A weekly feature in which my four-year-old son is let loose on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one of the most popular tourist attractions in Los Angeles, and chooses a star from among the more than 2,500 honorees. His “random” picks sometimes reveal unexplained connections such as the summer day in 2012 when he sat down on the star of actress Celeste Holm and refused to budge. We later learned that the Oscar-winning actress had died only hours earlier.
I could barely keep up with Charlie this week on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as he ran straight to the star of Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff, otherwise known as Doris Day. Once I saw whose star he was proudly standing on (obscuring most of her name), I couldn’t help but be delighted, as Miss Day is a family favorite. Charlie’s mom and I walked down the aisle to the warblings of “Que Sera Sera,” one of Day’s biggest hits. While Charlie landed on the star that honors Doris’s achievements in the recording industry (she’s released 31 albums that spent hundreds of weeks in the Top 40 and has received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award), the talented singer has another star on the Walk of Fame for her many contributions to the movies.
I know what you’re thinking. To some , the name Doris Day conjures up memories of mindless widescreen froth — empty-headed Technicolor confections with stories that have no relevance to today. To those of you in this camp, I say you really need to take another look. Doris Day made 39 films and was considered the country’s biggest box-office star for four years (1960, 62, 63 and 64). I’m not saying that every one of her films was a gem but looking back today, I’ve always felt that Doris Day was grossly underrated as an actress. I could point to moments in many of her films in which she exhibits a talent that any actress today would kill for but for now, I’ll only mention two.
The first one occurs toward the beginning of the Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 remake of his own The Man Who Knew Too Much. Jimmy Stewart and Doris are on vacation in Morocco with their young son. Stewart plays Dr. Ben McKenna and Doris his wife Jo, a once famous musical comedy star. One day in Morocco, the couple witnesses a man being murdered in the marketplace. As the man is dying, he whispers something about an assassination plot in Stewart’s ear. To keep the American couple quiet, the would-be assassins kidnap their son Hank. Stewart finds out about the kidnapping first, and to prevent Doris from becoming hysterical, he slips her a heavy tranquilizer just before telling her. The scene in which Doris Day reacts to the news about her son being kidnapped while she is feeling the effects of the tranquilizer is some of the best acting I’ve ever seen.
The other scene I wanted to mention is the opening of 1960’s Please Don’t Eat the Daisies starring Doris Day, David Niven and Janis Paige and directed by Charles Walters. In the first scene, Doris is getting ready for a night on the town but as she’s getting dressed her four rambunctious boys are all over her, making bratty comments about everything from her girdle to her make-up. It’s hard to articulate why I’m so impressed with this scene but Doris is so incredibly natural and at ease with those kids you would swear she was really their mother — you just can’t fake that kind of intimacy. Later in the film, when she’s furious with her theatre critic husband, David Niven, for his flirtation with sexy actress Janis Paige, Doris is fuming as she watches Niven and Paige bantering on a TV talk show. Her boys are bored and protest, “Mom, change the channel! We can see Daddy anytime—we want to watch Frankenstein!” to which Doris replies sharply, “IS THERE A DIFFERENCE?” This is yet another movie line that I find myself repeating on an almost daily basis. You’d be surprised at how often it comes in handy.
There are so many other great Doris Day performances. If you’ve only seen her in her classic comedies from the early 1960s (which I also love), do yourself a favor and rent Storm Warning, a very disturbing film noir from 1951 in which Doris is married to a member of the Ku Klux Klan who beats the crap out of Doris’s visiting sister, played by Ginger Rogers. Ginger then helps the local District Attorney (Ronald Reagan!) bring down the Klan.
Or take a look at the dark 1955 musical Love Me or Leave Me about real-life torch singer Ruth Etting. James Cagney plays a Chicago mobster named Jimmy “the Gimp” Snyder who makes Doris a star but beats the crap out of her along the way. Or you might check out 1960s Midnight Lace in which Doris is living in London with her English husband. It seems like an idyllic marriage…or is it? “Who knew that hubby Rex Harrison would turn out to be a sociopath who tries to beat the crap out of her?
I don’t mean to be lurid in mentioning the litany of men who tried to beat up Doris Day in her films. I’m just trying to give you a more in-depth view of her career and acting abilities than you might have if you’re only familiar with her Rock Hudson movies. Sadly, there were also a few men in Doris’s real life who were up to no good including her first husband Al Jordan who beat her up while she was pregnant with her son. She next married George Weidler, the brother of the wonderful actress Virginia Weidler (Katharine Hepburn’s little sister in The Philadelphia Story) but that marriage didn’t last long, and third husband Marty Melcher brought about Doris’s nervous breakdown by working his wife to the bone and signing her up for a bunch of movies and TV shows she didn’t want to make. Marty ended up squandering every cent Doris made and by the time he died in 1968 Doris was deeply in debt. She was eventually awarded $22 million by the courts and used this money to begin her animal rights organization.
Doris’s only child, Terry Melcher, was a pioneering rock and roll producer who once rejected would-be singer Charles Manson. Many people believe that Melcher was the actual target of the 1969 Manson murders since he once lived in the house where Sharon Tate and the others were slaughtered. Sadly, Terry Melcher died several years ago of cancer. Doris Day will turn 90 later this year. Retired from performing, she lives in Carmel, California, where she owns an animal-friendly hotel. Thank you, Charlie, for reminding me of this amazing, multi-talented national treasure.