Day had been married four times by the time of her death. In the 1960s, she was with her third husband, producer Martin Melcher. The couple started their own production company in 1952, called Arwin Productions. Of course, the majority of films they made starred Day.
But in 1968, fate would take a turn for the worse, when Melcher passed away. Doctors later told Day it was due to an enlarged heart.
Day and Hudson were back at it a few years after their successful first film. This time, it was in 1961’s "Lover Come Back", directed by Delbert Mann. They appeared in one more film together in 1964, before the tragic news of his AIDS diagnosis got around.
The actor passed away in 1985. Day would later recall in her interview with People that she believed the reason people liked them together so much is because “they could see how much we liked each other.”
Although Day’s career lasted for decades, the shift in Hollywood’s demand would likely mean the end of her popularity. After all, here she was, the all-American girl who was sweet and naive. But as the Golden Age started to give way to a new tide, the demand for that type of character started to fade away.
Unfortunately, she would find herself dealing with much more pressing issues.
But the death of her beloved husband wasn’t the only bad surprise the actress got that year. In dealing with the after-death finances, she was shocked to learn that Melcher, along with his lawyer, Jerome Rosenthal, had basically robbed her blind.
Not only did they spend loads of her money, they spent so much of it that she was now over $500,000 in debt.
Losing her husband and finding out that he was responsible for her going broke, and a half a million dollars in debt was bad enough, but that wasn’t even the end of her troubles. It turns out that before Melcher died, he’d signed a deal for her to do a sitcom - and she was not happy.
She’d made it perfectly clear to him that she would rather die than do a sitcom, and at this point, she was probably starting to feel less bad about him suddenly dying, and more so about how he’d completely betrayed her before he did.