Doris Day Confidential

Hollywood, Sex and Stardom

Tamar Jeffers McDonald

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781848855823
• eBook ISBN: 9780857734228
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Doris Day was a major star during the 1950s and 60s. Even now, many years after her final film and years since her last regular television appearances, the star's name retains currency: she is often invoked as shorthand for a kind of sexuality now felt outmoded, with virginity firmly maintained until marriage. Although this assumption is widespread, close attention to the facts of Day's own life challenges it, and the majority of her film roles also prove otherwise, with Day most frequently portraying a woman of maturely sexual desires. Redressing a surprisingly meagre body of work on Doris Day, this book investigates why the rigid view of Day's maintained virginity should have arisen and become so fixed to the star, even now. Taking a twofold approach, Tamar Jeffers McDonald both closely examines Day's film roles and performances and explores material from other popular media for the source of the virgin myth. Day featured continuously in public discourse, and media stories were often devoted to her personal life: it was widely known that she had been married three times and had a son.
Why then did the pejorative label, 'the-forty-year-old virgin', arise, and why has it stuck so tenaciously to Day until today? Investigating a range of sources in order to discover why this maturely sexual star has become indelibly associated with maintained virginity, Doris Day Confidential analyses in detail Day's characters and performances across her career. By focusing on contemporary popular culture contexts, using newspaper stories, articles from film, fan and lifestyle magazines, reviews and gossip, it charts the developments in Day's screen 'persona', highlighting the changing public perception of the star of Calamity Jane, Love Me Or Leave Me and Pillow Talk, as aided and abetted by the media.

SECTION 1

Contexts

Since I have declared that the current monolithic view of Day as a coy old maid persists so strongly partly because it is never taken apart and investigated, but always taken for granted, it behoves me not just to take for granted myself the fact that it is an established – if erroneous – fact. If ‘everyone’ really does believe Doris Day always plays a virgin, I should be able to demonstrate instances where this has been asserted or insinuated. Beyond this provision of evidence, however, I think a greater historical context is also necessary for Day’s career and press reception, in order to explain why the issue of her sexual status should ever have arisen. Put in the context of today’s celebrity-saturated mediascape, where the internet records every peccadillo, affair, liaison, DUI and drinking binge of a bewildering array of stars and wannabes, Day’s pillorying for not doing something – which is what virginity means – seems non-news, tame rather than compelling. What was it about the particular period of her stardom, then, that meant a mature woman, thrice-married and a mother, could be associated with sexual innocence, and this association be found intriguing, even perversely stimulating? In order to answer this question I will look here at a specific moment in American popular culture when the virgin female became the object of intense scrutiny, debate and mingled anxiety and excitement. Exploring the virginity obsession of the mid-50s to early 60s alongside invocations of Day the virgin, this section attempts to provide twin backgrounds for this study’s twin foci.

Released in 1953 with as much careful preparatory fanfare as the most skilfully ballyhooed film, Kinsey’s second ‘Report’, his Sexual Behavior In The Human Female, set out to do what his first investigation had done for the male six years before: comment dispassionately on the norms of human sexual behaviour, based on the findings within his sample. Although the Report meticulously presents data solely on the sample of 5,940 unmarried white women, his audience – fellow scientists, church leaders, social critics, journalists, and the mass of general readers – inevitably extrapolated the findings to make assumptions about all unmarried American women. When he mildly noted that the popular presumption that unmarried women were virgins had, based on his sample, proved to be erroneous, Kinsey seemed to have little idea of the ‘K bomb’³ he was unleashing:

Because of [the] public condemnation of pre-marital coitus, one might believe that such contacts would be rare among American females and males. But this is only the overt culture, the things that people openly profess to believe and to do. Our previous report (1948) on the male has indicated how far publicly expressed attitudes may depart from the realities of behaviour – the covert culture, what males really do. We may now examine the pre-marital coital behavior of the female sample which has been available for this study.

(Kinsey et al., 1953: 285).

It is possible that this broad assumption, that an unmarried girl was likely to be a virgin, was actually a post-hoc invention, a nostalgic notion which became more mourned at the moment of its perceived demise than was previously ever believed to be true. What does seem clear is that, from the moment Kinsey published Sexual Behavior In The Human Female, the majority of his findings and observations were ignored. Only one was discussed and circulated in the media storm that greeted the book’s publication, the most obviously newsworthy revelation: that 50 per cent of the unmarried 30 year olds in his sample had ignored the traditional idea that ‘nice girls don’t’, and had done. This finding elicited not only solemn, in-depth analyses and counter-claims in serious periodicals and further scientific tomes, but also intensely curious examinations and requests for more information in women’s and family magazines, cartoons, jokes and smutty stories in many different media (Jones, 1997: 711). This media storm seems both a reaction to, and an attempt to assuage, the anxiety the revelation evoked societally.

