I must have been six or seven when I first heard Doris Day singing Que Sera, Sera. And just like Doris in the song, I asked my mother… well, what does it mean exactly? Whatever will b
Mick Brown
May 19 2019 4:59 PM
I must have been six or seven when I first heard Doris Day singing Que Sera, Sera. And just like Doris in the song, I asked my mother… well, what does it mean exactly? Whatever will be, will be, the future’s not ours to see…
Was there ever a song more sweet and beguiling, soft and melancholic.
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At the time she recorded it in 1956, Doris Day was 34, well known as an actor in musical comedy, the star of her own radio programme and already into her third marriage. She could little have imaged that Que Sera, Sera would become the song with which she would be indelibly associated for the rest of her life, that she would become the biggest female box-office star of all time, that her third husband would rob her blind, that her son, Terry Melcher, would be threatened by Charles Manson, and that her later life would be devoted to animal rights.
No actress of her generation better epitomises the role of American sweetheart. Day came to prominence during the Eisenhower years, a time of post-War affluence and suburban comforts – the manicured lawn behind the white picket fence. The United States of America was a country bent on cheerful optimism in the face of nuclear uncertainty, where actresses were obliged to perform to stereotype. Day’s romantic comedies, as American as mom and apple pie, fit the bill perfectly.
On the one hand there was Marilyn Monroe, with her hourglass figure and skittish, sexy persona; on the other there was Doris, pretty rather than beautiful, the wholesome girl next door, with a big grin and a cheerful disposition.
If Marilyn was a dangerously seductive presence, a potential home-wrecker, Doris was forever cast as home-maker, the girl any man would be proud to bring home to mom. She was a role model through whom a generation of women could function vicariously, and whom a generation of men found powerfully tantalising for reasons they might not have been able to articulate.
« I’m always looking for insights into the real Doris Day, » the author John Updike once confessed, « because I’m stuck with this infatuation and need to explain it to myself. » So infatuated was Updike that he wrote a poem to her (after Andrew Marvell), Her Coy Lover Sings Out. « Doris, ever since 1945/when I was all of 13 and you a mere 21/and Sentimental Journey came winging/out of the juke box at the sweet shop/your voice piercing me like a silver arrow/I knew you were sexy.
