A Doris Kind of Day

It’s amazing how certain twists of fate, good and bad, can impact a Hollywood career (perhaps many of us worker bees have the same sort of influences in our lives but, since no one really gives a hoot about us, it isn’t as closely examined or as well known!)

Today’s sunny subject, Miss Doris Day, has had several curves head her way, but a positive outlook and some dogged determination (not to mention a significant work ethic) got her through and helped her provide entertainment to millions of people.

Born in the Cincinnati, Ohio suburb of Evanston in 1922, Doris Kappelhoff (as she was then known) was the daughter of German immigrants. Her father, a music teacher, was an alcoholic, a fact that eventually broke up her parents’ marriage. Day wanted more than anything to be a dancer. In fact, she and Vera-Ellen, who hailed from nearby Norwood, carpooled to the same ballet class.

In the mid-30s, Day and a male partner had formed a successful dance duo and by 1937 (when she was still only 15!) they made plans to head to Hollywood. Sadly, in what was one of her first major setbacks, the night before their departure, she was involved in a serious car accident that damaged her legs!

Her dance career now in shambles, Doris turned to singing as an avocation and took lessons. Within a couple of years, she was singing locally to good response and finally wound up on local bandleader Barney Rapp’s stage. Her first song for him, Day After Day, was what inspired him to rename her Doris Day. She met and married a trombonist in Rapp’s band, but it was a dismal scenario with him beating her while pregnant with their son, among other things. They divorced by 1943.

In 1945, she was singing with Les Brown and recorded the song Sentimental Journey, which became a smash hit, striking a chord with soldiers returning from WWII as well as their waiting wives and girlfriends. She then married a second husband, but the marriage didn’t even last a year. She continued to tour heavily with hit records springing forth here and there.

In another one of those twists of fate (this time a good one), she was in Los Angeles, but readying to come home to Cincinnati, weary of the demands of being a traveling girl singer. Her agent persuaded her to attend a party at which she was coerced, almost against her will, into singing Embraceable You. Her emotional delivery captivated the host Jules Styne and his writing partner Sammy Cahn and they decided to push for her to appear in their forthcoming film Romance on the High Seas, which had lost its leading lady Betty Hutton due to pregnancy.

Day now had a leading role in a colorful musical film and a contract with Warner Brothers! She was paired three times in a row with husky, but charming, Jack Carson, also working thrice, later, with handsome Gordon MacRae. In 1950, she was given a dramatic role in the Kirk Douglas/Lauren Bacall film Young Man With a Horn. Doris felt shut out by the other two stars and didn’t enjoy the experience at all. It would be a recurring situation in her life that dramatic roles tended to wind up being unpleasant projects to work on for one reason or another.
Day married for a third time in 1951, this time to Martin Melcher, a man who would become her manager and to whom she would stay married the longest. He adopted her son from the first marriage, who then went by the name Terry Melcher.

She continued to make many colorful and bright musicals, offering cheerful, perky performances, but ones that were generally pretty undemanding. Though Day had taken dancing and singing lessons, she had not taken acting lessons and adopted a very honest and genuine style that came from feeling the scenes as much as she was able to had they been occurring with her in real life.

In 1953, she made Calamity Jane, a zesty musical that cast her as the tomboyish, rough and tumble title character. Her garb, mostly consisting of buckskin and an old hat, along with scenes showing her setting up house with a female friend, did much to engender a massive lesbian following. This was further encouraged by the tune Secret Love, which won the Oscar that year as Best Song. She recorded the number in one take, the producer exclaiming that there was no point in doing it again because she’d never do it any better.

James Cagney was her costar in the film Love Me or Leave Me, a bio-pic of singer Ruth Etting, and though Ava Gardner had wanted to play the role, Cagney pushed to have Doris in it. She was hailed for her ability to enact dramatic scenes within the framework of a heavily musical film. This movie also presented Day in a somewhat sexier light, with more figure flattering (and in some ways revealing) costumes.

Next was the chance to work for The Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, in The Man Who Knew Too Much. She played the ex-singer spouse of doctor James Stewart, on an extended trip with their young son through Marrakech and other locales. When a mysterious man befriends them and later dies in their presence, it kicks off a sequence of events, not the least of which is the kidnapping of their boy.

Day, who looks appealing in tailored Edith Head clothes, went places in the role that dredged up hysterical feelings and it’s a very authentic portrayal. She, however, having little or no acting training, felt insecure about her work, especially since Hitch said almost nothing to her during filming. Finally, distraught, she went to him and asked to be taken off the picture since she was not giving him what he wanted. He replied, in typically dry fashion, that the reason he hadn’t given her any direction or spoken to her was because she was doing exactly what he wanted her to! After that, she was able to relax and continue on with more confidence.

