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How Hollywood Heartthrob Troy Donahue Lost Career, Wives and Home Before Becoming Sober
In 1997, Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee reunited in New York City for a revival screening of their soapy 1959 romance A Summer Place. “I was mesmerized by my own image up there. I kind of said, ‘Man, that’s what they were talking about.’ Because you forget,” Troy said. “Being that young and beautiful, both of us — that’s pretty heady stuff.”
The popular movie made Troy a star, but his time on the A-list didn’t last long. Changing movie tastes, Troy’s unwillingness to play handsome-yet-vapid characters, and a secret drinking problem would derail his career before it really started. But that wasn’t the end of Troy’s story. In middle age, he turned his life around and achieved the internal peace that would allow him to look back on his early years with pride.
Merle Johnson Jr., who would be christened Troy Donahue by the same agent who named Rock Hudson, came from a privileged background in New York. “Central Park was his playground,” says Michael Gregg Michaud, author of Inventing Troy Donahue: The Making of a Movie Star.
His idyllic childhood ended when Troy’s father became ill with ALS and died in 1947. “He absolutely adored his father. His death was something that he never, ever recovered from,” says Michaud. Troy confessed that he started sneaking liquor around this time. “I started drinking when I was studying for midterms in the seventh grade. It was a functional thing,” said Troy.
In his second year of high school, he dropped out, causing his despairing mother to enroll him at New York Military Academy, where he met future director Francis Ford Coppola. “I think I threw some stones in his tuba,” said Troy, “ but everybody throws stones into tubas in high school.”
At 19, Troy landed in LA, but his drinking continued to get him into trouble. “He was drunk one night, and he drove off Malibu Canyon Road and was nearly killed,” says Michaud, who adds that despite “a long, slow recovery,” the aspiring actor retained his handsome looks.
After a year of bit parts at Universal Studios, Troy’s career heated up when he played a racist brute who beats up Susan Kohner in 1959’s Imitation of Life. “It really made people sit up and take notice,” says Michaud. “And then he was cast in the movie that started everything, A Summer Place.” One of the first films to be marketed specifically to teenage girls, it made Troy an overnight sensation.
The next few years were busy. Troy starred on TV’s Hawaiian Eye from 1959 to 1963 and in 1960 joined the cast of Surfside 6. He also appeared on the silver screen in films including Parrish, Susan Slade and Rome Adventure, where he met Suzanne Pleshette, who became his first wife in 1964.
Troy’s secret drinking continued. “I never had a reputation of being an alcoholic or a drug addict,” he said. “But it was rare that I ever got in front of a camera without just a little edge taken off.” Stage fright wasn’t the only reason he drank. “He felt very trapped by his image,” says Michaud. “That just made the drinking and drug abuse more pronounced. He finally walked out of his seven-year contract with two years left. The studio blackballed him.”
Troy’s personal life also suffered. His marriage to Suzanne lasted less than a year. His second, to Valerie Allen, survived less than two. His divorces and his inability to work led to financial troubles. “I went from a beautiful home, garden, swimming pool to living in shabby apartments,” he confessed. Before long, Troy couldn’t even afford that. In 1969, he fled LA for New York and for a time lived in Central Park with only a backpack. “He would go home with fans who recognized him so that he could get a meal or take a bath,” says Michaud.
In 1982, shortly after his fourth divorce, Troy sought help for his drinking and substance abuse. “I realized that I was going to die, and I was dying — or, worse than that, I might live the way I was living for the rest of my life,” he said.
Alcoholics Anonymous “saved my life,” he added. It also helped him find family. “A woman came up to him [at a meeting] and said, ‘Hi, I don’t know if you remember me,’” recalls Jane Nunez, a close friend of Troy’s, to Closer. “On the other side of the room, there was a 13-year-old boy. She said, ‘That’s your son.’” In time, Troy also met a daughter from another former lover who had been given up for adoption but came looking for her birth parents. “I think it was a happy time for him,” says Michaud. “They accepted him, and he spent time with them when he could.”
Troy found romantic love, too. He met opera singer Zheng Cao on a cruise ship where she was performing and he was giving acting seminars. “They really did fall in love,” says Michaud. “She was very, very good for him.”
In his last decades, Troy continued to act and even toured with the musical Bye Bye Birdie. He never became a big star again before his death from a sudden heart attack in 2001 at age 65, but it didn’t matter. “I don’t pine for the old days,” he said in 1998. “I’m really not looking for comebacks, not looking to make my life any better or any different. It’s never been as good as it is now.”
