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She shut down her act
way too soon for me
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
In a TV tribute to Doris Day in the 1990s, film critic Roger Ebert observed that Doris was way ahead of her time in some of her films of the 1950s by exhibiting a kind of independence that was uncommon for female characters on the movie screen in those days.
At first, I thought this must be a classic error by Ebert because Doris Day was so often thought of as a squeaky clean, forever virginal screen sterotype, the kind my friend and fellow columnist Gerald Nachman describes in this same edition as "a plastic Barbie Doll in that pre-Barbie age--blond, bland and sexless, too Waspy white bread, pretty on the surface without much of interest underneath--sort of a grownup cheerleader."
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized Ebert had called it right. I began to think of all the Doris Day-Gordon MacRae musicals in which Doris was a grown-up tomboy, tackling so-called "man's work," like auto repair, and doing it quite well, if you don't count the cute little grease smudges she got on her pert nose.
And I thought of Doris, acting all grown-up and without so much dazzling sunshine in her first non-musical role back in 1951's "Storm Warning," playing the pregnant wife of a racist killer, movie bad guy Steve Cochran. Doris displayed real acting chops in that superb film, holding her own with co-star Ginger Rogers, who already had won an Oscar for dramatic acting, in what turned out to be a hard-hitting drama.
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At left: A very serious DORIS DAY as the pregnant wife of a killer in "STORM WARNING" (1951) with Ginger Rogers, playing her sister. At right: A foolish attempt to glamorize Doris
in her screen debut role in "ROMANCE ON THE HIGH SEAS" (1948).
For that matter, Doris had been completely convincing to me as the band singer who falls for tragedy-prone trumpet player Kirk Douglas in "Young Man With A Horn" (1950) a film based on Dorothy Baker's thinly-veiled novel about a musician very much like the late Bix Beiderbecke.
Reflecitng now on what Roger Ebert pointed out in the 1990s and what Nachman is saying about her today, I'm more firmly convinced than ever that Doris Day deserved every bit of the enormous popularity she had from her movie debut in 1948 through her final big screen performance in "With Six, You Get Eggroll" (1968)--a 20-year run in which she was one of America's most beloved of all movie stars.
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serious role as a band singer with trumpet player KIRK DOUGLAS in "YOUNG MAN WITH A HORN" (1950). |
Sure, Day's thing was giddy cheerfulness most of the time. Like, that's so bad? What's wrong with a grown-up cheerleader anyway? I could use one about now and I'll bet I'm not the only one who would welcome a rah-rah girl like Doris, even in her late 80s.
Some pretty important and serious filmmakers thought Doris Day was something special. My all-time favorite movie director, Alfred Hitchcock, for instance. Hitch was not one to recruit movie stars for their ability to generate sunshine. If an actress was the flavor of the month, he especially didn't need her. He didn't want sexy Kim Novak for "Vertigo," but was forced to take her anyway as his leading lady. Surely, you would think, he must also have blanched at the thought of cheerful Doris Day as the leading lady of his 1956 thriller "The Man Who Knew Too Much."
Well, nothing could be further from the truth. Hitch not only wanted Day for that movie, but he actively went after her personally to get her on board. Though it may be true that he had always had a weakness for "cool" blondes, Doris Day was never accused of being "cool," either in temperature or hipness. That wasn't the appeal to Hitchcock. As the story goes, Hitch approached Doris at a party and told her he wanted to work with her, something that apparently would never have occurred to Doris to put on her "bucket list" of things to do before she died.
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At left: DORIS DAY with JAMES STEWART in "THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH" (1956). At right, Alfred Hitchcock directing a sober-faced Doris in the movie, a thriller.
It took several years for the right project to come along, but it turned out to be "The Man Who Knew Too Much," the remake of his 1934 thriller. Accounts of the filming suggest Doris wasn't very happy working with Hitchcock for the first few weeks on location in Morocco. For one thing, she didn't like the way animals were treated by the Moroccans and wasn't crazy about the not-so-healthy food. But mostly she was upset because Hitchcock never took her aside and told her how she was doing in the scenes they had filmed so far.
