ENTERTAINMENT

Doris Day is best remembered as the relentlessly cheerful co-star of Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk and other chaste sex comedies. Her fans included millions of ordinary Americans as well as literary giant John Updike, who told viewers on a TV documentary about Ms. Day that "she just glowed for me."

In her 39 films in the 1950s and '60s, with actors ranging from Jack Lemmon and Cary Grant to Frank Sinatra and Clark Gable, she was portrayed as "American as apple pie" and "the girl next door."

But the real Doris Day was not the smiling, upbeat woman she played in most of her films.

Despite her enormous popularity, the legendary star never had what she always wanted, a happy home life, writes David Kaufman in this exhaustive biography. None of her four marriages, three before age 30, was fulfilling, and she was a tireless workaholic whose only son, Terry, became an alcoholic. She had a nervous breakdown after the filming of Calamity Jane, and was cheated out of $22.8 million by an attorney who handled her business affairs.

Little wonder that Ms. Day, now 86, is a recluse who refuses to even get together with old friends, according to Mr. Kaufman. But 40 years after her retirement "she remains the number one female star of all time," he writes. "Both on screen and off, she was a bundle of energy with an innate tendency to exude both sexual and prim qualities simultaneously. It was this paradoxical if natural aspect of Day that made her a paradigm for her era, 'the perennial virgin' who was at once voluptuous and innocent."

A longtime theater critic and acknowledged fan, Mr. Kaufman spent eight years interviewing more than 150 people to write what he hopes is the definitive book about Ms. Day. (Several other biographies have come out over the years, including Considering Doris Day, published in 2007, but that book doesn't reveal much about her personal life.) Convinced that she has been unfairly neglected by cultural arbiters, Mr. Kaufman believes her legacy was seriously damaged by the last few films she made that tended "to freeze her image," as one critic noted.

While Ms. Day wanted to take on more demanding roles, her third husband, who was also her agent, argued against it. That 16-year marriage to Marty Melcher, which lasted until his death in 1968, was a disaster, both professionally and personally, Mr. Kaufman writes.

There's much more here about America's puritan sweetheart, including endless details about the filming of many of her movies, most of them long forgotten. It's hard to imagine anyone but the most die-hard fans wanting to plow through more than 600 pages of this.

But for the hordes of "Dayniacs," this may be the book they've long wanted to read.

Elizabeth Bennett is a freelance writer in Houston.

The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door

David Kaufman

(Virgin Books, $29.95)