1932, Mantz married Myrtle "Red" Harvey, one of his former flying students, but divorced in 1935. He remarried two years later to Theresa "Terry" Mae Minor and had a son, Paul, Jr., with his second wife. He adopted her two children by a previous marriage to Roy T. Minor (1904–1935), Roy, Jr. and Nita Lou "Tenita". The Mantz family lived on Balboa Island, off Newport Beach, California, where Mantz had a yacht. After years of successful ventures in both air racing and movie work, he had accumulated more than $10 million in profits, and by 1965, was planning his retirement. When his partner, Frank Tallman, broke his leg in a freak accident, Mantz stepped in to finish the aerial scenes for one last movie project. Death Mantz died on July 8, 1965, while working on the movie The Flight of the Phoenix, which was produced and directed by Robert Aldrich. Flying a very unusual aircraft, the Tallmantz Phoenix P-1 built especially for the film, Mantz struck a small hillock while skimming over a desert site in Arizona for a second take. As Mantz attempted to recover by opening the throttle to its maximum, the over-stressed aircraft broke in two and nosed over into the ground, killing Mantz instantly. Bobby Rose, a stuntman standing behind Mantz in the cockpit and representing a character played by Hardy Krüger, was seriously injured. The FAA investigation noted Mantz's alcohol consumption before the flight and said the resulting impairment to his "efficiency and judgment" contributed to the accident. Thirteen years later his business partner, Frank Tallman, also died in an aviation mishap. Some who were with Mantz during the shoot dispute that he was flying under the influence, although they acknowledge he was drinking alcohol the night before the fatal flight. Toxicology tests were performed several hours after the accident; in the absence of refrigeration, normal postmortem biochemical processes might produce blood ethanol and cause or contribute to an elevated BAC level. Out of respect, neither take appeared in the completed film, although the accident was shown in contemporary newsreels and stills of the moment of impact have been published. The final credits of The Flight of the Phoenix bear a tribute to Paul Mantz: "It should be remembered ... that Paul Mantz, a fine man and a brilliant flyer gave his life in the making of this film ..." In the 1988 TV movie