The script required her to sing (and sing!) a song as part of the rescue attempt of her son and she reluctantly recorded Que Sera Sera, a ditty that she found lacking. Her remark at the time was, “That’s the last time you’ll ever hear that song,” but it became a big success, won an Oscar as Best Song that year and eventually became her own personal theme music!

During the filming of Man, Day witnessed some unkind treatment towards various animals being used in and around the location site of Morocco and it awakened in her the desire to guard against cruelty to animals. Though this wouldn’t completely manifest itself in every way at first, it was the start of a new chapter in her life nonetheless.

That same year, 1956, she took on another dramatic role, this one featuring no singing at all (other than over the opening credits.) She played the title character in Julie, an early (and overwrought) example of a stalker flick, in which Louis Jourdan obsessively tracks and chases Day all over the place as she runs and runs for her life (check out this hooty magazine page featuring her on the go!)

The climax involves her character, a stewardess, having to land a passenger jet after Jourdan takes out the flight crew! A precursor to Karen Black’s frantic piloting in Airport 1975, this nail-biter is equally hysterical, even more so because of the hilarity of the scenes that come before it and the desperate voice-overs Day provides. And Day flies the plane very frequently with her eyes closed! Still, the nature of the story, with a cruel man trying to hurt her, dredged up many unpleasant feelings for her of her two prior marriages and she was unhappy during the shoot.

She actually had reason to feel bad beyond the emotional aspects of the filming. She discovered after wrapping the movie that she had a large ovarian cyst and it required a hysterectomy. Two positives came from the experience. One was that she discovered the stunning district of Carmel, California, where some of the scenes were shot and the other is that she made friends with Jourdan and later lived across the street from him in Beverly Hills.


When The Pajama Game (an adaptation of a hit Broadway musical) was made, practically the entire cast was brought along to film it. Out, however, was female lead Janis Paige, whose role was played by Doris. Here she and costar John Raitt (father of famous singer Bonnie) share one pair of pjs.

A major shift in Doris’s career came about in 1959. Producer Ross Hunter decided to cast Day in his romantic comedy Pillow Talk, about the unlikely love affair that springs up between two very differing people who share a party line on their telephone (almost inconceivable now, there was a day when more than one household would share the same telephone line and courtesy was expected if the other person wanted to make a call!) Doris hilariously portrayed intense exasperation with the suave womanizer on the other end of the line.

Rock Hudson was cast as the leading man (after having said no three times!) and Tony Randall played a key supporting part as Rock’s rival for Doris’s affection. Hunter (rightly) suspected that Doris Day was hiding a rocking figure and enlisted designer Jean Louis to bring it out in an eye-popping series of suits and gowns, giving her a completely new glamorous image. The repartee between the stars, enhanced by their own off-screen camaraderie, played beautifully and the film (which almost no one outside the project had any faith in) was a roaring success.

Day received her first (and only) Oscar nomination for the film. It has been suggested that her nomination was accidental - a backfire caused by a sliding scale process that studio heads utilized to secure nominations for their chosen few. (During the "Studio Era" nomination choices were weighted, depending on the order they were listed on Academy member ballots, with first place gleaning five votes, second choice four votes, etc... Chiefs encouraged voters from their studios to list the golden boy or girl in spot one and fill out the rest with lesser lights, in order to ensure that their selections made it through with ease. The story goes that Doris won enough of the lower tier votes to secure a nomination.) Nonetheless, the fact remains that she is expert in the film and it’s gratifying to see someone rewarded for comedy rather than the usual “sturm und drang.”Rock and Doris proceeded to make two more such films together, Lover Come Back and Send Me No Flowers, always with the inimitable Tony Randall along for the ride. His contributions to these films’ success cannot be underestimated as it is really the combination of the three performers that helps put them over the top, especially his work in Flowers as Rock’s devoted friend.

One of my favorite Day moments is in Flowers when she steps outside in her nightgown and robe to collect some groceries and gets locked out. She goes through a series of pitfalls before making it back indoors. Despite her amazing figure and her pretty looks, she is truly one of the greatest (and somehow unsung) physical comediennes of all time and never hesitated to make herself look goofy, messy or awkward if it meant a great sight gag.

