Customer Reviews

Doris Day: Sentimental Journey

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Not simply a biography, but a reference book of Doris' life and her career on records, radio, film and television. This was a much needed book, and is very nicely done. Succinct, thorough and with some nicely rare pictures, although I noticed at least one photo caption which incorrectly identified the year, but that is a small quibble.

Just having a listing of the episodes of DORIS DAY'S BEST FRIENDS, the animel-centered series she produced and appeared in back in the 1980s, would be reason enough to purchase this enchantingly obsessed volume. But there are plenty more. I enjoyed seeing McGee scampering through the gardens and byways of Day's multifaceted movie career, mysteriously cut short after the release of THE BALLAD OF JOSIE and WITH SIX YOU GET EGG ROLL. He even has a section detailing the films Day might have made but alas, or in some cases thank God, she wound up not playing in. I never really wanted to see her playing in THE GRADUATE, but some of the other roles offered her she really should have said yes to. Of course there were many other complications in Day's life, and to his credit McGee takes them all on. She had bad luck in husbands, and despite an eternal, and very American optimism, the sunny side of Doris Day we are initially drawn to, there's a darker, sadder, even more melancholy side to her persona as well that's a little harder to access. Thus her appearance at Rock's side in his episode of BEST FRIENDS revealed her in a new avatar, the brave stalwart supporter, nearly an angel, in the time of AIDS, avowing a sexual knowledge she had played with and played behind since the days of ROMANCE ON THE HIGH SEAS.

McGee is also extremely thorough on Day's recording career, a subject on which I was never very well briefed, and now I think I could hold my own end up in any charity competition for knowing how many of Rodgers and Hart's songs Day recorded (plenty, compared to the very few of, say, Cole Porter's) if that was one of the test questions. McGee loves Doris Day, that is for sure, and yet he is surprisingly objective about her talents, judging this or that as a failure or success in its own terms. I never realized, for example, what a mistake JUMBO seems to have been for Doris; its failure, McGee states, precluded Fox from giving her the Maria Von Trapp psrt in the Robert Wise film of SOUND OF MUSIC.