Before Raquel Welch became a Hollywood icon, she was just a teenage girl at San Diego High School who fell hard for a calm, dark-haired boy named James Westley Welch. While the world would come to know Raquel as an international star, James Westley Welch remained a quiet figure in the background, a man who valued privacy, family, and a life far removed from the glitz of entertainment. Yet his story matters because it shaped one of cinema’s most legendary actresses during her most formative years.
This is the untold story of James Westley Welch: the tuna fisherman who became a real estate developer, the young husband who couldn’t quite hold onto his Hollywood-bound wife, and the father who never sought the spotlight despite his permanent connection to one of the 1960s’ brightest stars.
Who Was James Westley Welch?
James Westley Welch was born on January 29, 1937, in Pike County, Missouri, though he grew up in San Diego, California. Before becoming known as Raquel Welch’s first husband, James was a working man with humble ambitions. He was an American tuna fisherman, and later he built a strong and stable career, working as a publicist and agent in his younger years before finding success as a real estate developer.
What’s striking about James is how deliberately he stayed out of the spotlight. Unlike many people connected to major celebrities, he never gave interviews, never courted media attention, and never capitalized on his famous ex-wife’s name. This wasn’t shyness, it was a genuine choice. He wanted a normal life, and he built one, even as Raquel’s star climbed to heights neither of them could have imagined when they first met.
A High School Romance That Changed Everything
The origin of James and Raquel’s story reads like something out of a 1950s film. They started dating in high school, where Raquel was a cheerleader while James played on the football team. According to Raquel’s 2010 memoir, Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage, she first spotted him when she was 15, and she regarded him as a gorgeous man with a calm demeanor, thinking it was love at first sight.
In her memoir, Raquel was remarkably candid about her feelings: “From the first moment I saw him, I knew I was destined to have his babies. In my emotionally charged, romantic young mind, I fixated on Jim as ‘my one and only.'”
This wasn’t teenage infatuation that faded with time. They married in Las Vegas on May 8, 1959, while both were still college students at San Diego State University. Raquel made a significant sacrifice right from the start: she dropped out of college to marry James. Their families weren’t thrilled about the sudden elopement; both were far too young to be making such a permanent commitment. But James and Raquel were convinced they’d found the real thing.
Marriage, Children, and Growing Apart
The early years of their marriage moved fast. Their son, Damon, was born on November 6, 1959, and their daughter, Latanne Rene “Tahnee” Welch came along two years later in 1961. Raquel was only 19 years old when she became a mother, which she later said was “painfully young.”
Interestingly, Tahnee was named after James’s mother, Tahnee Land, a touching tribute that showed the bond between James and Raquel during their early years together.
But parenthood at such a young age, combined with Raquel’s growing ambitions, began to pull them in different directions. While James wanted the quiet, stable life of a fisherman or businessman, Raquel’s career was starting to take off. Raquel wanted to act, to move to New York and chase her goals, while James was not comfortable with that. This fundamental difference in what they each wanted from life became impossible to reconcile.
They married in Las Vegas on May 8, 1959, separated in 1962, and divorced in 1964. Their marriage lasted roughly five years, brief in the span of a lifetime, but long enough to create two children who would carry forward both of their legacies in different ways.
What Made Raquel Keep His Name
One of the most telling details about James Westley Welch is what happened after the divorce. Despite three subsequent marriages, Raquel retained the surname Welch throughout her life and career. She didn’t simply erase him from her professional identity. Instead, she carried his name through four marriages, making Welch synonymous with one of Hollywood’s most recognizable faces.
In her memoir, Raquel described James as her “first true love” and wrote that he would be “the unforgettable, always present love, against whom all others would be judged”. That’s powerful language about someone she’d only been married to for five years. It speaks to the intensity of their connection during those early years, and the lasting impact he had on her life.
Later in life, in 1977, James and Raquel briefly reunited to cooperate on co-parenting their children. Even after nearly 15 years apart, they found it important to rebuild some kind of relationship for the sake of Damon and Tahnee. It was a mature decision from two people who could easily have let hurt feelings keep them apart.
A Private Life After Hollywood
After his divorce from Raquel in 1964, James made a deliberate choice: he stepped away from any connection to the entertainment world. He stepped away from the spotlight completely, never doing interviews or talking to the media about Raquel. He didn’t capitalize on his famous ex-wife’s success. He didn’t write a tell-all book or seek a cut of her earnings. He simply moved forward.
James remarried to a woman named Jean, and together they had a son, keeping this marriage completely private. His second family represented a clean break from Hollywood, a real, ordinary life in the way he’d always wanted to live.
This choice to remain private is important. It shaped how his children viewed success and privacy. Damon lives an extremely private life and does not have any known public social media profiles. Tahnee, while more visible due to her modeling and acting career, also maintained boundaries and dignity around her personal life. Both inherited their father’s grounded nature despite growing up around their mother’s extraordinary fame.
The Legacy Through His Children
While James never sought the entertainment industry himself, both his children found their way into it. Both of Raquel’s children followed her into the acting business, while Tahnee also became a top model.
Damon Welch pursued production work more than acting. He has just one acting credit under his IMDb page for The Beloved, in which he played a little boy when he was two years old. He also served as a production assistant in 1979’s The Day the Earth Got Stoned and a production associate in his mother’s Raquel: Total Beauty and Fitness, which debuted in 1984. He even worked as executive producer on I Am Raquel Welch, a more behind-the-scenes role that suited his preference for privacy.
Tahnee made a bigger splash in entertainment. Tahnee graced the pages of American and Italian editions of Vogue, British GQ and Germany’s Bunte magazines, and also posed for Playboy in 1995, landing the cover as well as a nude pictorial. Her film roles included Cocoon (1985) and I Shot Andy Warhol (1996). Yet even with her success, she maintained the measured approach to fame that her father had modeled.
The fact that both children pursued careers in entertainment but in measured, thoughtful ways suggests they inherited the balance between ambition and privacy that their parents, despite their conflicts, both valued in different ways.
The Question of James’s Later Life
There’s surprisingly little verified information about James Westley Welch’s life after the late 1970s. Conflicting information exists regarding James’s death, with multiple sources claiming he passed away on November 23, 2019, at age 82. However, obituary records show a James Wesley Welch died on that date in Bryan, Texas, but this was an electrician and musician, explicitly noted as NOT being Raquel Welch’s husband. No verified death record exists for James Westley Welch, Raquel’s ex-husband.
This ambiguity is fitting, in a way. James Westley Welch lived most of his life determined to stay out of the public eye. The lack of clear records about his final years is consistent with how he chose to live quietly, privately, without fanfare or documentation.
Why James Westley Welch Still Matters
You might ask: why should anyone care about James Westley Welch? He wasn’t an actor, a musician, or a public figure. He was a working man who married the wrong woman at the wrong time or perhaps the right woman at the wrong time.
The reason his story endures is because it reveals something human beneath the mythology of celebrity. Raquel Welch is remembered as a global icon, a bombshell, a trailblazer. But before all that, she was a teenager in love with a quiet, good-looking boy from San Diego. That connection, real, messy, and ultimately doomed, shaped her entire life.
James Westley Welch showed that you don’t have to be famous to matter. You don’t have to seek the spotlight to leave a mark. Two children who grew up with a mother in the entertainment industry but a father who chose dignity and privacy over fame inherited both approaches to life. They became successful on their own terms, neither chasing Hollywood’s glare nor rejecting it entirely.
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