"Doris Day - The Cutest Blonde of them all"
By David Thomson
"I think of Doris Day as the icon nobody really
knew, and I'm thinking of her these days because, just down the Californian
coast from me, in Carmel, that eternal, perpetual, cute tomboy blonde
next door, she of the undying smile and unequalled decency, who could
sing so well you spent hours listening to her, was 80-something on the 3rd April."
Somewhere down there, tucked away, she lives with a quantity
of four-legged animals, the objects of her affection. She doesn't do interviews;
she isn't interested in her own legend. So this can be no more than a fond
card to someone a generation adored but never really cornered - that's
the mystery I find intriguing to this day.
She has been away so long, you may have wondered if she was
still here. Her last movie - With Six You Get Egg Roll - was made in 1968,
when she was a mere 44. The television series that ran from l968 to 1973,
The Doris Day Show, isn't syndicated, and I don't think it ever played
in England. But 44 isn't so drastic, is it? Meryl Streep is 59; Jessica
Lange is 60.
Maybe Doris had heard those jokes about the soft focus of
her last films, took the hint, and elected to rest up on her small fortune.
Because, only a few years before, from 1961 to 1965 (with pictures like
That Touch of Mink, Move Over Darling, Send Me No Flowers and Do Not Disturb),
she had been the top box-office attraction in the world. So, she must have
been rich, right? Well, yes, as it happens, but it is a complicated story.
There is something strange about her life. Oscar Levant once remarked that
he had known her 'before she became a professional virgin'.
She was born Doris Kappelhoff in 1924, in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Her father was German and Catholic, a musician and a conductor, who left
the family for another woman when Doris was 12. Doris showed nothing. Instead,
with a boy named Jerry, she formed a prize-winning dance team. They were
about to take up a Hollywood offer when a locomotive hit the car she was
riding in. Her right leg was wrecked - she couldn't dance for years. She
was 14. But she didn't back off. As she convalesced, she taught herself
to sing by listening to Ella Fitzgerald records.
At the age of 16, she got a job as singer with Bob Crosby's
Bobcats. A year later, she was singing for Les Brown's Blue Devils, a Hollywood
band. That was 1941. She was pretty, with a warm, brave voice full of feeling
(it was as good as Judy Garland's, yet without that self-pitying vibrato),
and she had breasts that guys told stories about. I know this is not a
prominent part of the Doris legend. But speak with anyone who knew her
and they remember the breasts. Men were crazy about her.
When she was 17, she married a trombone-player, Al Jorden.
He beat her, and demanded that she abort their pregnancy. Doris stood up
to it all. She left Jorden and kept the baby - her only child, a son, Terry.
But she married again, to a saxophonist named George Weidler. She had a
hit record, Sentimental Journey, with Les Brown, and a movie contract with
Warners. And she was Doris Day now. Weidler resented her fame, and quit,
leaving her nothing but his Christian Science faith. Warner Brothers reckoned
they had a sweet, true songbird, and in the late 1940s and early 1950s,
they paired her with bland guys in movies with soothing titles - My Dream
Is Yours, It's a Great Feeling, Tea for Two, On Moonlight Bay, I'll See
You in My Dreams, By the Light of the Silvery Moon, Lucky Me. These were
uncomplicated musicals in which a tomboy friendship blossomed into 'Gee!
I must be in love'. She sang the songs, and kidded with the guys - Gordon
MacRae, Dennis Morgan, and Jack Carson.
There was a real romance with Carson, and some said another
of her co-stars, Ronald Reagan, was soft on her. There were two tougher
pictures: Young Man With a Horn, where she was the suffering girl-friend
to jazz trumpeter Kirk Douglas; and Storm Warning, a drama, in which her
husband in the film, Steve Cochran, proved to be a member of the Ku Klux
Klan. She was pretty good at being a sweetheart with a vicious jerk for
a husband. She was very popular, but her material was old-fashioned to
the point of silliness. Then, as she reached 30, three pictures raised
her to a new level. Calamity Jane (1953) was a musical about Wild Bill
Hickock and his tomboy sidekick. It proved a box-office smash, and it gave
Doris the song "Secret Love", a hit record and the later basis
of her status as gay icon. Young at Heart (1954) is a noir musical in which
she marries a creepy, failed songwriter, played by Frank Sinatra. Doris
responded to his nasty manner and foreboding: they made a maudlin chemistry.
Then, in Love Me or Leave Me (1955), she played torch singer
Ruth Etting, whose husband-manager treated her like a punching bag. That
role went to Jimmy Cagney. He and Day took one look at each other on set,
and clicked. It's still a very good picture, with Doris, in low neckline,
singing "Ten Cents a Dance" and "I'll Never Stop Loving
You", and swapping cracks and slaps with Cagney. By now, Doris was
an authentic star on screen and in the hit parade. She had a third husband,
Marty Melcher, who managed her and was famous in that everybody loathed
him - except for the nicest blonde anyone knew. Through sheer conviction,
she carried off some bizarre films - not least, Alfred Hitchcock's The
Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), where she sang "Que. Sera, Sera";
Julie (1956), in which she had to land an aircraft without training; and
The Pajama Game (1957), the Stanley Donen musical where she was a union
leader in a garment factory.
It was an age of blondes: Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, Kim
Novak - but Grace went legit, Monroe cracked and Novak made great flops,
like Vertigo. Doris just got bigger, and on the eve of feminism, she played
career women that acted like coy ingenues in what were supposed to be sophisticated
comedies. This is the 'professional virgin' period of the late 1950s and
early 1960s, with films like Teacher's Pet, Pillow Talk, Please Don't Eat
the Daisies and That Touch of Mink. Her co-stars were Clark Gable, Cary
Grant and Rock Hudson, and the films were hugely successful, no matter
that in the next few years their prissiness would be ridiculed. She actually
got a nomination for Pillow Talk (Simone Signoret won that year for Room
at the Top - like absinthe after Coca-Cola).
The success overlapped with Jane Fonda and real bedroom scenes.
At which point, in 1968, Marty Melcher died. Everyone except Doris said,
'I told you so' when it was discovered that he had either wasted or embezzled
a cool US$20m of her money. Doris didn't waver. She did the TV series that
Melcher had committed her to without her knowledge. And then she set about
suing Melcher's lawyer for $US22m.
Don't mess with Doris, people said. Then she was gone. Once
retired, Doris Day became a 'gay icon'. Secret Love was an anthem in gay
bars, and it was noted that in some of her last films she had played with
Cary Grant and Rock Hudson. She spoke out for Rock when he fell ill with
Aids. Was she gay? Is she? I don't know, or care. She surely had enough
grief from men to look elsewhere. Maybe she settled for dumb animals -
there was a brief, fourth marriage to a restaurateur. Maybe she made mistakes
with men, and had strangers for her best admirers.
John Updike wrote a review of her autobiography Doris Day,
Her Own Story (1976) in which he admitted affection - without ever having
met her. Molly Haskell, a critic and a fan, got an interview in which Doris
didn't want to discuss or see her old films. They were all awful. Maybe
that was Christian Science talking or German sense. It's still a mystery,
if you listen to Doris in her great songs or her good movies, plunging
into the romance, to wonder what left her cool or impenetrable later. Our
loss. Happy Birthday, Doris!
There are lots of us who make no secret about what we feel for you.
David Thomson
