Que sera sera; Doris Day represented all Americans cherished about

I HAVE fallen in love with rather few public figures - Errol Flynn, Ted Williams, Harry Truman and Doris Day. The three men have a common denominator in cockiness. How cocky Miss Day also is did not strike me until the reading of Doris Day: Her Own Story, as orchestrated by AE Hotchner (New York; William Morrow, 1976). "I must emphasise," she tells us in the autobiographical tapes Hotchner has edited, "that I have never had any doubts about my ability in anything I have ever undertaken."

Elsewhere, in describing her audition, at the age of 16, for the job of lead singer with Bob Crosby's Bobcats, she says: "But to be honest about it, despite my nervousness and reluctance to sing for these mighty professionals, it never occurred to me that I wouldn't get the job. I have never tried out for anything that I failed to get." And, it is true, her life shows a remarkably consistent pattern of professional success, alternating with personal tribulation.

When she was 11, her father, "Professor" William Kappelhoff, Cincinnati's "most sought-after conductor", left her mother for another woman. When Doris was 12, the dance team of Doris & Jerry won the grand prize in a citywide amateur contest, and with the money they visited Hollywood, where people "were so enthusiastic about our ability that I had no doubt that we would do very well". But when she left a farewell party given on the eve of her moving to Hollywood, a locomotive struck the car in which she was riding. Her right leg was shattered and her dancing career with it (Jerry's too; without Doris Kappelhoff as a partner, he became in time a Cincinnati milkman). During her nearly two years of convalescence, Doris listened to the radio, admiring especially the singing of Ella Fitzgerald, and before she was off crutches she was performing in a downtown Chinese restaurant and on local radio. A Cincinnati nightclub job led to Chicago and the Bobcats, and from there to Les Brown and his Blue Devils - all this before her 17th birthday.

In one of the interviews that Hotchner usefully splices into his subject's account of her days, Les Brown remembers that he "listened to her for five minutes, immediately went backstage, and signed her for my band. She was every bandleader's dream, a vocalist who had natural talent, a keen regard for the lyrics, and an attractive appearance The reason her salary rose so precipitously was that virtually every band in the business tried to hire her away from me".

Yet at the age of 17 she left the Blue Devils and married an obscure, surly trombonist named Al Jorden. "From the time I was a little girl," she says, "my only true ambition in life was to get married and tend house and have a family. Singing was just some thing to do until that time came, and now it was here." Though she had known Jorden in Cincinnati, he surprised her, once married, with psychopathic behaviour that bordered on the murderous. He was frantically jealous, beat her, begged forgiveness in fits of remorse which became as repellent as his rage, and demanded she abort the pregnancy that came along in the second month of the hasty match.

Doris Day, as she was by then called, in rapid succession had the baby (her only child, Terry), divorced Jorden, went back to Les Brown and recorded Sentimental Journey, her first hit record and the point where I, among millions, began to love her. Unaware of my feelings, she married another bandman, George Weidler, who played alto sax. This marriage ended even quicker than the one to Jorden, though on a different note. Weidler, with whom she was contentedly living in a trailer camp in post-war Los Angeles, told her she was going to become a star and he didn't wish to become Mr Doris Day.

She protests even now: "I loved him, or at least I thought I did, and with all the hardship and struggle I was enjoying my trailer wifedom." Nor did Weidler seem to find her wanting. "I could not doubt his strong desire for me. But I guess his desire not to be Mr Doris Day was even stronger, for in the morning we parted, and I knew it would be final." At this low ebb, then, homeless, husbandless and penniless, she permitted herself to be dragged to a screen test and was handed the lead in the first of her many successful movies, Romance On The High Seas. She and the cameras fell in love at first sight: "I found I could enter a room and move easily to my floor- mark without actually looking for it. I felt a nice exhilaration at hearing the word 'Action!' and then responding to the pressure of the rolling camera. It was effortless and thoroughly enjoyable From the first take onward, I never had any trepidation about what I was called on to do. Movie acting came to me with greater ease and naturalness than anything else I had ever done I never had a qualm. Water off a duck's back."

