As one of the last major living icons of un certain Golden Age in Hollywood, the one that made it so much easier to release movies without everyone getting so up in arms about whether it was too heteronormative or too white, the death of America’s ultimate sweetheart (long before Julia Roberts somehow finagled that title after playing a prostitute), Doris Day, has reminded one of a particularly jarring moment in the 2016 James Baldwin documentary, I Am Not Your Negro.
Narrated by Samuel L. Jackson from Baldwin’s unreleased manuscript, Remember This House, the author’s description of the divisive so-called “American experience” (much different from the “American black experience”) is brutally boiled down by the juxtaposition of Doris Day in 1961’s Lover Come Back (co-starring her go-to, Rock Hudson) against subsequent scenes of lynching going on at the same time in the U.S.
As Baldwin assessed the Hollywood phenomenon/moneymaking machine of blatantly excluding black people altogether from the narrative (apart from the occasional Mammys/Sambos or the “allowance” of Sidney Poitier to slip through the celluloid cracks), “In this country, for a dangerously long time, there have been two levels of experience. One, to put it cruelly, can be summed up in the images of Gary Cooper and Doris Day, two of the most grotesque appeals to innocence the world has ever seen. And the other, subterranean, indispensable and denied, can be summed up, let us say, in the tone and in the face of Ray Charles.”
Speaking to the ways in which the culture’s throat was crammed solely with images of beautiful and pure white beings like Day, Baldwin noted, “You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves. And furthermore, you give me a terrifying advantage. You never had to look at me. I had to look at you. I know more about you than you know about me.” And what one knows of Day is that her films certainly tell a different story from her fraught personal life–one that still found her self-righteous enough to turn down the role of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate (which, by the way, would have been deliciously macabre had she carried it off). A personal life riddled with defeat and broken dreams–and yes, there is irony in the fact that she once commented of her singing inspirations, “…the one radio voice I listened to above others belonged to Ella Fitzgerald. There was a quality to her voice that fascinated me, and I’d sing along with her, trying to catch the subtle ways she shaded her voice, the casual yet clean way she sang the words.” One wonders if Baldwin was aware of this, that Day was more “with it” in “understanding” black folk than he might have previously given her “credit” for. For this is what the black person is still expected to do: give the white person some credit for at least “trying” to empathize. This much is also touched on in I Am Not Your Negro, with Baldwin specifically calling out the absurdity of Sidney Poitier’s character, Noah Cullen, in The Defiant Ones not escaping at the end of the film, but instead, remaining metaphorically as opposed to, as throughout the entire movie, literally shackled to this white man. Because again, it is the “job” of the black man to make whitey feel less guilty for his actions.
And while Day fretted over how to make a gay man appear to love her convincingly onscreen, the rest of the world down at heel continued to look up at the screen wondering why their life didn’t look even remotely as fun-loving or squeaky clean. Of course, this isn’t to say that any of it is Day’s fault. A girl has to make a living, after all. Even if that living ended up getting pilfered by her husband (the third one, despite her wholesome persona), producer Martin Melcher. Because, in typical cad fashion Melcher had, in conjunction with his business partner, Jerome Bernard Rosenthal, not only spent all of her wealth, but left her in severe debt. To boot, before his death he signed her freedom away by promising she would perform on the TV series that would become known as The Doris Day Show. Though she hated doing it, she needed the money to dig herself out of her financial hole, ultimately settling for a lovely hole in Carmel-by-the-Sea. The perfect place for the emblem of whitewashed America to live.
As the 60s raged on and it became more challenging even for Midwestern audiences to swallow the spoonful of saccharine slop Day’s films wanted to give them, her career took a nosedive, and she was soon being referred to as “The World’s Oldest Virgin.” Tellingly, Lucille Ball’s radio interview with Doris Day (the two would later compete with the same premised films Yours, Mine and Ours and what would be Day’s final movie, the obviously offensively titled With Six You Get Eggroll in 1968) in 1964 while the latter was on the set of Do Not Disturb finds the former gushing, “It’s been a long time since anyone was really allowed to escape in the theater and dream a little and see some beauty…and not have to be weighted down with the worries of the world and the psychiatric–the messes-and all that.” Could she have been shading Hitchcock’s predilection for the “unpleasant”? Who knows? The point is, one of the foremost entertainers of the 1950s wanted things to remain as they were in that decade: whitewashed to the point of sterilization. And commended Day for her manifestation of that whitewashing that made everything so much “easier” for “a particular audience” that didn’t want to think too much about the ickiness of the world.
Then again, maybe escapism is just escapism. And that’s the core point of cinema’s existence. Or so many tell themselves as they work without trying to fulfill the prophecy of Idiocracy (a terrible movie with an ingenious log line). Whatever the case, one could argue the death of Day represents more than just the cemented demise of a period of tinseled glory in Hollywood’s history, but a solidified new era in which sugar-coating isn’t the norm in entertainment.
