Page 3: The Girl Next Door
Doris Day sings her signature tune, “Que Sera, Sera”, to her son
in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much”.
Q “How did you first become interested in Doris Day?”
David Kaufman: “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. It was a few years later when I saw her in “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” and fell in love with her again. It was later still, when I was a teenager that I finally caught up with what I consider to be her greatest performance, in her best picture, “Love Me or Leave Me.” Then, over the years, as I kept up with her newly released films, I gradually discovered a number of her earlier pictures. Even though I did not think her last few movies were very good, I still thought that she was utterly natural in them. But some of her earliest pictures I never saw until I began to do the research for the book in the year 2000.”
Q “I know from having spoken to you before that, in the case of the book on Doris Day, you left certain, possibly even more surprising, revelations out of the finished book. Why did you do that? And what are your guidelines as a biographer – is it anything the lawyers will pass, or are you influenced also by your stated regard for the subject? How do you evaluate the public’s need to know against the subject’s right to privacy and your own sense of “might writing about this’ upset her”?”
David Kaufman: “Yes, there were several things I learned which my publisher’s lawyers said I could not include; and I obviously can’t reveal them now, either. There were still other things I learned which I chose not to include, because they bordered on being tasteless and wouldn’t have leant anything to the story anyway. But for the most part, as a biographer, I consider it my job to be as complete and as accurate as possible. And, as I’ve already said, an icon of Doris Day’s stature relinquished her rights to privacy when she became such a public figure. It certainly goes with the territory of being such a major star. Indeed, it’s a big part of her story – the extent to which the media was constantly churning out stories on Day during her heyday, which continued even after she retired in 1973, and which sometimes upset her. It’s part of the reason she retreated and cut herself off from the past – even while she continued to respond to fans and devoted herself to her pet causes.”
The demands of celebrity – Doris Day was one of the most photographed and written about entertainers of the 1950s and 60s.
Q “We both know that Doris inspires uncritical adulation among her fans and it has been said to me by someone who knows her that people genuinely confuse her with her screen persona, including those who went to work for her expecting her to be a “Laurie Tuttle” type from “Young at Heart”: sweet, wholesome and always upbeat. Personally, I’ve never had a problem seeing her as a normal human being, warts and all. Your book illustrates how her talent was exploited by Hollywood, from her first contract with Warner Brothers when film director, Michael Curtiz, signed her to a personal contract taking a big percentage of her earnings, before hiring her on to Warners – to her agent-husband, Martin Melcher, at the end of her career, selling her to the highest bidder on film projects that weren’t worthy of her talents – ironic given that all that money was eventually stolen from her. Given all that, why do people have a problem believing she could be anything other than “the girl next door”? And why do you think she agreed to hand over responsibility for her career to someone else? I’m thinking of other female stars of that period that fought hard to have control over their film careers; Bette Davis, Katherine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, and even Marilyn Monroe.„
David Kaufman: “That’s not exactly accurate about Michael Curtiz – he was a MAJOR Hollywood director with films like Casablanca (1942) and Mildred Pierce (1945) to his credit, so signing Doris Day to a personal contract was not unusual or necessarily exploitive. (Apologies for the slander! – bj)
But, it’s difficult to say why some people can’t believe that Doris Day is anything other than ‘the girl next door’ – especially because there probably isn’t any one reason. In other words, different people might have different motives for needing to maintain her girl-next-door image. But perhaps the most common or basic reason is that some people need to believe in the notion of “normal,” and that was definitely what Doris Day’s image represented to many. Some of the most impassioned fans that need to maintain her manufactured image, simply fail to understand that there’s a difference between the movie star image and the person she is in real life. Also, some fans, by their very nature, are nostalgic, and they want to imagine that what they believed when they were growing up, continues to be true. Fandom often involves fantasy. And hardcore fans don’t want to have their nostalgic beliefs interfered with or questioned. It’s like a sacred violation of holy territory.
Michael Curtiz, standing left, beems approvingly at his new leading lady, Doris Day, on the set of their first film together, “Romance on the High Seas”, made at Warner Brothers in 1949.
“Actors have to be willing to burst fans’ bubbles in order to move on; and fans have to let them do it.” And that, in a sense, is something Day never did.”
While further considering your question, I am reminded of one of my favourite lines in contemporary drama, from Tracy Letts’ play, “Killer Joe”, which I reviewed for the Daily News when it opened Off Broadway in 2000: “Normal people are people you don’t know very well.” The point is that no one is “normal,” per se, and Doris Day certainly wasn’t normal. She was —and continues to be – an extremely complicated and contradictory woman. This makes her all the more fascinating for a biographer, no less than for a reader. How boring and tedious her story would be, were she the “normal” “girl next door” she was perceived as being by the world at large. But Doris Day wanted to maintain that image for her fans, some of whom cling to what Doris herself referred to as its “goodie-two-shoes” aspects.
I just read, the other day, in Nancy Franklin’s advance review of Edie Falco’s new HBO series, “Nurse Jackie” (in the “New Yorker”): “Actors have to be willing to burst fans’ bubbles in order to move on; and fans have to let them do it.” And that, in a sense, is something Day never did. It was amazing to discover in the archives how often Day said she never understood where her “girl-next-door” image came from, when, seemingly as many times, she said that she had to maintain that image, otherwise she disappointed her fans. One of the many contradictions….
Not just a pretty face: Doris shows she can act in the film, “Storm Warning”, a story about the Ku Klux Klan, with Ginger Rogers and Steve Cochran.
As for, “Why do you think she agreed to hand over responsibility for her career to someone else?” – Doris Day was taught, early in life, to heed her mother. And with Alma’s blessing, Melcher succeeded DD’s mother as a parental figure, followed by Terry, her son, her final handler. But increasingly, after Melcher’s death in 1968, Doris pulled away from the limelight, and retreated to the privacy she always craved. Though she hates being called “reclusive,” that’s what she became, turning down the Kennedy Center Award – among other offers – because she didn’t want to make a public appearance, and also wanted to put the past behind her. Yet another contradiction: the tireless workaholic was basically a stay-at-home, who didn’t get her real wishes until long after her husband/manager died, in 1968.”
Doris Day and agent-husband Martin Melcher in the 1950s.