Doris Day wasn’t the innocent ingenue of her on-screen persona. Nor was she the “world’s oldest virgin,” as the actress was dubbed later in her career. In fact, even when she got married at the age of 16, she wasn’t a virgin. And that husband? He wasn’t her first lover, either.
“I was hardly ahead of my time,” Day told WWD in 1976. “Life was the same then, only people didn’t talk about it. And you have to realize I was a band singer on the road with a band at 16. I wasn’t living at home with mama and papa, so I don’t think that should surprise anyone….I really don’t know where I got that goody-two-shoes reputation, unless it was some of those awful movies I made.”
Day, a sexy vamp? Who knew?
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Also surprising was the often painful, at times depressing, life she had led. The Cincinnati native discovered her father was having an affair with her mother’s best friend — “I never told mother, but I sort of understood even at that age” — and, at age 13, got her legs smashed in a car crash. Her first husband, meanwhile, turned out to be a sadomasochist, who beat her while she was pregnant and threatened her life. Her second marriage lasted less than a year. Day’s third husband mismanaged nearly $20 million of her earnings and left her in $450,000 in debt; she only found out after he died, 17 years after they married.
“Look, everything that happened to me was supposed to happen,” she said. “Right now, I have a very good time and I’m very peaceful. [People would] rather see me hostile and bitter. But I’m not.”