Melinda Ledbetter
Wife, manager and ‘saviour’ of the Beach Boy Brian Wilson
MELINDA LEDBETTER, who has died aged 77, was the manager and second wife of Brian Wilson, whom she helped bring back to the real world following his experiences at the hands of the psychologist Eugene Landy; a former car saleswoman, she had first met the Beach
Boys co-founder in 1986 when she sold him a brown Cadillac Seville.
“Melinda was more than my wife,” Wilson said when he announced her death. “She was my saviour. She gave me the emotional security I needed to have a career... She was my anchor.” She once said that, although her husband had problems “dealing with the world’s insanity”, he was “probably the most sane person I know”.
Melinda Kae Ledbetter was born on October 3 1946 into a German-irish family in Pueblo, Colorado, where her father, Leonard, a US Air Force pilot, had been stationed; her mother was Rosemary. She grew up in Whittier, California, where she attended college, before spending 16 years as a model. She moved into car sales at a dealership in Los Angeles, where she met Brian Wilson.
By then Wilson had been in Eugene Landy’s clutches for several years. The celebrity therapist – whose clients had included Alice Cooper, Richard Harris and Rod Steiger – had first treated him in the mid1970s, declaring that the Beach Boy was an undiagnosed schizophrenic, but he had been sacked when his regularly increased fees reached $20,000 a month.
He re-entered Wilson’s orbit in 1982 after the musician had overdosed on alcohol, cocaine and prescription drugs. He worked his way into Wilson’s life and within a couple of years was telling an interviewer: “I influence all of his thinking. I’m practically a member of the band – we’re partners in life.”
When Melinda Ledbetter met Wilson in 1986 they began dating, and six months later she reported Landy to California’s attorney general for ethical violations, but was told that nothing could be done without the agreement of Wilson’s family – who had been edged out of his life by Landy. In 1989, she claimed, Landy ordered Wilson to split with her.
But the Wilson family and his bandmates fought back, meanwhile, and in 1991 a court order was granted banning Landy from all contact. Wilson contacted Melinda Ledbetter and they resumed their relationship.
They married in 1995, and in 1999 she became Wilson’s manager, and was widely credited with making sure he had proper medical care and helping him to start touring again and complete the famously unfinished Beach Boys album, Smile (which he re-recorded and released in 2004 as Brian Wilson Presents Smile).
But there were dissenting voices, and her influence on Wilson was questioned. His daughter Carnie (of the band Wilson Phillips) began referring to her as Melandy, conflating her name with that of Eugene Landy, and questions were raised about the extent to which Wilson had control over his life.
In 2007, he said his marriage to Melinda had allowed him to resume his career – although in the same interview he observed that he felt he should have spent the early 2000s “in a mental institution under heavy sedation”.
According to Wilson’s fellow Beach Boy (and cousin) Mike Love, the band’s 2012 50thanniversary reunion tour was curtailed because of Melinda’s influence. She and Love were said to have rowed regularly and fiercely, and he demanded that she be banned from rehearsals.
In the 2014 Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy she was played by Elizabeth Banks. The actress recalled that Melinda Ledbetter told her: “Music is his first love. Nothing can replace it, it’s his being, it’s his essence, it’s his everything. So I’m settling for second, but it’s a pretty good second.”
Brian Wilson survives her with their three adopted daughters and two adopted sons.
Melinda Ledbetter, born October 3 1946, died January 30 2024