Doris Day around the time of Tea for Two (1950). Image source: Billboard
I had long thought Doris Day only worthy of disdain. She was the perpetual virgin, the whitebread archetype of marriage and suburban conformity whose signature song was the bland "Que sera, sera," belted out in Hitchcock's 1950s remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much.
But in the past few years I've come to realize that my contempt was misplaced—I had been seriously underestimating her. Day was a triple threat: she could act, dance (she clearly had ballet and jazz-tap training), and sing everything from torch songs to Broadway show-stoppers. In fact, it was the film version of a Broadway show (Pajama Game) that was my Doris Day conversion experience.
Her virginal image also belied her real-life experience. By age 17 she was a big-band singer, and at age 18 married trombonist Al Jorden. He beat her during a pregnancy to try to induce a miscarriage, and they divorced before Day turned 20. At 25 as she was filming her first movie Romance on the High Seas she was two years into her second marriage, to saxophonist George Weidler, but the union was in serious trouble (they divorced a year later). As her co-star in that film, Oscar Levant, once quipped, "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin."
Two years after her second divorce she married for a third time, to producer Martin Melcher, only to discover at the end of her film career that he'd bankrupted her. And she yet went on in her mid-50s to marry once more (the triumph of hope over experience, surely; that marriage also ended in divorce).
Below I survey some of Day's better-known films, but a word of warning: if you're allergic to glossy Hollywood musicals and/or outdated social mores, these movies are best avoided. Nonetheless, even when the movies themselves are less than great her work in them is very much worthy of note.
Romance on the High Seas (1948). Screenplay by Julius and Philip Epstein with additional dialogue by I.A. Diamond; directed by Michael Curtiz.
Doris Day as Georgia Garrett/"Elvira Kent" with the Page Cavanaugh Trio in Romance on the High Seas.
The dialogue is sparkling, as you might guess of a film written by the Epstein brothers (who wrote the Curtiz-directed Casablanca) and Diamond (Billy Wilder's co-writer on Some Like It Hot and The Apartment). In her first film role Day plays Georgia Garrett, a sassy saloon singer who dreams of foreign travel. She's so smitten with the idea that she goes to travel agencies and pretends to be shopping for cruises to exotic locales so that she can collect the brochures as fuel for her fantasies.
One day at a travel agency she encounters Elvira Kent (Janis Paige), who wants to take a long-postponed trip with her husband Michael (Don DeFore) to revive the flagging romance in their marriage and divert his attention from his stunning secretary (Leslie Brooks). When Michael comes up with yet another excuse that prevents his going and suggests that Elvira take the romantic South American cruise on her own, she becomes suspicious. She decides to use Georgia as a decoy on the cruise, offering her a dream trip on the condition that she travel under Elvira's name and send Michael an occasional telegram; Elvira will secretly stay in New York to spy on her husband to see if he's having an affair. Meanwhile, Michael is mistrustful of Elvira's pretended eagerness to travel by herself and hires a detective, Peter Virgil (Jack Carson), to take the cruise and watch his wife to see if she's having an affair.
When during the cruise Peter starts to fall for "Elvira" (actually Georgia, of course), the comic complications multiply. (Some detective: he didn't even ask to see a photo of the woman he's supposed to be shadowing? Whose hair is dark rather than blond? Never mind.) As leading men Carson and DeFore are uninspiring, but that leaves the focus instead on the fourth-billed Day and a colorful supporting cast prominently featuring the sardonic Oscar Levant, as always brilliantly playing himself.
If you're familiar with classic Hollywood you'll likely also recognize Franklin Pangborn (of the Preston Sturges comedies), Eric Blore (of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies), and S.Z. Sakall (Karl in Casablanca). Add appearances by performers such as Avon Long, Sir Lancelot and the Samba Kings, plus a half-dozen songs for Day by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn, and there's no time for your higher brain centers to engage before the Feydeauesque false identities, mutual suspicions and erotic confusions are resolved and the couples are happily united.
This is the film that introduced "It's Magic," which instantly became a standard:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQLNF0d9PKY
For reasons that are readily apparent audiences loved Day, and the movie was box office magic. Her film career was launched.
Calamity Jane (1953). Screenplay by James O'Hanlon; directed by David Butler.
Doris Day in and as Calamity Jane—a still that long deterred me from watching it.
