Doris Day

Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff was born on April 3, 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the daughter of German American parents. Her father, William Kappelhoff, worked as a music teacher and church choirmaster, and her mother, Alma, encouraged her early interest in performing ^[1]. Any account of the Doris Day biography has to begin with a detail she herself only learned late in life: for decades she believed she had been born in 1924, and her true birth year of 1922 was confirmed publicly around her 95th birthday, when the Associated Press located her birth certificate ^[2].

As a girl she trained seriously as a dancer and formed a duo with a young partner, Jerry Doherty. The pair won a local amateur contest, and a professional dancing career in Hollywood seemed within reach. That plan ended in October 1937, when a car she was riding in was struck by a train near Hamilton, Ohio. Her right leg was badly broken, and the long recovery ruled out dancing ^[1].

Confined to the house during her convalescence, the teenager sang along with the radio, paying close attention to Ella Fitzgerald's phrasing. Her mother arranged singing lessons with a Cincinnati vocal coach, Grace Raine, who recognized an unusual natural gift. Within a short time the girl was singing on local radio station WLW and in Cincinnati clubs, where bandleader Barney Rapp hired her and suggested she shorten her name. Because audiences responded to her rendition of the song "Day After Day", she became Doris Day ^[1].

Day's apprenticeship came in the big band world of the late 1930s and early 1940s. After working with Barney Rapp and Bob Crosby, she joined the orchestra of trombonist Les Brown, the association that made her a national name. In 1945 she recorded "Sentimental Journey" with Brown's band, and the song became an enormous wartime hit, embraced by servicemen returning home as an anthem of the journey back ^[3]. She followed it with "My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time" and a string of other successful sides with Brown.

Her film career began almost by accident. In 1947 she performed at a Hollywood party attended by songwriter Jule Styne and lyricist Sammy Cahn, who were struck by her singing and recommended her to director Michael Curtiz. Warner Bros. was searching for a lead in the musical Romance on the High Seas after Betty Hutton withdrew, and Day, then in her mid twenties and with no acting experience, won the part ^[1]. The 1948 film introduced her signature song "It's Magic" and launched a contract with the studio.

Through the late 1940s and early 1950s Warner Bros. cast her in a run of musicals, among them My Dream Is Yours, Tea for Two, On Moonlight Bay, and By the Light of the Silvery Moon. She also took on tougher material, playing opposite Kirk Douglas in Young Man with a Horn (1950) and appearing in Storm Warning (1951), a drama about the Ku Klux Klan. By the time she starred as the sharpshooting heroine of Calamity Jane in 1953, she was one of the most bankable performers in Hollywood. That film produced "Secret Love", which won the Academy Award for best original song and gave Day another number one record ^[3].

For anyone asking who was Doris Day at her professional peak, the answer is straightforward: the most popular female star in American movies. Exhibitor polls ranked her the top box office attraction in the country several times between 1959 and the mid 1960s, a level of sustained commercial pull no other actress of the era matched ^[4]. Her range was wider than her wholesome image suggested. In Love Me or Leave Me (1955) she played the singer Ruth Etting in a dark story of coercion and ambition, a performance many critics consider her finest. The following year Alfred Hitchcock cast her opposite James Stewart in The Man Who Knew Too Much, in which she introduced "Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)". The song won the 1956 Academy Award for best original song and became her lifelong theme ^[3].

The late 1950s brought the films most closely tied to her name. Pillow Talk (1959), the first of three comedies pairing her with Rock Hudson, earned Day her only Academy Award nomination for best actress and reinvented her as a sophisticated comedienne playing career women who sparred with charming men ^[1]. Lover Come Back (1961) and Send Me No Flowers (1964) continued the partnership, while comedies with James Garner, including The Thrill of It All and Move Over, Darling (both 1963), kept her at the top of the box office rankings.

Her recording career ran parallel to all of this. Signed to Columbia Records in 1947, she cut more than 600 songs over roughly two decades, and albums such as Day by Day and Duet, her 1962 collaboration with pianist André Previn, showed a jazz singer's control of phrasing and time ^[3]. Among the most notable Doris Day achievements outside the sales charts were the honors that arrived later: the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 1989 Golden Globes, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded by President George W. Bush in 2004 for her work in entertainment and animal welfare ^[5]. She declined to attend the White House ceremony because she no longer flew, an absence entirely in character for a star who had walked away from Hollywood decades earlier.

