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These things happened: Tony Randall picked Rock Hudson up in a bar with the line "Need a light, cowboy?" Rock Hudson pretended to be gay to piss off Doris Day. ("You’re a fashion designer? That must be fascinating — all those fabrics and textures.") Rock went into a ladies room and signed up for an exam from an obstetrician. Rock and Tony spent two weeks alone together in a hunting lodge, and were pursued by a sexually aroused bullmoose. Rock and Tony went to bed together. (Sample dialogue: "Your feet are cold!" "Why don’t you cut your toenails?") Rock ran around in the nude wearing nothing but a fur coat, and was mistaken for a queer.
Welcome to the wacky, wacky world of late fifties, early sixties big-screen comedy, a world in which anything could happen, except the loss of the heroine’s virginity. During this period, Doris Day was simultaneously the biggest moneymaker and the biggest joke in Hollywood, thanks to the massive success of Pillow Talk and its numerous spinoffs.1 Doris kept her knees and elbows together from 1959 to 1968, calling it quits with Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?, in which she parodied her image as "The Great American Virgin" and finally consented to lose it.
Legend has it that Rock and Doris made a near-endless string of virgo intacta sex comedies. In fact, they only made three films together: Pillow Talk (1959), Lover Come Back (1961), and Send Me No Flowers (1964, by which time they were married and, presumably, doing it). Like Astaire and Rogers, they really had no desire to be a team; unlike their predecessors, they had the box-office clout to break up the act. However, each made similar films with other costars. Rock did Man’s Favorite Sport? with Paula Prentiss and Come September and Strange Bedfellows with Gina Lollobrigida, while Doris did Please Don't Eat the Daisies with David Niven, That Touch of Mink with Cary Grant, and The Thrill of it All and Move Over, Darling with James Garner. Doris was married in all of these except That Touch of Mink, but in the public’s mind the hymen remained unbroken, so inherently virginal was her presence.2
Only gray-hairs can remember the avalanche of ridicule that was poured on poor Doris for her pains. "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin," snickered Oscar Levant.3 Seeing films like Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back today, the first question that comes to mind is how anyone could buy it. How could anyone believe that baby-faced big boy twenty-something Rock Hudson could have the hots for forty-something goody-goody Doris Day?4 How could they believe that any forty-something would fight to preserve her chastity in the face of such temptation? And how could they believe that a forty-something career gal living in New York City would have any chastity left to preserve?
The answer was that Doris’ audience wanted to buy it. They were largely thirty- and forty-somethings themselves; they were the last generation of Americans to grow up without the tube and without the pill, women who spent their youth going to the movies at least twice a week. They knew what they wanted. They wanted fantasy. They wanted to see simple, honest, plain-Jane Doris in a fabulous wardrobe,5 being pursued by movie gods like David Niven, Rock Hudson, Cary Grant, and James Garner. They got their wish, and it made Doris rich.
Women adored Doris because she was glamorous, but nonthreatening. Female movie stars of the fifties fell heavily into the "bombshell" category — Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor, not to mention foreigners like Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobridgida, Brigitte Bardot, and Anita Ekberg. By the late fifties, Jane was running out of gas, Marilyn and Liz were too big to work regularly, and the foreign gals were just too damn sexy. There was an opening for an old-fashioned girl with a touch of class, and Doris took it.
Pillow Talk took the old-fashioned moralizing of pre-TV Hollywood and combined it with what passed for hip in 1959 — a string of Broadway cliches dealing largely with psychiatrists, swingers, and the occasional fag. Watching the films Rock and Doris did together, one can watch cultural assumptions of this world start to come apart, watch the great cultural shift from Manhattan to LA, from urban style to suburban comfort, take place.
In Pillow Talk, New York still reigns supreme. To let us know that the film is about S-E-X, it opens with Doris pulling a stocking on a long, elegant leg.6 She lives alone in a fabulous New York apartment on Park Avenue. Rock lives in an adjoining building. The basic gag of the film is that they share a "party line,"7 which means that poor Doris can hardly get a word in edgewise, thanks to all the "last night was wonderful, when can I see you again" calls that bad-boy Rock gets from his multitudinous girlfriends. Doris accuses Rock of being a sex maniac, while he patronizingly expresses sympathy for her situation: "The only thing sadder than a woman who lives alone is one who thinks she’s happy that way."
As swinging Broadway songwriter Bret Allen, Rock naturally has his pick of the chicks.8 To help things along, he has special switches built into his couch to dim the lights, lock the door, and turn on some mood music. The final switch, of course, converts the couch into a bed.9 Doris, on the other hand, is a nonswinging career gal, an interior decorator with a top firm. (Her oh-so-French boss is "Pierot," played by Marcel Dalio.10) She’s being pursued by Tony Randall, a thrice-divorced, neurotic playboy with eight million dollars burning a hole in his pocket. He enters the film in a Mercedes 300SL11, which he tries to give Doris as an engagement present.12
Despite the fact that they live next to one another, and talk daily, if unwillingly, on the phone, Rock and Doris have never met. Tony knows them both (he backs Rock’s musicals), and hears each bitch about the other, but never tumbles to the fact that they’re the two with the party line. It’s Rock who finally figures out who Doris is, overhearing her defending her honor at the "Copa del Rio" nightclub against an assault by Nick Adams, giving a thoroughly unconvincing performance as a Harvard Phi Bet. One glimpse of her twitching fanny13 on the dance floor sends Rock’s libido into high, and he quickly concocts the scheme of wooing her under the guise of "Rex Stetson," a wealthy but naïve Texan.
