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Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, based on Jean Kerr’s best-selling book of the same title, was already in the works when Pillow Talk came out. Kerr was the envy of every literate woman in America in those days. Not only was she a successful author, she was married to Walter Kerr, drama critic for the New York Times, which meant that she attended every first night on Broadway for free.1
Her book consisted mostly of loveable anecdotes about her wacky, wacky sons,2 but the massive success of Pillow Talk demanded that the film be turned into a sex comedy. The result is tepid, to say the least. The film starts with Doris looking pretty damn sexy in a black silk slip, echoing the stockings scene in Pillow Talk. But David Niven, playing Walter Kerr, proves to be no Rock Hudson. He underplays so vigorously that he seems to be suffering from stomach flu, as though appearing in a film with a bourgeois broad like Doris bored the hell out of him, which it probably did. He wanders wanly through the wan plot, clearly wishing he could dash off to his club in London. The Kerrs are moving from their Manhattan apartment to a "dream house" in Connecticut, which naturally proves to be an enormous wreck. Doris seems to be more interested in the house than in David; a blonde bombshell suggests that she and David could be more than friends. Does Doris succeed in turning the house into a perfectly decorated showplace? Does David resist temptation? Does Doris sing a dippy song about Please Don't Eat the Daisies? You don’t have to see the film to find out.
Rock, instead of going to Connecticut, got the hell out of the country in his first non-Doris flick, Come September. As the film opens, he’s driving through the Italian countryside in a Rolls Royce convertible on the way to a villa he maintains for his private use one month a year, shacking up with Gina Lollobridgida, a gal who’s as Italian as Doris is American. Gina lacked the earth-mother monumentality of Sophia Loren, but she was a wonderfully urbane and sexy actress, who spent too much time in sexpot roles.3 When we first see her, she delivers a very funny parody of Italian "temperament," with lots of shouts, gestures, and flashing eyes. Rock and Gina are joined by Walter Slezak, Rock’s major domo, who secretly uses the villa as a hotel the other 11 months of the year. But after a promising start, Come September hits rock bottom and stays there with the arrival of both Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee. Apparently, the producers felt the film needed a Beach Blanket Bingo punch. Old man Rock is forced to babysit a bunch of college punks, including a sadly misused Joel Grey as "Beagle," a very long way indeed from Cabaret. Bobby lectures Rock on how a fellow really needs to respect a girl, and Sandra explains to Gina that only a good girl gets a ring. Worst of all, Darin sings.4
Clearly, audiences wouldn’t be satisfied with such ersatz Rock and Doris. They wanted the real kitsch, and they got it in Lover Come Back, a near-exact remake of the first film. The two play rival advertising executives who have "heard" about each other but have never met. Doris is the "good" advertising executive, who wins clients through hard work and brilliant ad campaigns.5 Rock is the "bad" advertising executive, who swaggers around town in a white Chrysler Imperial convertible6 and wins clients by taking them to the "Bunny Club," a nightspot where the chorus girls all dress as bunnies.7 Rock keeps the most giving of the girls (Edie Adams, in a trivial role that makes no use of her talents) on a line by promising to use her in an ad campaign. When she gets too persistent, he puts her in a series of fake ads for a made-up product, "VIP." Of course, Rock never plans to run the ads, but when his boss, Tony Randall (once more the millionaire wastrel but this time riding around in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce), hears about it, he has to create a product to go along with the campaign. Doris, smarting from the loss of a major client, also gets wind of the VIP campaign and decides to outbid Rock for the account. Rock hires an eccentric Greenwich Village scientist to invent VIP. Doris, visiting the lab, mistakes Rock for the scientist. Rock goes along with the gag, pretending to be the innocent once more8, and lets Doris "woo" him, driving her to greater and greater heights by telling her about all the awful things that other ad executive is making him do: "He took me to this club, and he made me smoke this funny cigarette that didn’t have any writing on it." To keep scientist Rock happy, Doris takes him to a strip club, where they watch "Sigrid Freud, the Id Girl" pluck daisies off her breasts.9 Eventually, Doris takes Rock to her apartment. While he waits for her in bed, Doris presses a champagne bottle between her breasts and sings "Surrender." Once again, however, Rock’s diabolic deceit goes unrewarded. A timely phone call alerts Doris to the true state of affairs. She slyly suggests a midnight trip to the beach for a nude swim. When Rock undresses, she leaves him in the lurch. But by the power of VIP, Rock manages to get Doris married and pregnant in the course of one night.10 Doris annuls the marriage (she doesn’t know she’s pregnant, of course), setting the scene for hilarious, delivery-room nuptials. (We can only assume that Doris never noticed that she was pregnant until she went into labor.)