In fact, the story goes that Doris was certain the famous director was deeply disappointed in her work, which depressed her no end.
Then co-star James Stewart, a Hitchcock veteran, pointed out to her that if Hitch never said anything to you, that meant he liked what you were doing. He only took you aside and talked to you if he wanted you to do something better. That news, the story goes, improved her attitude tremendously and, from then on, she had a grand time working with Hitch.
Oh, but there was that awful song they wanted her to sing: "Que Sera, Sera." She thought it was another one of the dreadful novelty tunes she'd been plagued with when she worked under the aegis of Mitch Miller when he was calling the shots for singers at Columbia Records. But Hitchcock had positioned the song in a most important place in his movie: Her abducted little boy, overhearing the song while held prisoner in an upstairs room, realizes his Mom is in the house--and creates a ruckus that leads to his rescue!
And it also turned out to be the most popular recording Doris Day ever made and won the Academy Award for Best Song of 1956. In fact, she's superb in that movie, a different kind of Hitchcock heroine, for sure, but an engaging one.
As for the singing voice of Doris Day, she has sometimes suffered in comparison to some of her 1950s contemporaries, most especially Rosemary Clooney, who also was fed a steady diet of novelty tunes at Columbia by Mitch Miller ("Come On-A My House," "Botch-A-Me," etc.) instead of the ballads and standards she did best. But Doris made a lot of records over the years and got to sing lots of great ballads and torch songs. If you listen to her versions of some of those great tunes, you'll hear a bell-clear voice with perfect tone, considerable feeling and great range. She was an amazing singer whose special little breathless flourishes were incredibly exciting to hear.
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At left, DORIS DAY in her band singing days with orchestra leader Les Brown. At right, Doris
in the perkier mode in affected in most of her early Warnber Brothers musicals.
Was she really a sexless Barbie doll? Not in my book. Her appeal wasn't as the virgin you wanted to deflower. She was the lively, physically fit, wholesome girl you wanted to do lots of things with--and making love to her was just one of them. She was somebody you knew you'd have fun being with because she was a regular girl with a positive outlook on life. Heck, she was even a baseball fanatic. What was not to like?
This wholesome appeal was obvious from her very first film, a 1948 shipboard musical called "Romance on the High Seas," where she was not the main star, but second banana to Janis Paige. who is largely forgotten today. She was romantically paired with, of all people, beefy Jack Carson, which was like putting a ball and chain on her leg and telling her to dance. But she steals the picture right out from under Carson, Paige and everybody else the minute, early in the picture, when she stops a group of strolling Mexican musicians in the ship's dining room and asks them if they have the English lyrics to the song they're performing, a wistful tune with an infectious Latin beat. They do, of course, and, working from the sheet of lyrics they hand her, she sings, for the first time, that classic love song, "It's Magic," and, voila!. a star is born!
Doris sang "It's Magic" twice in the movie and it became a huge hit for her, propelling the movie to even greater success at the box office. It's still an amazing song that nobody else could put over like Doris did whenever she sang it.
Her overnight stardom is easy to understand. In 1948, America was still recovering from all the nightmares of World War II and the coming of the Atomic Age. I think there was an absolsute hunger for a beautiful young female screen star who represented fresh, exciting, clean American femininity. Here was a fun-loving, good-natured, sweet and pretty girl that you actually could imagine loving without having to worry about catching anything that would require penicillin to clear up afterward.
And she could do it all. She could match any guy step for step, including even tap-dancing whiz Gene Nelson ("Lullaby of Broadway," 1951) and that grand old eccentric dancer and retired scarecrow, Ray Bolger ("April in Paris," 1952). She could match Gordon MacRae song for song and even held her own with the incomparable Frank Sinatra in their hit film of 1954, "Young at Heart."
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only film together, "YOUNG AT HEART," a 1954 box office hit. |
She was, in fact, the antidote to Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, Jayne Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren, the buxom babes of 1950s Hollywood who now seem like somebody's cartoon visions of what sex was all about. And she was also the antidote to the "ring-a-ding" finger-snapping Playboy bachelors for whom Sinatra was the high priest. She was the real "girl next door," in my opinion, and not Nachman's favorite, Debbie Reynolds, who was pretty much a fraudulent sweetie-pie and, in real life, was a rather profane and down-to-earthier type than she ever appeared to be on screen.
