Doris Day, dead at 97, made a paradoxical, patriarchal ideal of womanhood look effortless.
Doris Day, who has died at 97 in her home in California, was a movie star unique even among other movie stars of her era. Her brand of effortless charm and wholesome femininity made her the embodiment of the ideal woman during the late ’50s and early ’60s. She was simultaneously virginal yet sexy, career-focused yet domestic, elegant yet approachable; she didn’t just “enjoy being a girl” —she presented an uncomplicated, nigh-mythical image of womanhood.
Yet Day’s peppy all-American girl persona belied a career full of hard work that made her far more realisticthan she seemed — and even as she represented a vanishing vision of the perfect woman, her own life was an example of just how far removed that image was from reality.
Born in Cincinnati in 1922 as Doris Kappelhoff, Day trained as a dancer as a child but got her start as a recording artist, singing first in local nightclubs and on radio before working with swing orchestras in her mid-20s. By her late teens, she’d chosen her stage name and was working with major band leaders like Les Brown. In 1945, at 23, she released her first smash hit, “Sentimental Journey,” which became an anthem of wartime America. By the mid-’40s, she’d appeared as a singer in several films. In 1948, director Michael Curtiz cast her in his film Romance on the High Seas, because he said “her freckles made her look like the all-American girl,” and her lengthy film career began.
For several years during the period between 1960 and 1965, Day was the top box office draw in the country, garnering an Academy Award nod for 1959’s Pillow Talk, as well as a Golden Globe win and four nominations, and two Grammy nominations for Female Pop performer.
Though she quit the movie business in 1968 and focused on devoting the rest of her life to animal charities, like the Doris Day Animal Foundation, Day remained a popular public figure and frequent guest on talk shows and variety shows throughout her life. She later received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004 for her work as an actor and activist, and received an Honorary Grammy Award in 2008. Today, her run of iconic postwar films continues to influence women’s fashion, style, and even lifestyle choices.
It’s easy to see what Day’s basic appeal was. Her voice was fresh and vibrant — she was heavily influenced by Ella Fitzgerald’s vocal style — and she had an energy and vivacity that came through even from her earliest roles.
But Day also had the ability to present an enticing, almost fantastical picture of sexual purity. Take this scene from 1950’s Tea For Two: Framed in soft lighting and posed in a setting that seems anachronistically Victorian, Day manages to make the title song, which is about two lovers on a romantic getaway, seem like an innocently suggestive, but not overly sexual, vacation, all while singing to her uncle.
Even in her saucier films, Day manages to evince a combination of sexual appeal and proper womanly chastity — such as in this scene from 1959’s Pillow Talk, where she expresses overt horror and disgust when confronted with a bachelor pad and intimations of out-of-wedlock sex.
Day had the opportunity to play more dramatic parts — she most notably played James Stewart’s wife in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much, where she debuted her signature song, “Que Sera Sera.” But she always turned away from more nuanced roles in favor of sticking to type in frothier rom-coms — or as they were often dubbed at the time, “sex comedies.