Two decades off, her back found their high-water mark in the early 1960s, when she was number one at the box office. In 1953, however, she had suffered an incapacitating nervous breakdown and throughout her movie-making prime her personal life was bounded by shyness, Christian Science, a slavish work schedule and marriage to a man nobody else liked - Marty Melcher. Les Brown is quoted as saying: "Marty Melcher was an awful man, pushy, grating on the nerves, crass, money-hungry. He lived off Patty Andrews; then, when Doris came along and looked like a better ticket, he glommed on to her."

Her manager as well as her husband, Melcher kept the cameras churning out sugary Daydreams while the focus got softer and softer and American audiences were moving on to skin and rock. In 1968, Doris Day made the last of her 39 films and Melcher suddenly died. The financial post mortem revealed that, like many a man in love with money, he could only lose it. Over the fat years he had poured her fortune into the schemes of a swindler named Rosenthal, leaving her a half a million dollars in debt. She bailed herself out by going ahead, against her inclinations, with a television series Melcher had secretly signed her to and put herself through five years of sit-com paces on the little box. As an additional trauma, her son, who had evolved into a young pop music entrepreneur, was peripherally involved in the Tate-Manson murders and retreated to a cave of pills and vodka. In an eerie rerun of her childhood accident, he broke both legs while carousing on a motorcycle.

The particulars of her life surprise us, like graffiti scratched on a sacred statue. She appears sheer symbol - of a kind of beauty, of a kind of fresh and energetic innocence, of a kind of banality. Her very name seems to signify less a person than a product, wrapped in an alliterating aura. She herself, it turns out, doesn't like her name, which was given her because "Kappelhoff" didn't fit on a marquee. Of her name, Doris Day says: "I never did like it. Still don't. I think it's a phoney name. As a matter of fact, over the years many of my friends didn't feel that Doris Day suited me, and gave me names of their own invention. Billy De Wolfe christened me Clara Bixby Rock Hudson called me Eunice and others call me Do-Do, and lately one of my friends has taken to calling me Suzie Creamcheese."

This shy goddess who avoids parties and live audiences fascinates us with the amount of space we imagine between her face and her mask. Among the co-actors and fellow-musicians who let their words be used in this book, only Kirk Douglas touches on the mystery: "I haven't a clue as to who Doris Day really is. That face that she shows the world - smiling, only talking good, happy, tuned into God - as far as I'm concerned, that's just a mask. I haven't a clue as to what's underneath. Doris is just about the remotest person I know." In a spunky footnote, she counter-attacks: "But then Kirk never makes much of an effort toward anyone else. He's pretty much wrapped up in himself."

The entire book is announced by her as an attack upon her own image as "Miss Chastity Belt", "America's la-di-da happy virgin". True, her virginity seems to have been yielded before she married in her midteens, and her tough life shows in the tough advice she gives her readers: "You don't really know a person until you live with him, not just sleep with him I staunchly believe no two people should get married until they have lived together." For all her love of marriage, she refused both her early husbands when they begged to reconcile, and at one point in her marriage to Melcher she kicked him out, observing simply: "There comes a time when a marriage must be terminated. Nothing is forever". She brushes aside Patty Andrews's belief that Doris had stolen her husband with the sentence: "A person does not leave a good marriage for someone else", and of a post- Marty lover she says: "I didn't care whether he was married or not. I have no qualms about the other person's marital life."

How sexy is she, America's girl next door? Her son, who is full of opinions, claims: "Sad to say, I don't think my mother's had much of a sex life." But she makes a point of telling us, of each husband, that their sex life was good, and James Garner, with whom she made two of the romantic comedies that followed the great success of Pillow Talk, confides: "I've had to play love scenes with a lot of screen ladies but of all the women I've had to be intimate with on the screen, I'd rate two as sexiest by far - Doris and Julie Andrews, both of them notorious girls next door. Playing a love scene with either of them is duck soup because they communicate something sexy which means I also let myself go somewhat and that really makes a love scene work The fact of the matter is that with Doris, one hundred grips or not, there was always something there and I must admit that if I had not been married I would have tried to carry forward, after hours, where we left off on the sound stage."

