Hollywood actress Doris Day, who died on Monday at 97, starred with Ronald Reagan in the 1950s movies “Storm Warning” and “The Winning Team” and briefly dated the future president.
A lifelong Republican, she received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004 from President George W. Bush, who said it was “a good day for America when Doris Marianne von Kappelhoff of Evanston, Ohio, decided to become an entertainer.” His father George H.W. Bush had had a crush on her while he was a World War II pilot in the Pacific.
Day briefly dated Reagan around the time she starred with him in “Storm Warning” in 1951, shortly before she married her third husband Marty Melcher. In her tell-all 1976 memoir Doris Day: Her Own Story, she wrote: “Marty was married to Patty Andrews, of the Andrews Sisters, and I was seeing several men — Jack Carson, occasionally my ex-husband. George Weidler, when his band was in town, and Ronald Reagan, with whom I made two movies.
“I had met Ronald Reagan through mutual friends from New York who had come out to Los Angeles to live. Ronnie had recently been divorced from Jane Wyman, and he lived alone in an apartment high above Sunset Strip. There were two things about Ronnie that impressed me: how much he liked to dance and how much he liked to talk. Ronnie is really the only man I’ve ever known who loved dancing. He danced well and he had a pleasant personality, so I invariably enjoyed going out with Ronnie.”
She later said: “He wasn’t actually in politics, of course, but he had what I would call a political personality — engaging, strong and very voluble,” she said. She also appeared with him in the 1952 film “The Winning Team.”
According to the Daily Mail: “[Day] said two things impressed her about Reagan – his skill on the dance floor and his ability to have an intelligent conversation. The two would sneak off to his apartment high in the Hollywood Hills and make love while marveling at the panoramic view below.”
Day died at her Carmel Valley, Calif., home surrounded by close friends. Her foundation, the Doris Day Animal Foundation, said the actress “had been in excellent physical health for her age, until recently contracting a serious case of pneumonia, resulting in her death.”
She began her career as a singer, with one of her first records, “Sentimental Journey,” selling more than a million copies after it was released in 1945, before going on to star in 39 films. She never won an Oscar but was awarded a Grammy for lifetime achievement in 2008.