Just before Rock and Doris teamed up for the second time, she filmed the glitzy and now-hilariously campy mystery Midnight Lace, a star-laden (Rex Harrison, Roddy MacDowall and Myrna Loy costarred), glossy movie in which Doris is terrorized by creepy phone calls. Once again, the effects of filming these disturbing scenes put her through the wringer and this time she made sure it was the last. At least she was once again decked out in Jean Louis confections and got to work with gorgeous John Gavin. (Later, she would express regret at the fact that she wore so much fur without having fully realized the cruelty of it.)
Doris had been paired with some huge stars over the years: James Cagney (Love Me or Leave Me), Frank Sinatra (Young at Heart), Cary Grant (That Touch of Mink – pictured here in a fantasy sequence involving a bed floating in a pool – Check out Cary’s li’l white trunks!) and, of course, Rock. However, her biggest costar ever was in 1962 when she starred in Billy Rose’s Jumbo. The title character was a massive elephant! Also featuring Stephen Boyd, Jimmy Durante and Martha Raye, the circus-themed musical was long-delayed (based on a 1930’s Broadway show), first having been considered for filming a decade prior and as a vehicle for Debbie Reynolds. Jumbo was one performer, anyway, with a schnozz bigger than Durante's!

Many folks are surprised, considering how connected they are as a unit, that Rock and Doris only made three of their big screen romps together. Filling in for Rock on two occasions, and generally doing very well as a matter of fact, was James Garner. First was The Thrill of It All, in which Doris found success as an advertising spokeswoman to the chagrin of her physician husband and then, most memorably Move Over, Darling. This one was the result of the discarded project Something’s Got to Give that fell apart when Marilyn Monroe died and Dean Martin refused to continue with another costar (Lee Remick was offered to him at the time.)

In it, Day has been shipwrecked for 5 years and comes back to find herself declared legally dead and her husband Garner freshly married to Polly Bergen. All sorts of contrived complications ensue, but it’s generally a good time and the film was the 6th most successful one of its year, 1963. Presumably, Doris’s almost white hair and its bouffant style is a holdover from the design scheme determined when Marilyn had the part?

Day’s next two films, Do Not Disturb and The Glass Bottom Boat, paired her with hunky Rod Taylor, who also proved to be a complimentary costar. Though the first film is more than a little tiresome at times (and it was one she did not want to make, but was pushed into by her husband), she was still giving 100% and looked great, notably in this tangerine sequined concoction with complimentary evening coat.
The second film was far wackier (and far more fun) and featured Doris in a mermaid get-up and had her acting as a spy and running into amusing costars Dom DeLuise and Paul Lynde (who appears in drag at one point in the movie!) By now, Day’s husband Melcher was coercing her into appearing in film after film, sometimes of a sub-par quality, and not too much unlike the treadmill-like existence that Elvis Presley was enduring under Colonel Tom Parker’s career “guidance.” The cookie-cutter films continued even as public tastes changed and Doris, who had enjoyed being a top money-making star, was fast becoming old hat and passé.

One thing that might have changed this course was an offer to play Mrs. Robinson in Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (the mind reels!), but Day turned the offer down, fearful of what her core fans would think of her playing such a sexually aggressive role. The films she’d been doing had cultivated a persona of virtue and purity, prompting Oscar Levant to quip that he had known Doris “before she was a virgin!”

In 1968, after working steadily for all those years and having earned millions of dollars, Melcher died and Doris was horrified to find that, not only had he and her attorney squandered all of her lifelong earnings, but that she was deeply in debt and, to add insult to injury, had signed her up without her knowledge to headline a television series!!

Day, to that point, had scarcely ever appeared on TV and never in an acting capacity. Now she was faced, freshly widowed, with a mountain of debt and a series to work on. In true indomitable Doris Day spirit, she dove into the work and got through the first season. However, before long, she took the reins and demanded that the program be suited to her own tastes. Her sit-com The Doris Day Show went through many permutations over its five-year run, but was generally a success. She chose Que Sera Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be) as the theme music and adopted a zany, distinctive, mod sense of fashion style for herself that made the series visually interesting in any case. She also displayed an astonishingly fit body (keep in mind she was pushing 50 here and looks better than a lot of the skanky starlets who roam California beaches today!)

The legal entanglements of her financial debacle went on for years and years in an almost indecipherable quagmire. Finally, she was awarded a settlement and that, paired with her income from the series, meant that she basically didn’t ever have to work again. She fulfilled (still more!) obligations to do a couple of specials on TV, but never acted again after 1973. On one of her specials, she had Rock Hudson on as a guest. She moved to Carmel and devoted herself to the care and feeding of many, many dogs, quite a few of them rescued strays.

Years later, in 1985, she would unwittingly become part of an international uproar when she hosted a pet oriented show called Doris Day’s Best Friends and, naturally, selected as her first guest Rock Hudson, who was by then in the final stages of AIDS and appeared shockingly emaciated and unhealthy. She was crestfallen to see him that way, but didn’t let on to him that anything was wrong.

In 1989, Day was selected to receive the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award by The Hollywood Foreign Press and she made a very rare public appearance to accept it in person. At the podium, she spoke of her long hiatus from acting and appeared ready to make a return, but nothing ever materialized for one reason or another. It’s been more than two decades since that and Ms. Day lives a very quiet life as proprietor of a Carmel bed & breakfast and still cares for her army of dogs. A fourth husband (from 1976 – 1982) divorced her because he felt that he came after them in her life, and he probably did!

