The Indomitable Doris Day

America’s sweetheart and eternal girl next door is alive and well at 89

by Christopher Cooper

She hasn’t graced the silver screen since 1968 or appeared on television in decades, but at 89, singer/actress Doris Day is one of a select few bona fide living superstars from Hollywood’s golden era.

“I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin,” cracked wit Oscar Levant about the perky blond beauty with the sunny disposition. (The joke was so good, Groucho Marx stole it for himself.)

Born Doris Kappelhoff on April 3, 1924 (the same day and year as Marlon Brando), she changed her name when she got a job as vocalist with Barney Rapp’s band, where her first spotlight number was  “Day by Day.” She was signed for pictures by Warner Brothers in 1948, and quickly became one of Hollywood’s brightest young stars.

Romance On The High Seas (1948)

Singing "Secret Love" in Calamity Jane (1953)

With James Cagney in Love Me Or Leave Me (1955)

With James Stewart in Alfred Hitchock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

With Rex Harrison in Midnight Lace (1960)

Rehearsing with Rock for Send Me No Flowers (1964)

Though later in life she protested her screen image as a virginal  goody-two-shoes, her way of life was nevertheless an example of positive thinking and clean living. A Christian Scientist for most of her life, she didn’t drink or smoke--although she admitted in her 1975 memoir that she’d fall off the wagon with a Tom Collins on occasion when she was  “feeling crotchety.”

Doris turned down the part of lascivious cougar Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate because she deemed the role too racy. (Anne Bancroft then got the part.) Still, she was socially liberal. Rumored to have dated African-American L.A. Dodger Maury Wills, Day’s own father married a black woman his later years. Married unsuccessfully four times, she publicly stated that she felt a couple should live together before tying the knot.

She admitted that upon first hearing the song “Que Sera Sera,” which became her biggest hit and signature tune, she didn’t much care for it, but later warmed to the song’s simple philosophy: What will be, will be.

She had been the #1 box office champion for four years running in the early 1960s, but made a graceful exit from show business after her TV sitcom “The Doris Day Show” ended a five-year run in 1973. She turned her considerable energy toward another lifelong passion by founding a rescue organization called Actors and Others for Animals in 1971. The charity, now championed by Day’s old friend Betty White, still thrives. Day hosted a short-lived cable series centered around animals, “Doris Day’s Best Friends,” in 1985.

With son Terry Melcher circa 1970

Doris founded Actors and Others for Animals in the early 1970s

Doris with some of her best friends

Today, Doris Day lives a quiet life. She has outlived her beloved only son, record producer Terry Melcher, who died of cancer in 2004. She currently shares her house in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California with six dogs and four cats. In 2011, she did record an album and agreed to a few rare interviews via radio to promote it, but is content to let the new stars shine and enjoy her retirement. “I’ve had mine,” she told an interviewer in 2012. “I had a great time. Now it’s their turn.”

To hear Doris Day's 2012 NPR interview, click here.

Little-known Doris Day data:

- Dated Ronald Reagan between his marriages to Jane Wyman and Nancy Davis.

- Received just one Oscar nomination, as Best Actress for Pillow Talk (1959).

- Feared for her son Terry Melcher’s life in 1969. The music producer had been the initial target of Charles Manson’s gang and owner of the house rented by Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate at the time of the grisly Helter Skelter murders.

- Hates the name Doris Day, so all her close friends call her nicknames like Clara Bixby, Eunice and Suzie Creamcheese.

- Is so afraid to fly that she turned down a recent Kennedy Center Honors spot. She has been terrified of airplanes after traveling through a blizzard on a tour with Bob Hope in the 1940s.

- Owned a pet-friendly hotel in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California.

- Cannot read music.

- Preferred being photographed on the right side, as she thought her left was too cheeky.

- Swore by a beauty regimen that included slathering her entire body with Vaseline once a week.

As seen on DoYouRemember.com.

Rita Hayworth's Make-Believe World

We remember a lovely face and a ravishing figure, a spirited toss of shining red hair. Her name conjures images of 1940s glamour and romance, music and magic. But what was Rita Hayworth really like?

Rita Hayworth died on May 14th, 1987, of complications from Alzheimer's disease, at age 68. Hayworth led a stormy and tumultuous life full of well-publicized ups and downs. She was film royalty and a real-life princess, but her true story was a somewhat grim fairy tale, and she never enjoyed a happily-ever-after.

