David Kaufman, author of “Doris Day: The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door” talks to Bryan James, creator of The Films of Doris Day website, about his love affair with Doris Day – strictly from the cinema stalls - and the highs and lows of writing a book about a screen icon.
“I was all of six or seven years old, when my parents took me to see my first Doris Day film, “The Man Who Knew Too Much”; and by identifying with her on-screen son, I immediately fell in love with her.” – David Kaufman
Doris Day is an internationally known singer and actress whose work is appreciated as much today as it was when she first caught the world’s attention during the Second World War with the song, “Sentimental Journey” in 1945, her first No 1 chart hit.
She captured the international mood with that song, including, in particular, a young US Navy aircraft mechanic heading for the Philippines, named Roy Harold Fitzgerald, later to become her most famous co-star Rock Hudson.
Her life has been well documented in books and videos, detailing her ambivalence to fame; giving up her singing career to get married, just as it was getting off the ground – her father’s desertion that required her to become the breadwinner to support her mother and young son – the Hollywood years that saw her rise to become the world’s most popular star – the marriages that didn’t lead to happiness, etc, etc. So what more is there to say?
Quite a lot, it turns out. In the past few years there have been four new books about her and the reprint of another. The world, it seems, still can’t get enough of Doris Day. A number of these books have caused controversy among fans who object to Miss Day’s private life being mulled over for what they see as financial gain for the authors. As the creator of a website and forum about Doris Day, I can bear witness to the divisive disagreements and often bitter arguments between fans, on the morals and merits of these books.
On the controversial side – but not leading the pack in that area – is David Kaufman’s “Doris Day – The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door”, published in June 2008 and now out in paperback. I met him in London the year before the book was published, when he flew over to talk to members of her UK fan base. We had a fun Doris Day dinner – in that there was only one topic of discussion; her – and I listened, fascinated, to stories of Doris and Hollywood until his partner chipped in, “Hey, David, you’re giving too much away and getting nothing back!” Unfortunately, never having met her, there wasn’t much I could contribute apart from my own experience of being a fan.
Doris Day on the set of “Love Me or Leave Me” – Kaufman’s favourite film of hers.
We met again the following day when he took me to a café, put a tape recorder in front of me and started firing questions while I desperately tried to come up with something interesting to say (so I’ve enjoyed turning the tables.) All I recall is making some lame comments about thinking that in “Pillow Talk”, Doris was really playing the male role in that she was in control and was training (or ‘grooming’, as they call it now) Rock to be the kind of man she wanted. Surprisingly that little gem of insight didn’t make it on to the bookshelves! I finally left, impressed by his sincerity and obvious enthusiasm for his subject, saying I would either review the book or interview him about it at a later date. Now, a year later, I’ve finally gotten around to it. I started by asking:
Q “You’ve spent most of this decade writing and researching the lives of two very different individuals with, to the casual observer, nothing in common, apart from both being in the entertainment business. What made you choose Charles Ludlam and Doris Day?
(Note: For those readers who have no idea who Ludlam is, he was a New York theatre figure who wrote, starred in and directed 29 plays in 20 years while running his own troupe, The Ridiculous Theatrical Company. Embraced by the cognoscenti, mainstream critics and a large, if local following, Ludlam was at the forefront of the very cultural revolution that Day turned her back on in the late 1960’s. His achievements abruptly drew to a close, however, when he died of AIDS in 1987, at the age of 44. – David Kaufman)
David Kaufman: “Indeed, I’ve spent nearly the last two decades writing about the subjects of my first two biographies. And even though they seem, on first blush, to have nothing in common, I came to realize that both Charles Ludlam and Doris Day were undervalued by the culture, which otherwise celebrated what they had to offer. I also grew to appreciate that they both had an obvious joie de vivre, with which they could infect everyone in their presence.
From a biographer’s viewpoint, I further appreciated that, having written Ludlam’s bio after his demise, and without being able to interview him about his life, my biography of Doris Day could be equally as valid, without my having any direct access to her, given Day’s famous reluctance to respond to any probing questions about her past. I already learned and understood, in other words, that a biographer does not need to have direct access to his subject, in order to write a meaningful biography. How else could there be significant biographies of all of the great historical figures who died hundreds of years ago, be it Michelangelo, George Washington, John Adams, Emily Dickinson, Winston Churchill or T.S. Eliot? As a highly public, and even an iconic figure, Doris Day relinquished her rights to privacy long before I was even born. As much as I respect her rights to privacy now, she has to respect my rights to write about her as a public figure in her heyday, when everything was up for grabs, so to speak, and she was being written about, on practically a daily basis—and, I might add, gave thousands of interviews.”
Buddies: Roy Harold Fitzgerald and Mary Anne von Kappelhoff.