Beneath wholesome image, Doris Day was actress of depth
LOS ANGELES — Doris Day, the beloved singer and actress who died Monday at 97 in California, was a contemporary of Marilyn Monroe but seemed to exist in a lost and parallel world of sexless sex comedies and the carefree ways of “Que Sera, Sera” (“Whatever Will Be, Will Be”). She helped embody the manufactured innocence of the 1950s, a product even she didn’t believe in.
“I’m tired of being thought of as Miss Goody Twoshoes .... I’m not the All-American Virgin Queen, and I’d like to deal with the true, honest story of who I really am,” she said in 1976, when her tell-all memoir “Doris Day: Her Own Story” chronicled her money troubles and failed marriages.
She gave acclaimed performances in “Love Me or Leave Me,” the story of songstress Ruth Etting, and in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller “The Man Who Knew Too Much.” Longing ballads such as “Blame My Absent Minded Heart” led critic Gary Giddins to call her “the coolest and sexiest female singer of slow-ballads in movie history.”
Millions loved her for her wholesome, blond beauty, and for her string of slick, stylish comedies, beginning with her Oscar-nominated role in “Pillow Talk” in 1959. She and Rock Hudson were two New Yorkers who shared a telephone party line. She followed with “The Thrill of It All,” playing a housewife who gains fame as a TV pitchwoman to the chagrin of husband James Garner.
The nation’s theater owners voted her the top moneymaking star in 1960, 1962, 1963 and 1964.
Younger generations would come to know her only through jokes at the inherent un-coolness of having such a pure image.
Day was one of the most natural born movie stars ever to grace the screen, beloved by co-stars and directors for her raw gift, honesty and charisma.
Garner told Vanity Fair that she was the “Fred Astaire of comedy.”
Her last film was “With Six You Get Eggroll,” a 1968 comedy about a widow and a widower and the problems they have when blending their families.
On television, “The Doris Day Show” was a moderate success in its 1968-1973 run on CBS.
She then turned her attentions wholly to the welfare of animals, which would occupy her for the rest of her life.
Day briefly returned to television in 1985 for the short-lived, animal-focused show “Doris Day’s Best Friends.”
Although Day was absent from the screen for decades, she was not forgotten. In 2004 she was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom, which she said she was grateful for but didn’t accept in person because she “didn’t fly.”
In 2011, she received a lifetime achievement honor from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
Born Doris von Kappelhoff, her dreams of a dance career ended at age 12 when a car she was in was hit by a train and her leg was badly broken. Listening to the radio while recuperating, she began singing along with Ella Fitzgerald.
Day began singing in a Cincinnati radio station, then a local nightclub, then in New York. A bandleader changed her name to Day, after the song “Day after Day,” to fit it on a marquee.
Her first musical hit was the 1945 smash “Sentimental Journey,” when she was barely in her 20s, singing with Les Brown’s band.
