To all appearances, Doris Day (1922-2019), America’s original "girl next door," moved easily from one success to the next. There might be some truth to this, but the full picture only emerges when you add Day's curiosity, discipline and conscientiousness to the mix. 

As a child, her talent, hard work, and dedication to dance won her fame in her hometown. While still a teenager, she sang with the best big bands in the country, recording hit after hit. After going solo, her voice was broadcast coast to coast, and she sang on the most popular radio shows of the era before hosting a show of her own. Her recording career, in which she demonstrated an effortless mastery of big band, pop, show tunes, jazz, and ballads, lasted more than two decades. In Hollywood, she landed the first film role for which she auditioned, and, immediately thereafter, signed a contract with Warner Bros. Studios. She went on to become a movie star. In the late 1960s/early '70s, she had a successful television sitcom, and, after her retirement from the entertainment industry, founded several non-profits dedicated to animal welfare. In 2004, she was awarded the United States' highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom, for her work as an animal rights activist. Day said, to biographer A.E. Hotchner in Doris Day: Her Own Story, “I have never had any doubts in my ability in anything I have ever undertaken… Dancing, singing, acting—the demand seems to create a rise in me that satisfies it. It is not a conscious effort. It is not anything I have control over. It is automatic and natural and as reliable as my breathing.”

Day was born Doris Mary Ann von Kappelhoff in Cincinnati, Ohio, to first generation German-American parents. Recalling the day her father left her childhood home, she told Hotchner, “...my big dream as a girl [was] that my parents would have a happy marriage and that I would someday have a happy marriage too. It was the only real ambition I ever had—not to be a dancer or Hollywood movie star, but to be a housewife in a good marriage.” About her wholesome image, Day said, “At ten years of age I discovered that my father was having an affair with the mother of my best friend. Divorce followed. At thirteen, I was in an auto that was hit by a train, and that abruptly ended my promising career as a dancer... I was married at seventeen to a psychopathic sadist. When my third husband died, a man I had been married to for seventeen years, I discovered that not only had he secretly contrived to wipe out the millions I had earned, but he left me with a debt of a half-million dollars. My reward for a lifetime of hard work. Yes, sir, America’s la-di-da happy virgin!” Three out of Day's four marriages ended in divorce.

Kappelhoff began dancing while in kindergarten. She took lessons at several schools in the Cincinnati area during her childhood, and, in her early teens, was part of the locally famous dancing duo Doris and Jerry (Doherty). After spending a summer performing in and around Hollywood with the famed Fanchon & Marco troupe, the duo’s mothers decided to relocate there. Just before they were to leave, on Friday October 13th, 1937, a car in which Kappelhoff was riding was struck by a train, crushing her right leg. This injury put an end to her dreams of becoming a professional dancer. While at home recovering, living with her mother above her uncle’s bar, she began singing along with the radio, and to the jukebox downstairs, emulating her idol Ella Fitzgerald’s clear-as-a-bell enunciation and tone. Her ever-encouraging mother hired a vocal coach, Grace Raine, who, astounded by Kappelhoff’s perfect pitch, clear diction, and seamless modulations from key to key, gave her three lessons a week for the price of one. Raine, said Day, "taught me the importance of singing the lyrics correctly. 'When you sing the words to this song,' she'd say... 'imagine that you're singing to one person, just one, a very special person, and that you're singing it in that someone's ear.'”

At age 15, Kappelhoff found professional jobs as a vocalist through her connection to Raine, first on Cincinnati’s WLW radio program Carlin's Carnival, and then in a local restaurant, Charlie Yee's Shanghai Inn. In 1939, her radio performances caught the ear of Barney Rapp, and she began working for him in his Cincinnati club, The Sign of the Drum. Told by Rapp that "Kappelhoff" was too long for marquees, she adopted the surname "Day" from the song "Day After Day.” Of her new name, Day told Hotchner, “I never did like it. Still don’t. I think it’s a phony name.” (Over the years, friends and colleagues gave her other names: the one that stuck, Clara Bixby, was given her by actor Billy De Wolfe. Rock Hudson called her Eunice and she called him Ernie, and Gordon MacRae called her Do-Do.) It was at Rapp’s club that she met her first husband Al Jorden, a trombonist whom Day called “one of the best musicians in the band”. With the exception of the birth of son Terry, this marriage was a catastrophe; Jorden was a violent, jealous, and physically abusive man. They would marry in 1941 and divorce two years later. 

In the spring of 1940, Bob Crosby (brother of Bing) hired Day as singer for his world class swing band, which was voted the third best in the country, after Benny Goodman’s and Glenn Miller’s. They toured the United States extensively, and that summer, at a date at The Strand in New York City, she was spotted and hired by Les Brown. Day made her first recordings with Brown that year. Although many urged her not to, she took a two-year absence in 1941 to marry Jorden; during these years she gave birth to a son, and sang as a staff singer on Cincinnati’s WLW, which broadcast nationwide. By 1943, in the midst of World War II, Day was once again touring, and performing at military hospitals and for war bond drives. Recording a total of 42 songs with Les Brown and His Band of Renown, she released her first number one hit, Ben Homer, Bud Green, and Brown’s "Sentimental Journey" in early 1945. Recalling the song in the documentary Doris Day: A Sentimental Journey, Day said, “Just thinking about it makes me cry. The servicemen… That song said so much.”She had six other top-ten hits with Brown in 1945 and '46, including Vic Mizzy and Manny Curtis’ "My Dreams Are Getting Better All The Time." 