Her son is recently deceased (and, to be honest, only survived death during Charles Manson’s killing spree years before because he happened to move out of the house prior to The Roman Polanskis moving in!) and she doesn’t fly anywhere thanks to some close calls in the air during trips to entertain troops during WWII. A grass roots proposal to honor her with an Honorary Oscar has been stifled here and there which is a shame because she was a monumental entertainer and, even now, remains the top-ranking female box office star of all time (and 6th overall.) Her contributions to the cinema are practically unparalleled when you get right down to it.

Because of her reclusiveness and the fact that she won’t allow her singing voice to be used in any film that includes profanity, her recognizability these days is severely limited. It doesn’t change, however, the many hours of entertainment she provided while at her peak. She retains a legion of fans and Poseidon must be counted among them.

Be Still My Hart

My belated Valentine’s Day gift to you, loyal readers, is this tribute to yet another 80s hunk who melted my butter and who remains a handsome (and multi-tasking) man today, Mr. Hart Bochner.

Hart is the son of veteran Canadian actor Lloyd Bochner (probably best known for his role as Cecil Colby on Dynasty, but a familiar face on countless TV series and in many movies.) When Hart was about 4 years old, his father and the family moved to Los Angeles, so he really was raised a Californian.

Blessed with silky brown hair and blue bedroom eyes, his handsome face, with its solid jaw and strong features, assured that he would make an impact if given half a chance.

In 1976, director Franklin Schaffner was preparing Islands in the Stream for George C. Scott (who he has directed to an Oscar in Patton in 1970) and needed to cast a few boys as his sons. Schaffner’s wife had spotted Hart Bochner at an American Film Institute open house the year before and recommended him to her husband. Bochner won the part and began his film career among some serious pros (the cast also included David Hemmings, Gilbert Roland and Claire Bloom.)

The film was released in 1977 and it would be two more years before Hart did another feature. This time it was the sleeper hit Breaking Away, about cycling, which starred Dennis Christopher. Hart played a rich kid rival of Christopher’s and appeared in a blue Speedo in one sequence!

Next, Bochner had a role in the TV film Haywire, all about screenwriter Leland Hayward and his actress wife Margaret Sullavan and featuring heavy hitters Jason Robards and Lee Remick as his parents. He then starred in the horror flick Terror Train. It certainly wasn’t good or prestigious, but it has a minor cult following, mostly thanks to costar Jamie Lee Curtis. (This, by the way, is not her pictured in the attached photo.)

In 1981, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden was turned into a miniseries. It featured a stunning, tour de force performance from Jane Seymour as the venomous Cathy and, in the latter half of the program, Hart portrayed her virtuous son Aron. That same year, he played one of Jacqueline Bisset’s (younger) lovers in Rich and Famous, also becoming involved with her onscreen daughter Meg Ryan.

He tried to land a network series in the Indiana Jones-ish knock-off Callahan, but the pilot didn’t sell. His screen career slid into low gear until he was selected to portray, Ethan, the love interest opposite Helen Slater’s Supergirl.

This all-star companion piece to the major success Superman boasted lots of special effects, a large budget and a fire-breathing performance from Faye Dunaway as evil sorceress Selena. The fact that it tanked miserably at the box office doesn’t change the fact that he is exceedingly beautiful in it! He wears a pair of snug jeans that aren't shown much from the waist down in the actual movie, but which appear to greater advantage in the featurette that was made on location. Wow...

He plays a manly, sexy landscaper who is used as a pawn by Dunaway to test her magic powers. She wants to make him fall in love with her, but unfortunately, circumstances lead to him loving Supergirl instead! He shaves and cleans himself up and follows the heroine around like a puppy. Eventually, Dunaway succeeds in bring him back to her side and he winds up for a while as a boy toy, complete with open collared shirt and a vacant stare.

I don’t usually set out to make visitors to The Underworld jealous, but I really can’t help it this time. Thanks to a keen eye and some quick thinking, I managed to take a one-dollar bill and salvage from the clearance shelves of a local bookstore a copy of Tom Tierney’s set of Supergirl paper dolls! Who else among you can lay claim to a paper doll of Hart Bochner naked but for a pair of little briefs?!

1984 was a busy year for Hart. Not only was that the year of Supergirl, but he also appeared as one of bigamist Dyan Cannon’s husbands in the TV movie Having It All, followed by the leading role in another TV miniseries, The Sun Also Rises. Jane Seymour was on board again, but not as his mother this time, rather as a contemporary.

Another dry period in films and TV followed. In 1987, he appeared in Making Mr. Right, the John Malkovich comedy about a hunk made from scratch (and Hart wasn’t the hunk?!) before assaying one of his most memorable roles.

