This is how random stuff led to interesting stuff, six degrees of separation style. I saw this clickbait ad and wondered who the man with Doris Day was.
What caught my attention was his small nose, which looked like a coke nose. So I googled Doris Day’s husbands. It wasn’t her husband, but her only son, Terry Melcher.
Melcher was the son of a trombonist Doris Day married, but the kid was adopted by Day’s following husband, actor Martin Melcher, who prayed himself to death for refusing medical attention because he was a Christian Scientist.
Anyway, Terry Melcher became a music producer and created great albums such as The Byrds’ first two albums and co-wrote Kokomo by The Beach Boys. He also produced a few stinkers, but that’s just how it is.
At some point, Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys told him about this great talent called Charlie Manson, who lived with Wilson and some members of the Manson “family”. Manson auditioned for Melcher at his home at 10050 Cielo Drive in 1968, where he lived with his girlfriend, Candice Bergen.
Melcher wasn’t impressed, though, and passed on Charlie. Not long after that, Melcher and Bergen moved out, and Roman Polanski and his wife, Sharon Tate, leased the house.
Manson’s family members murdered Tate and some friends in that house less than a year later. One of the main theories about the murders is that Manson sent his crew to kill Melcher, not Tate or Polanski, because Melcher passed on him.
Melcher was a key witness during the trial before continuing his career, and in 1992 produced the first album made in Pro Tools, The Beach Boys’ Summer in Paradise, which sucks so much it has been out of print ever since. Melcher died in 2004 of Melanoma. RIP
