She embodied an image she hated, and for much of her life, sought a familial ideal never achieved, becoming, in the process, the biggest box-office draw in the movie business at one time before simply fading away. Doris Day became a phenomenon of sight and sound, a hit song machine in the first part of her career and, in the second, Hollywood’s No. 1 female box-office star and the epitome of the girl next door. Her résumé composed an American archetype – the pristine, bright-eyed sweetheart of America’s neo-Victorian 1950s, even if she was far from her on-screen type. Though often successfully