Day's private life ran far rougher than her cheerful screen persona. She married four times. Her first husband, trombonist Al Jorden, whom she wed in 1941 at age 19, was violent, and the marriage ended in divorce in 1943; their son, Terry, born in 1942, was her only child ^[1]. A brief second marriage to saxophonist George Weidler ended in 1949.

In 1951 she married Martin Melcher, who became her manager and producer and adopted Terry. The marriage lasted until Melcher's death in April 1968, at which point Day discovered that Melcher and his business partner, lawyer Jerome Rosenthal, had squandered or misappropriated her earnings, leaving her millions of dollars in debt. She sued Rosenthal, and in 1974 a California court awarded her a judgment of more than 22 million dollars, one of the largest civil awards in the state's history to that time ^[6]. She also learned after Melcher's death that he had committed her, without her knowledge, to a weekly television series. Rather than fight the contract she honored it, and The Doris Day Show ran on CBS from 1968 to 1973 ^[1].

Her son, Terry Melcher, became a successful record producer who worked with the Byrds and the Beach Boys. Day's fourth marriage, to restaurant maître d' Barry Comden in 1976, ended in divorce in 1982. Terry's death from melanoma in 2004 was a heavy blow; Day, by then long retired, mourned him privately at her home in Carmel ^[2].

After her last feature film, With Six You Get Eggroll (1968), and the end of her television series in 1973, Day essentially closed the door on performing. She turned down repeated offers, including reported approaches for high profile film and stage roles, and settled permanently in Carmel, on California's Monterey Peninsula ^[2]. Her energy went instead into animal welfare. She co-founded Actors and Others for Animals in 1971, then established the Doris Day Animal Foundation in 1978 and the Doris Day Animal League in 1987, the latter a lobbying organization that pressed for legislation on humane treatment and helped create the annual Spay Day event ^[5].

She made one significant return to the screen, hosting Doris Day's Best Friends on the Christian Broadcasting Network in 1985 and 1986, a cable series about animals and their care. The show is remembered chiefly for a poignant 1985 episode featuring her old co-star Rock Hudson, visibly ill in his last public appearance before his death from AIDS related illness later that year ^[1].

Day remained a quiet presence in Carmel for the rest of her life, co-owning the pet friendly Cypress Inn and tending to the dozens of rescued dogs and cats that shared her property. In 2011, at 89, she surprised admirers by releasing My Heart, an album drawing on unreleased recordings produced years earlier by her son; it entered the UK top ten, making her one of the oldest artists ever to chart there with an album of new material ^[7]. She died of pneumonia at her Carmel Valley home on May 13, 2019, at the age of 97. Following her instructions there was no funeral, no memorial service, and no grave marker ^[2].

Day's reputation has deepened since the years when critics dismissed her as merely wholesome. Later assessments emphasize the craft beneath the sunshine: a vocalist whose intimate, conversational phrasing influenced generations of singers, and a screen actress capable of drama (Love Me or Leave Me), suspense (The Man Who Knew Too Much), and precision comedy (Pillow Talk) ^[4]. Film scholars have also revisited her comedies of the early 1960s, noting that she repeatedly played self-supporting professional women, interior decorators, advertising executives, journalists, at a time when such characters were rare in Hollywood ^[4].

The basic Doris Day facts trace an arc few careers can match: 39 feature films, hundreds of recordings, chart hits across three decades, top box office standing among the era's biggest names, an Oscar nomination, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom ^[5]. "Que Sera, Sera" and "Sentimental Journey" remain fixtures of the American songbook, revived constantly in films, television, and advertising.

Her second act may prove just as durable. The Doris Day Animal Foundation continues to fund rescue groups, spay and neuter programs, and pet food banks, sustained in part by her estate ^[5]. Obituaries in 2019 described her as the biggest female film star of her generation and one of the last great figures of the studio era, but many gave equal weight to the decades she spent, far from any camera, working on behalf of animals ^[2].