James Westley Welch: What’s Actually Known About Raquel Welch’s First Husband

James Westley Welch is remembered for one thing: he was Raquel Welch’s high school sweetheart and first husband, married to her before the world knew her name. Search his name today and you’ll find dozens of near-identical articles claiming to tell “the untold story” of his life, death, and fortune — but a closer look shows most of those specific details don’t trace back to any real source. Here’s what’s actually documented, and what isn’t.

Who was James Westley Welch?

James Westley Welch worked as a tuna fisherman in his early adult years and became known publicly as the man Raquel Welch — born Jo Raquel Tejada — married before her acting career began. He and Raquel met as teenagers in San Diego, California, where he played football and she was a cheerleader. In her 2010 memoir, Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage, Welch described spotting him at fifteen and feeling an immediate, powerful pull toward him, writing that from the moment she saw him she felt destined to have his children.

The couple kept in touch while Raquel attended San Diego State College on a theater scholarship and Welch was away — reportedly at sea for work. When he returned, tanned and changed, she left college to marry him. They eloped in Las Vegas in 1959.

Marriage and children

James Westley Welch and Raquel Welch were married from 1959 to 1964. Accounts of the exact separation timeline vary slightly — some sources describe a separation around 1962 ahead of the 1964 divorce — but the marriage and divorce dates themselves are consistently reported.

The couple had two children:

• Damon Welch, their son, born not long after the couple eloped.
• Tahnee Welch (sometimes referred to by variant spellings), their daughter, who went on to work as a model and actress — she’s best known for a role in the 1985 film Cocoon and appeared in fashion publications including Vogue.

Raquel Welch kept the Welch surname for the rest of her life and career, which is part of why his name has remained attached to hers in public memory even decades after their divorce — she was later married to Patrick Curtis, André Weinfeld, and Richard Palmer, but never changed her professional name again.

By Raquel Welch’s own account in her memoir, Welch remained a significant figure in her personal history — she reportedly described him, even decades later, as the partner against whom she measured everyone who came after.

What isn’t well established

This is the part worth being upfront about. A large cluster of similarly worded articles all claim, with identical specifics, that Welch:

• Passed away on November 23, 2019, at age 82, at a named nursing facility in Bryan, Texas
• Built a net worth of approximately $40 million as a publicist, agent, and later real estate developer
• Remarried a woman named Jean and had a third child

These claims appear, often nearly word-for-word, across more than a dozen unrelated-looking “magazine” and “news” websites — but none of them cite an obituary, a news report, a public record, or any other verifiable primary source. No mainstream outlet or established biography appears to corroborate the death date, the facility name, or the net worth figure. That pattern — a specific, plausible-sounding claim repeated verbatim across many low-quality sites with no original source — is a well-known sign of content that originated as speculation or AI-generated filler and then got copied site to site until it started looking like an established fact.

That doesn’t necessarily mean these details are false. It means they’re unconfirmed, and shouldn’t be repeated as settled fact without a real source behind them. If you’re researching him for something that requires accuracy — a family history project, journalism, or anything similar — treat his date of death, cause of death, career after fishing, and net worth as open questions, not established record.

Why his name still comes up

Interest in James Westley Welch has consistently tracked interest in Raquel Welch herself. Her death on February 15, 2023, at age 82, brought renewed attention to her personal history, including her four marriages — and searches for her “first husband” or “first love” followed. Because Welch never sought public attention, gave interviews about their relationship, or built any public profile of his own, there’s genuinely very little primary material about him independent of what Raquel Welch chose to share in her own memoir and interviews.

That’s also exactly the kind of information gap that content-mill sites tend to fill with confident-sounding but unsourced detail — which is what appears to have happened here.

Bottom line

What’s solidly documented about James Westley Welch is fairly simple: he was Raquel Welch’s high school sweetheart in San Diego, her first husband from 1959 to 1964, the father of her two children, Damon and Tahnee, and — by her own account — the great early love of her life. Everything specific beyond that, including how and when he died and what he did for a living afterward, currently rests on repetition rather than verifiable sourcing, and is worth treating with real skepticism until a credible primary source turns up.