The words "Doris Day" get a reaction, often adverse. They are an incantation and people who have no reason to disdain her fine entertainer's gifts shy from her as a religious force. Her starriness has a challenging, irritating twinkle peculiar to her - Monroe's image lulled us like a moon seen from a motel bed, and there is nothing about Katharine Hepburn's "goodness" that asks us to examine our own.

On the jacket of Doris Day: Her Own Story, the sprightly photograph of the heroine uncomfortably reminds us of those tireless, elastic TV ladies who exhort us to get up in the morning and do exercises; and the book ends with a set of exercises Doris Day does, and which do sound exhausting. She likes the movie actor's Spartan regimen, which begins at five in the morning, and more than once speaks with pleasure of "coming up to the mark" chalked on the floor of a movie set.

For years, she was a professed Christian Scientist; but, then, so were Ginger Rogers and Charlotte Greenwood, and nobody held it against them. Miss Day, religiously, is in fact an American Pelagian, an enemy of the despair-prone dualism which has been the intellectual pride of our Scots Protestants and our Irish Catholics alike. Doris Kappelhoff was raised as a Catholic, but "the Catholic side of me never took". She resented the obscurity of the Latin and resented even more being asked, at the age of seven, to make up sins to confess. "I had my own built-in church. It allowed me to question a lot of Catholic dogma."

She turned to the Church once, after the collapse of her first marriage, "desperate to find some way to restore the positive view I had always had toward life". When the priest told her she had never been really married and her son was illegitimate, she walked out. After their divorce, George Weidler (the most phantasmal and, in a way, most appealing man in her life) interested her in the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy and from the first line she read - "To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, today is big with blessings" - she met in "words of gleaming light" a prefigurement of her "own built-in church".

Though in some of her crises she has consulted doctors, and after Melcher's death broke with the organised Church, Christian Science's tenet that "All is infinite Mind" has remained a sustaining principle. She describes herself sitting outside her son's hospital room thinking: "I can't pray to a God to make him well, because there is no duality, no God outside of Terry There is but one power, and if that lovely son of mine is supposed to live, then nothing on this earth can take him." The fatalism that goes with monism suits both her toughness and her optimism. Almost brutally she enlists her misfortunes in the progress of her career: "And Marty's death - well, to be honest about it, had he lived I would have been totally wiped out". Que sera, sera.

Now, love must be clear-eyed, and Doris Day's accomplishment, resilient and versatile as she is, should not be exaggerated. Though she learned from Ella Fitzgerald "the subtle ways she shaded her voice, the casual yet clean way she sang the words", there are dark, sweet places where Ella's voice goes that her disciple's doesn't. And it was not just Hollywood crassness that cast her in so many tame, lame vehicles; her Pelagianism makes it impossible for her to be evil, so the top of her emotional range is an innocent victim's hysteria. But, as Michael Curtiz foretold when he prepared her for her first motion picture, the actor's art in a case such as hers functions as a mere halo of refinements around the "strong personality".

Her third picture, strange to say, ended with her make-believe marriage to Errol Flynn. A heavenly match, in the realm where both are loveable. Both brought to the corniest screen moment a gallant and guileless delight in being themselves, a faint air of excess, a skilful insouciance that, in those giant dreams projected across our Saturday nights, hinted at how, if we were angels, we would behave.

Extracted from Hugging The Shore, by John Updike, published by Penguin, #12.99. This essay is also in OK You Mugs: Writers On Movie Actors, Granta, #10.00, which was published last week Doris day animal league: www.ddal.org Fan Page: www.funkin.demon.co.uk/ dorisday

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