Melinda Wilson, who helped rescue her future husband, Brian Wilson, the chief musical architect and visionary of the Beach Boys, from a decades-long psychological spiral when they began dating in the 1980s, died on Tuesday at their home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 77.
Mr. Wilson confirmed the death on Instagram. No cause was given.
“Melinda was more than my wife,” Mr. Wilson wrote. “She was my savior. She gave me the emotional security I needed to have a career. She encouraged me to make the music that was closest to my heart. She was my anchor.”
An anchor was exactly what Mr. Wilson needed in 1986, when the two met in a Los Angeles Cadillac dealership, where she was a saleswoman — a scene immortalized in the 2014 movie “Love & Mercy,” starring Elizabeth Banks as Ms. Wilson and Paul Dano and John Cusack playing Mr. Wilson at different stages in his life.
Mr. Wilson’s mental challenges, long the stuff of rock lore, began to manifest themselves in the mid-1960s, when he began to grapple with the pressures of fame as the band’s primary composer and, in the view of many, the resident genius of America’s answer to the Beatles.
Even at the Beach Boys’ chart-topping peak, when they transformed their idealized vision of California, with its crashing waves, chrome-covered hot rods and doe-eyed romance, into a shared national fantasy, Mr. Wilson was teetering on psychological ruin.
After suffering a nervous breakdown on a flight to Houston with the band in 1964, he abandoned touring to focus on recording, embarking on a period of explosive creativity that would result in the boundary-pushing single “Good Vibrations” and the fabulously intricate, yet intimate, album “Pet Sounds” (1966), which would help reshape the pop landscape of the mid-1960s.
Even so, his struggles with mental illness grew worse. He battled depression and was eventually diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, which manifested itself in auditory hallucinations, among other symptoms.
He also experimented with LSD and other drugs and began overeating and abusing alcohol, putting a serious strain on his first wife, Marilyn, and their daughters, Carnie and Wendy, who would later form the pop trio Wilson Phillips with Chynna Phillips. He receded from the public eye and remained bedridden for extended periods during the 1970s. The couple filed for divorce in 1979.
By the early 1980s, Mr. Wilson seemed to experience a personal renaissance through his work with Eugene Landy, a psychotherapist who helped pull him back from the brink with an unorthodox approach that included boot-camp-level exercise regimens, a padlocked refrigerator and, some mornings, an icy splash of water to get him out of bed.
But Mr. Landy soon insinuated himself into all corners of Mr. Wilson’s life, serving as his business partner, record producer and occasional songwriting collaborator — to the alarm of Beach Boys intimates, who found the therapist’s control suffocating.
Mr. Wilson would soon find a far more nourishing form of salvation.
Melinda Kae Ledbetter was born on Oct. 3, 1946, in Pueblo, Colo. She grew up in Whittier, Calif., and, after a stint in college, worked as a model for more than 15 years. She was in her 40s and selling cars for the Cadillac dealership when Mr. Landy escorted Mr. Wilson into the showroom one day to buy one. It turned out to be a brown Seville, the first model she showed him.
“I remember meeting her at her dealership, Cadillac, and I said, ‘God, she’s a pretty girl,” Mr. Wilson said in a 2015 interview with ABC News. “I just said to myself, ‘God, I think I’ll see her again sometime.’”
“That’s what attracted me to him,” she said in the same interview. “He was so nice.”
Although she had come of age in Southern California at the height of the Beach Boys craze, Ms. Wilson knew little about the men behind the music. “I always thought Dennis was cute,” she said of Brian’s younger brother, the band’s heartthrob drummer, in an interview that she and Mr. Wilson did with Larry King of CNN in 2004.
Once they started dating, it took little time for her to glimpse the storm clouds. “He was having a lot of problems when I met him,” Ms. Wilson told Mr. King. Of Mr. Landy, she said, “I think originally he did help; he helped Brian lose weight, and he helped Brian care about himself physically again. But then, as time went on, he became very captive of Brian, where Brian was primarily a prisoner.”
She added, “I wasn’t allowed to call my family or my friends at all for nine years.”
Mr. Wilson told Mr. King that Mr. Landy had “doped me up with medication” so that he “couldn’t resist what he told me to do.”
The couple eventually managed to break the therapist’s hold. In 1992, a lawsuit filed by Mr. Wilson’s family resulted in a court order that barred Mr. Landy from contacting him. Mr. Landy died in 2006.
The couple married in 1995, and their union posed no shortage of challenges for Ms. Wilson. Her husband had a “tendency to push me away at times when he felt that things were becoming too close and too intimate,” she told Mr. King. “I think he does that because he is afraid to be disappointed.”
Nevertheless, they built a new life that both described as happy and adopted five children. With his new wife serving as his manager, Mr. Wilson embarked on a fertile career as a solo artist that had once seemed unimaginable, complete with a raft of new albums and tours.
“The music business is basically negotiating,” Ms. Wilson said in a 1999 interview with Rolling Stone, “and that’s what I did every single day when I sold cars.”
Mr. Wilson shook the music world in 2004 by completing a new version of what was considered his lost masterpiece, “Smile,” portions of which had been released in various forms over the years. Originally intended as the follow-up album to “Pet Sounds,” that expansively ambitious and wildly experimental project — Mr. Wilson once called it a “teenage symphony to God” — ultimately unraveled, along with Mr. Wilson’s fragile psyche.
Ms. Wilson also worked as a producer on several films related to her husband’s music, including “Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road” (2021) and “Pet Sounds Live at Royce Hall” (2006).
In addition to her husband, her survivors include their children, Dakota Rose, Daria Rose, Delanie Rose, Dylan and Dash.
Ms. Wilson’s enduring support of her husband was captured on celluloid with the release of “Love & Mercy. ” When they saw the film for the first time, Ms. Wilson told ABC News, she did not know how tough the experience would be.
“I think I was more nervous than him when I took him to see it, and after, I said, ‘So what did you think?’” she said. “And he goes, ‘Oh, it was really a lot worse in real life.’”
