Pendergast T., Pendergast S. St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture. Volume 1: A-D
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The Doors: (from left) John Densmore, Robbie Krieger, Ray Manzarek, and Jim Morrison.
In his earliest performances, Morrison was so introverted that he
performed with his back to the audience. Some nights, his baritone
was barely audible. However, his confidence grew with the group’s
reputation and, certainly, his stage presence was unique. He had
languid body movements, tended to throttle the microphone, and
often emoted with closed eyes as if in a spectral trance. Also, he could
be counted on to be unpredictable. Sometimes he dropped to the floor
to sob out his lyrics; other times he danced with abandon as if
possessed. One night at the Whiskey in late 1966, he delivered an
improvised rendition of his oedipal song, ‘‘The End.’’ The eleven-
and-a-half minute song climaxed with a young man’s screaming
threat to kill his father and rape his mother, but Morrison used a word
other than ‘‘rape,’’ bringing the entire club, including the go-go girls
in hanging cages, to a stunned silence. That very night the Doors were
fired. They would, however, ultimately have left on their own accord,
for they already had a contract with Elektra Records.
Released in January 1967, their debut album The Doors included
‘‘Light My Fire,’’ which, at six minutes and 50 seconds, was
considered too long for Top 40 airplay. As the group toured national-
ly, a shorter version began climbing the AM charts; meanwhile, the
full-length version became a favorite of FM. Eschewing the matching
costumes that were then in vogue among music groups, the Doors also
had no official leader, but in interviews, as well as on the stage, it was
invariably Morrison who took the spotlight. Shrewdly, the photogenic
singer-songwriter exploited his rapport with the camera, as well as his
appeal to journalists, who found him sensual, mystical, and eminently
quotable. For the erudite rock star was also a poet, who read and
quoted the nineteenth-century French poets Arthur Rimbaud and
Charles Baudelaire, and German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
Moreover, when not waxing metaphysical or apocalyptic, Morrison
could be surprisingly playful. When asked how he had prepared for
stardom, he once quipped, ‘‘I stopped getting haircuts.’’
In his Elektra Records publicity biography, he claimed to have
no family; in fact, he was the son of a Navy rear admiral, and from a
family of career militarists. As a performer, Morrison assumed
various alter egos. For a while, he called himself the ‘‘King of
Orgasmic Rock,’’ and as the ‘‘Lizard King’’ he donned tight-fitting
snakeskin pants. He also claimed to be possessed by the spirit of a
dead Indian, the result of a childhood trip across the desert. He and his
family had once passed an overturned truck, which had resulted in
fatalities, and Morrison claimed that the spirit of one of the dead
Indians somehow entered him. He accessorized that persona by
donning a concho belt, leather pants, and dancing in a ritualistic style.
But the role he played to the hilt was that of the rebel. When the
Doors appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in September 1967,
Morrison defied the famed host’s request that a particular line, with
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possible drug connotations, be deleted from ‘‘Light My Fire.’’ Three
months later, the singer made headlines when he was arrested on stage
in New Haven, Connecticut, on charges including ‘‘breach of the
peace’’ and indecent and immoral exhibition. In August 1968 he was
again arrested, this time for disorderly conduct on board a flight
to Phoenix.
Increasingly, Doors concerts became known for their dangerous
atmosphere, as an incorrigible and no-longer-slender Morrison stag-
gered across the stage, taunting the audience, inciting them to riot,
screaming at them to ‘‘Wake up!’’ He also clutched at his crotch and
tugged threateningly at his pants. The Doors were in a slump when
they embarked on a 21-city tour in March 1969 and, following the
arrest of the bloated, bearded Morrison in Miami, the rest of the tour
was canceled. The group’s symbiosis was on the wane when they
recorded their blues-oriented collection, L.A. Woman. Afterward, it
was a burned-out Morrison who headed for Paris to concentrate on his
poetry. He was just 27 when he died on July 3, 1971, reportedly of a
heart attack suffered while in the bathtub. Because of Morrison’s
penchant for substance abuse, and the curious handling of his death
and burial by several close friends, questions persist over how he
actually died. Since his body was found by his common-law wife,
who died in 1974 of a heroin overdose, there have long been
allegations that drugs were a factor. Whatever the cause, his death was
yet another reminder of the perils of the dark side of rock ’n’ roll. It
was also the third untimely passing of a rock star in less than a year,
following those of heavy metal guitarist Jimi Hendrix and rock-blues
queen Janis Joplin, both of whom died of overdoses.