The racial and sexual politics of this movie are indeed a calamity. The brownface "Injuns" exist only to mindlessly attack the Deadwood stagecoach and be mowed down by the shotgun-toting heroine. Meanwhile, Calamity shacks up (literally, in a shack) with frontier music-hall actress Katie Brown (the leggy Allyn Ann McLerie), and learns from her the regressive lesson that to catch the romantic eye of her bosom buddy Wild Bill Hickok (Howard Keel at his most Howard-Keelish) she has to pack away her butch buckskins and femme up—or down, depending on how you look at it.
Don't say you weren't warned. But if you are able to ignore all that (and not everyone can, or should—it's a lot to ignore) Calamity Jane gives Day a chance to shed (or at least complicate) her glamour and show off her athleticism. As the tomboyish "Calam" she does many of her own stunts, including riding horses, making a running leap onto a bar, and being lowered by her arms from a second-tier theater box onto the stage a dozen feet below.
Calamity Jane also gives Day a chance to perform what became another of her signature songs, Sammy Fain and Paul Webster's "My Secret Love":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8P_p7dB2dw
It's fun to watch Day play such a brash, indelicate character for most of the movie, but the wince-worthy racist and sexist stereotypes prevent me from ultimately recommending this one.
Love Me or Leave Me (1955). Screenplay by Daniel Fuchs and Isobel Lennart; directed by Charles Vidor.
Doris Day wearing a Helen Rose creation as chanteuse Ruth Etting in Love Me or Leave Me.
The story of a nightclub singer's rise to stardom and marriage to a controlling, violent man may have attracted Day because of the parallels to her own life. Singing hopeful Ruth Etting (Day) is spotted in a 10-cents-a-dance joint by Chicago gangster Martin Snyder (James Cagney), whose racket is shaking down nightclub owners under the cover of providing laundry services. Snyder aggressively takes charge of Ruth's career, strong-arming Ruth's way into a job singing a warm-up jingle for a male headliner, and then engineering the headliner's no-show so that Ruth can go on in his place. He peremptorily turns down a booking for Ruth in New York that he doesn't consider prestigious enough, and instead has her go on the radio, where her show becomes a hit. The Ziegfeld Follies are soon calling, and Ruth becomes the toast of Broadway for a time—but finds keeping Snyder at arm's length more and more difficult.
Snyder's frustration and jealousy are further inflamed by Ruth's musical director Johnny Alderman (Cameron Mitchell), who has made no secret of his attraction to her:
https://youtu.be/5yoHIxAXIlQ?t=10
Ruth gradually comes to return Johnny's feelings, but her career is tied to Snyder. Snyder ultimately coerces Ruth into marriage, resulting in misery for all three.
Just for contrast's sake, here is Ruth Etting herself performing "It All Depends on You"; the uptempo approach typical of its time makes it a little harder to believe her when she sings "I can be sad" or "I can be lonely":
https://youtu.be/nxAC3lONBMA?t=40
As with most Hollywood biopics, the film is a sanitized and glamourized version of real events, and liberties both large (Prohibition and bootlegging are never mentioned) and small (Alderman's actual name was Harry, not Johnny) are taken. Much of the glamour is provided by the gorgeous gowns designed for Day by Helen Rose (of Designing Woman fame), in which she looks smashing. Day surprises by playing Ruth as a woman whose sweet appearance conceals a will of steel, who knows what she wants and goes after it, even at the cost of her own happiness.
Cagney gives a fiercely driven performance as Snyder, the intensity of whose passion for Ruth is never enough to evoke responsive feelings in her. Cagney even manages at times to make Snyder sympathetic in his inability to help himself despite his recognition of the hopelessness of his situation. That hopelessness is emphasized by the nearly quarter-century age difference between Cagney and Day, and amplified by his looking and playing older, and she younger, than their real ages. (The actual Moe Snyder was only three years older than Etting.)
In addition to the strong script and performances, Day sings a dozen standards, including the title track, "Ten Cents A Dance," "Mean to Me," "I'll Never Stop Loving You," "You Made Me Love You," and a lush version of "Never Look Back":
https://youtu.be/rpdO0HFQ23c
If I were trying to convince a Doris Day skeptic of her range in both acting and singing, Love Me or Leave Me might be the movie I'd choose.
Pajama Game (1957). Screenplay by George Abbott and Richard Bissell; directed by Abbott and Stanley Donen.
John Raitt (Bonnie's dad) as Sid Sorokin and Doris Day as Babe Williams in Pajama Game.
