Robin Agnew
It's been a LONG winter. Longer for those of you on the east coast, I know, but it's been long and cold and miserable here in the midwest too. Sometimes that only thing that brings me sunshine on a day in March when it should be 60 degress but is instead 20 degrees, is a dose of Doris Day. I recently loaded up my netflix cue with some old Doris faves and had a viewing orgy.
Doris herself is a contradiction. She's petite and lovely and chic, but she's also very American in her healthy, musular arms, shiny hair and sweet girl next door voice. In this she resembles an earlier American film icon, Louise Brooks, who looked exotic but when she opened her mouth, there was no doubt of her pure American roots.
She's also a contradiction because in her actual life she left home early to be a big band singer with Harry James and moved from man to man. She was always a creer woman, becoming for a time one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, and her own son was raised very much by her mother. The only thing she shared with her onscreen persona appears to have been a cleanliness obsession.
In most of her movies she either plays a housewife or if she has a job, what she really wants is to get married and have a baby and settle down. In "the Thrill of it All" with James Garner she plays a doctor's wife (Garner's) who becomes an accidental TV star. But it's all too much, her hub doesn't like her working, and things get back to "normal" by the end of the movie. In "Please Dont Eat the Daisies" she plays the fruustrated wife of a theater critic (based loosley on the great Walter Kerr) who moves the family out to the wilds of Conneticut. In real life, of course, Jean Kerr was the successful author of "Please Don't Eat the Daisies."
In a more typical formula, she has some kind of a job, often an ad exec. In one of the odder ones, but still one of my favorites, "That Touch of Mink" she plays a youngish working gal who gets splashed by Cary Grant's limo on a rainy New York City morning. Grant is lots older and the camera is smeared with a bit of vaseline for Doris' closeups but there's still a great fashion show sequence and the bizarre plot - Grant takes her to Bermuda, but as a companion, not as a wife, and she breaks out in hives rather than hook up. Her roomie Audrey Meadows works in an automat, my other favorite part.
But of course the pinnacle of the Day films are those where she was paired with Rock Hudson, a gay man playing a straight one. It's best not to think about the reality because "Pillow Talk", my favorite of all her films, is a lovely confection. It actually won an Oscar for best screenplay, and really, it's nicely structured and has some actual humor, thanks to Hudson, who does a funny imiatation of a southern oil man to win Doris' heart. Doris plays a decorator in this one, but she snags Rock in the end by giving his apartment a hideous makeover. There's a dandy scene with Hudson and Thelma Ritter, who plays Doris' housekeeper, where she drinks him under the table. And Tony Randall, the straight man who seemed gay, plays the best friend.
Oh, and in "Pillow Talk" she gets to sing a bit, one of my favorites, "Roly Poly Baby." They set her up in a piano bar (in a red dress to die for) and let her go to it. She bursts into song in several of her movies, but they aren't really singing vehicles, though she had a lovely clear voice. It wasn't subtle or heartbreaking, but it was pretty.
It's too bad she's now such a recluse, because her films have given so many people so many hours of pleasure, as has her music. I have a favorite CD I listen to often. However she's just the ticket out of a long, cold winter.