Following Morrison’s death, the surviving Doors recorded two
additional albums. Manzarek also sought to reinvent the group, with
Iggy Pop as lead singer, but it was clear that the magic had died with
Morrison. It was Morrison’s mystique that led to a Doors rediscovery
that has enshrined the rock star as a modern-day Dionysus, the Greek
god of revelry and wine who was dismembered, and later resurrected.
The 1980 rock biography, No One Here Gets Out Alive, by rock
journalist Jerry Hopkins and Doors associate Danny Sugerman,
spurred on the revival, and sent other biographers in search of
similarly debauched rock subjects. And the 1980 reissue of the Doors’
Greatest Hits album, which entered Billboard’s Top 10 Chart, proved
that defunct groups can sell as well as those still active. Rolling Stone
acknowledged the power of dead celebrity with its September 1981
Morrison cover story, proclaiming ‘‘He’s hot, he’s sexy and he’s
dead.’’ Hollywood heralded Morrison in 1990 when a decade-long
quest to make a feature film was realized by controversial filmmaker
Oliver Stone, with the movie The Doors, starring Val Kilmer.
In the era of incarnations that dawned in the 1990s, Morrison
was depicted as a poet trapped in a self-created rock star image. He is,
after all, buried in Pere La Chaise Cemetery, the famous final resting-
place in Paris of such notables as Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, Honoré de
Balzac, and Frédéric Chopin. Moreover, the poetry he self-published
in 1970 was republished in the late 1980s and during the 1990s. His
writings have also been the subject of scholarly studies, including one
in which he is compared to his idol, the French symbolist, Rimbaud.
Yet if the Doors’ spotlight remains on Morrison, his musical
legacy came from his collaborative work with Manzarek, Krieger,
and Densmore. Benchmarks of the 1960s Doors songs—among them
‘‘Light My Fire,’’ ‘‘Hello, I Love You,’’ ‘‘Touch Me,’’ ‘‘Love Her
Madly,’’ ‘‘People Are Strange,’’ and ‘‘Riders on the Storm’’—have
remained accessible. Staples of the airwaves, they attest to the power
of provocative music, and to the seemingly-enduring interest wrought
by the potent combination of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.
—Pat H. Broeske
F
URTHER READING:
Breslin, Rosemary. ‘‘Jim Morrison, 1981: Renew My Subscription to
the Resurrection.’’ Rolling Stone, September 17, 1981, 31-34.
Broeske, Pat H. ‘‘Jim Morrison: Back to the Sixties, Darkly.’’ Los
Angeles Times. January 7, 1990, 6-7, 19-24.
Didion, Joan. ‘‘Waiting for Morrison.’’ Saturday Evening Post.
March 9, 1968, 16.
Hopkins, Jerry, and Daniel Sugerman. No One Here Gets Out Alive.
New York, Warner, 1980.
Rocco, John M., editor. The Doors Companion: Four Decades of
Commentary. New York, Schirmer, 1997.
Sugerman, Danny. The Doors: The Illustrated History. New York,
William Morrow, 1983.
Doo-wop Music
‘‘Doo-wop’’ is a form of close-harmony singing, based in
rhythm-and-blues. The style became popular in the 1950s, originating
among African-American vocal groups in urban centers. One of the
most common rhythm phrases used by 1950s groups in performance
and on their recordings, ‘‘doo-wop’’ came to name the musical style.
