Doris Day’s Lost Love

THE BELOVED ICON REVEALS THE TRUTH BEHIND A SPECIAL, BUT COMPLICATED, RELATIONSHIP

If Doris Day had listened to her instincts about backing out of dinner plans in the early ’70s with a former co-star, she may have missed out on one of the greatest love affairs of her life. “I had been so uneager to see him that when I came home from the studio that day I had wanted to cancel our date,” the actress, who at the time was starring in TV’s The Doris Day Show, recalls of that fateful night. “A few hours later,” though, “the earth was trembling under my chair at the restaurant. I fell in love — completely, unexpectedly in love.”

Actor Patrick O’Neal, the man who wowed Doris that night, was “a hunk. He was a handsome, debonair and funny guy,” Jackie Joseph, Doris’ TV series co-star tells Closer. But Doris didn’t dish about the passionate relationship until years later. And even then she didn’t use Patrick’s name, although it was obvious who she was describing. Doris, now 95, has noted that the love affair “had to be kept clandestine,” largely due to the fact that Patrick was a married man, albeit desperately unhappily. Still, said Doris, “It was a perfectly marvelous year for me. It was a time in my life when I badly needed to be uplifted, and uplift me it did.”

The duo had previously met when they worked together on the 1968 film Where Were You When the Lights Went Out? and Patrick was honest with Doris from the beginning about his complicated marital status. “I didn’t care whether he was married or not,” says Doris, who’s always insisted she wasn’t as naive as her public persona led people to believe. “I know that I am often thought of as a Pollyanna, but I’m far from it. I’m much too realistic to qualify as a Pollyanna.”

She believed him when he told her that he had been staying with his wife strictly for the sake of his children. “He was married to a woman he no longer loved,” Doris explains, adding that she had “no qualms” about his being married. “He was an adult, a forceful man,” she says, “and if he had honest feelings for me, that’s all I asked of him.”

A GOOD FIT

To those closest to Doris, Patrick seemed to be an excellent catch. “He was a very nice guy. I thought he would be perfect for her,” Kaye Ballard, another co-star on The Doris Day Show, tells Closer. “He was even a vegetarian,” she adds, noting how well that aligned with Doris’

lifelong passion for animal rights. “He understood all of that, and she was really attracted to him.” The emotional depth of the relationship was obvious to Kaye, who says, “I knew she was” in love with him. “They seemed very happy.”

Romantic happiness, sadly, was something that had long eluded Doris. At the time of her love affair with Patrick, she had been divorced twice — she’s called abusive first husband, trombonist Al Jorden, “a psychopathic sadist” and said that second husband, saxophonist George Weidler, was unfaithful — and widowed by her third husband, Martin Melcher, who left her half a million dollars in debt.

Jackie had only known Marty, an agent and producer, professionally, but she knows that his controlling ways caused Doris a lot of stress and heartache. “The only thing she said to me about him was, ‘Well, I sure can pick ’em,’ ” Jackie recalls. “She chose people who weren’t straight arrows.”

Though Marty adopted Doris’ son, Terry, whom she had with Al Jorden, Marty and Terry butted heads constantly. Doris’ own relationship with Marty eventually soured as well. “She’d wanted a divorce, but Marty talked her out of it,” David Kaufman, author of Doris Day: The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door, tells Closer. “They made a pact to remain married, but they’d have whatever other relationships they wanted to enjoy.”

It wasn’t until after Marty suffered a sudden and fatal heart attack in 1968 that Doris learned he had mismanaged her money and she was deeply in debt. He’d also committed her to doing The Doris Day Show and several specials without her knowledge or consent, but it proved to be the only way out of the financial hole he’d left her in.” The thing is she prevailed and is still having a pretty good life,” Jackie says of Doris’ strong survival instinct.

Her resilience would be tested even further when her only son — a talented music producer, songwriter and musician — was injured in a horrific motorcycle accident in 1972, leaving both of his legs shattered. “I was warned that Terry might not get through the night,” Doris recalls of living through every mother’s worst nightmare, but she helped nurse him back to health through months of rehabilitation.

HER LESSONS

IN LOVE Doris admits her marriages weren’t successful, but she’s

thankful for the gifts they gave her: son Terry (who died from cancer in 2004 at age 62) and “an inner strength

on which I can rely.”

“What bothers me about falling in love is how impermanent

it can be.”

— Doris

HER LOVE LIFELINE

It was during the period in which Doris was caring for Terry — and still reeling from Marty’s death and the dire situation he’d left her in — that her romance with Patrick started. “When we met,” she says, “he was feeling depressed about his marriage, and I brought as much into his life as he brought into mine. We really helped each other enormously.”

Jackie confirms that the relationship was an unexpected gift for Doris. “It was constantly a rough time in her life,” Jackie says. “She was in a trial with Marty’s partner who stole all her money and Terry had his accident. She was going back and forth to the hospital every day as soon as shooting was over. That’s when Patrick wove into the picture.”

Patrick also appealed to Doris because he was not at all like the other men in her life. “This man I fell in love with was totally different from the men I had known before him,” Doris raved. “He wasn’t a father figure, as Marty had been, a guardian telling me what to do and when to do it and what not to do.”

Patrick joined the The Doris Day Show in late 1972 as a semi-regular love interest for Doris. “The naughty part of me wishes she had the most wonderful wingding of her life,” Jackie says. “And that it didn’t hurt anybody, that it was fun, and it was just a little reassurance to her as a woman. She is a darling, giving person. It’s nice to have a connection with your fluttering heart!”

The relationship lasted more than a year, Doris says, but it eventually lost its steam. “Having had three marriages that turned out as badly as mine did, I was in no way thinking of getting married again,” she says. And when Patrick’s work commitments in LA ended, he decided to return home to his wife and kids.

“He went back East and I never saw him again,” Doris explains of their bittersweet goodbye. While she admits they had a small squabble at the time, Doris insists that didn’t affect their decision to end things. Instead, she says, “I realized after he left that I did not love him in an enduring way, but that he had brought something important into my life at a time when I sorely needed it.” A few years later, Doris married for a fourth time, to restaurateur Barry Comden. “I thought he was attractive,” recalled Kaye. “I also thought he looked a lot like Patrick, who was the one she said she really loved.” The couple divorced in 1981.

The entertainer, who heads the Doris Day Animal Foundation, continues to live a full and happy life in Carmel, Calif., surrounded by her many beloved pets. And while she cherishes the many memories she’s made through her years, she refuses to dwell on anything that could have been. “There is no sense in having regrets. We can’t change the past,” she assures Closer.

“I’ve always believed things work out exactly as they’re supposed to,” she adds. “Whatever will be, will be!”