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.
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.
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.
She tried everything she could think of to get out of doing the show. But the contract had already been signed and she was locked in.
Fortunately, she took her power back when she and her own lawyer made changes to the contract that ensured her ultimate success. They also tried to make it as painless as possible on the actress.
The sitcom ended up being named "The Doris Day Show" - which gave her a certain amount of pull when it came to how everything went behind (and in) the scenes.
In fact, she was free to do basically anything she wanted when it came to how a majority of things went, such as the script and actors.