Doris Day
1922 - 2019
This was the headline in The Hollywood Reporter this morning:
Doris Day, Hollywood's Favorite Girl Next Door, Dies at 97
The accompanying obituary told the story of the life and career of Doris Day, and it is worth reading:
I have written often of Doris Day on this Blog, usually in conjunction with her April birthday (just last month I noted that she had turned 97) and usually with the line "who doesn't like Dories Day?"
Rather than restate what I have written in the past, I thought that as my Absent Friends Tribute, I would except portions of a post that I wrote last August, after I had watched Miss Day's classic movie "Pillow Talk" on TCM. Here you go...
In her opening comments (prior to the TCM showing of the movie), TCM hostess Alicia Malone noted that by the end of the 1950's, the musical films in which Day had starred were becoming passe, and that she needed something to boost her career when she was approached to make this "sex comedy" (more about THAT term later on). She was reluctant at first, but did it anyway, and, presto-chango, Day's career was revived - she was nominated for an Oscar for PILLOW TALK - and a great screen team, Doris Day and Rock Hudson (and Tony Randall) was born. The three of them would take two more movies together after this one.
In PILLOW TALK, Day plays a single career woman, an interior decorator, who is forced to share a party line with Hudson, a philandering song writer. Now today, no one watching this movie under the age of fifty would know what a "party line" was, but you get the idea pretty quickly. Unknown to each other, they are connected by Randall, a three times divorced rich guy who is in love with Day and who is employing Hudson to write songs for show he is backing.
As it can only happen in the movies, Hudson realizes that his hated party line partner is not some wizened old crone, but rather the beautiful Doris Day, introduces himself by using another identity (again, only in the movies), Day, of course, falls madly in love with him, and hijinks, as they say, ensue.
I came away from watching PILLOW TALK with a heightened respect for Doris Day. She was quite beautiful (as emphasized with a gorgeous wardrobe), and very funny. She also had the ability to roll her eyes and make faces to terrific comic effect. The scene where she realizes that Hudson's "Rex Stetson" is really her party line nemesis Brad Allen by playing a bit of music on a piano is a brilliant bit of comic acting.
I mentioned that this was considered a "sex comedy" when it was released. Sexual mores have sure changed since then. In 1959, the sex comedy PILLOW TALK featured a New York City single career woman fighting off leering men in an effort to preserve her virtue. In the early 2000's, the sex comedy "Sex and the City" featured New York City single career women like Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Catrall shedding their clothes and boffing good looking guys at the drop of a hat. Times have certainly changed. Whether for the better or not is, I suppose, in the eye of the beholder.
For better or for worse Doris Day became typecast as the virtuous not-until-you-marry-me type soon after PILLOW TALK. This probably worked against her in the mid-1960's when director Mike Nichols strongly considered Day for the role of Mrs. Robinson in "The Graduate", or so the story goes. Of course that role went to Anne Bancroft, but one wonders "What if Doris Day became the predatory Mrs. Robinson?" We'll never know, but it's fun to speculate.
RIP Doris Day.
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