To sing in the doo-wop style, phonetic or nonsense words are used as
rhythmic parts in harmonic arrangements. Usually this is done by a
trio or quartet of vocalists, over which a soloist sings a melody. The
melody is expressed through understandable words, often accented
by the nonsense words of the vocal accompaniment. By the end of the
1960s, doo-wop groups were losing popularity. Yet rock ’n’ roll
musicians would often use doo-wop for their background vocal
arrangements, and in this way the style continued to develop beyond
the 1950s and to exert its influence on popular music.
—Brian Granger
F
URTHER READING:
Gribin, Dr. Anthony J., and Dr. Matthew M. Schiff. Doo-wop: The
Forgotten Third of Rock ’n’ Roll. Iola, Wisconsin, Krause Publi-
cations, 1992.
Pruter, Robert. Doowop: The Chicago Scene. Urbana and Chicago,
University of Illinois Press, 1996.
Dorsey, Jimmy (1904-1957)
In the 1920s, Jimmy Dorsey toured with the Paul Whiteman and
Red Nichols bands, and was considered an excellent clarinet perform-
er and the leading jazz performer on alto saxophone, influencing such
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Tommy (left) and Jimmy Dorsey
jazz greats as Charlie Parker and Lester Young. He and his brother,
Tommy, founded the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra 1933, starring Glenn
Miller on trombone and Ray McKinley on drums. After Tommy left
to form his own orchestra in 1935, Jimmy Dorsey led the band to
national stardom in the 1940s, featuring the popular singing duo of
Helen O’Connell and Bob Eberly. The song ‘‘Green Eyes,’’ as sung
by O’Connell, was the band’s most requested number. In 1953, the
brothers reunited.
—Benjamin Griffith
F
URTHER READING:
Atkins, Ronald, editor. All That Jazz. New York, Carlton, 1996.
Balliett, Whitney. American Musicians. New York, Oxford Press, 1986.
Simon, George T. The Big Bands. New York, MacMillan, 1974.
Dorsey, Tommy (1905-1956)
A trombone-player known for his warm, silken tone on ballads
as well as upbeat improvisations, Tommy Dorsey, ‘‘The Sentimental
Gentleman of Swing,’’ led one of the most versatile orchestras of the
big band era. With its premier jazz stars, the band could swing with
the best, and none equaled its style on slow ballads, as sung by Frank
Sinatra and Jo Stafford.
By age 25, Tommy had become a successful free-lance radio and
recording star, and in 1933 he and his brother Jimmy formed the
Dorsey Brothers Orchestra. Within two years Tommy left to start his
own orchestra. His band’s best-selling record was the swinging
Boogie-Woogie, selling over four million copies, but the most re-
quested number was the poignant ‘‘I’ll Never Smile Again.’’ The
brothers reunited in 1953.
—Benjamin Griffith
F
URTHER READING:
Atkins, Ronald, editor. All That Jazz. New York, Carlton, 1996.
Balliett, Whitney. American Musicians. New York, Oxford Press, 1986.
Simon, George T. The Big Bands. New York, MacMillan, 1974.
Double Indemnity
Double Indemnity (1935) is one of the classic, tough-talking
murder stories of the late 1930s. Written by controversial mystery
novelist James M. Cain (1892-1977), Double Indemnity is based upon
a true story about a weak-willed insurance agent, Walter Huff, who
falls for sultry blond, Phyllis Nirdlinger. Nirdlinger’s inconvenient
husband has to be eliminated so that his wife and her lover can collect
on his life insurance, a policy which doubles in value if the holder dies
by accident.
Like The Postman Always Rings Twice, upon which it is mod-
eled, l’amour fou, or sexually charged obsessive love, is at the heart of
this psychologically realistic novel. Cain, along with, for example,
Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett have been called, perhaps
unjustly in Cain’s case, members of the hard-boiled school of
detective novelists. Edmund Wilson has referred to them as ‘‘the
poets of the tabloid murder’’ because of their interest in the low life
aspects of American culture, and the often sordid stories of murder,
eroticism, and adultery that fascinated them.