Most fans know about her fabled marriages to film luminary Orson Welles and international playboy Prince Aly Khan; her adversarial relationship with Columbia studio head Harry Cohn; her iconic film noir turns as Gilda (1946) and The Lady from Shanghai (1948); her staggering dancing ability and legendary pairings with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. They also know she died too soon.

Rita was a reluctant glamour goddess who preferred to slouch around in jeans and sweatshirts with no makeup far before it was fashionable. Unable to live up to her screen image, she was unlucky at love. "They went to bed with Gilda," she said sadly, referring to her most iconic role, "but they woke up with me." She counted among her greatest achievements being a good mother to her two daughters. She looked upon her acting career as a job, nothing more.

Many young stars have a stage mother pushing them into the business. Margarita Cansino had a stage father, dancer Eduardo Cansino, a perfectionist and taskmaster who superimposed his own frustrated ambitions on his lovely young daughter. Cansino owned a school of dance in Hollywood where the studios sent their contract players to teach them the basics. (This is where James Cagney learned to tap dance, and Jean Harlow prepared for her only musical role, in 1935's Reckless).

From the age of 13, young Margarita was put to work as a primary Cansino breadwinner alongside her father, to supplement the family income. Appearing in after-hours Tijuana nightclubs as Eduardo's dancing partner, Rita was performing sexually charged rhumbas and tangos with her own father to drunken crowds. More than one source suggests that Margarita may have been physically and sexually abused by her hard-driving, exacting father, as well.

She was signed as a contract player at Fox Studios in 1935, where she played a succession of exotics and stereotyped South-of-the-Border characters until her option was dropped a few months later.

A Svengali-style first marriage to a much older man, a fast-talking salesman named Edward Judson, took her from Latin bit player to Hollywood ingénue. It was Judson who oversaw the complete transformation of black-haired Latin lovely Rita Cansino into the all-American girl next door Rita Hayworth. He had her hairline completely reshaped by painful electrolysis and dyed her locks a deep shade of red, changing her name from Cansino to Hayworth in the process.

She signed with Columbia, her career took off, and she became one of the top stars of the 1940s. Though she enjoyed rehearsing her dancing and the camaraderie with her Columbia Studios family, Rita never took her work too seriously. Her ambitions were to be a wife and mother, but she found her career left her precious little time to spend with her children, Rebecca (Welles) and Yasmin (Khan). And every man she married turned out to be the wrong man.

After the marriage to Aly Khan in 1949 (her third), Hayworth retired from the screen. After their divorce, she returned to Hollywood to resume her career, but it had lost momentum. The decade that followed was a series of comebacks. So the goddess of the 1940s struggled in the 1950s, as her tabloid-worthy personal life became more interesting than the films she was making, including her musical swan song, Pal Joey (1957).

Aging gracefully is difficult at best in Hollywood, and Hayworth was scrutinized and criticized in the press for her weight fluctuations and the lines around her eyes——and she was only in her 30s! But again, she was determined to reinvent herself, so she could continue to make a living and provide for her children.

By the late '50s, Hayworth was on her way to becoming a dramatic actress in literate fare such as Terrence Rattigan's Separate Tables (1958) and Clifford Odets' The Story on Page One (1960). But again, her professional achievements were overshadowed by reports of alcoholism and domestic violence via her embattled relationships with her fourth husband, fading singer Dick Haymes, and her fifth, producer James Hill.

Though Hayworth was not diagnosed until 1980, it was as far back as the early 1960s when friends and family began to notice a change in Rita. She began having blackout-type episodes that most attributed to her heavy drinking. MGM star Ann Miller recalled that Rita had invited her and choreographer Hermes Pan to dinner one night. They knocked on the front door and waited a long time for an answer. Finally, the door flew open and there stood an unkempt, wild-eyed Rita, who stared at her two friends uncomprehendingly. "Who are you? Go away!" she blurted to Miller and Pan, then slammed the door in their faces before they could identify themselves. When Rita and Ann spoke a few days later, Hayworth told Miller she had no memory of the event.