In her 1955 "Love Me or Leave Me," Day played real-life torch singer Ruth Etting and earned lots of good notices for her dramatic acting. But the movie is really a testament to how much longer Etting would have lasted if she'd had a modicum of Day's talents. Day's treatment of the Etting songbook was deliciously revisionist and that soundtrack is a never-ending treat. Those who've seen some of the early talkie short subjects Etting made will have no doubts about what a superior performer Doris Day was in comparison to the original. It may be easier to imagine Etting as the tired dance hall girl who made "Ten Cents A Dance" an immortal song in her day, but I'd much rather hear Doris sing it her own way.
Lots of attention has been paid to "Secret Love," Doris' fabulous hit song from her 1953 muiscal "Calamity Jane," because its lyrics are now regarded as the lesbian national anthem, especially after real-life lesbian songtress C.D. Lang recorded it. Was Doris Day aware her cross-dressing frontier character was all coded-up with secret gay references? I doubt it sincerely, but who cares? In the movie, she's clearly thinking of a guy--Howard Keel--when she sings it and you can take the song as either a romantic ballad by a heterosexual lady who just happened to dress like a man or a gay lover's declaration of independence. It works either way for me because it's such a great song no matter what spin you put on it.
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the Oscar-winning song "Secret Love," now regarded as the lesbian national anthem thanks to its double-meaning lyrics. |
Like Nachman, I'm not a fan of the romantic comedies Doris made with Rock Hudson or, for that matter, Cary Grant. "Pillow Talk" and some of the others are worth seeing today for all the in-jokes gay producer Ross Hunter worked in involving gay leading man Hudson. Check out, for example, the scenes where Hudson winds up wearing Doris' clothes. Yes, it's sometimes funny to see a guy wearing a lady's nightgown, but that's not why Hunter had Hudson wearing one.
In real life, though, Day truly loved Rock Hudson as a good friend. I had met Hudson on a couple of occasions and found him to be a charming, really likeable guy, so I can understand why they clicked so well. They worked well together and it was on Day's TV talk show that Hudson was first revealed as suffering from AIDS, which eventually took his life. Her profound sadness for him was so plainly evident in that TV program.
That warm and caring side of Doris Day helps endear her to me even more today. Looking back over her life, I think she suffered a lot, but kept it mainly to herself. Her love of animals is another passion I share with her. I like just about everything I've ever heard about the way she conducts her life. At a time when the public seems to dote on bad behavior by its stars, she stands out as a genuinely decent person who just happened to become world famous and didn't let it change her.
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Stephen Boyd as JImmy Durante and Martha Raye look on in her last really good movie, "Billy Rose's Jumbo" (1962). |
Doris made some pretty weak comedies later in her career and her first TV series, the sitcom known as "The Doris Day Show," is hard going today because of its infernal cuteness. But I treasure the copies I have of some of her TV musical specials and her last good movie, "Billy Rose's Jumbo" (1962), puts her together with two old-time favorites, Jimmy Durante and Martha Raye, and also lets her sing some grand old standards.
Was Doris Day in the league of Ella Fitzgerald as a singer? Probably not. Who was? But she enchanted me and my father before me with her sunny personality and her flawless voice. I can listen to her sing "I'll Never Stop Loving You" from "Love Me or Leave Me" over and over again and I feel the same way about many of her lesser-known recordings, like "I Speak to the Stars" from "Lucky Me" or the jump tune "Put 'Em in A Box" from "Romance on the High Seas."
In a word, Doris Day endlessly entertains me. I'll be buying her "new" album of songs that she recorded many years ago, but were never released until now. I like the idea of ordering a Doris Day album and knowing she's going to be happy seeing all her fans respond to her once more after so long a hiatus.
If she wants to avoid the public eye for the rest of her life, that's all right with me. My memories of her are fresh and still exciting. May she keep on painting the clouds with sunshine well into her 90s down in Carmel.
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