Check out the latest news and updates here.

Doris Day And Predation In The Golden Age Of Hollywood

Pam Munter

July 8, 2021

The long and celebrated life of screen star Doris Day has been well documented in numerous biographies and in the extensive obituaries that followed her death in 2019 at the age of 97.

From the start of her long career to the end, she conveyed an image of the happy girl next door, perpetually smiling and effervescent. But still, her early work at Warner Bros. was often dismissed as fluffy, while the later films with Rock Hudson and others were criticized as reflections of a sexually repressed era.

Feminists, however, have revisited her career and now acknowledge that many of her roles put her out in front, portraying women with careers when that was an unusual occurrence.

Of course, that, too, was a mirage. She didn’t write those screenplays and left major decisions about her career to men, most notably her third husband, Marty Melcher.

Behind that sunny, virginal exterior was a woman who — like so many before her — likely paid her dues on the casting couch.

“Discovered” singing at a Hollywood party, she signed a personal management contract with famed director, Michael Curtiz, a notorious womanizer. He helped get her the standard seven-year contract at Warner Bros., a studio run by another compulsive philanderer, Jack Warner.

Warner is the one most responsible for shaping her wholesome image — no subtle irony there.

A woman’s career path teeming with predation was not unique in those times. Judy Garland was under the thumb (at least) of MGM’s tyrannical boss, Louis B. Mayer, throughout most of her career.

Quid pro quos abounded at MGM. It would seem the two women had much in common.

Neither of them had much formal education. Judy was educated largely on the set or hit-and-miss on the road. Doris left school at 15 when she was severely injured in a car collision with a train. Doris was cast in her first film, Romance on the High Seas, a score said to be originally intended for Judy.

Both women were admired for their screen work, and their unique, emotionally charged vocal skills. Each had to withstand the advances of the men at omnipotent studios, and each did her best work after those contracts ended (Judy with A Star is Born, Doris in Love Me or Leave Me).

One could argue that each career peaked after they married strong men, neither known for his attractiveness or charm.

Judy’s marriage to Sid Luft brought her back for a time from the edge of the trash heap of chemical dependency.

Doris married Melcher in the middle of her seven-year servitude at Warners. He refused to renew her contract and moved her into roles that allowed her to play mature women.

Did the two women ever meet? One of the ten short stories in Fading Fame: Women of a Certain Age in Hollywood (Adelaide, 2021) speculates a spontaneous encounter that might have taken place on a train. Would they have compared notes? Ridiculed their studio masters? Admitted to each other the toll taken by their climb to fame? It could have happened.

In real life, Doris refused to travel by air and, at the point in her life when the story takes place, Judy might not have been able to afford much more than a coach seat on the Super Chief.

There is no evidence that either seemed to have a trusted woman friend in whom they could confide their thoughts and feelings. Both relied on men to guide them in and out of show business, not unusual for that generation and that profession.

Judy was barely into her fifth marriage when she died of what the coroner declared to be an accidental overdose in London. Doris had come to rely on the male CEO of the Doris Day Animal Foundation where she poured her money and energies in the final decades of her life. They had nine husbands between them.

Judy died at 47 doing what she loved, performing, even in her severely diminished state. Doris has been quoted as saying all she ever wanted was a husband, family and a white picket fence.

We’ll remember them for their extraordinary talent and ability to reach across media to touch us at a deep level. We can only hope that the existential costs they paid were worth it to them.

Writing the Familiar Female Protagonist by Pam Munter

Fading Fame: Women of a Certain Age in Hollywood is a series of ten short stories and two short plays about women who have aged out of the profession they love. Many of them were screened for “success” early in their careers by the infamous and widely-accepted casting couch, the audition site wielded by powerful men in the motion picture industry. When one reaches a certain age, however, even sex won’t grant professional longevity.

When I thought about whom to include in this collection, I wanted to write not only about the famous, but also those who might not be immediately recognizable. As a film historian and movie fan, I was more than familiar with the real stories. I had hoped by adding a twist of fiction, all these would translate well to an inclusive readership.

It would be easy to think of these women as victims but the more I wrote, I came to see them as existential survivors, struggling to carve out new identities when the old ones had been stripped away. My goal was to present their stories in such a way that the reader could see the complexity, the inner workings of a famous woman coping not merely with the challenging process of aging, but also with a world in which she no longer had agency.

My first stop was a familiar one. I had worshipped Doris Day since I was very young. Without knowing who she was in real life, her Warner Bros. image impacted my decisions in several areas. I became a performer and a writer largely due to exposure to her films and recording career. As I matured and learned more, I came to appreciate her real-life tribulations. When I read that her late third husband had stolen her $20 million fortune leaving her in debt to the IRS, I wondered how the woman I had so admired would cope with that.

She had been habitually dependent on strong men, including, toward the end, her own son. She was married four times with an assemblage of short assignations. But she and this husband had been together nearly 20 years. How did she miss the signs, the warnings? Did her fame blind her to his perverse conniving? How did she find out? It seemed a natural set-up for a short story, which eventually became “Deconstructing Doris.” In this fictionalized version, she tries to piece together the betrayal, the depth of the violation, but we can see she is ill-equipped for the task. We feel for her, want to comfort her, but also to warn her it could happen again. After years of reading about the “real” Doris Day, I thought I knew her as well as one can from a distance. I discovered that inserting my knowledge into a fictionalized story led to further vicarious insight, understanding the juxtaposition of fame with violation at the most vulnerable levels.

The female characters in Fading Fame are each faced with a set of formidable issues, confronting them with an insufficient supply of psychological tools. When one spends a lifetime seeking fame as a primary source of identity, it’s easy to let other, critical developmental tasks slide. Reinvention is much easier when one has a strong sense of self, not one created by external appraisal.

Some of the women in Fading Fame cope with the displacement better than others; some slip into chemical dependency; one can’t handle it at all. Even though the stories and the outcomes are diverse, each of these journeys resonates with us as women. We can learn from these stories and empathize. The female protagonists here may be from another era, but their plights are not so different from the issues we will all face eventually.

What’s New

Writing the Familiar Female Protagonist by Pam Munter