Although less frequently noted by the contemporary media, Kinsey’s other achievements were no less significant. By the very act of taking women’s sexual activities as the topic of the book, Kinsey assumed a parity between women and men, the subject of the first report in 1948. In counting women’s activities, Kinsey thus made women’s activities count. Moreover, by listing the variety of sexual activities that the women in his sample chose to indulge in besides actual coitus, Kinsey’s report informed the reader how to experience various sexual pleasures without giving up virginity through penetrative sex, noting such techniques as:

Simple kissing […] deep kissing […] breast stimulation […] mouth-breast contacts […] manual stimulation of the female genitalia […] manual stimulation of the male genitalia […] oral contacts with female genitalia […] oral contacts with male genitalia […] genital apposition.

(Kinsey et al., 1953: 251–259).

This listing of various activities also importantly served to expose a hazy nebulousness over what ‘virginity’ meant contemporaneously. If the word was used as shorthand to indicate no experience of penetrative sex, then nothing was breached by such ‘petting’ activities as those cited above. If, however, ‘virginity’ was endowed with some sense of moral value, seen as an intrinsic guarantor of innocence or purity, then any sexual experience nullified it.

An uneasiness about the notion that virginity is subject to gradations of loss, rather than being an either/or, is observable in the contemporary concept of the ‘technical virgin’, a woman who had done or permitted everything but the act of coitus itself. If virginity was supposed to matter, to be a guarantee of the woman’s lack of sexual history, then technical virginity undid this guarantee. The technical virgin threatened the status quo since she had arrived at her own independent concept of how much she could do and still retain her virgin status, as a Playboy writer bemoaned: ‘Each girl seems to have her own peculiar and rather precise idea of just how far she can go without losing it’ (‘Smith’, 1954: 9).

Kinsey’s Report had thus, in effect, informed America that the popular cultural concept of the ‘technical virgin’ was factually-based and statistically proven; worryingly, therefore, the division between virgin/post-virgin could not be uniform and clear-cut, if it were individual women, rather than societal consensus, who were deciding the definition of ‘virginity’. Furthermore, a belief that women were somehow manipulating this borderline, this metaphorical hymen, between the possible meanings of the word, was prevalent at the time. If technical virginity undid the guarantee of absolute innocence, it also undermined the double standard that assumed a man’s right to his bride’s chastity.

One further strand of contemporary anxiety is observable woven into this fretting over ‘technical virginity’: a belief in women’s detached exploitation of their sexual attractiveness, in their willingness to grant or withhold sexual favours. It was feared that the detached female gave in a little at a time in order to draw the man in, trapping him by implying she would eventually assent to full sex, but holding this back as a final bargaining point until she had gained marriage. This very prevalent notion makes women frighteningly superior to men in their ability to direct and restrain their own libidinous desires and can be observed as an underlying assumption across this period, and into the early 1970s.

Whether his statistic-laden Report actually helped women in their appreciation of the right to sexual satisfaction, as letters to Kinsey suggest (Jones, 1997: 703–4) it is indisputable that the book, through deeming women’s sexual activities worthy of discussion and minute record, propelled the trope of the desirous woman into the public arena, to be debated, denied, or supported, making her, for about a decade, an obsessive object of attention and scrutiny across high and low culture.

Kinsey’s extrapolated findings therefore seemed to affix a metaphorical question mark over the head of every young woman, and this interrogative urge became overtly employed, not only in Clairol’s 1955 hair colouring tag – ‘Does she or doesn’t she? Only her hairdresser knows for sure’ – but in other contemporary popular media texts, including cinema. Three further particular instances of this questioning stand out to me, each reframing a central interrogation. Clairol’s question is designed to be asked about the woman by an intrigued other party, but the next topical use of the inquiry turns from ambivalence to probability, introducing self-interest into the equation. A 1956 article in Playboy asked ‘Will she or won’t she?’, going on to suggest that a woman who ‘would’ immediately was not worth cultivating; the only woman worth the investment of ‘time, energy and cash’ is the eventual yielder, who needs gradual persuasion (Archer, 1956: 13). The man’s point of view removes the enigma attached to the Clairol advert, suggesting that the question can be definitively answered. By contrast, Nora Johnson’s use of the interrogative in her 1959 article, ‘Sex and the College Girl’ from the highbrow Atlantic Monthly, posits the same question – ‘Should she or shouldn’t she?’ – but inflected by morality rather than feasibility, and, ultimately, without hope of an answer.