Though his next big screen part is possibly his best known, it is possibly the one I, personally, enjoy the least. He played Bonnie Bedelia’s sleazy, asinine coworker in Die Hard, the blockbuster action film that really put Bruce Willis on the map. His coke-addled, smarmy jerk of a character, Harry Ellis, was voted #2 on Maxim Magazine’s list “The Greatest Movie Sleazeballs of All Time.”

That same year, in a far more arresting role, he starred as Colin Firth’s dangerously sexy roommate in Apartment Zero. Firth’s character, by the way, is one of those rare, rare ones who I can really identify with. Like him, I used to keep framed portraits of movie stars in my home (in lieu of any shots of family!) and his repressed, understated affection for his roommate mirrors several scenarios in my life. In any case, Hart was WHITE HOT in the film and, even if it all starts to come apart towards the end, for the bulk of the movie, he is amazingly sexy.

In 1988, a sequel to the mammoth, and highly popular, miniseries The Winds of War was created, War and Remembrance. Costing more than any other project of its type to that time ($110 million!), the program had 358 speaking parts and employed 44,000 actors and extras! In the initial miniseries, Jan Michael Vincent and Ali MacGraw played the lovers Byron and Natalie Henry. Critics ripped MacGraw to shreds and did a flamenco dance on the remains and so the parts were recast for the sequel. Hart was chosen to play Byron and, as his Jewish wife Natalie, it was none other than Jane Seymour! Hart has the distinction of playing in what I consider to be the two best things Ms. Seymour ever did. They certainly made a stunning couple.

They are not together for the better part of War and Remembrance because he is in the service and she is in Europe. When she is swept away into a concentration camp, it becomes his supreme mission to find her and rescue her before she is killed. The show was incredibly graphic (full nudity was included in order to avoid being coy during the camp scenes) and the experiences Seymour endured were harrowing to say the least. (It may have been too depressing for viewers, too, because the sequel did not meet expectations ratings-wise.) In any case, anyone with half a brain would be proud to have Bochner out there searching desperately for him or her (that is, after first having a fling with his brother’s widow Sharon Stone!)

Leading roles in small films or supporting roles in bigger ones were Hart’s bread and butter, though he continued to find success in the miniseries genre. In 1991, he joined James Brolin and Rachel Ward in the murder mystery And the Sea Will Tell, looking scruffy and degenerate, but ever sexy.

In Complex of Fear, a minor television movie, he donned a mustache and played a police officer opposite Joe Don Baker (and, fortunately for us, showed off his still impressive body in a swimming pool sequence.) And I’m a sucker for a man in uniform, so this shot of him is pleasant to look at as well.
Since this, he has continued to appear in quite a few TV movies or in series guest roles and has also branched out into writing and directing. He supplements his time by championing “green” issues and drove, first, an electric car and, now, a hydrogen-operated one. (He was even cited by Time Magazine as the “Greenest Celebrity in Hollywood.”) One of his more high-profile recent gigs was on the Debra Messing series The Starter Wife, but he is a frequent attendee at industry functions as well.

Hart Bochner has been accused of being wooden, though I have never had that issue with him myself. If anything, I think he resisted being just another hunk, often taking on parts that either downplayed that aspect of him or that stretched him in another direction. In any case, he only got so far in his film career, which is a shame because, with his face, he could have been an absolute idol had he been in the business a few decades earlier when good looks were required of leading men more than they are now. His face pigeonholed him to a degree, but when he was given the chance to do something more challenging, he usually rose to the occasion, as, for example, in the arresting Apartment Zero.

Joans-ing for Collins

There must be something about showbiz folks named Joan that lends itself to survival against all the odds. Joan Crawford certainly carved out a lengthy and prestigious film career out of less than humble beginnings. Joan Fontaine is still kicking (and looking wonderful, all things considered) at 92. Joan Rivers waded through the dicey waters of female stand-up comedy before overcoming a disastrous battle in the late night talk show field and the suicide of her husband, but rebounded to enjoy considerable success and wealth. Then there’s today’s featured gal, Joan Collins, whose career and personal life saw many highs and lows, but who weathered all the storms to land in a field of clover.

Collins was born in 1933 London, England to a mother who was a former dancer and a father who was agent to various stage acts. She spent many a terrified night as a child listening to the German’s bomb the city during WWII. Watching and meeting her father’s clients in the heady world of entertainment, she soon developed two wishes – to play Broadway and to enact the role of Amanda in Noel Coward’s Private Lives. Enrolling at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, she gained a bit of stage experience, but her striking and curvy looks were such that she soon found herself working in the British film industry.