Day went solo in 1947, signing a recording contract with Columbia Records. Her concurrent radio work with Frank Sinatra on Your Hit Parade led to divorce from second husband, saxophonist George Weidler, who did not want to be known as Mr. Doris Day. From 1948 to 1950, she appeared weekly on Bob Hope’s Hollywood-based radio program, doing two nationwide tours with Hope in 1949. The Doris Day Radio Show premiered on CBS in 1952, and ran for a little over a year.

A tearful, post-divorce performance at a Hollywood party of George and Ira Gerswin’s "Embraceable You" impressed songwriters Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn, who recommended Day for a role in Romance on the High Seas (1948); after a successful audition, she was cast by director Michael Curtiz. Her popularity in films, a box office reign that ran from about 1955 to 1965, would drive her success as a recording artist. From 1948 to 1956, Columbia released singles and albums of songs featured in her movies, albeit different versions—for contractual reasons—than recorded in the Warner Bros. films. An early example, Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn’s “It’s Magic,” from Romance on the High Seas hit number two on the Billboard charts in 1948. From 1950-1952, Day had four Top 5 movie albums, three of which charted at number one, and more than a dozen charted singles. One of these albums, Young Man With a Horn, released in 1950, paired Day with trumpeter Harry James. Another album released concurrently with the movie in 1950, Tea for Two, illustrated Day’s aptitude for showtunes, and included Vincent Youmans and Irving Caesar’s “I Want to Be Happy.”

Day married third husband, agent Marty Melcher, in 1951. In what seemed like a good idea at the time,  she left control of her finances to him. After Melcher’s death in 1968, she found that Melcher and his lawyer Jerome Rosenthal had lost all of her money, an estimated $22 million, and she was now $500,000 in debt. In 1974, Day, in a lawsuit against Rosenthal, was awarded $22.8 million—the largest amount ever awarded in a California civil suit up to that time. Rosenthal was disbarred in 1987.

Day had many signature songs over the long course of her career. Sammy Fail and Paul Francis Webster's “Secret Love,” from the album Calamity Jane hit number one in 1954. Day’s most famous song, Jay Livingston and Ray Evans’ “Que Sera, Sera” was introduced in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The Man Who Knew Too Much; it received the 1956 Academy Award for Best Original Song. (And, from 1968 to 1973, it was the theme song for her television series, The Doris Day Show.) “Everybody Loves a Lover,” by Richard Adler and Robert Allen, was a hit single in 1958. Also worth a mention is “Move Over Darling,” a song written in 1963 for the film by Day’s son Terry Melcher, along with Hal Kanter and Joe Lubin.

Despite Day’s numerous successful hit singles and movie-themed albums, the excellence of her musical legacy is ultimately to be found in her concept albums, most of which she made with Columbia Records, beginning in 1956 (Day By Day) and ending in 1967 (The Love Album). A match was made in musical heaven when arranger/composer Paul Weston stepped in on the first two, Day By Day and Day By Night (1957), employing some of the best big band musicians around. Weston had previously worked as musical director at Capitol Records, developing the “mood music” genre, and arranging and conducting for wife Jo Stafford. Day, Weston recalled, “was a very expressive singer. She could take a lyric, and to some extent act it out, while never losing sight of the musical part.”

Frank DeVol, with his big band background, was the best arranger of Day’s up-tempo songs during this time, as evidenced by her next two albums, Hooray for Hollywood (1958) and Cuttin’ Capers (1959). The latter perfectly reflects the optimistic mood of post-war America, in feel-good songs like Ray Henderson, Sam M. Lewis, and Joe Young’s “I'm Sittin’ On Top of the World,” and Harold Arlen, Ira Gershwin, and Edgar Yipsel Harburg’s joyous “Let’s Take a Walk Around the Block.” Tom Santopietro, in Considering Doris Day, explained, "Americans believed that they were sitting on top of the world, heading to the promised land of the 'nice' wide open suburbs, and generally living in the best place on the planet. Doris Day expressed that unbounded self-sufficiency and optimism..."

Duet (1962), with Andre Previn, is a spare album that contains some of the jazziest arrangements of Day's career. Here, she is accompanied by Previn on piano, Red Mitchell/Joe Mondragon on bass, and Frank Capp/Larry Bunker on drums. Bernice Petkere’s “Close Your Eyes” is a revelation (and one of my favorite Day recordings), as is Previn’s full-out “Control Yourself." Day explored religious themes on her next album, You’ll Never Walk Alone (1962), Jim Harbert conducting. She noted, “My favorite things are hymns. I enjoyed singing hymns more than anything.” Day, born Catholic, belonged to the Christian Science Church for nearly two decades before leaving to practice a more personal form of spirituality.

Love Him (1963), was produced by son Terry Melcher, with lush orchestral arrangements by conductor Tommy Oliver. This is Day’s most contemporary sounding album and a perfect example of early ‘60s popular music. Highlights include Buddy Johnson’s “Since I Fell For You” and Riz Ortolani, Nino Oliviero and Norman Newell’s “More.” With a Smile and a Song (1964), arranged/conducted by Allyn Ferguson with Jimmy Joyce and his Children’s Chorus, consists of sunny, optimistic songs that closely mirrored Day's wholesome image. Leigh Harline and Frank Churchill’s, “With a Smile and a Song,” was featured in Walt Disney’s animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and in the stage adaptation of the movie.