A hugely successful Broadway show (winner of the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1955), Pajama Game was transferred to the screen with its creative team and cast largely intact—with one key exception. On Broadway the role of Babe Williams was played by Janis Paige, who, when she'd portrayed Elvira Kent in Romance on the High Seas, was billed two spots above Day. As evidence of the different trajectories of their film careers in the succeeding decade, the now far more famous Day was brought in to replace Paige for the movie version. (They would work together again in the 1960 movie Please Don't Eat the Daisies, which this post will pass over in silence.)
Babe Williams (Day) is the head of the union grievance committee at the Sleep-Tite Pajama Company; Sid Sorokin (John Raitt) is the new factory manager. The workers are asking for a 7 and 1/2 cent hourly pay increase, but Sid must enforce the hard line of factory owner Myron Hasler (Ralph Dunn). It's inevitable that despite misunderstandings (and being members of historically opposed classes) Babe and Sid will come to a labor-management accord on both the personal and professional levels. Along the way: choreography by a young Bob Fosse and energetic songs by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross (also writers of the songs for Damn Yankees), including "Steam Heat," "I'm Not At All In Love," and "There Once Was A Man" (actually written by Frank Loesser, according to Raitt).
But in addition to those brassy numbers the show also includes the gorgeously wistful ballad "Hey There":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FpLgiuv9mU
In retrospect Pajama Game's story of a strike at a garment factory was already outdated. It belonged more to the era of union militancy before WWII than to the 1950s, when unions traded guarantees of labor peace for modest wage and benefit gains. But speaking of being instantly outdated. . .
Pillow Talk (1959)
Doris Day as career woman Jan Morrow and Rock Hudson as footloose bachelor Brad Allen in Pillow Talk.
In 1748 Samuel Richardson wrote in the preface to
Clarissa Harlowe, or
the History of a Young Lady, that he'd written the novel "to warn the
inconsiderate and thoughtless of the one sex, against the base arts and
designs of specious contrivers of the other. . .[and to caution them
against] that dangerous but too-commonly-received notion, that a
reformed rake makes the best husband." Evidently Day's character in
Pillow Talk, Jan Morrow, never got around to reading Richardson.
Jan is a single woman with a successful career as an interior decorator. Unfortunately for the no-nonsense Jan, she shares a party line with Broadway composer Brad Allen, a playboy who spends most of his daylight hours on the phone sweet-talking his stable of girlfriends. To Jan's great irritation, he not only hogs the line when she needs to make business calls, he also plays for each of his girlfriends the same love song, "Inspiration," which he claims was "written just for you."
One night out at a club Brad overhears a woman complaining about the guy who shares her party line. He recognizes her voice: it's Jan, of course. Brad is instantly attracted, but realizes that if he introduces himself she'll reject him without a second thought. So he puts on a fake (and terrible) Southern accent and pretends to be "Rex Stetson," a millionaire Texas rancher. While Rex is wooing Jan with dinners and late-night phone calls, Brad pretends to have overheard a phone conversation between them on the party line and disparages Rex in order to spur Jan's praise of him. Jan is utterly smitten with Rex, and as they are heading to a weekend in a country cabin together we hear her (surprisingly explicit) thoughts:
https://youtu.be/6AmBP45SKts
But of course she'll ultimately discover that she's been deceived, and will seek her revenge.
I confess that I found Pillow Talk more entertaining than I
had expected, despite its paucity of songs for Day (in addition to "Possess Me" there's only the title song and the cringeworthy novelty number "Roly Poly"). But just a few years after its release the movie's social
mores would seem like ancient history (and the sources of much of its
humor would seem unfunny). Pillow Talk tries to wring comedy out of the predatory Brad's bachelor pad, which features pushbuttons that automatically convert the sofa into a bed and remotely lock the door to prevent a reluctant date's escape. There is also a lot of coded innuendo about "Rex"'s effeminacy (although shouldn't that make us wonder whether Brad's rampant womanizing is just overcompensation?). And finally, even in 1959 it was probably quite a stretch to imagine that two adults who were seeing one another romantically would spend a chaste weekend together in a cozy country cabin, although it must be said that a similar situation occurs in Patricia Highsmith's novel The Cry of the Owl, published three years later.
The gay subtexts of Pillow Talk are made starkly apparent in Mark Rappaport's video essay Rock Hudson's Home Movies (1992), included as an extra on the Criterion Collection DVD of All That Heaven Allows (1955), director Douglas Sirk's melodrama masterpiece starring Hudson and Jane Wyman. It was seeing Rappaport's film that made us curious about Pillow Talk, and ultimately inspired the at-home Doris Day film festival which led to this post; a post on Douglas Sirk may follow soon.
