Doris Day Icon

A whole thesis could be written on just this topic. In “Frontiers” (2001), Georganne Scheiner, writing about Sandra Dee, who has been referred to as a junior Doris Day,quotes film historian Richard Dyer who defines a star image as a
“complex configuration of visual, verbal and aural signs manifest not only in films, but in all kinds of media texts”.

According to Scheiner, media texts include promotion and publicity material developed by the studio in the manufacture of the star image, material about the star not controlled by the studio, contemporary commentary and criticism, and, of course, the films themselves.

The Doris Day image can be divided into archetypal subtexts: girl next door, America’s sweetheart, tomboy, mother and wife, independent career woman. Adjectives that have been used to describe Doris Day are just as varied: perky, sultry, versatile, magnetic, virginal, resilient, possessing wholesome sexiness, ingénue, sophisticated. There are a lot of contradictions in how Doris Day’s image has been interpreted by various writers.

The girl next door:

Brent Simon reviewing the Doris Day Collection in Now playing magazine, May 4, 2005, had this to say about the girl next door and Doris Day

“Cinema exploded into the national consciousness with an array of starlets, dames, vixens and femme fatales leading the way, actresses who became famous precisely because they weren’t the type of women living on every block
The phenomenon of the girl next door, then, took some time to take hold. But when it did, America’s relationships with its screen stars began to change, laying the groundwork for their place today as de facto royalty.
Blonde, perky, overflowing with enthusiasm and yet still approachable and teeming with a rare, untainted sincerity, Doris Day was one of the biggest and yet least fetishized stars of the 1950s and 60s.”

Note: “least fetishized stars” what did the author mean by that?

In tihe article The Girls Next Door  in The New York Times, 24 November 1996, Jeanine Basinger, chairman of the film studies program at Weslyan University states the following:

The all-American girl was a teen-ager who wasn’t the prettiest girl in school, but the peppiest. She had to use her brains and energy, and she had to work, work, work. She was the head of the prom committee, cheered the team on, edited the school paper and was just swell to everyone And we didn’t have to worry about doing things only men were supposed to do because Doris slid under her boyfriend’s car, quickly repaired it and earned his gratitude and a proposal. Most of us had finished college by then and were now in our early 20’s. We were left without role models, until suddenly Doris Day defied the odds. With her freckles, slightly bucked teeth and obvious warmth, she had been one of the most effective personalities — the good sport with spunk. Instead of fading from the screen, Doris, although aging right along with the others, dug in and hung on. She started playing an older, successful, unmarried career woman, better known as the All-American Hold-out. There was hope!

America’s sweetheart:

Diana Saenger writes in Your Guide to Classic Movies: ”Doris Day – whose on-screen wholesomeness, unfailing optimism and understated strength of character helped make her America’s sweetheart in the 1950s and ‘60s”

Tomboy and butch:

Pauline Kael

Typical 50’s mother and wife

Virgin

If there is a famous but unfortunate quote that has doggedly followed Doris Day since the 60’s and has caused harm to her image then it is Oscar Levant’s “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin”

Although it might have been witty quote at the time it should have died a quick death but it was picked up by other comedians and lazy writers and this cliché persists to this day amongst writers and film critics

In the book “Multiple Virgins and Contemporary Virginities”, the author(?) writes:

 Along with Audrey Hepburn (who managed to appear perpetually virginal in real life as well, even after two marriages and a long-term live-in relationship), Doris Day and Sandra Dee are perhaps the great iconic American virgins of the 50s. (And if Doris Day was the blonde virgin par excellence of the decade, then Jayne Mansfield was the supreme blonde anti-virgin. Both women’s images were carefully controlled on screen and off. Hairstyle, makeup, and the cut of a dress were signs made readable to all.)

Definition of a virgin is of someone inexperienced, unsophisticated, child-like, in other words, someone not to be taken seriously. This quote does not at all describe the complex Doris Day persona and ultimately undermines a very talented. and competent comedienne and actress.

John Ellis, pondering Day’s star phenomenon, questions the ways in which her image has obscured the reality of her films. He argues that her film roles are “to one side of her circulated images.” 14(Scheiner)

According to Scheiner (2001):

The characterization of Day as the quintessential virgin conflicts with the reality of many of her screen roles. Although Day might have been puritanical, she was not without a libido. Unlike Monroe and Mansfield, Day was paired with more sexy, romantic leads like Clark Gable, Rock Hudson, Cary Grant, and James Garner. Nevertheless, our collective memory of Day is one of a forty-year-old virgin.

The above paragraph is an excellent assessment of the Doris Day film persona but for the last sentence which would be vigourously challenged by Doris Day fans, film critics and academics who don’t fall for easy cliches and by this author.There is no such thing as “our collective memory of Doris Day as a forty-year old virgin” The collective memory Scheiner is referring to has been perpetuated by a handful of film critics, academics and comedians who do not like nor have fully understood or researched the Doris Day phenomena.

