Day, Doris (1924—)

Questions on this topic? Just ask!

Vocalist and screen actress Doris Day, a freckle-faced buttercup blonde with a sunny smile that radiated wholesome good cheer,embodied the healthy girl-next-door zeitgeist of 1950s Hollywood. The decade marked the fall of the Hollywood musical and Day, with her pleasing personality and distinctive voice, huskily emotive yet pure and on-note, helped to prolong the genre's demise. Thanks largely to her infectious presence, a series of mostly anodyne musical films attracted bobby-soxers and their parents alike during the otherwise somber era of the Cold War and McCarthyism.

Behind the smile, however, Doris Day's life was marked by much unhappiness endured, remarkably, away from the glare of publicity. She was born Doris von Kappelhoff in Cincinnati, Ohio on April 3, 1924, the daughter of German parents who divorced when she was eight. She pursued a dancing career from an early age, but her ambitions were cut short by a serious automobile accident in her mid-teens, and she turned to singing as an alternative. She had two disastrous early marriages, the first, at the age of 17, to musician Al Jorden, by whom she had a son. She divorced him because of his violence, and later married George Weidler, a liaison that lasted eight months. By the age of 24, she had worked her way up from appearing on local radio stations to becoming a popular band singer with Bob Crosby and Les Brown, and had begun to making records.

In 1948, Warner Brothers needed an emergency replacement for a pregnant Betty Hutton in Romance on the High Seas. Day was suggested, got the part and, true to the cliché, became a star overnight. The movie yielded a huge recording hit in "It's Magic," establishing a pattern which held for most of her films and secured her place as a best-selling recording artist in tandem with her screen career. The songs as sung by Day threaded themselves into a tapestry of cultural consciousness that has remained familiar across generations. Notable among her many hits are the wistfully romantic and Oscar-winning "Secret Love" from Calamity Jane (1953) and the insidious "Que Sera Sera" from Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), which sold over a million at the time and earned her a Gold Disc.

No matter what the role or the plot of a movie, Day retained an essentially "virginal" persona about which it was once fashionable to make jokes. She confounded derision, however, with sheer energy and professionalism, revealing a range that allowed her to broaden her scope and prolong her career in non-musicals—an achievement that had eluded her few rivals.

Early on, her string of Warner musicals, which paired her with Jack Carson, then Gordon MacRae, or Gene Nelson, were interrupted by a couple of straight roles (opposite Kirk Douglas' Bix Beiderbecke in Young Man With a Horn and murdered by the Klan in Storm Warning, both 1950), but it was for Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer (M-G-M), in the biopic Love Me or Leave Me (1955), that Day won her colors as an actress of some accomplishment and grit. As Ruth Etting, the famed nightclub singer of the 1920s who suffered at the hands of her crippled hoodlum husband (played by James Cagney), she was able to meet the acting challenge while given ample opportunity to display her vocal expertise. She had, however, no further opportunity to develop the dramatic promise she displayed in this film.

The most effervescent and enduring of Day's musicals, the screen version of the Broadway hit The Pajama Game (1957), marked the end of her Warner Brothers tenure, after which she studio-hopped for three undistinguished comedies, Tunnel of Love (M-G-M 1958, with Richard Widmark), Teacher's Pet (Paramount 1958, with Clark Gable), and It Happened to Jane (Columbia, 1959, with Jack Lemmon). A star of lesser universal appeal might have sunk with these leaden enterprises, but her popularity emerged unscathed—indeed, in 1958 the Hollywood Foreign Press Association voted her the World'sFavorite Actress, the first of several similar accolades that included a Golden Globe in 1962.

In 1959, any threat to Day's star status was removed by a series of monumentally profitable comedies in which oh-so-mild risqué innuendo stood in for sex, and the generally farcical plots were made to work through the light touch and attractive personalities of Day and her coterie of leading men. The first of these, Pillow Talk (1959), teamed her with Rock Hudson, grossed a massive $7.5 million and won her an Oscar nomination for her masquerade as a buttoned-up interior designer. The Day-Hudson formula was repeated twice more with Lover Come Back (1962) and Send Me No Flowers (1964). In between, That Touch of Mink (1962) co-starred her with Cary Grant, while The Thrill of it All and Move Over Darling (both 1963) added James Garner to her long list of leading men. The last years of the 1960s saw a decline in both the number and the quality of her films, and she made her last, With Six You Get Eggroll, in 1968, exactly 20 years after the release of her first film.

Her third husband Martin Melcher, who administered her financial affairs and who forced the pace of her career in defiance of her wishes, produced most of Doris Day's comedies. After his death in 1968, nervous exhaustion, coupled with the discovery that he had divested her of her earnings of some $20 million, leaving her penniless, led to a breakdown. She recovered and starred for five years in her own television show to which Melcher had committed her without her knowledge, and in 1974 was awarded damages (reputed to be $22 million) against her former lawyer who had been a party to Melcher's embezzlement of her fortune.

Other than making a series of margarine commercials and hosting a television cable show Doris Day and Friends (1985-1986), she retired from the entertainment profession in 1975 to devote herself to the cause of animal rights. She married Barry Comden in 1976, but they divorced four years later. From her ranch estate in Carmel, she now administers the Doris Day Animal League, working tirelessly to lobby for legislative protection against all forms of cruelty. Her recordings still sell and her films are continually shown on television. To some, Doris Day is a hopeless eccentric, to many a saint, but she continues to enjoy a high profile and the loyalty of her many fans—her celluloid image of goodness lent veracity by her actions.

Braun, Eric. Doris Day. London, Orion, 1992.

Hirschhorn, Clive. The Hollywood Musical. New York, Crown, 1981.

Hotchner, A.E. Doris Day: Her Own Story. New York, Morrow, 1975.

Shipman, David. The Great Movie Stars: The International Years. London, Angus and Robertson, 1980.

This is the complete article, containing 1,101 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page).