Unlike Chandler, with whom he has been compared (and who
wrote the screenplay for the film version of Double Indemnity),
Cain’s writing is deeply pessimistic and far less romantic. His
characters are terribly flawed yet very human in their failings, and the
eroticism of many of his novels made them controversial in their day.
Cain’s interests and lean writing style also made him stand apart from
much of the popular writing of his time. His gritty, downbeat, stories,
like The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce, and Double
Indemnity had a pictorial quality which made them attractive for
adaptation to the movies. All, however, underwent considerable
sanitation before the more censorship-plagued Hollywood studios
could make them into films.
In the case of Double Indemnity, the novel ends with Huff and
Phyllis on a freighter going nowhere in particular, unable to return to
the United States because of their murderous pasts, and contemplat-
ing suicide by jumping off the boat into shark infested waters. As
Phyllis says, ‘‘There’s nothing ahead of us, is there Walter.’’ And
Walter replies, ‘‘No, nothing.’’ This existential gloom did not survive
in the film version where Walter, after narrating his sordid tale of
adultery and betrayal, lies dying from a gunshot wound inflicted by,
perhaps, Phyllis, who he has murdered a few hours before.
Billy Wilder turned the novel into a convention-setting film noir
in 1944, starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward G.
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Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in a scene from Double Indemnity.
Robinson. Told in a confessional flashback by the dying insurance
agent, Wilder’s more cynical, but less gloomy version, helped estab-
lish flashback—first person narration as a convention in film noir.
The unconventional casting of Fred MacMurray, who was noted for
his roles in comedy, helped the audience identify with the amoral, but
ruthless Huff, who is now called Walter Neff.
In the film version, the first person narration helps to draw the
audience into a morally complex position where they viscerally
experience the amoral world in which Neff and Phyllis operate—we
see the events unfold through his eyes. To put the spectator on edge,
Wilder sets the rigid and righteous Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robin-
son), an insurance investigator and Neff’s boss and friend, up against
the Neff character, giving the audience a choice between identifying
with a slippery, ruthless, and greasily charming insurance salesman or
his cold and obsessive nemesis. As in Alfred Hitchcock films, the
audience becomes ethically involved with the criminals hoping that
they will elude the ever present, relentless Keyes. With its raw, more
naturalist flavor, and serious, unsentimental prose the novel makes
identification with the characters more difficult. Thus in the film
when Neff sets out to kill Phyllis, the audience is uncomfortably
aware that they have identified with a hero who is a callous and
brutal loner.
—Jeannette Sloniowski
F
URTHER READING:
Cain, James M. Double Indemnity. New York, Random House, 1978.
Evans, Peter William. ‘‘Double Indemnity (or Bringing up Baby).’’
In The Book of Film Noir, edited by Ian Cameron. New York,
Continuum, 1993, 165-73.
Johnston, Claire. ‘‘Double Indemnity.’’ In Women in Film Noir,
edited by E. Ann Kaplan. London, The British Film Institute Press,
1980, 100-11.
Palmer, R. Barton. Hollywood’s Dark Cinema. New York, Twayne
Publishers, 1994.
Schickel, Richard. Double Indemnity. London, British Film Insti-
tute, 1992.
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Silver, Alain, and Elizabeth Ward, editors. Film Noir: An Encyclope-
dic Reference to the American Style. Woodstock, New York,
Overlook Press, 1992.
Douglas, Lloyd C. (1878-1951)
With the publication of The Robe in 1942, Lloyd C. Douglas
became the most influential religious novelist in the world. Following
in the tradition of Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur (1880), Douglas’ novels
satisfied a reading public’s demands for rollicking adventure and
historical romance, combined with piety. The Robe purports to tell
what happened to the Roman soldier who acquired Jesus’ garment at
the Crucifixion. After many adventures, this soldier meets St. Peter
and accepts Christianity, later to die a happy martyr’s death. Douglas,
who retired from the Congregational ministry to write, never pretend-
ed his novels were refined works of literature. He graciously suffered
the attacks of reviewers, who found him loquacious and sentimental.
