Que Sera Sera: Doris Day (1922-2019)

She knew how to pick 'em.
Day with Melcher.

I woke up this morning to the news that famed actress and singer Doris Day, a mere 97, has passed away, no doubt surrounded by the animals she loved so much.  She had been out of the public limelight for years, especially since the death of her only child Terry Melcher.  He died of melanoma in 2004.

Day was known for her many hit records.  She had a highly successful movie career, most notably the "fluff" movies with co-star and close friend Rock Hudson.  Day also had a successful television career, with a hit show, The Doris Day Show, which ran for several years in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

She later became known for her work on behalf of animals, but unfortunately, she fell off the turnip truck and went full animal "rights," complete with adopting the cult vegetarian or vegan diet.  She loved the animals she adopted over the decades, which was a good thing, but it is a shame she wasted a lot of her money on outfits like PETA that don't give a shit about animals and want to abolish animal domestication entirely.  (Day did found an organization devoted to stray dogs, which announced her death, so there are some mitigating factors here.)*

Day in other words had some lapses in judgment.  However, her questionable philanthropy choices pale  in comparison with her choice of husbands, especially one Marty Melcher, who became her manager.  Day had already been married twice, with two divorces under her belt, when she met and fell in love with Melcher. Day thought she had the perfect marriage, but little did she know what he was REALLY like.   He might as well have been named "Moocher," for when he passed away in 1968, all the money she thought she had was gone thanks to him and his lawyer stealing or mishandling it all.  I believe she had something like $20 MILLION in earnings, and Melcher and his attorney left her flat broke.  No wonder she decided to take on a television series at about that time.  She had no choice but to work.  She was lucky she found success on the small screen and was able to secure a cushy retirement.

At the same time she sued the attorney and won a judgment of some $22 million.  I am assuming the lawyer's insurance company helped settle the case.

Born Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff in Cincinnati in 1922, she had just had a birthday some five or six weeks ago.

Aljean Harmetz does it again with another great obituary:

By the time she retired in 1973, after starring for five years on the hit CBS comedy “The Doris Day Show,” Ms. Day had been dismissed as a goody-two-shoes, the leader of Hollywood’s chastity brigade, and, in the words of the film critic Pauline Kael, ”the all-American middle-aged girl.” The critic Dwight Macdonald wrote of “the Doris Day Syndrome” and defined her as “wholesome as a bowl of cornflakes and at least as sexy.”

But the passing decades have brought a reappraisal, especially by some feminists, of Ms. Day’s screen personality and her achievements. In her book “Holding My Own in No Man’s Land” (1997), the critic Molly Haskell described Ms. Day as “challenging, in her working-woman roles, the limited destiny of women to marry, live happily ever after and never be heard from again.”

Ms. Day in fact was one of the few actresses of the 1950s and ’60s to play women who had a real profession, and her characters were often more passionate about their career than about their co-stars.

*--Upon further reading, Doris Day's foundation later merged with HSUS, which is every bit as bad as PETA.  They are in the business of abolishing animal domestication.