And Here’s to You, Doris Day: The Woman who Didn’t Become Mrs. Robinson

The tributes pouring in for Doris Day (who left us Monday morning at age 97) do not mention one tidbit I find unforgettable. Day was the first choice of producer Larry Turman and director Mike Nichols to play the predatory Mrs. Robinson in their film adaptation of The Graduate. Forget the fact that Day’s image was that of a virginal –or at least a prim and proper—young woman with a sunny disposition and a great capacity for love, as opposed to sex. In such mid-century comedies as Teacher’s Pet, Pillow Talk, and Lover Come Back, she’s the perky innocent who lands the hunky guy because of her winning combo of smarts, sass, and sheer unadulterated goodness. Which is why Turman and Nichols, who enjoyed casting against type, loved the idea of her playing the scheming adulteress who lures Benjamin Braddock into the sack

My Seduced by Mrs. Robinson: How The Graduate Became the Touchstone of a Generation tells the tale. Back when The Graduate was just a modestly-selling novel waiting to be made into a screenplay, Turman sent the book to Day to ascertain her interest in the project. (It was clear to the production team that the Mrs. Robinson role was the one that required an established star, someone who could fill the seats of movie houses.), Turman has said the idea was to subvert Day’s wholesome, bubbly image by showing her in rebellion against the social rules that governed her earlier films. Day long maintained, in her memoir and elsewhere, that she refused the part because it offended her values. But Turman insists that when he sent her Charles Webb’s novel, it was withheld from Day by her husband and manager, Martin Melcher. Fittingly for a woman whose onscreen persona defines the fifties, Day’s course of action was predetermined, in this and other matters, by the domineering man she married.

Which shouldn’t imply that Doris Day was not a rule-breaker in her own right. Though her roles bought into 1950s standards of sexual conservatism, she was not  portrayed as being without libido. In Lover Come Back, for instance, her character (a New York ad exec) comes very close to succumbing to the seductive moves of arch-rival Rock Hudson, but (phew!) her honor is saved by a timely phonecall.  And Molly Haskell, whose From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies is the essential work on the subject, informed me that as a young woman growing up in Richmond, Virginia, she admired Day not for her sexual standards but because, in an era that exalted the happy housewife, Day was generally portrayed as a working woman—a writer, an executive, a college prof--making it on her own in the big city.

It’s a mistake to underestimate Doris Day’s professionalism. As a big band singer, she idolized Ella Fitzgerald, whose exuberant style resembles Day’s own. As an untrained but potent actress, she starred in thrillers (The Man Who Knew Too Much, Midnight Lace) and a schmaltzy musical biopic (Love Me or Leave Me) as well as romantic comedies. And of course her 1945  performance, along with Les Brown’s Band of Renown, of one of my favorite songs, “Sentimental Journey,” will never be equaled.

Romantically speaking, Day knew what it was like to suffer. She was married four times, and the mismanagement of her assets by her abrasive third husband, Melcher, nearly brought her career to a halt. In later years she seemed to prefer animals to people, and her charitable work on behalf of her furry friends is one more reason we’ll remember her fondly.

Molly Haskell, Wonder Woman at the Movies

To my mind, Molly Haskell is a feminist icon. Haskell—author, teacher, film critic—is also a gracious individual, and I’ve enjoyed chatting with her over the years about movies and life. (Yes, she wrote a fabulous blurb for my Seduced by Mrs. Robinson: How The Graduate Became the Touchstone of a Generation.) Haskell has published books about everything from Gone With the Wind to the career of Steven Spielberg to her brother’s late-in-life transformation into her sister. But her best-known book is still her first. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. First published in 1974, it was updated in 1987, and then reissued in a beautiful paperback edition in 2016.

Haskell’s thesis, presented in lively prose, is that female characters—who were once at the very center of Hollywood screen scenarios—have been increasingly marginalized. Whereas there  used to be heroines of stature, more recent films have regarded women as villains or victims, or else basically non-existent. Haskell’s study ends in the eighties, but has much to say to today’s moviegoers. A Wonder Woman or an Ocean’s Eight notwithstanding, just think of all those Hollywood hits that are essentially all male, with a few bimbos and wives-back-home added as set decoration.

Haskell is uniquely sensitive to the part played by movie stars in Golden Age Hollywood. She regards stars like Garbo, Bette Davis, and Katharine Hepburn as auteurs in their own right, casting their larger-than-life shadows over all of their roles. She also finds a particular fascination in the so-called Woman’s Film, the once hugely-popular genre in which a female star faces (and often triumphs by way of) heartache. Her book contains so many provocative thoughts that it’s hard to corral even a few of them, but here, as she discusses the Woman’s  Film, is her take on child-bearing and child-rearing: “Children are an obsession in American movies—sacrifice of and for children, the use of children as justification for all manner of sacrifice—in marked contrast to European films about love and romantic intrigue, where children rarely appear at all and are almost never the instruments of judgment they are in American films.”

Such Haskell pronouncements led me to compare two classic films about mother love, Stella Dallas (1937) and Mildred Pierce (1941). Both contain powerful central performances by genuine Hollywood stars: Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford. Crawford, as Mildred, claws her way up the food chain in order to provide all the finer things for her social-climbing daughter, Veda. Ultimately, after years of being rebuffed by the ungrateful Veda, Mildred finds herself trying to save her daughter from a murder rap. In Stella Dallas, Stanwyck plays a high-spirited young woman from the wrong side of the tracks. We see her woo and win a man who’s her social better, and their marriage—doomed from the start—produces a charming young daughter named Laurel. Stella works hard to give Laurel every social advantage, but mother and daughter are snubbed by Laurel’s prissy schoolmates and their parents. Finally, in the name of mother-love, Stella pretends to reject Laurel, turning her over to her father for a more genteel upbringing. The final scene shows Stanwyck standing in the rain, spying through the window of a mansion on her daughter’s fairytale society wedding. 

Molly once told me that “you find what you need in movies.” Her affection for Doris Day in films like Lover Come Back stems from her own youthful desire to move to New York (from her home in Richmond, Virginia) and become a working woman. At that she has succeeded magnificently.