Doris went from Lover Come Back to That Touch of Mink, with none other than Cary Grant, Hollywood’s aging but still-reigning dream man. The film has a very heavy Manhattan flavor, looking back to the forties and even the thirties rather than ahead to the sixties. Grant plays a skirt-chasing near-billionaire who’s used to getting anything and everything he wants.11 Doris is a working gal once more but distinctly low-rent this time around, so low-rent that she’s actually on her way to a job interview when Cary’s chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce splashes mud on her dress. Gig Young takes over Tony Randall’s adorable weakling role, playing Grant’s economic advisor, a former Princeton professor who’s been lured from the innocent groves of academe by Cary’s bucks to serve Mammon. Young gets a lot of screen time, bemoaning Grant’s ability to seduce anyone with "That Touch of Mink."
Doris, of course, gets that touch of mink, and a whole lot more, but she earns it the hard way, by keeping her knees together until the ring goes on. That Touch of Mink is a painfully bad film, one of the worst of the series. Grant, though he still looks and sounds great, is practically immobile, and seriously unbelievable as a ladies man. Doris is at her whiniest (when it looks like she’ll actually have to go to bed with Cary, she comes down with hives). Young, trapped in an "author’s mouthpiece" role, can’t shut up.
Bad as That Touch of Mink is, it’s topped by The Thrill of It All, scripted by Carl Reiner and Larry Gelbart and hopefully the worst thing either of them did. Doris, tiring of old man Cary, is hooked up with young James Garner, fresh from his TV triumphs as Maverick.12 The Thrill of It All is a clumsy satire on advertising and television. Doris, married to Manhattan obstetrician Jim, is a wonderful mom who ends up as a TV spokeswoman for soap because she’s so honest and natural. Success, however, goes to her head. She’s so excited by the glamour of her career that she starts neglecting her own children! Fortunately, helping Jim deliver a baby (in the backseat of a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce) brings her to her senses.
NEXT: Rock knows nothing about fishing.
NOTES
1. In the fifties, Broadway consisted of more than Cats and Love! Valor! Compassion! Some plays had intellectual and even aesthetic pretensions. We’re told in the film that Kerr, as drama critic for the Times, is "one of the seven critics with the power to make or break any play on Broadway." If you can name the other six, you’re even older than I am.
2. When they ate the daisies someone brought as a house-warming gift, their defense was that she hadn’t told them not to.
3. For a look at early, bounteous, black-and-white Gina, see the cult favorite Beat the Devil, with Humphrey Bogart, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre, and Jennifer Jones. The first half of this film, written by Truman Capote and directed by John Huston, is extremely funny. For camp Gina, see Solomon and Sheba, with Yul Brynner (he’s Solomon, she’s Sheba).
4. A song he wrote himself, "Multiplication," which remarkably enough is not about mathematics.
5. A scene showing Doris at work with her creative team contains a classic fifties fag joke. Doris, looking at sketches from her art director, says "They’re great, Jerry, but you’ll have to do something about the color. I mean, who has a lilac floor in their kitchen?" "Well, I do," he sniffs.
6. The Imperial, fully the Cadillac Eldorado’s equal in baroque impracticality, is virtually unknown today, for the simple reason that Chrysler found it almost impossible to sell the damn things. Overpriced and undersprung, the Imperial was as hard to handle as an aircraft carrier, and just as expensive. The few that remain are almost all owned by TV funnyman Jay Leno, probably because the Imperial is the only car ever built that actually makes Leno’s chin look small. Pictures of the Imperial, and Rock, in action are available at The Imperial Club's Lover Come Back page. The Imperial Club’s homepage lets you download fifties TV commercials for the Imperial.
7. Twenty-somethings may not be familiar with the string of Playboy Clubs that once dotted the nation. The clubs, which featured "Playboy Bunnies," waitresses serving drinks in armored corsets, were, ironically, victims of the sexual revolution that Hefner championed so vigorously. Despite the explosion of nude entertainment that started in the sixties, Hefner insisted on keeping his girls in corsets, and suffered the consequences.
8. Rock’s passive-aggressive approach to seduction is clearly based on Tony Curtis’s wooing of Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot.
9. Unfortunately, we don’t get to see her act. Her nickname plays off of that of 'twenties "It Girl" Clara Bow ("It" meaning sex appeal).
10. The newly invented VIP is a candy that gets you drunk.
11. Cary appears to have moved into Rock’s old office, since they share the same jade Chinese horse.
12. Maverick, produced by Warner Bros., was one of a series of shows that helped destroy the "Golden Age" of live TV. Once producers realized that people were willing to see the same show twice, the film studios took over and production shifted from New York to LA. In The Thrill of It All, TV is still centered in New York, because that’s the way Reiner and Gelbart remembered it from their days with Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows in the early fifties. A number of Maverick episodes are now available on video, featuring once-budding, now-aging guest stars like Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, and Roger Moore.
