Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1957)

-r . Escape to Happiness (Continued from page 69) if they were actors whom she remembered from her movie-going days in Cincinnati, she was more apt to gaze at them in wideeyed wonder than bounce her scene off them and take the camera for her own. Curtiz, who has been known to get excited, was the epitome of patience with Doris. When retakes were in order, he blamed himself, the cameraman and stagehands, or some vague airplane that had put a buzz in the sound track. He never blamed Doris. And Doris responded by working so hard that Curtiz was moved to remark, “Such application! No complaints. Always cheerful. With her around, the whole set is happy and hard-working.” Every director who has worked with her has said much the same thing since, but Doris had a special reason for working hard on her first picture, and making good was only part of it. Actually, she did not think she was making good, nor did she see any point in raising false hopes that she would ever make a second picture. Every day that she went to the set she was surprised to find herself still a member of the cast. She was hard-working because only by losing herself in her role, by driving herself to exhaustion, could she return to her lonely hotel room — living in their trailer home had become unthinkable after husband George Weidler’s departure — and find any peace in sleep. The girl who appeared in the finished production of “Romance on the High Seas,” was a gay, vivacious blonde without a care in her happy, slightly-addled head. And that was the girl the movie reviewers and Hollywood writers believed she was. But that was not the girl who dragged herself home alone each night. At twenty-three Doris saw herself as a mother who rarely saw her child, as a wife who had miserably failed not once but twice in holding her husbands. Work was not merely the road to success, but an antidote to misery. The sensitive Curtiz felt some of this conflict that was seething within his star. From the start he discouraged her seeing any of the rushes on her day’s shooting. Once she expressed doubt about a scene, and asked to see how it turned out. “I liked it,” he said firmly, “and that’s good enough for you.” He was afraid that if Doris saw the frivolous blonde on the screen, she would try to redeem her in the next take by making her a solid, seriousminded citizen. Thus began an odd policy that Doris has continued to this day. She will not see her rushes, and only when forced to attend the premiere of one of her pictures will she endure the agony of seeing herself as others see her. Today she has a good reason. It is in conflict with the accepted theory that an actor should study himself on the screen to better improve himself for his next roles, but it works for her. She explains it this way: “When I study a script I develop a mental picture of the woman I am playing. I study that woman. By the time we are ready to start filming, that woman is very real to me, and I know just what she will do.” “You actually become that woman?” “To the best of my ability, yes.” She crinkled her brows, hunting for words. “Mind you, the woman I am playing isn’t like me at all. She’s what I think she is. Now, suppose I see the rushes of a day’s shooting. Sitting in the projection room, I’m not that woman, I’m me again. I look at that woman up there on the screen, and I don’t like her. Like in ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much,’ for instance. In some of the terror scenes I looked just awful. My mouth was crooked, my hair was all mussed, my eyes were swollen, my dress was like a sack. If I had seen the rushes of that — well, I’ll tell you one thing. I’d have marched in to Hitchcock and told him he was ruining me.” “But I thought you did a marvelous job.” “That woman did, not me,” Doris said emphatically. “In that situation, she was supposed to look awful, and as long as I was her, I knew it. Tears, moans, ugly mouth, everything. But me, personally, I don’t like to see myself looking like that. As I say, if I had seen the rushes, the next time we played such a scene I’d have settled my dress, combed my hair and kept my mouth straight. Consciously or subconsciously, I’d be trying to make me, Doris Day, look pretty instead of making that woman look real. So I don’t look at the rushes. As long as it’s a picture about that woman, I keep myself out of it.” But Doris did not encounter this dualpersonality conflict in her first pictures. “Romance on the High Seas,” with Jack Carson carrying the laughs in his inimitable style, was just light enough and fast enough to carry Doris to success without putting too much strain on her limited acting ability. At once Warner Brothers starred her in another picture, and then another, warning her meantime to avoid acting lessons like the plague. “You’re a natural without lessons,” she was told. “They can’t improve you, but they might give you some wrong ideas. Just leave good enough alone.” The odd thing about it is that, unsuspected by herself or anyone else, she was doing a superb acting job all the time. She was type-cast as the wholesome, bouncy, all-American girl-next-door, and no one was less that girl than Doris Day. At ten she had started her professional dancing lessons. At an age when most girls are giggling over their first dates, she was in bed with a shattered leg, her dancing career over. When other girls were going to the high school prom, she was singing for college proms with Bob Crosby’s orchestra. When they were off to college, she was on the road with Les Brown’s band, and when they were beginning their first serious romances, she was already a divorced wife and mother. And where other girls saw their own lives filled with humdrum reality and envied Doris her gay and romantic life in big-time show business, she saw the harsh reality of her world and envied them their special teen-age life filled with a sparkling magic of its own. She did not play the girl next door. She acted out her dream of that girl, and it was her glowing, envy-touched dream that added the extra lift to her films. If her first films were repetitious they had their rewards. With her first paycheck she was able to bring her mother and Terry out to California, and for the first time in years she was with her son. One of the big moments in her life was when she moved with her family into a small, to her enchanted, cottage in Hidden Valley. Movie fame also brought her big radio assignments, among them the Bob Hope show, and big recording contracts. Within two years of her first movie assignment, Doris was earning $500,000 a year in movies, radio and in recording royalties. 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