In 1951, when he was seventeen, he occasionally acted on the TV series
The Aldrich Family (1949), where he met his first wife, twenty-one-year-old
Tippi Hedren, who was doing a walk-on role. She tripped on her foot and fell into his arms. He tended to her, and they immediately fell in love and married within a year. In 1957, they had their daughter
Melanie Griffith. In her 2016 memoir, Tippi alleged that she divorced him in 1961 because he was an unfaithful alcoholic who resented the fact that she was the breadwinner. Nevertheless, when he died in 2001, she attended his funeral with his four other wives.