Doris Day’s public image was the one role she could never shake off | Hadley Freeman
‘Girl next door’ was a label that didn’t suit a woman whose life was anything but ordinary
Hollywood has always prided itself on being the place where illusion is sold as reality. But no film director was ever as skilled at mining the gap between fantasy and fact as the studios’ PR chiefs in Hollywood’s golden era (1910-1960), imposing images on their stars that had about as much to do with the truth as pornography does with genuine sexuality. Marilyn Monroe was sold as an all-knowing sexual vamp, when in truth she was a deeply damaged woman who was sexually abused and exploited throughout her life. Kirk Douglas was styled as an all-American alpha male when his name is actually Issur Danielovitch and he grew up speaking Yiddish, in unimaginable poverty.
Doris Day, who died this week, was in many ways the most interesting example of this dissonance between the public persona and often not entirely private reality. Her image of the perky girl next door was both the making and eventual undoing of her career, and it has proved extraordinarily tenacious in the minds of the public and critics. Movie fans long ago grasped that, say, Judy Garland’s image as the innocent sweet songbird didn’t really match up with the miserable, pill-addled figure she already was by her mid-20s. But it was the rare obituary of Day this week that didn’t describe her somewhere as the “girl next door”.