Yet he proved incapable of writing a book that did not become a best
seller; the public loved his vintage narratives of decent characters who
worked through problems to happy resolutions. In 1953, Henry
Koster directed a major Hollywood film adaptation of The Robe
which is still highly regarded. Douglas’ continuing though diluted
influence may be seen in books by Fulton Oursler, Taylor Caldwell,
and Frank G. Slaughter.
—Allene Phy-Olsen
F
URTHER READING:
Douglas, Lloyd C. Time to Remember. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1951.
Hackett, Alice P. 60 Years of Best Sellers, 1895-1955. New York,
R.R. Bowker, 1956.
Schneider, Louis, and Sanford M. Dornbusch. Popular Religion:
Inspirational Books in America. Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 1958.
Douglas, Melvyn (1901-1981)
Although he acted in motion pictures from the early 1930s to the
late 1970s, Melvyn Douglas was never especially fond of most of the
more than three score and ten movies in which he starred. He much
preferred the theater and returned to the stage whenever he got the
chance. A versatile actor, he excelled in both dramatic and comedy
roles. He appeared in horror films, mysteries, and melodramas, but is
best remembered for playing opposite Greta Garbo in the comedy
Ninotchka (1939). Later in his screen career, when he’d ceased doing
dapper leading man roles and was showing up in character parts,
Douglas earned two supporting actor Oscars. A dedicated liberal, he
was active in politics and his wife, Helen Gahagan Douglas, ran
against Richard Nixon for the United States Senate but was defeated.
Born Melvyn Hesselberg in Macon, Georgia, he grew up in the
Midwest. He served in the Army during World War I, but never went
overseas—‘‘The closest I personally came to death was in the
kitchen, narrowly avoiding a meat cleaver thrown at me by a furious
cook,’’ he remembered in See You at the Movies. After the war, he
joined his family—his father was a modestly successful concert
pianist—in Chicago. Douglas hadn’t yet picked a career and had ‘‘no
idea what to do with my life.’’ By the early 1920s he’d decided on the
theater and was touring the Midwest. After several years of this, with
an assortment of companies, he reached Broadway in 1928 in A Free
Soul. He played the gangster, a role that made Clark Gable a star when
he appeared later in the movie version.
Melvyn Douglas’s work in the 1930 Broadway comedy Tonight
or Never changed his life in two important ways. It was in the play that
he first met Helen Gahagan, his costar, and fell in love with her. And
when the play was filmed, Douglas repeated his role in Hollywood.
He went on to make several films in the early 1930s, including The
Vampire Bat (1933), The Old Dark House (1932), and As You Desire
Me (1932), in which he first starred opposite Garbo. Unimpressed
with the movie business, the actor left Hollywood for a time to return
to the New York stage. ‘‘I had gotten disgusted with being photo-
graphed at close range,’’ he later explained, ‘‘with a microphone
down my throat.’’
He soon was lured back to Hollywood and began working again
in a wide variety of films. He played such reformed rogues as the
Lone Wolf and Arsene Lupin and a range of sleuths in mystery
movies such as Fast Company (1938), Tell No Tales (1939), and
There’s That Woman Again (1939). He also began to shine in a
successful string of screwball comedies. He worked opposite Irene
Dunne in Theodora Goes Wild (1936), with Marlene Dietrich in
Angel (1937), and with Myrna Loy in Third Finger Left Hand (1940).
In 1939 he made Garbo laugh in Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka.
Douglas said that he didn’t become politically active until ‘‘just
before Roosevelt’s reelection in 1936.’’ His wife was a singer as well
as an actress and he’d accompanied her on a tour that took her to
Germany. Once they saw Hitler’s campaign against the Jews first-
hand, Helen Douglas cancelled her tour and they returned home.