Had Doris Day been perceived by the movie going public as a “forty-year old virgin” she would not have been as phenomenally popular as she was for so many years. There is nothing sexy, alluring or compelling about the image of a forty-year old virgin. The movie going public knew that Doris Day had the goods to attract the alpha males of Hollywood and they readily went for the joyful ride as the initially unattainable heroine gets her man in the end.

Furthermore, what attracted audiences to Doris Day and made her one of the top ten stars in the world for many years was her talent as an actress, singer and comedienne and her warm and magnetic screen presence.

When the audience watched a movie such as Pillow Talk they saw an independent, beautiful and elegant woman engage in the Battle of the Sexes with an equally attractive and desirable male movie star. Sure she would play bit of a tease and everybody knew that the two main characters would eventually end up together, but the fun part was when and how.

In the Sixties Doris Day was enormously successful and this could have generated both envy and resentment. Not only was she an actress no longer in the blush of youth but she was taking on roles of a younger desirable woman and the audiences were buying it and loving it, proof being in the box office successes of these romantic comedies. So she had to be knocked down a few notches and what a better way than proclaiming her as a prim, puritanical, middle aged virgin.

Assessment of Doris Day’s movies showed that in the late Fifties and Sixties she played more often a married woman or a widow than a single woman.

In the films where she is single there is only one movie, That Touch of Mink, where she plays a possible virginal character. Otherwise, she plays characters who will even initiate courtship. For example, in Lover Come Back she not only takes Rock Hudson’s character to a strip show, she is even willing to teach him the arts of love. In Teacher’s Pet and Pillow Talk she plays a sophisticated career woman with an active social life and with plenty of male admirers. These characters will conduct a relationship on their own terms.

What is important to keep in mind when deconstructing the films of the Fifties and early Sixties is the societal norms that prevailed at the time.The American society was still sexually repressed and the Pill barely having been invented. According to the norms of the day and not to forget the Production Code which gave very specific and stringent guidelines to what could and could not be portrayed on film. For example, no interracial kissing, no showing of a pregnant belly, only twin beds, even for married couples.

In romantic comedies there was plenty of flirting, chasing and witty dialogue but the main characters didn’t jump into bed until the end of the movie when they were most probably married. This was the formula for a romantic comedy in the Fifties and early Sixties, dictated by both Society and the Production Code.

Films such as Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back, as difficult as it is for our contemporary sensibilities to comprehend, were quite racy in their time. According to Ross Hunter, the producer of Pillow Talk, Rock Hudson was reluctant to star in Pillow Talk and had to be convinced.to do the movie.

On the other side of the virgin spectrum are voices such as Liz Smith and Gary Giddens who see Doris Day’s image as more grown up and complex. Liz Smith in her May 6,2005 article quotes Gary Giddens of the New York Sun:

In truth, the only thing virginal about Doris Day was her insuperable blonde and beaming independence, fortified by confidence, she went her own way, never parodying sexuality, a la Marilyn, or bottling it up the better to smolder, a la Princess Grace. Yet she ended happily in bed more than either of them and on her own terms.

Liz Smith:

He (Gary Giddens) is right on the money, and he also accurately describes her unique and sexy singing voice, and how it elevated her films - that voice “promised sultry nights in the kasbah.” There’s been a sea change among discerning critics and film buffs concerning Doris, her remarkable career, her oft-misunderstood image. What can I say, but what I have been saying for years - give this icon an honorary Oscar!

In some circles the virgin label still hangs onto Doris Day despite her attempt to set the record straight in the excellent biography, “Doris Day Her Own Story”, by AE Hotchner she states:

“The succession of cheerful, period musicals I made, plus Oscar Levant’s widely publicized remark about my virginity, contributed to what has been called my ‘image,’ which is a word that baffles me. There never was any intent on my part either in my acting or in my private life to create any such thing as an image”.

Authors note: In the original reviews of Pillow Talk, and Lover Come Back and  That Touch of Mink is  there any mention of Doris Day portraying a virginal character? To be checked

Did the writers of Pillow talk and Lover Come Back write in the script that Doris Day plays a virginal character?

Working woman and independent career woman

In the article, Female Film Stars and the Dominant Ideologies of 1950s America, Jessica Freame (University of Melbourne)

Further elements of subversion appeared within Day’s wholesome star image through her portrayal of women with professional jobs in the later sex comedies. Day was among the few female stars of the 1950s given roles where they worked for a living and enjoyed it, thereby undermining her representation of idealized femininity. As Quart and Auster explain ‘despite Day’s girl-next-door looks and behavior, her characters often had jobs and projected a tougher, more independent persona than other major female stars’.[47] This independence was evident in roles where her expertise in her profession was constantly reinforced, including an advertising executive in Lover Come Back and an interior designer in Pillow Talk.[48] Such films which demonstrated female capabilities in the professional arena complicated Day’s otherwise idealized representation of femininity and a woman’s place. Towards the end of the decade her star image incorporated an alternative to the dominant ideologies she embodied and hinted at the complex reality of 1950s American society.

