I’m Well Again!—Doris Day

Dear Photoplay Readers—

I have a.terrible crush on the mailman. Also a heart bursting with sympathy for him. But I’m not so sure how he feels about me. For the last few weeks he has been staggering around like a blue-suited Santa under the load of get-well messages from Photoplay readers. I shouldn’t be at all astonished if he asked for a transfer—like to Alaska!

It’s natural for people to want to respond to expressions of concern and cheer, and | want you all to know that | am boundlessly grateful for your interest in my health. Today, | am so busy with my new picture, my husband, my youngster that illness seems a remote experience to me.

An actress can’t afford to be sick. She may be perfectly human in other ways and fall in and out of love and have children and go to fancy parties and traipse blithely around the world. But she can’t be sick. There’s nothing very appealing about illness, except possibly to doctors and pharmacists. And certainly as movie fans, you people don’t want to think of your favorite actors and actresses in any other condition than the buoyancy of health and happiness. Believe me, that’s exactly the condition actors and actresses like to be in and, indeed, have to be in.

When I started “Lucky Me” at Warners last November, Marty and my doctor and I decided that for the good of the picture and for my own continued well-being I should find more time to relax from the necessary and ever-present tension of the film sets. In view of the ten or more musical numbers in the picture, each of which is a couple of weeks’ workout in itself, this seemed like a sensible idea, and I tried to maintain a more restful schedule during the production.

Between scenes, if I wasn’t carried away too much with one of Phil Silvers’ capers, I rested in my dressing-room. At noon I scampered off the lot and drove the few blocks to my home where I lunched with Terry and my mother and relaxed in the comfortable surroundings of my own house.

If these things sound like the whimsical indulgences of a movie star, I want you to know that they were calculated to allow me to expend all my energy in the picture—and to make it the kind of vigorous and spirited picture that I like to make and that I hope you like to see.

It might be fun to be sick . . . breakfast in bed at noon, red roses in white vases, everybody administering to your requests and a box full of chocolate creams under the pillow. I’d give it more serious consideration, except for one thing: It would keep me away from pictures, away from the joys of being an actress—and from you, my fans, who have always been a source of deep inspiration to me.

So thanks for writing, “Please get well.” Now you know for sure that I am.

DORIS.

 

It is a quote. PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE MAY 1954