Melvyn Douglas joined the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, worked
for the rights of migrant workers, campaigned for the Democratic
candidate for governor, and in June of 1938 he organized the Motion
Picture Democratic Committee, the earliest group of movie people to
campaign for a specific political party. Never a Communist, Douglas
found himself attacked by the local members of the party when he
called Russia as big a totalitarian threat as Germany and Italy. And for
his criticisms of Nazi Germany he was labeled a ‘‘premature anti-
Fascist.’’ When Helen Gahagan Douglas ran against fledgling politi-
cian Richard Nixon for the U.S. Senate in 1950, some of Nixon’s
campaigners introduced a strong note of anti-Semitism. And in
speaking of his opponent, the future President of the United States
would often refer to her as Mrs. Hesselberg. One of Nixon’s more
extreme supporters, the racist Gerald L. K. Smith, told his followers
that they must ‘‘not send to the Senate the wife of a Jew.’’
During World War II Douglas enlisted in the Army and was
eventually stationed in the China-Burma-India war area. He returned
to the movies after the war—notably in Mr. Blandings Builds His
Dream House (1948) with Cary Grant and Myrna Loy. But after
1951, he concentrated on the stage again, winning a Tony for his
performance in Gore Vidal’s political drama, The Best Man. Older,
and letting his age show, Douglas reentered motion pictures once
again in the early 1960s. He made over a dozen films in his last years,
including Hud (1963) for which he won his first Oscar, and Being
There (1979) for which he won his second.
—Ron Goulart
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FURTHER READING:
Douglas, Melvyn and Arthur, Tom. See You at the Movies. Lanham,
University Press of America, 1986.
Mitchell, Greg. Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady. New York, Random
House, 1998.
Douglas, Mike (1925—)
Daytime television talk show host Mike Douglas personified
mainstream popular entertainment during the 21-year run of The Mike
Douglas Show from 1961 to 1982. The show, which initially originat-
ed from Cleveland, Ohio, and later moved to Philadelphia, Pennsyl-
vania, was a 90-minute syndicated program that dominated the
ratings during the important weekday afternoon/early evening time
slots. Douglas served as an affable Midwestern everyman who
welcomed guests from show business, politics, and current events.
Unlike many daytime shows of the 1990s, which focused primarily on
confrontations between outrageous and often vulgar guests, The Mike
Douglas Show offered viewers a mixture of thoughtful conversation
and wholesome entertainment. Douglas once described his personali-
ty and appeal to the mass audience by stating, ‘‘I’d have to say I’m
square and I’m happy that I am.’’ His charming ‘‘Mr. Nice Guy’’
image made him the quintessential TV host and encouraged such
personalities as Marlon Brando, John Lennon, Barbra Streisand, Rose
Kennedy, and Princess Grace of Monaco to choose his program for
their rare talk show appearances.
Born Michael Dowd on August 11, 1925, in Chicago, Illinois,
Mike Douglas served in the Navy during World War II and first
attracted attention with an impromptu singing performance while
visiting the famous Hollywood Canteen. His rendition of ‘‘When
Irish Eyes Are Smiling’’ so impressed nightclub manager Earl Carroll
that the young sailor was given a standing offer of a job as a singer as
soon as he was free to take it. However, upon leaving the service in
1945, Dowd turned down Carroll’s offer and a Hollywood film
contract to join Kay Kayser’s big band as a featured male singer. For
five years Douglas, whose professional name was bestowed upon him
during a performance by Kayser, sang on both the radio and television
versions of Kay Kayser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge. Among his
most popular songs with Kayser and his own spin-off group Michael
Douglas & The Campus Kids were ‘‘Ole Buttermilk Sky’’ (1946) and
‘‘The Old Lamplighter’’ (1947). Upon Kayser’s retirement in 1950,
Douglas began a solo singing career. His most noteworthy perform-
ance of this period occurred when he provided the singing voice for
Prince Charming in Walt Disney’s animated fairytale classic
Cinderella (1950).