Examining Johnson’s article in some detail is useful as this text brings to the surface many of the contemporary anxieties and assumptions that coalesced around the figure of the desirous virgin.

The piece exhibits both traditional assumptions – sex is something boys want and girls grant or withhold – and more counter-traditional notions, such as ascribing the wish for monogamy to the male. The article also interestingly reveals, however, an awareness of the nebulousness of virginity as a category, thus chiming with the contemporary anxiety over the idea of the technical virgin.

In her account of the sex lives of her sample – noticeably younger than Kinsey’s and more personal too – Johnson invents a college Everygirl, Susie, and her boyfriend Joe, to act out the sexual negotiations she analyses. Surprisingly, it is Joe rather than Susie who wants a steady relationship leading to marriage, rather than a bachelor life of multiple conquests. The boy is pragmatically said to want a reliable girlfriend in order to spare himself:

…the bother of starting the whole sex cycle over again, with discussions and possibly arguments about how far he can go how soon. He wants it all understood, with the lady reasonably willing if possible. (This depends on his and her notions of what constitutes a nice girl).

(Johnson, 1959: 57)

Although Johnson here seems to conform to the idea that boys want and girls grant – ‘how far he can go’ – her parenthesis undermines this assumption while it also contributes to mid-century debates about women’s desires, agency and self-control. Susie is posited throughout as more aware of the mechanics of the relationship than the boy, thus fitting with the contemporary idea of the scheming female detached from her body, able to manipulate it and the man who desires it, in order to attain her goal of marriage. Susie permits intimacies gradually, not because of any romantic need for a relationship, or from deficiency of desire, prudishness or morals on her part, but calculatingly, in order to convince Joe that she is ‘a nice girl’. If she permitted penetrative sex he would not respect her; therefore Susie feigns the reluctance that reassures Joe what he wants is worth having.

Susie is no stranger to desire, but her experiences are not to be acknowledged since they would counteract the pose of virginity she adopts. A longish passage from the article is worth quoting since it develops these themes:

Susie has, on the whole, kept her chastity. She is no demimondaine, and she wants to be reasonably intact on her wedding night. She had an unfortunate experience at Dartmouth, when she and her date were both in their cups, but she barely remembers anything about it and hasn’t seen the boy since. She has also done some heavy petting with boys she didn’t care about, because she reasoned that it wouldn’t matter what they thought of her.

…

She has kept Joe fairly well at arm’s length, giving in a little at a time, because she wanted him to respect her. He didn’t really excite her sexually, but probably he would if they had some privacy. Nothing was less romantic than the front porch of the house… or in the back of someone’s car with only fifteen minutes before she had to be in. Anyway, it might be just as well. Susie and Joe have decided that they will sleep together when it is feasible, since by now Joe knows she is a nice girl and it’s all right…She will sleep with Joe, if they become engaged, because he wants to, and if she becomes pregnant, they can get married sooner.

(Johnson, 1959: 58–59)

These passages testify to the force of the contemporary double standard, and the prevalence of the idea of ‘technical virginity’. They also indicate how women could manipulate the boundaries of the good/bad girl dichotomy to which these notions both spoke, the double standard in attempting to impose such binary categories, and technical virginity in subverting them. The account of Susie’s sexual history is a fascinating one since it indicates the topical masquerade of chastity girls were adopting while still going about the business of sexual experimentation.

Susie can believe herself to be fairly virginal not because she has had no experience, but because her experiments have been with unimportant men. She maintains the stance of the virgin with Joe, who counts because he is marriageable material; the intimacies permitted when drunk with the boy at Dartmouth College do not matter to her, both because she is now unaware of them and he is not still on the scene. In other words, she remains innocent because she cannot remember her experience, and no one else knows about it; thus her reputation is intact both internally and externally. The extent of the intellectual negotiations Susie undertakes to maintain the illusion of inexperience undercuts the concept of purity and chastity. These become not qualities in themselves but goods on the market, not devalued if no one has seen them being handled.

