Background
Day, Doris was born on April 3, 1924 in Cincinnati. Daughter of Frederick Wilhelm and Alma Sophia von Kappelhoff.
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Day, Doris was born on April 3, 1924 in Cincinnati. Daughter of Frederick Wilhelm and Alma Sophia von Kappelhoff.
Studied at public schools.
She was a famous band singer seen bv Michael Curtiz, who gave her a starring debut in Romance on the High Seas (48). She had a few straight roles—in Young Man With a Horn (50, Curtiz) and Storm Warning (50, Stuart Heisler)—but it was in Warners musicals that she found fame: as the studio waitress in It’s a Great Feeling (49, David Butler); My Dream Is Yours (49, Curtiz); Tea for Two (50, Butler); The West Point Story (50, del Ruth); Lullaby of Broadway (51, Butler); I See You in My Dreams (51, Curtiz); April in Paris (52, Butler); By the Light of the Silvery Moon (52, Butler); Calamity Jane (53, Butler); and Lucky Me (54, |ack Donohue). Nor should it be forgotten that she was one of the first singers whose records were bought as “pop” by teenagers. There were girls who worked to look like Doris, and boys who responded warmly to those efforts.
We should not underestimate the quality of her voice. Not only was she a fine singer, technically, but her singing voice had a natural dramatic force that carried her beyond her acting ability. Thus, in many cases, her songs deepen the movie she is in especially of “Secret Love” in Calamity Jane and most of Love Me or Leave Me (57, Charles Vidor), where she had a triumph playing singer Ruth Etting and proved her readiness for musicals of more developed content. (If only she and Sondheim could have worked together.) Listening to her sound tracks makes you believe her films were richer or more moving than was really the case.
In addition to Love Me or Leave Me, in the mid-fifties she broadened her range, emoting enormously and slipping a ludicrous song (“Che Sera Sera ) into The Man Who Knew Too Much (55, Alfred Hitchcock); somehow managing to land an aeroplane in Julie (56, Andrew L. Stone); and her best film. The Pajama Game (57, Stanley Donen and George Abbott), which harnessed her bounce to the role ol factory shop steward. Her work turned to romantic comedy in The Tunnel of Love (58, Gene Kelly) and Teacher's Pet (58, George Seaton), and she contrived to become the untainted subject of Ross Hunter’s sexual innuendo (and a top box-office attraction) in Pillow Talk (59, Michael Gordon); Lover Come Back (61, Delbert Mann); and That Touch of Mink (62, Mann). She was wide-eyed with fright in Midnight Lace (60, David Miller); funny in Please Don't Eat the Daisies (60, Charles Walters); and returned to music in Billy Rose’s Jumbo (62, Walters), but pillow talk held sway: The Thrill of It All (63. Norman Jewison); Move Over, Darling (63, Gordon); Send Me No Flowers (64. Jewison); and Do Not Disturb (64, Ralph Levy). But since two Frank Tashlin films—the amusing The Glass Bottom Boat (66) and the woeful Caprice (67)—she has made nothing of interest and now seems to have retired to the world of margarine commercials and looking after animals.
This may also have been influenced by the death in 1968 of Martin Melcher, her husband and frequent producer—and also the exploiter of her money.
Founder Doris Day Animal League, Washington, 1987.
Doris Day is redolent of the early 1950s, a pop-art blonde who lived on to an age when her simplicity was reinterpreted by instant nostalgia. She hoped to suggest that the world was okay, that wholesome blonde girls with cheerful voices and big tits were destined to meet nice guvs who would woo them chastely and tunefully On Moonlight Bat/ (51, Roy del Ruth) or in some such Californian paradise. She was the home fire that refused to admit the cold war. She was, too, a grand confidence trick, boasting in Young at Heart (54, Gordon Douglas) that she was “Ready, Willing and Able” but demonstrating throughout her career the very opposite.
Above all, she was optimistic, just as the years of her first success were defiantly hopeful and religiously preoccupied with dating, 78s, and banana splits. She is easv to deride. But her fans were devoted and her energy was authentic. She was not sophisticated, but in the early 1950s that in itself was cool. What is most impressive about her professionalism is the wav she survived into the 1960s, riding new fashions without actually changing her nature.
Married Al Jorden, March 1941 (divorced 1943). 1 son, Terry; Married George Weilder, 1946 (divorced 1949). Married Marty Melcher, April 3, 1951 (deceased 1968).
Married Barry Comden, April 1976 (divorced).
