All-American Girl: Doris Day’s Deceptively Sunny Life (2025)

“I think God did a little dance around her when she was born,” actress Kaye Ballard once said of her dear friend Doris Day.

Midcentury America agreed. Day, the bubbly superstar of classics like Pillow Talk and The Man Who Knew Too Much, even captivated A.E. Hotchner, the initially reluctant coauthor of her best-selling 1976 autobiography Doris Day: Her Own Story. It was yet another win for the woman who walked into a room “infectiously radiating the joy of life,” according to Hotchner.

Encouraged by her friend Jacqueline Susann, author of Valley of the Dolls, to set the record straight, Day is refreshingly forthright and frank in Her Own Story—especially about sex. She speaks movingly of her nervous breakdown in the 1950s, her inability to fake an orgasm, and her lack of guilt about having an affair with an unnamed married man (revealed by biographer David Kaufman in 2008’s detailed and rather cold-eyed Doris Day: The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door as actor Patrick O’Neal). And she does it all—in the words of James Cagney—with a shocking lack of pretension or guile.

“I’m not the all-American virgin queen,” Day told Hotchner in their first conversation. “The image I’ve got…it’s not me, not at all who I am. It has nothing to do with the life I’ve had.”

On a Chariot of Sunshine

On April 3, 1922, in Cincinnati, Doris Kappelhoff was born into a large German American family. While her gregarious mother, Alma, was devoted to her sunny daughter, her father, William, a choirmaster, was distant and dismissive.

In Her Own Story, Day is frank about the heartbreak she suffered as a result of her relationship with her cold father—but in what becomes a pattern, she focuses on the warmth she found elsewhere. She writes picturesquely of waiting on customers in her family’s pretzel factory and “lingering over nectar soda in the drugstore and then going back to the front porch and sitting in the swing, reading funnies while listening to the radio.”

A people pleaser from the get-go, a nervous Day had an accident the first time she performed onstage, giving her the nickname “wet pants Kappelhoff.” But she soon developed a strident confidence (that she repeatedly reiterates was not arrogance), which led her to reject her family’s strict Catholic views and become an outstanding member of a celebrated local dance team. “I got up in the morning on my hands and went to bed that way,” she recalls of preparing for a handstand contest. “I easily won the prize.”

By the time she was 15, it was clear to Alma that her effervescent, dancing daughter was destined for Hollywood. But the night before they were set to move to L.A., tragedy struck when a car filled with Day and her friends was hit by a train. “My finger came to the sharp ends of the shattered bones protruding from my leg,” Day recalled of the accident’s aftermath. “I began talking to myself about my leg. ‘How will I dance? How can I dance?’ Then I fainted in the gutter.”

No Sentimental Journey

Her dancing career over, Day turned to singing, and naturally excelled. Fond of highlighting her own tenacity, Day recalled scooting up the stairs on her bottom to her first singing gig at Charlie Yee’s Shanghai Inn. Still a teenager, Day was living the grueling touring life, traveling with big bands and falling in love with trombonist Al Jorden, whom she married at the age of 17.

Just when the reader feels vaguely annoyed by Day’s pert matter-of-factness (“I have never tried out for anything that I’ve failed to get,” she says at one point), she reveals a heartbreaking vulnerability and honesty. Nowhere is this truer than in her passages about the brutal Jorden, whom she claims routinely beat her, once holding a gun to her stomach while she was pregnant with their son, Terry.

Day planned an escape, returning to Cincinnati only to be stalked by Jorden while she was working at a local radio station. Throughout Her Own Story, a still traumatized Day repeatedly refers to the horror of her first marriage and the damage it caused her psyche.

But the fighter in Day would not let her give up. There were more years of exhaustive touring, and another busted marriage. By 1948, Day was worn out, living in a trailer outside of L.A. and desperate to get back to Cincinnati, where her mother and Terry were living. Uninterested in acting, she reluctantly agreed to her first movie audition, for 1948’s Romance on the High Seas.

A distraught Day cried throughout the audition in front of director Michael Curtiz, much to her agent’s horror.

Curtiz was charmed, and she got the part.

Clara Bixby

According to Day, acting for the camera was the easiest thing she had ever done: “I had no inhibitions, no doubts, no hang-ups.” A creature of habit, she loved being a “lunch-bucket lady” at the studio where “the bell rings at noon, you go to lunch, the whistle blows at six, you go home…I love that kind of organized life.”

This confidence did not extend into her social life. When not performing, Day was painfully introverted, and hated the Hollywood social whirl. “Snug in a corner, gratefully overlooked,” Day recalls of one L.A. party. “I realized that there had been standing in the corner beside me, as immobile as I, Mr. Alfred Hitchcock… I had heard he was the shyest man in L.A., but after we stood there for a while, I think he realized he had met his match.”

After a long silence, Hitchcock told her, “You can act.” Day’s costars agreed with Hitch. Called Clara Bixby by her closest friends and Jutt-Butt by Bob Hope (since “we could play a nice game of bridge on your ass”), she was adored by everyone from Jack Lemmon to James Cagney, Rock Hudson, and Jimmy Stewart. These men and many others uniquely contribute their remembrances of Day throughout Her Own Story, praising her while often talking even more about themselves. (They are actors, after all.)

Day is equally complimentary of these “charming men” and others, including her assertive childhood idol Ginger Rogers, the gentle and clever Louis Jourdan (whom Kaufman posits she may have had an affair with), and the hilarious and tightly wound Judy Garland, who hated flying as much as Day did.