While still in her late teens, she began appearing in a variety of black and white movies, sometimes as a good girl, but occasionally (and often most effectively) as a less than good girl. In 1953, she took part in Decameron Nights, a color film made in Spain that happened to star Joan Fontaine and the ladies enacted various tales from the legendary collection The Decameron. The following year she was married to British cinema star Maxwell Reed.

Eventually, she caught the eye of 20th Century Fox scouts who signed her to a contract and she was placed in Howard Hawks epic film set in ancient Egypt (but filmed in Italy), Land of the Pharaohs. Here she played the evil Princess Nellifer, a rebellious and scheming vixen who is the property of Jack Hawkins, but who carries on with his guard Sydney Chaplin. The expensive production was a flop, though it became popular later in some circles for the campy villainy she displayed. She and Chaplin (the son of Charlie) began an affair as her marriage to Reed faltered almost from the start (she claims that he once attempted to sell her to an Arab Sheik for 10,000 pounds!) and they had so many romantic spaghetti dinners that makeup artists had a tough time keeping the (censorship required) ruby in her belly button! She’s pictured here with costar Dewey Martin, who looks mighty cute in his li’l pyramid-building outfit.

Next up, Joan was assigned to the Bette Davis drama The Virgin Queen. Davis had played Elizabeth I once before in the 30s (The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex), but was tackling the character again, this time actually shaving part of her head to get the right look. Never one to cotton to (most of) her female costars, prickly Davis was less than impressed by the young and beautiful Collins. Decades later, Davis would sniff at Joan again because of her revealing dress at a Night of 100 Stars benefit concert at which they shared a dressing room.

When Marilyn Monroe declined the lead role in The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, Collins was given a massive boost in receiving it, even earning a spot on the cover of Life magazine. Based on a true incident, she played Evelyn Nesbit, a performer who is involved with both Ray Milland and Farley Granger, which leads to jealousy, murder and scandal. (This same story was told in small part in the film and the Broadway musical Ragtime.) About 30 years later, Joan would appear on Life's cover again, this time for a spread she did dressed as iconic women through the ages (including Cleopatra.)

In 1956, 20th Century remade the 1939 classic The Women as a musical. In this exceedingly colorful and (deliberately?) garish film called The Opposite Sex, Collins inherited the juicy role of Crystal Allen, a gold-digging schemer (played in the original by Joan Crawford) who steals June Allyson’s husband (played by no less than Leslie Nielsen!) In this rendition, Allen is a showgirl and Joan takes part in a hooty production number featuring islanders and bananas. Norma Shearer verbally confronted Crawford in a boutique in the original, but this time Allyson got to slap Collins and when she did, it was with such force that Collins lost an earring and had an imprint on her cheek afterward! Though no one thinks that this outdoes the ’39 version, it remains a campy and zesty affair. Years later, Dynasty fans would chuckle at the fact that her character’s name was Crystal.

From here, Collins began appearing in more serious fare for a while. She did the grungy drama The Wayward Bus, based on a John Steinbeck novel, then flew to Barbados to take part in the all-star soap opera Island in the Sun, all about interracial love in the tropics and featuring James Mason, Harry Belafonte, Stephen Boyd, Joan Fontaine and Dorothy Dandridge. The controversial movie only fared marginally well, with the South, in particular, tending to stay away from it.

Joan was thrilled to win the lead role in a Roberto Rossellini film and be cast opposite Richard Burton, but just before Sea Wife got underway, Rossellini changed his mind and the movie wound up being directed by an associate producer with limited experience. Playing a shipwrecked nun, Collins offered up a clean-scrubbed, virtually makeup-less appearance.

Next was a minor effort with Robert Wagner called Stopover Tokyo that the pair declared should be titled Stop Overacting! The following year, she played a caring rancher to Gregory Peck’s vengeful character in The Bravados. Following the rape and murder of his wife, Peck sought the outlaws (including Stephen Boyd) out one by one while Collins fretted on the sidelines and watched his little daughter.

In 1958, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward filmed the loopy domestic vs military comedy Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys! and personally requested for Joan to play the saucy and uninhibited neighbor Angela, who has her eye on Newman. Joan and Paul have a wild, drunken scene in which they shimmy and dance amusingly and eventually flop around all over the room. It was a rare moment of true mirth in an otherwise forced film.

Henry Hathaway’s caper flick Seven Thieves starred Edward G. Robinson, Rod Steiger and Eli Wallach along with Collins as a distraction. She trained with an actual stripper in order to get the moves down pat for her character, who disrobes as part of the big scheme, though the better part of her striptease didn’t make it past the censors.

She then portrayed the famed Jewish Biblical heroine in Esther and the King against Richard Egan. Joan’s Esther seemed more a testament to the powers of AquaNet than to the Almighty, but the film has its moments.

