I honestly routinely forget she’s still alive. In my head, I think she died some time back in the ’90s. And given her stated antipathy of funerals, I don’t think I’ll do an obituary of her when she dies. I don’t think she’d like that. But Doris Day is still going at 96, as of this month. She’s been retired since before I was born; it seems she was in the running for several prominent roles, including Jessica Fletcher, and turned them down because she had no intention of starting her career up again. At this point, you figure she can just live on residuals from “Que Sera Sera.”

Initially, she wanted to be a dancer. In 1937, she was in a car accident that actually left her in a wheelchair for a while, destroying any chance of a professional dancing career. After that, she began singing. She took eight months of singing lessons, and during that time, she got her first job. By 1939, she was singing with successful bands; she later said the happiest time in her career was singing with Les Brown. By 1945, she had a hit with “Sentimental Journey.” Her first film was in 1948.

In short, her career is older than my mother, who is not a young woman herself. There’s an episode of M*A*S*H where Radar spends an OR session as a disc jockey, and Colonel Potter repeatedly requests “Sentimental Journey” because of a run-in with Doris Day back during World War II. Harry Morgan was older than Day, of course; he was born in 1911. But Colonel Potter was shown at the time as not being a young man, and Doris Day was even older when the show aired than she was when the episode is set. Though I suppose she was still known primarily as a singer in the early ’50s, which is before those Rock Hudson movies.

Day is a staunch Republican. (She apparently dated Ronald Reagan briefly after his divorce, but it was in the days when he himself was still a Democrat.) On the other hand, she insists that Rock Hudson is in Heaven if there is one and does not seem inclined to condemn him for his sexuality. She does claim that she didn’t know he was gay until he came out after his AIDS diagnosis. More importantly than her party affiliation, though, she became a devoted animal activist on the set of The Man Who Knew Too Much and has done good work with animals for decades.

There’s more to Doris Day than those Rock Hudson movies. Certainly there’s more to her than the execrable The Thrill of It All, a movie I can only recommend if you want to see how badly Hollywood treated women in the ’50s and ’60s. Or The Touch of Mink, where she essentially prostitutes herself to Cary Grant. But she’s really quite good in films such as, yes, The Man Who Knew Too Much. She doesn’t see the point to movies that aren’t happy; she doesn’t think people want to go to movies to be miserable. But personally, I prefer the movies that have a bit of plot to some of her chipper comedies, where she’s so energetic as to come off as shrill at times. And where, let’s be honest, the sexual dynamic is not great.

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