor, told The Times. She “was way ahead of her time, a feminist before there was feminism.” From 1948 to 1968, Day appeared in 39 films, most often as the wholesome girl next door. At age 46, she made her last film, “With Six You Get Eggroll.” Day’s body of work shows “how much of an icon she was, how much she became in her own way the female equivalent of John Wayne or Clint Eastwood,” Times film critic Kenneth Turan once wrote. She was such a natural that when director Michael Curtiz caught her taking acting lessons while making her first movie, “Romance on the High Seas” (1948), he told her to stop, she recounted in “Doris Day: Her Own Story,” her 1976 as-told-to autobiography by A.E. Hotchner. Advertisement Day “was an Actors Studio all by herself,” Hudson said in her autobiography. “Her sense of timing, her instincts — I just kept my eyes open and copied her.” She was at her best in films that allowed her sultry voice and “wonderful way with a song” to carry some of the dramatic weight, Turan wrote, including “Calamity Jane” (1953) and “Young Man With a Horn” (1950), in which she played a band singer opposite Kirk Douglas’ trumpet player. Doris Day: A guileless natural on screen and record, and a mystery even to her devotees » Day also became one of the most popular singers of her generation. Next to Frank Sinatra, Day was “the best in the business on selling a lyric,” band leader Les Brown said in her autobiography. Advertisement Her rendition of “Sentimental Journey,” recorded with Brown and his Band of Renown in 1945, brought her a flood of letters from servicemen at the end of World War II. More than 50 years later, her version of the song made it into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Songs she sang were nominated for Academy Awards half a dozen times. Two won: “Secret Love” from “Calamity Jane,” a musical that was her favorite film; and “Que Será, Será (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)” from “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 movie that cast her against type as a neurotic American mother abroad. “Que Será, Será” was also inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, in 2012. The “Secret Love” album sold well and made producers realize the potential for cross-promotion between movies and music, said Casper, who has screened Day’s movies in his USC classes because her talent and message “signified the very best of postwar culture.” Yet her insistence on making mostly sunny, upbeat films earned the rancor of some feminists in the 1960s, who thought Day’s roles glorified an ideal woman who never really existed. Advertisement<doc-sep>She turned down the Sound of Music, declaring herself too American to play a nun from Salzburg. But nor was she ready to change her image and embrace the times: rejecting the role of Mrs Robinson in The Graduate. She said she found the script to be "vulgar and offensive".<doc-sep>Portrait of American movie and television star, singer, and a friend to all the animals Doris Day as ... [+] she wears a flower brooch, circa 1966. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images) Getty Images Topline: After actress and singer Doris Day (who died Monday at 97) was an ascendant star of the 1950s and ’60s, she experienced a sudden financial crisis, brought on by her husband (who was also her manager) and a Beverly Hills lawyer who squandered her $20 million fortune and left her in debt, as documented by Forbes at the time (read the original 1974 article, below). Doris Day’s husband and agent, Martin Melcher, let a Beverly Hills lawyer named Jerome Rosenthal handle his wife’s money, according to Forbes. Rosenthal poured it into shoddy investments, took kickbacks and then charged clients exorbitant fees to save face. Rosenthal’s investments included sham land bank bond transactions, doomed venture capital projects, bankrupt hotels and shady oil and gas deals. “My husband thought Rosenthal was a genius,” Day said at the time. “I was working away, knowing nothing and trusting.” After Day’s husband died suddenly in 1968, Rosenthal tried to claim half of Day’s remaining fortune. Day sued. During the lawsuit, sheriff's deputies had to use force to get Rosenthal’s files. In 1974, a judge decided that Day was owed $22.8 million. Her son said in a 1986 interview that she eventually got some of the money from an insurance company but “nothing like that amount,” according to the New York Times. Day was known for being one of the biggest box office draws of the early ’60s, with acclaimed roles in Pillow Talk—which earned her an Academy Award nomination—and in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. After her movie career, Day starred in The Doris Day Show after her husband—in addition to losing her money—signed a contract committing her to the show without her knowledge, according to NPR. She agreed to star in the show in order to pay off her debts.<doc-sep>
Doris Day, the legendary screen actress, has died at age 97. Her family included one son, although she left behind a trail of husbands. As for Doris Day’s birth family, her grandparents were German immigrants. Although Doris Day was known for her innocence on screen and became an American sweetheart, her personal life was more complicated and, at times, was very troubled. What was the cause of death? Day’s foundation told the Associated Press that Doris Day “had been in excellent physical health for her age, until recently contracting a serious case of pneumonia.” Doris Day’s life was punctuated by tragedy, however. Her only child, Terry Melcher, died in 2004 of melanoma. Here’s what you need to know about Doris Day’s family: 1. Doris Day Was Married Four Times Doris Day had four husbands throughout the course of her life. She divorced three of them. One of her marriages, to her agent, was long-lasting until his death. Day’s four husbands were Al Jorden (married in 1941 and divorced two years later); George Weidler (married in 1946 and divorced three years later); Martin Melcher (married in 1951 and he died in 1968); and Barry Comden (married in 1976 and divorced in 1981). One of those marriages – the first, to Al Jorden – produced Day’s son, Terry Melcher. According to Fox 19, although it was the longest lived, Day’s marriage to Martin Melcher, who was a film producer, was a troubled one, at least at the end. Their marriage ended with his death in 1968. “Day was shocked to learn that he and his business partner, Jerome Bernard Rosenthal, had squandered her earnings for 17 years,” Fox 19 reported. She sued Rosenthal, won damages, and “soon learned her late husband had committed her to appear in a TV series,” the news site reports. That show was “The Doris Day Show.” Melcher was Day’s agent and “pulled her out of her Warner Brothers contract and revamped her as a freelance actress for hire,” UK Telegraph reports. 2. Day’s Son Terry Was Described as the Love of Her Life Doris Day bore one child: Her son, Terry Melcher. Although Melcher bore the name of Day’s third husband, he was her child with her first husband. She was a teenage mom. His death of melanoma broke her heart. She told Closer Magazine, that her biggest heartbreak was “losing my dear son, Terry. He was such a huge part of my life, and I miss him all the time.” A friend told Closer: “She talks about Terry all the time. Terry was the love of her life.” Doris Day met Al Jorden, Terry’s dad and a trombonist, when she was only 16 and was known as Doris Kappelhoff, according to UK Standard. He asked her to the movies. Jorden was older – 23 – and Day told her mother, Standard recalled, “He’s a creep and I wouldn’t go out with him if they were giving away gold nuggets at the movie!” They had things in common, though. They were in the same band in Evanstown, Cincinnati, where Day grew up. “He cheated on Doris, knocked her around and humiliated her in public,” Standard reports, but he also fathered her child, Terry Melcher. She was only 18. They eventually divorced. 3. Doris Day Was Born to a Music Teacher & Housewife in Ohio Doris Day’s acting prowess could have derived from her father, who was artistic – he was involved in music. She wasn’t always known as Doris Day. According to Biography.com, she was born Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff on April 3, 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her parents, Biography.com reports, were “Alma Sophia (Welz), a housewife, and William Joseph Kappelhoff, a music teacher and choir master.” According to the site, her grandparents were German immigrants and she had two siblings, both brothers, who were named Richard and Paul. Richard died before she was born, and her parents divorced when she was young, although she lived with Alma, Biography.com reports. She was dancing by the time she was a teen. The site DorisDayMagic.com reports that Alma “was raised to be a hausfrau, someone who saw to the needs of others. As a sister, mother, and grandmother, she was kind, loving and nurturing.” She worked in a bakery after the divorce and became her daughter’s manager for a time, the site says.