All about when Doris Day "was everywhere!"

books:


	• Considering Doris Day Tom Santopietro Thomas Dunne Books, 2007 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 20 reviews view larger image
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BUT HE MISSED THE POINT!

Santopietro's book, CONSIDERING DORIS DAY, begins with just the right tone and certainly the right premise: Doris is the most underrated, underappreciated, and undermanaged star in the history of Hollywood. Once he makes this point (rather well), he then begins to tear apart so many of the things that fans loved about her...FOR WHAT REASON?
My first interest in Doris happened when I was a little boy and saw her performing with the Les Brown Orchestra at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, New Jersey. To put it mildly, I was totally enchanted, even at that young age. I loved her voice, her manner, her smile, her personality. I begged my aunts and uncles (who brought me) to buy a pile of the records (then 78 rpm) which she had done as female vocalist with the orchestra.
Then came her first movie, ROMANCE ON THE HIGH SEAS. It makes NO DIFFERENCE what the plot was, how trite it might have been, it was HER FIRST TIME on film...and audiences all over the world fell in love with Doris at first sight (critics, be damned!)And the main song from the film, "It's Magic", is a special favorite of hundreds of people who still remember it very well (Ask Betty White, for instance!)
Her second film, MY DREAM IS YOURS, further enchanted millions of fans. Who could not be totally spellbound to hear her sing "I'll String Along With You" or the title song? Follow this with a weekly radio show heard around the world, and the infatuation continued.
MAIN POINT....from then on, it matters not what Doris did...movies, television, records, radio, in person performance (very few), the legion of Doris fans grew and grew and grew. Some of the songs and movies and tv shows may have seemed silly...IT DID NOT MATTER! If Doris was in it, we wanted to see it. If Doris sang it, we wanted to own it. If Doris loved pets, we should love pets, too! THAT IS WHAT SANTOPIETRO FORGOT.
That she is the world's foremost female entertainer of all time, he says, second to Ella Fitzgerald? What is that....an ad for his next femme fatale biography? Doris could run circles around Ella or Barbra 7 days a week, 365 days a year, for all of her 83 years of life.
I hope the next big book coming out gets it straight. Doris DAy fans are loyal, and we last a lifetime. She has been a major part of my life every day for the past 53 years, and she will be until I die.

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All about when Doris Day "was everywhere!"

When I told an 85-year-old friend that I was reading Doris Day's biography, she said, "I always wanted to be like Doris Day."

Doris Day (yes, she's still alive) was born on April 3, 1924 and was 83 spring p 2007. She started as a singer and became associated with big bands, traveling with them around the country. And by 18, she was a single parent of son Terry, divorced from his abusive father, also in a big band.

The author (who also wrote a definitive work about Barbara Streisand--The Importance of Being Barbara) details Doris Day's movies, starting in 1948 when she was 24. She made 17 movies under Warner Brother's contract--sometimes up to three a year. In some she was allowed to sing and dance, using her pitch-perfect voice. Some movies were drama. She could do comedy, drama, sing and dance with the best of them.

In her prolific signing career, she recorded more than 600 songs from 1948 to 1967. She did not get to choose what movies she would do--because of the studio contract system-but as Doris Day would often say: A deal is a deal.

After leaving Warners in 1954, she starred in many more movies. Alfred Hitchcock directed a very believable Doris Day in The Man Who Knew Too Much.

Whatever she did, she did her best. So what happened that she quit in 1968 after making more than 40 movies? After doing a TV show until 1986, she just disappeared from public eye. Some say the sexual revolution, women's rights and role changing made her kind of movies passe.

The author recapped her career nicely at the end of the book, giving an overview of her talent, successes and vast work. Ask most women of a certain age which Doris Day movie they loved the best, and they might mention Pillow Talk or the one co-staring James Garner, where she went through the car wash with the convertible top down. Doris Day was everywhere for many years--and we loved that she sang, danced and acted her way into our hearts. If we admired Doris Day, I image the men in our lives envied her many leading men.

Her life, loves and her son Terry play a big role in the book--and of course her many years of animal rights advocacy.

Armchair Interviews says: If you loved Doris Day's public life, and want to know more about her private life, this book is for you.

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What's A Nice Girl Like You Doing.....

This book discusses the music, movie and tv career of Doris Day. It is not really a biography.

I was most interested in reading the author's sometimes very descriptive re-telling of Doris Day's movies - when they worked (The Thrill of It All) and when they didn't (Midnight Lace, Caprice, etc). Having seen practically all of Day's movies, I could easily relate and agree with Tom Santopietro's analysis but this made the book, for me anyway, a bit redundant. I kept hoping for insight into Doris Day but was left hanging as the author himself said more than once after a questionable career choice - what was she thinking? Well, we are none the wiser with this book.

Doris Day is usually described as a busy, hard working, talented professional who did not succumb to the dark side of Hollywood life and who maintained a spiritual if somewhat passive outlook on life. What drove her through her long and very successful career even after she had gained the pinnacle of her success? We all know the story about her husband Marty Melcher making the deals but she was the one who had to do all the work preparing and performing. Did she ever get tired of it all during the early 60's and want out?

I look forward to a future book on Doris Day, a talented nice girl in a brutally competitive business.

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reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4

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