Douglas moved into television in the early 1950s and appeared
on numerous programs originating from Chicago. In 1961, he arrived
in Cleveland to launch his own talk show. Westinghouse, which
syndicated the Douglas show, owned KYW-TV in Cleveland and
believed it would be most cost-effective to originate the program from
those facilities. Later, an FCC ruling on a legal technicality forced
Westinghouse and NBC to swap their stations in Cleveland and
Philadelphia. In 1965, Douglas and his successful program relocated
to Philadelphia’s Independence Mall. Each episode of The Mike
Douglas Show began with Douglas singing an opening number (most
often ‘‘On a Wonderful Day Like Today’’) and then commenting on
his personal life with his wife Genevieve and their three daughters.
He then welcomed various guests and participated in comedy-
variety segments.
One of the most noteworthy elements of the Douglas Show was
the inclusion of a celebrity guest co-host each week. Performers such
as Rosemary Clooney, Jim Nabors, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and
Gloria Swanson would join Mike in this role for five days. Perhaps
Douglas’s most unconventional co-hosts were John Lennon and
Yoko Ono, who appeared for a week in February 1972. The couple
introduced Douglas and his Middle American audience to such
counterculture figures as Jerry Rubin, Black Panther Bobby Seale,
and several segments of performance art. Highlights of the unusual
week included Lennon playing with his rock idol Chuck Berry and
Douglas joining the couple in an unrehearsed segment where they
phoned strangers to say they loved them.
Mike Douglas symbolized family entertainment during the
turbulent 1960s and 1970s. He was extremely popular and prominent
on the American scene. Beyond his own afternoon program, he often
substituted for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. Douglas even
produced a hit record, ‘‘The Men in My Little Girl’s Life,’’ a song
about fatherhood that reached number three on the Billboard charts.
He was even seen on the big screen when he made a cameo
appearance as a southern governor in the Burt Reynolds film Gator
(1976). After The Mike Douglas Show ceased production in 1982, the
host moved to the fledgling CNN cable network to briefly host an
interview show. Douglas remained out of the spotlight until 1996
when he made a special guest appearance during the premiere week of
The Rosie O’Donnell Show. Rosie O’Donnell credited Douglas as the
inspiration for the positive, entertainment-based, and family-friendly
show she hoped to create. Her great success in the late 1990s proved
the daytime talk show format pioneered by Mike Douglas still
resonated with many Americans.
—Charles Coletta
F
URTHER READING:
Douglas, Mike. Mike Douglas: My Story. New York, Putnam, 1978.
White, Mel. Mike Douglas: When the Going Gets Tough. Waco,
Texas, Word Books, 1982.
Downs, Hugh (1921—)
Throughout his more than sixty years in broadcasting, Hugh
Downs has been the embodiment of reassurance and congeniality.
Learning his craft as a radio announcer in the late 1930s and 1940s,
Downs became the master host of television. After serving as an-
nouncer on Caesar’s Hour and The Tonight Show, Downs simultane-
ously hosted an early morning series, Today, and a daily game show,
Concentration. Always curious about health and science, Downs
oversaw the first successful series on aging, Over Easy, for PBS.
When the magazine series, 20/20, was floundering, ABC lured the
affable Downs out of semi-retirement to anchor the show in 1978. He
reported on many of his special interests, including sailing, psycholo-
gy, and astronomy, for 20/20, helping to make it the network’s
signature primetime newsmagazine for over two decades. Because of
his decency and trustworthiness, Downs is one of the most familiar
and reassuring figures in the history of television, clocking more
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hours on the air than any other network personality according to The
Guinness Book of World Records.
—Ron Simon
F
URTHER READING:
Downs, Hugh. On Camera: My Ten Thousand Hours on Television.
New York, Putnam, 1986.
Doyle, Arthur Conan (1859-1930)
So great is the influence of Sherlock Holmes, that only the truest
of the great detective’s fans know that his creator, Arthur Conan
Doyle, thought far less of Holmes than he did of his other creative
efforts. For Doyle was not a stock-in-trade mystery writer, a genre
that was still finding its legs. He certainly had not ‘‘invented’’ the
genre of detective fiction, a privilege that belonged to Edgar Allan
Poe and his own creation, master detective August Dupin. Although
Doyle claimed that Holmes had been modeled on his medical school
teacher, Dr. Joseph Bell, the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, as well as
Emile Gaboriau, Charles Dickens, Eugene Vidocq, and Wilkie Col-
lins, were what provided Doyle with the basic elements for building
his mythic detective.
