When Doris Day died last week, at age 97, the Twitter account for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences paid tribute to her as someone “who brought us so much joy with her humor, extraordinary talent and kind heart.”
What the Academy did not say is that Day never won an Academy Award, not even one of those honorary Oscars that have gone to the likes of Spike Lee and Jackie Chan.
To be sure, Day may well have been the last person to care about such things: “My nature is to fold early,” she wrote in her 1976 memoir. “I should have been a bird or a flower.”
Day began her career singing in a big band on the eve of World War II, ended it with a highly rated television sitcom in the 1970s, and was by far the most popular female movie actor of the 1950s and ’60s.
As a singer, she had fashioned her style after Ella Fitzgerald, and her clear, expressive voice was alternately smooth and swinging and versatile. In her later years, however, she was genuinely surprised that critics regarded her as one of the great song stylists of the postwar era. At the height of her box-office popularity, in 1968, she made her last movie and, a dozen years later, retreated from Hollywood to the hills above Carmel, Calif., where she spent her last four decades caring for innumerable stray dogs and founding a formidable animal-welfare organization, the Doris Day Animal Foundation.
Still, the Academy’s ambivalence about Day was, in some sense, a reflection of her slightly ambiguous reputation, reflected in last week’s swarm of obituary tributes.
Day was remembered with a series of adjectives — “perky,” “wholesome,” “freckle-faced,” “all-American” — which, while strictly accurate, were only partly descriptive. She began her movie career as a singing actor, appearing alongside such male leads as James Cagney in the dramatic “Love Me or Leave Me” (1955) and Clark Gable in the comic “Teacher’s Pet” (1958), as well as the film adaptation of the Broadway hit “The Pajama Game” (1957). Her signature cinema ballad, the pensive “Que Sera, Sera” was first sung in an Alfred Hitchcock thriller, “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1956), in which she co-starred with James Stewart.
From the late 1950s until the mid-’60s, she appeared in a series of wildly successful romantic comedies that typecast her as a wholesome, spirited career gal defending her virtue against such challengers as Cary Grant, Rock Hudson, and James Garner. By the standards of the day, “Pillow Talk” (1959) or “Lover Come Back” (1961) were not quite as squeaky clean as they’re remembered; but as the Swinging Sixties rolled along, they did appear slightly antiquated, turning Day from a Hollywood icon into an object of feminist derision.
This was both unfair and inaccurate, and in recent years her work has been favorably reappraised. Yet it does beg the question of Day’s unique appeal. Pretty without being drop-dead gorgeous, smart but not pedantic, sweet and congenial without being saccharine, funny but not hilarious, strong but not imperious, she cast her spell on the public for decades and earned such unlikely devotees as John Updike, who swooned at the thought of “this shy goddess who … fascinates us with the amount of space we imagine between her face and her mask.”
As is often the case with movie stars, some of Day’s popularity might have drawn on an awareness that her own romantic life was none too happy. She was married and divorced four times. Her first husband beat her throughout a pregnancy she refused to terminate at age 19. Day was in her late 40s when her third husband died and she discovered that, as her manager, he had embezzled and mismanaged her earnings, leaving her $500,000 in debt.
But she earned it all back, and more, living happily ever after in a real-life version of a Doris Day film.
Philip Terzian, a former writer and editor at the Weekly Standard, is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