Analysing the character of Ally McBeal in the March 18, 1998 article in the New York Times entitled  “You Want to Slap Ally McBeal, but Do You Like Her?“ writer Margo Jefferson compares Ally McBeal to the the characters portrayed in the Doris Day and Audrey Hepburn movies:

”The fact is, a young actress playing a young woman coping with work and love in the city must still come to terms with the legacies of Doris Day and Audrey Hepburn in the romantic comedies of the 1950’s and early 60’s. Miss Day and Hepburn were just about the only women who had jobs as well as suitors in movies of that period, who, as a friend put it on the day of Hepburn’s death, ‘’you could project your tiny little fantasies about glamour and success onto.'’
At her best, the much-maligned Doris Day had pluck and spirit. Her characters were good at what they did, they played fair and they defended their sense of what was decent, even honorable, in a middle-class, middle-of-the-road life.
Miss Day was always cast as a vigorous working woman in movies like ‘’The Pajama Game,'’ ‘’Teacher’s Pet'’ and even ‘’Pillow Talk,'’ though that one sealed her in the tomb of the American mind as the immortal adult virgin (really?). The problem was the hopeless conventionality with which so many scripts defined decency and honor. And as the scripts got more and more fixed, so did her acting. In the end, nothing was left of her but implacable wholesomeness.

Sex symbol

Louis Black writing in the Austin Chronicle had this to say about Doris Day:

 Watching Romance (on the High Seas) opened my eyes. As Groucho Marx once said, “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.” It’s not that she’s a vamp here, there’s just an undeniable sexiness and intensity.

Natalie Hancock:

 Doris Day, the quintessential 50s gal—more wholesome than brown bread, more American than apple pie. She didn’t have the sizzling sensuality of Marilyn Monroe or the acid tongue of Katherine Hepburn, but her sweetly-sexy screen persona endeared her to the hearts of millions.

In 2005 a poll by Mueller asked 1000 British men and women which Hollywood stars they would most like to spend the night with. The British men named Marilyn Monroe and Doris Day their top two choices (Angelina Jolie came in at three) Virginia Soto,Your Guide to Chicago

Rod Taylor had this to say about working with Doris Day:

I’ll tell you this much about Doris Day: I love that girl! She’s one of the greatest pros I’ve ever worked with. I’ve been going to the rushes every day on this picture [Do Not Disturb], which is something I never did before; all I can say is that I haven’t recognised myself because of her. I can’t put my finger on it, but whatever it is, Doris brings out great things in a man. We play a happily married couple who fight like mad, but make up like crazy, and I’ll think you’ll agree that she has all the warmth and sex and charm in the world. The studio seems to think we have a sort of… chemistry. Anyway, they’ve thought enough of us to team us in another picture called The Glass Bottom Boat.

Modern Screen, July 1965

James Garner: as quoted  “Doris Day Her Own Story”, by AE Hotchner he states:

John Updike

Patrick Stewart

Colin Firth

Elle, January 2004, by Andrew Goldman

Firth Love Colin Firth, cinema’s favorite wounded Brit
 
Elle: I happened upon a Web site devoted to you called Firthfrenzy. Could you describe what a Firthfrenzy looks like?

Colin Firth: I don’t have any idea!

Elle: Were you obsessed with any movie stars as a kid?

CF: I did have a sleepless night over Doris Day when I was eight and Bye the Light of the Silvery Moon was on TV. She had that pure quality, but she always seemed within an inch of giving in to being absolutely, um, ah…

Elle: Giving in to a Firthfrenzy?

CF: Giving in to a frenzy of some kind, yes.

http://www.firth.com/articles/04elle_jan.html

Edmund Wilson

Richard Hauer Costa (in Chron.com The consummate critic  Sept 26, 2005) reviewing Lewis Dabney’s EDMUND WILSON: A Life in Literature.:

What literate non-specialist readers — the ones every serious author seeks — may miss after hundreds of pages of scholarship is the Pickwickian Wilson who made card tricks his ice-breakers at first meetings; the jowly and stocky owner of a voice given to an almost imperceptible stutter and hesitant chuckle that were irresistible until too many scotches made even a classic story impenetrable; the world-class sexual partner, dubbed by his previous biographer “one of the great literary fornicators of all time”; the man who loved Edna St. Vincent Millay, married Mary McCarthy, and proposed to Anais Nin but was also attracted to Doris Day (”so much the true female”) and his friends’ wives, especially if they could type and drive a car.
For all the panoply of achievement that Professor Dabney has laid out in Pompeian levels, Edmund Wilson’s signal contribution was essentially this: More than any other 20th-century man of letters, he elevated higher journalism to literary art.

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