Johnson’s assertion that Susie has petted with boys who did not matter contradicts the traditional assumption that girls need romantic attachment to their partners before being persuaded to have some kind of sexual relations; Susie has experimented with ‘boys she didn’t care about’ (58). Presumably, this is because they are not marriage material: if they were, she would care about them. Susie is being cautious with Joe, not risking him ending the relationship because she mismanages her sexuality. This is why Johnson feels ‘it might be just as well’ (58) that Joe does not excite Susie, since she wants to retain her detachment and her hold on him, which means sublimating her own desires.

Concluding, Johnson’s article revisits the idea of technical virginity; without directly referencing Kinsey, the article shows awareness of the kind of hazy boundaries around virginity that he posited, exploiting the ambivalence of the meaning of ‘virginity’ (sexual inexperience/lack of full penetration) for the maintenance of the title even if not the purity it is taken to represent:

I suppose the ideal girl is still technically a virgin but has done every possible kind of petting without actually having had intercourse. This gives her savoir-faire, while still maintaining her maiden dignity.

(Johnson, 1959: 60)

As argued, if the idea of virginity was meant to convey merely the withholding of the ultimate act, coitus, then petting did not contravene this, but if it implied some kind of inherent value in innocence, then any sexual experience negated it. Virginity can thus be seen occupying its own vexed terrain, being perhaps subject to binary rules – one is either a virgin or a post-virgin, with no middle ground – but perhaps able to support a gradation of experiences. In either case, that it was the woman who seemed the one to decide the status of virginity provoked unease. Susie may be subject to internal debating about yielding, but it is still the female debating; furthermore, that the debate is internal means that, as long as she keeps her composure afterwards, the woman’s eventual decision need not be visible. This brings us back to the ultimate anxiety, the invisibility of the experience being discussed and the fact that, if virginity is not discernible, then it can be faked.

I have noted elsewhere that this invisibility and the impossibility of definitive ocular proof caused as much anxiety to cinema, a medium predicated upon the visible, as it did to contemporary society (2006 a; 2010 a); fittingly, then, the final instance of this virginity question I want to mention is a filmic one. It does not come, however, from the group of films I posit were topically engendered by the K bomb and its fallout – what I call the ‘virginity dilemma’ cycle (Jeffers McDonald, 2006 a: 74) – but from a Doris Day film, Lover Come Back (1961). As will be discussed further, this film overtly inaugurated the character of the mature maiden played by the star. It seems significant, however, not just to this brief overview of the importance of the contemporary virginity obsession but also to Day’s persona that the character, Carol Templeton, should be a mature maid, and not a girl like the other exemplar virgins, both of the ‘virginity dilemma’ cycle and the majority of those discussed in coterminous texts, such as the Playboy and Atlantic Monthly articles. Critically, Carol is nearer in age to the women in Kinsey’s sample but by 1961 is being viewed as an anomaly – not part of the 50 per cent of Kinsey’s group who hadn’t in 1953, but seemingly, eight years later, one of a much smaller number of women still clinging humorously to outmoded mores. When Carol asks herself, therefore, in the film’s moment of virginal crisis, ‘Should I surrender?’ it is a self-interrogation designed to appear comical rather than meaningful. It is in this altered context that, the following year, the media was overtaken by another best-selling book, viewed as being as news-worthy in its moment as Kinsey’s report nine years earlier. This was Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex And The Single Girl, a text which openly asserted ‘nice girls do’ (206) and that men were glad of it. Brown urged her readers to enjoy the men that came their way before Mr Right, training themselves to be the perfect, experienced partner qualified to entrap a highly marriageable man. Unlike Johnson’s Everygirl who allowed herself a certain amount of sexual freedom with boys who did not matter, for Brown every man matters because he will teach or give her something. In this latter point Brown’s sexually amenable girl is not that different from the seemingly dichotomous figure of the manipulative maid: both barter intimacies for material goods, the main difference being that the Single Girl does not withhold the ultimate intimacy. Furthermore, the experiences garnered by the Single Girl will not be later denied, innocence feigned, when Mr Right turns up, but converted into yet more material goods: the most radical part of her message is not just that ‘nice girls do’, but that they assert it and can turn it to their own advantage:

Should a man think you are a virgin? I can’t imagine why, if you aren’t. Is he? Is there anything particularly attractive about a thirty-four year old virgin?

(Brown, 1962: 212)

Brown...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Section 1: Contexts
• Section 2: Film Fan Magazines
• Section 3: Performance Analysis
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Synopses
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Back Cover