Vol. 30 No. 17 · 11 September 2008
pages 29-30 | 3315 words
Miss Lachrymose
Liz Brown
- Doris Day: The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door by David Kaufman
Virgin, 628 pp, £29.95, June 2008, ISBN 978 1 905264 30 8
In her very first stage appearance Doris Day wet herself. It was in her hometown of Cincinnati in 1927. She was five years old and not yet Doris Day. She was still Doris Kappelhoff and the red satin pants that her mother, Alma, had sewn for the kindergarten pageant were quick to betray her. It’s tempting to see this as a primal scene for Doris Day, the moment from which her longheld stage fright sprang.
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Letters
Vol. 30 No. 21 · 6 November 2008
From Christopher Frayling
Liz Brown asserts that Doris Day ‘has no interest in her past’ and agrees with Molly Haskell’s description of her as having an ‘almost pathological aversion to discussing her films’ (LRB, 11 September). In January 1990 I filmed a two-day conversation with Doris Day at her hotel in Carmel and her nearby dog sanctuary, during which she reminisced enthusiastically about her films and helped me to select the right clips to illustrate her memories. After the filming, we went out to dinner: far from looking like ‘anybody’s grandma’, as Liz Brown puts it, she was instantly recognised by everyone in the diner. On the day the documentary was broadcast, she phoned to say how much she’d enjoyed revisiting the highlights of her film career. More contentiously, she then said that I reminded her of ‘David Niven in his prime’.
Christopher Frayling
Royal College of Art