The episodes of strange behavior continued on and off for more than a decade, as Hayworth continued to work sporadically in film and on television. Finally, it became clear she could not continue. Hayworth's youngest daughter, the Princess Yasmin Khan, became her mother's primary caregiver. In the late 1970s, Yasmin set up her mother in an apartment with round-the-clock care in her building on Central Park West in New York City. It was not until 1980 that Hayworth's condition was given a name, after pioneer researcher Dr. Alois Alzheimer. (In 1994, the diagnosis of American President and former movie actor Ronald Reagan would continue to bring universal awareness to the disease.) By now, Rita was in decent physical shape, but completely incoherent.

From this perpetual dream world, her daughter remembers, Hayworth was unreachable...except when there was music playing. Then, she would sway to the rhythm and a smile would light up her still lovely face, almost as if she were rehearsing those long-ago dance routines to romantic standards by Berlin, Porter and Kern. In the recesses of the mind is where all Love Goddesses really reside.

An Haute Hippie Inspired the Birkin Bag

Owning one is de rigueur for the super-rich and fashionably famous. Victoria Beckham carries one. So do Jennifer Lopez and Kim Kardashian. Since its introduction by Hermès in 1984, the Birkin Bag has become a symbol of lavish wealth and haute couture. Crafted from a variety of hides, from crocodile to ostrich to lizard, lined with goat skin and often encrusted with a fortune in jewels and precious metals, a Birkin can command a price from $7,000 up to $150,000—and beyond.

The inspiration for the iconic leather carryall was the beautiful British-born actress and singer Jane Birkin. She first burst onto the Swinging London scene as a fashion model in 1966, but caused a sensation in France with her 1969 duet with singer/songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, "Je t'aime...moi non plus" ("I love you...me neither"). The pair married soon after, and Birkin was elevated to superstar status in France. She went on to appear in several films, including two Agatha Christie mysteries, Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun. 

In 1981, Birkin was seated on an airplane next to a gentleman who watched with interest as the actress struggled with a battered straw tote containing her possessions, spilling the flimsy bag's contents all over the first-class cabin. She confided to her seat partner that she could never find a leather organizer bag she liked. The man on the plane was Jean-Louis Dumas, the CEO of Hermès International.

In 1984, Dumas presented Birkin with a supple, simple black leather bag, based on an 1892 design. A phenomenon was born. Even today, each Birkin Bag is meticulously hand-sewn, buffed, polished and accessorized by artisans, taking several days to finish, which, Hermès maintains, justifies its exorbitant price.

As the years went by, the down-to-earth Birkin became an activist embracing human rights causes, leaving her little time to live the life of a jetsetter, socialite or fashionista. At the same time, the design of the Birkin Bag seemed to become more and more ostentatious. Apparently unrestrained opulence wasn't Birkin's "bag," after all, and she rarely carried the Hermès creations that she inspired and which now bore her name.

In April, 2011 Jane Birkin auctioned off one of her namesake totes to benefit Japan Tsunami Aid. The well-worn black bag was emblazoned with beads and stickers and signed by the free-spirited actress herself. When interviewed, Birkin explained, tongue obviously in cheek, "There's no fun in a bag if it's not kicked around, so that it looks as if the cat's been sitting on it—and it usually has. The cat may even be in it! I always put on stickers and beads and worry beads. You can get them from Greece, Israel, Palestine—from anywhere in the world. I always hang things on my bags because I don't like them looking like everyone else's. A Birkin Bag is a very good rain hat; just put everything else in a plastic bag." Birkin's beat-up Birkin raised a little more than $2,000.

Make Me Beautiful

Who needs Botox injections and plastic surgery to look youthful? There's an easier and cheaper way to go. Try the Hollywood secret - Wrinkies and Frownies, band-aid-like tapes that pull the skin behind the ears and the hairline, giving your skin a taut and therefore more youthful appearance. They've been around for years - rumor has it that Lucy used 'em in Mame (along with Vaseline over the camera lens) and Rosalind Russell wore them under her wimple in The Trouble with Angels. Bette Davis reportedly hid hers under her bangs in the 60s and 70s.
Hey, look at what they did for Kennedy matriarch Rose Kennedy, who retained her rosy girlish glow to the age of 105. If Mrs. Kennedy used them, you know they have to be affordable. This was a woman who pinched every penny her husband made. She'd only paint the front of her Hyannis Port and Palm Beach houses in order to save money, leaving the rest of the building in peeling disrepair.