Around this time, Joan became heavily involved with Warren Beatty and eventually the pair became engaged, even going so far as to pose for an official engagement portrait. He was obsessive about several things, according to her, including endless vitamins and endless sex (seven times a day.) At the time, she was an established star and he was little more than Shirley MacLaine’s little brother, but Splendor in the Grass would soon change that. Joan became pregnant (what are the odds?!) and not too long after he nudged her towards an abortion, their differences outweighed their bliss and they ended it.

In ’62, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby returned for yet another of their “Road” movies, Road to Hong Kong. Longtime leading lady Dorothy Lamour was brushed aside into a cameo appearance in order to feature Joan and it wound up being the last such outing. It would be five years before Joan filmed another Hollywood movie. It wasn’t so much that her career was tanking as that she had found another husband, singer-actor Anthony Newley, and was living with him in England and planning a family.

During this time, Joan looked perhaps her most chic, at one point sporting a fetching, mod, Vidal Sassoon-esque haircut, yet she was hardly doing any acting work to speak of. She played David Janssen’s estranged wife in the star-heavy Warning Shot, but most of her other work was in TV guest roles.

She does have the distinction, however, of having played on several of the most iconic 60s series ever. She did an episode of The Man From U.N.C.L.E and then worked on one of the highest quality episodes that Star Trek ever offered. She played Edith Keeler, a social worker from the past who Captain Kirk falls in love with, but who is slated to die in an accident. The appearance earned her a place in the sizeable Trekker following and she is still approached about it today, 40 + years later.

On Batman, she got to play a villain (something almost everyone was salivating to do during the show’s heyday.) The Siren was a gorgeous woman who played a harp and emitted a hypnotic tone from her voice when she chose to use it. It was campy and silly, but, again, it’s one of those jobs that is still remembered today by series fans. She rounded out the decade with a featured guest role on Mission: Impossible, working closely with Peter Graves.

Husband Newley found fidelity rather difficult and when he wrote and directed the fanciful, yet autobiographically themed, Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?, in which he also cast Joan and their two children, the wheels started to come off the marriage. All about a man carrying on an affair with a blonde called Mercy Humppe while married to Polyester Poontang (Collins), the indulgent work severely strained the couple’s relationship. This shot from the film could almost serve as a flashback sequence for Krystle, Blake and Alexis on Dynasty! Ha!

Following the divorce, Collins began working more steadily, but mostly in low-budget projects that were not worthy of her, and often containing horror or sexually suggestive elements. She did get to work with Orson Welles in 1972 in his Hallmark Hall of Fame TV adaptation of The Man Who Came to Dinner, but he read everything off of cue cards, thus diminishing her experience with him tremendously.

Though married again, by now, to businessman Ron Kass, the mother of two was finding it difficult to get by, despite occasional guest roles on series like Baretta, Police Woman and Starsky and Hutch. For a while, she even drove to the unemployment office and collected checks. What was probably a career low point for her came when she agreed to star in a Z-grade adaptation of H.G. Wells’ Empire of the Ants. She played a snippy land development promoter in the Florida Everglades whose trolley full of prospective buyers winds up as snack food for a colony of gigantic (and papier-mâché) ants! Conditions during the swampy, hot and filthy filming were abysmal.

Of all people, it was her little sister Jackie who managed to come to the rescue of Joan’s tattered career. (Check out the sisters at the left, as they appeared in the mid-70s!) A rather rebellious young lady who was tossed out of school at sixteen, she would eventually pen (to date) 27 sultry and successful novels, almost always about the wealthy and the sexually absorbed. One of her books, The Stud, became a film starring Joan and it was a wild success, thanks in no small part to her brief nude scenes and her erotic presence in general.

She played rich, seductive Fontaine Khaled who has a fling with the title character. The sequel to The Stud, also based on a Jackie Collins book, The Bitch, was a little bit trashier than the first film and Joan later regretted making it, especially when people, especially advertisers, seemed to be equating Joan Collins with “The Bitch.”

Back during her stint at 20th Century Fox, Collins had been in place to play Cleopatra in the film of the same name. She filmed a screen test for it and began to prepare herself for the showcase of a role. However, it was eventually decided to ratchet up the budget and go with a much bigger star, namely Elizabeth Taylor, so Collins was out (though she was almost back in a second time when Liz fell deathly ill during initial filming.) Many years later, on an episode of Fantasy Island, Joan would finally play Cleo and it would be a fortuitous experience for more than one reason.

Aaron Spelling was in the midst of producing Dynasty, a prime time soap opera about a wealthy oil business family in Denver, Colorado. The abbreviated first season was slow to catch on with viewers and so it was determined to bring on lead character Blake Carrington’s long estranged first wife Alexis. Everyone and her grandmother was considered for the plum role. Some turned it down. Some demanded too much money. Sophia Loren was chief in the running, but finally said no.