The ruse offers rich comic possibilities. Rock as Bret can pretend
to Doris that he’s been listening in on her conversations with
Rex, and warn her about what her cowpoke plans on poking.14
Doris angrily defends both her virtue and Rex’s, who naturally
resists all the temptations that Doris, spurred on by Bret, puts in
his path. When she triumphantly reports this to Bret, he slyly suggests
that perhaps Rex is riding sidesaddle.15
Then, when Rex starts talking about fabrics and recipes, a nervous Doris
encourages him to be more forthcoming, and he gladly obliges. As they
drive out to Connecticut in Rock’s convertible, Doris sings "Possess Me" on the voiceover. To the surprise
of absolutely no one, of course, she discovers Rock’s true identity
prior to party time and returns to New York with only her illusions
shattered.
The debacle brings Rock to his senses. He realizes that he truly loves Doris, which he proves by dragging her out of her bed (a scene that was used in the trailer to make the film look sexier than it is) and carrying her through the streets of New York over to his place, where, presumably, they’ll get married.16
NEXT: Doris looking pretty damn sexy
NOTES
1. Pillow Talk was the second-largest-grossing film of the fifties, surpassed only by The Glenn Miller Story, an exercise in WWII nostalgia. Miller, who died in a plane crash over the English Channel while serving in the army (as a bandleader), had the most successful big band of the era. You may not know it, but you’re probably familiar with many of his hits, like "In the Mood" and "Chattanooga Choo Choo." If you like these tunes, don’t bother to see The Glenn Miller Story, which is a serious bore. Instead, track down Sun Valley Serenade and Orchestra Wives, which feature the real Glenn Miller and, more importantly, the fabulous Nicholas Brothers. Sun Valley Serenade, which teams a deliciously young and saucy Dorothy Dandridge with the Brothers, is the better of the two. It also features a deliciously young and saucy Milton Berle (talk about "must see"!) and Sonja Henie, who practically invented modern figure skating. She was also John F. Kennedy’s first celebrity lay, back in 1940 (too bad he didn’t strangle her instead).
2. Paula, though she was almost 20 years younger than Doris, found it hard to play a virgin with a straight face. Gina, of course, didn’t even try.
3. Levant appeared with Doris in her first film, Romance on the High Seas (1948), so maybe he knew what he was talking about.
4. Naturally, I’m calculating Rock’s age in movie-star years. Rock was actually 34 when Pillow Talk was made. If you can believe online biographies, Doris was only a year ahead of Rock. However, her puffy cheeks, prissy attitude, and "monied matron" wardrobe made her seem much older.
5. Doris wears three different fur-trimmed full-length coats during the course of Pillow Talk, along with two matching fur hat-and-muff sets (mink and leopard). She also has a full-time maid, who apparently spends her days dusting Doris’s shoes.
6. Back in the 'fifites, women wore stockings and garter belts in real life, not just in MTV videos. Panty hose didn’t come along until the sixties, when it helped make the miniskirt possible.
7. In the olden times, people didn’t have individual phone lines. However, the idea that this would still be the case in 1959 on Park Avenue is the second least believable detail from Pillow Talk.
8. He sings the same song, "You Are My Inspiration," obligingly written to accommodate his four-note range, to each of them
9. This gag takes off from an urban legend of the era, Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Pad, with its famous circular bed, which featured a built-in bar, stereo, etc. Hef, who didn’t need Viagra in those days, rarely got out from between the covers.
10. Twenty years earlier, Dalio had a better role in a better picture, the Jew Rosenthal in Jean Renoir’s classic The Grand Illusion.
11. The fifties-era 300SL was one of the most elegant cars ever built, though Tony is driving the convertible, not the even more desirable "gull-wing" coupe, with the doors hinged in the roof rather than the side.
12. Randall appeared in all three of the pictures Doris and Rock did together, playing (of course) exactly the same character. Something there was about Randall that made it hard for him to play the romantic lead. In the early 1950s TV show Mr. Peepers, he played second banana to Wally Cox!
13. One has to admit that Doris shows an elegant, and elegantly tanned, back in this scene. Doris broke into show biz as a song and dance girl, and she kept her dancer’s figure into the sixties. In one of her early musicals, Tea for Two, she does quite a bit of dancing, to little effect. She was competent, but not interesting.
14. Such an explicit pun would not occur in a fifties film.
15. This too would not occur in a fifties film. Ernie Kovacs’s once-famous line, "You show me a cowboy who rides sidesaddle and I’ll show you a gay caballero," was seriously blue material, for nightclub use only.
16. Fortunately, modest Doris had gone to bed wearing pajamas the night before. For further protection, she wraps herself in an electric blanket.