But it wasn’t all sunshine and daisies, as Kaufman notes. As her fame grew, crews nicknamed the fastidious Day “Nora Neat” and branded her a “temperamental worrywart.” For her own part, Day refreshingly isn’t above occasional catty comments, calling her That Touch of Mink costar Cary Grant “very distant” and recalling of her ex-boyfriend Ronald Reagan, “when he wasn’t dancing, he was talking…talking at you, sort of long discourses on subjects that interested him.”

But the only true vitriol she shows for a fellow celebrity is directed at Kirk Douglas, her costar in 1949’s Young Man With a Horn. “Kirk never makes much of an effort toward anyone else. He’s pretty much wrapped up in himself,” she writes. Douglas for his part offers up his own brutal assessment to Hotchner. “That face that she shows the world, smiling…that’s just a mask,” Douglas writes. “Doris is just about the remotest person I know.”

Daddy Lessons

Looming over My Own Story is the ghost of Day’s father, William, whom she describes as a “rigid man…so unyielding, so bigoted.” As a child she overheard him having sex with her mother’s best friend, an affair which led to her parents’ divorce. “There were no goodbyes,” she recalled of the day he left. “My father didn’t ask for me and all I wanted to do was hide…in the draperies and watch him.”

She would not be reunited with him until 1956, during a trip back to Cincinnati to promote the film Julie. According to Day, she discovered that her racist, conservative father had transformed into a warm, gregarious bar owner, whose patrons were Cincinnati’s Black residents. On a visit to the bar, she met his fiancée, a Black woman named Luvenia, and joined them behind the bar to serve beer. “I felt totally enveloped by the warm glow of the beer, the loving, joyful people, and the beautiful change that had come over my father,” she writes. “It was without a doubt the best party I had ever been to.”

Kaufman, who appears much more critical and cynical about his subject—perhaps because unlike the clearly besotted Hotchner, he never interviewed the magnetic Day himself—throws cold water on the happy story, noting that Luvenia claimed she never heard from Day again.

But to her credit, Day is honest about her own cowardice, recalling a later meeting with her father at her aunt’s home in a racist, all-white neighborhood. His wife and a friend waited in the car. “I was dying to invite the women to come in, but it wasn’t my house,” Day recalled. “I regretted not having done that…I just stood there at a safe distance on the porch and watched them go. It was the last time I saw my father.”

Mr. Doris Day

“It is my nature to be trusting—I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Day writes. This blithe assertion is shocking when one considers what trusting her third husband, agent Marty Melcher, cost her.

The two, who married in 1951, had much in common: a commitment to the Christian Science faith, an obsession with the Dodgers and the Lakers, and a singular focus on her career. According to Kaufman, Day was not innocent in regards to Melcher’s legendary bad behavior; she let him play the bad cop professionally so she could maintain her sweetheart reputation.

In Her Own Story, Day again lets others do the dirty work. James Garner decries him as “a shallow, insecure hustler.” Bandleader Les Brown felt he was an “awful man, pushy, grating on the nerves, crass, money-hungry.” Melcher was so hated by Frank Sinatra that he was banned from the studio lot during the filming of 1954’s Young at Heart.

Day’s son, Terry, also eviscerates his adoptive father, recalling him as a bully who kept him from his mother, “treated her like a patient,” and forced himself into every aspect of his mom’s career. While Day admits to Melcher’s bullying ways and obsession with money, she consistently proves Kaufman’s assertion that she was often absent-minded (friends called her “Priscilla Preoccupied”) and incapable of dealing with anything unpleasant.

After Melcher’s death in 1968, it was Terry, now a hip, successful music producer, who had to tell his mother that her husband and his lawyer, Jerome Rosenthal, had left them in massive debt. Rosenthal had also financially ruined stars like Gordon MacRae, Kirk Douglas, and director Ross Hunter. Day was crushed by the revelation, writing, “Who was Marty Melcher? That was the question that constantly thrust itself at me. How could I have lived with a man for 17 years and not know who he was?”

A Dog’s Life

Amid sorting out the mess Melcher left behind, Day was dealt another blow while swimming in her pool in August 1969. Over the radio she heard that Sharon Tate and four others had been brutally murdered at 10050 Cielo Drive. With horror, she recognized that address as the former home of her son and Candice Bergen.

It was soon revealed that Charles Manson had targeted Terry’s former home because of a grudge he held against the respected record producer. For months, Day and Terry were under 24-hour protection, terrified they were next. “Life for both of us,” she writes, “had become just one casualty after another.”

Over the next few years, Terry would increasingly take care of his mother’s career. “Ninety percent of the time I have the parent role,” he writes in Her Own Story. After a successful run in TV, Day retreated almost totally into her own private world—caring for her beloved pack of rescue dogs (whom she describes in her autobiography in greater detail than she uses for most of her costars), and spending time in the splendid natural wonder of her compound in Carmel, California.

As Kaufman notes, she also maintained close relationships with many of her fans, who could shower her with love while she held them at a friendly distance. Day died in 2019, an effervescent enigma to the last. “‘Que Será, Será’…precisely stated my philosophy, a philosophy which has not been dented over the arrows of what occasionally has been rather outrageous misfortune,” she wrote in Her Own Story. “Whatever will be, will be, and I have made the best of it.”

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