Spelling’s wife Candy saw Joan as Cleopatra on Fantasy Island and suggested her for the part. Despite what should have been a no-brainer, many executives at the network did not want her in the role, feeling she was either not famous enough or else simply “reeked of the 50s” as she would later remark.

However, almost from the moment she entered the series, dressed in a wide-brimmed white hat with a veil and sunglasses, and proceeded to try to bury Blake on the witness stand during his murder trial, both she and the show were a hit.

Alexis was a villainess extraordinaire and Collins sank her teeth into every nasty line (and her dialogue was always full of them) while showing off increasingly extravagant ensembles by resident designer Nolan Miller, a man known for catering to the legendary divas of Hollywood’s golden age. Collins and the other ladies of the series ushered in a whole new era of over-the-top glamour that included furs, sequins, stoles, hats and, of course, shoulder pads.

An onscreen rivalry was established between Alexis and the current Mrs. Carrington Krystle (Linda Evans), which would eventually seep into the ladies’ real life relationship, though both of them strove to keep things professional on the set. They were simply two very different types of women and had no desire to keep company with one another. Rugged Linda enjoyed the celebrated catfights while Joan preferred to do battle with her tongue. Decades after the cancellation of Dynasty, the ladies would reunite in a touring production of the play Legends and it was, in many ways, a fiasco, the stars still not getting along particularly well. It’s amusing to compare these publicity photos from the two projects, noting what poor Linda did to her face (and though Joan hasn’t subjected herself to all the procedures that Linda has, she is hideously and preposterously airbrushed in it.)

Joan’s time on Dynasty was punctuated by many experiences including helping her daughter by Kass recover from a harrowing accident that had left her comatose for a while, an eventual divorce from Kass, many commercial endorsements, sideline TV-movie and miniseries deals, salary disputes, a much-publicized spread (at age 50) in Playboy magazine with pictures taken by George Hurrell of all people, a hellacious (but thankfully brief) marriage to Swedish gold-digger Peter Holm, a Golden Globe for Best Actress on a TV Drama Series and any number of other dizzying experiences as she rode the wave.

When it was all over, she took a little while off to finally rest. This didn’t last long, however, and she was soon back in the swim of things, working in every conceivable medium. She was guest-starring on such varied series as Roseanne, The Nanny and Will & Grace. Recalling her Princess Nellifer days, she had a cameo in Donny Osmond’s videotaped version of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. She also spent a six-month stint on the daytime soap Guiding Light. She is the author of over a dozen books, both fictional and non-fictional. Her landmark case against Random House Publishing (in which she was awarded over a million dollars for a book that was never published) is in The Guinness Book of World Records and made her a hero among mistreated authors everywhere.

She acted in a deliberately campy (and pretty rotten) TV movie called These Old Broads that placed her in the midst of several other performers whose lives had crossed with hers and each other’s. Peter Graves played her husband, her almost sister-in-law Shirley MacLaine was on board and Elizabeth Taylor, who inherited Cleopatra, appeared as well. Debbie Reynolds, whose husband Taylor stole, also starred, though the hatchet had long since been buried. Collins once stated after being called “The Poor Man’s Elizabeth Taylor” that “the poor man didn’t do too badly after all!”

Most notable for her personally, though, were the three following things: She got to play Amanda in Private Lives on Broadway, thus fulfilling two of her lifelong dreams at once. She was decorated with an O.B.E. by Queen Elizabeth II. She met and married (in 2002) a handsome man, Percy Gibson, almost half her age (and, in fact, the same age as her own son!) who has filled her days with almost unimaginable joy. The pair is frequently photographed together, either at industry events or just on vacation, and always look as if they are having the time of their lives. And that’s the thing. Joan has never lost her sense of humor. When prodded by journalists about her marriage to a man 32 years her junior and whether it worried her or not, her typical response was, “If he dies, he dies!”

A bizarre rumor has spread over the years that underneath her ever-present wigs, Joan Collins is bald. Heaven only knows where it began, but it isn’t true. She has thin, fine hair that really won’t do anything and she simply prefers wigs for their variety, convenience and style. Here is a picture from 2009 in which her own hair is on view. She has appeared quite a few times with it visible, but Joan isn’t Joan without the full monty of voluminous hair.

It would be hard to find a more active woman of 76 as she continues to globe trot and appear on talk shows or on series (even hosting a British program on fashion last year, something she knows a great deal about), always looking like a million bucks and, as she has declared, thanks to her own hard work. Joan was always the one to PAY alimony, never accept it. Her life has contained countless ups and downs and she’s been exceedingly frank about her experiences in her two autobiographies Past Imperfect and Second Act. As ought to be rather obvious, she has always held me in her considerable grip, ever since I watched her in Arthur Hailey’s The Moneychangers as a child.