‘Sentimental Journey: A Tribute to Doris Day’
Hosted by Rex Reed
Rose Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center
October 18

Unless I missed it, the most famous and infamous quip of a notorious quipster, Oscar Levant — “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin” — was somehow not included in the recent and excellent Broadway play about his life, “Good Night Oscar.” Perhaps the playwright reasoned everybody in the audience had already heard it. 

Rex Reed mentioned that quote — it’s hard to get around it when you’re talking about her — when the two of us were talking about Day (1922-2019) in anticipation of a concert he is hosting and producing on October 18 as part of the Mabel Mercer Cabaret Convention. In addition, I’m honoring her musical legacy in a special episode of my program, “Sing! Sing! Sing!” on KSDS, which will be heard on jazz88.org on October 14 at 1 p.m. EDT and will include excerpts from my recent conversation with Mr. Reed as well as my 2011 interview with the great lady herself.

The Levant quip is funny because it’s just enough of an exaggeration; in reality, Day was the archetypal showbiz working mom — and a single parent for much of the time — who’d been raising her son Terry since the age of 19. Indeed, she was so young at the time of her disastrous first marriage and the birth of her only child that she named him after a comic strip character.  

Still, Levant clearly was not necessarily referring to her personal “status,” as they say on social media, but to her on-screen persona. Her long film career, in its broadest outlines, can be broken down into three phases that revolve around her recurring leading men. First, there are the three films with Jack Carson, starting with “Romance on the High Seas,” with a great supporting role by Levant, in all of which she essentially plays an adorably perky but also hip young band singer.  

Then there comes the so-called virginal period, in which she made four features opposite baritone Gordon MacRae. Two of these, “On Moonlight Bay” (1951) and “By The Light of the Silvery Moon” (1953), were so overwhelmingly successful that they cemented the perception of Day as an innocent young girl in an even more innocent era, the turn of the 20th century in small town America. In her films of this period, age-of-anxiety America essentially dealt with its dread of communism and nuclear annihilation by covering it up with escapist innocence.  

Clearly, by the end of the 1950s, Day had already exemplified both the can-do gal of the 1940s and the ultimate unspoiled example of American womanhood during the virginal ’50s — not to mention playing a proto-feminist in “Calamity Jane” (1953). That was likely the reason why she became the leading lady to usher us into the next era of American culture, the swinging early ’60s, the era of the Rat Pack and JFK.  

In three romantic comedies with Rock Hudson — plus honorable mention to two more with James Garner — Day, determined to move beyond her suffocatingly wholesome image, became one of the first stars to bring sex to American cinema. Even though it was mostly of the marital variety, this was a bold move.

Mr. Reed feels that she had the opportunity to take her screen persona and her career up to an even higher level, and to make an even more courageous step as a cultural figure when she was asked to play Mrs. Robinson in 1967. “The minute she turned down Mike Nichols in ‘The Graduate,’ that was kind of a left-hand turn in her career,” Mr. Reed says. The film critic feels that she was so identified with those earlier virginal roles that no one took her seriously.  

No one, that is, except the Hollywood establishment itself: In between those films with Carson, MacRae, and Hudson, she worked with nearly every A-list leading man of the era: James Stewart, Ronald Reagan, Frank Sinatra, Richard Widmark, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, etc. There also were three pictures with James Cagney, climaxing in the harrowing biopic “Love Me or Leave Me,” a milestone in both careers. As Mr. Reed points out, Cagney considered her one of the very finest actresses he’d ever had the pleasure of working with.

I’ve written extensively about her singing in nearly all of my books, and I’ll talk more about it on my radio show, but I wanted to end with a mention of her remarkable performance of the standard “You Go to My Head,” from 1949; both the singing and the arrangement are of a similar caliber to Sinatra’s classic 1945 version. She delivers the lyrics with such directness and warmth, and with a total lack of artifice, that it never quite sounds like she’s interpreting or singing — just as her performances in films never really seem like acting or even performances — but rather, she just being.  

Perhaps the finest tribute I can pay her is as a friend, and I’m proud to say that I got to know her in the final years of her long life. Maybe the nicest thing I can say about her — and which Mr. Reed will share at Wednesday’s concert, since he knew much better and longer than I — is that she was every bit as sweet, funny, charming, caring, and adorable as you would expect Doris Day to be.