Arthur Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859 in Edinburgh,
the eldest son of Charles Altimont Doyle and his wife, Mary Foley.
Doyle’s father, a builder and designer in the Edinburgh Public Works
Arthur Conan Doyle
Office, was from a staunchly Catholic family. In 1869, Doyle was
enrolled in Hodder Preparatory, a Jesuit school in Lancashire. Two
years later he attended the Jesuit college, Stonyhurst School, also in
Lancashire. Upon graduating, he traveled to Austria, where he spent a
year studying German in Feldkirch School before entering Edinburgh
University in 1876 to study medicine. Despite his Jesuit education,
Doyle’s year in Austria proved a major turning point, as a crisis of
faith led him to abandon his Catholic upbringing for a studied
agnosticism. This change in religious perspective, based on his own
faith in scientific reasoning, prepared Doyle for the rigors of
medical school.
Interestingly, it was Doyle’s avowed agnosticism and unwavering
commitment to honest dealing that led to his becoming a writer. After
he informed his father’s well-to-do family of his religious disillusion-
ment, all social and financial help was withdrawn. Barely able to
support himself, Doyle turned in his third year in medical school to
writing fiction for extra cash, using as material his own adventures
serving while in school as a ship’s doctor on a whaling vessel to the
Antarctic and later on an African freighter. Between the few stories he
published, which paid just enough to keep him and his family afloat,
Doyle racked up a good number of rejections before achieving steady
work as a writer.
In 1882, Doyle established a private practice in Southsea,
Portsmouth. Three years later, he married Louise Hawkins, whose
own small family income offered him greater freedom to write more.
His first novel, The Firm of Girdlestone, written in 1886, was soundly
rejected by the British publishing industry and did not see publication
until 1890. His next work was his first Sherlock Holmes story, the
novella A Study in Scarlet, which after several initial rejections, was
published in the 1887 issue of Beeton’s Christmas Annual. Despite
Doyle’s faith in the quality and originality of the story’s hero, A Study
in Scarlet gained little notice among readers. His next novel, howev-
er, Micah Clarke (1889), caused a great stir after its publication—
following the usual round of rejections by British publishers—by
Andrew Lang, as chief editor at Longmans Publishing Company.
Micah Clarke, a story about the dangers of fanaticism, was Doyle’s
first work of historical fiction and an immediate success, propelling
the author into literary stardom in England.
Meanwhile, despite the poor showing Holmes had made in his
creator’s home country, Doyle’s detective fared quite well in the
United States, where a request for another story about the master
detective was made to Doyle while he was deep in his next historical
novel, The White Company (1890). As soon as Doyle had completed
The White Company, which was to be his personal favorite, he dashed
off The Sign of Four (1890) which was, once again, well received in
America. Fortunately for Doyle, Holmes’ stock, despite his poor
initial showing, was beginning to rise in England by leaps and bounds.
In July 1891, Doyle wrote his first of six Sherlock Holmes tales for
The Strand, making Doyle England’s most popular serialized fiction
writer. Doyle continued to write Sherlock Holmes stories over the
next two years until he decided to have Holmes killed by his arch-
nemesis, Dr. Moriarty, in December 1893, with the story ‘‘The
Final Problem.’’
Doyle’s decision was a momentous one. Holmes’ death was met
with howls of outrage and large-scale subscription cancellations of
the magazine. The pressure on Doyle was enormous to continue the
series, but he was adamant about letting Holmes rest in peace. As it
was, the production of a Holmes story for serial publication proved to
be an enormous strain on Doyle’s creative powers, draining precious
energy that he thought better spent on his now little known historical
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
756
novels, such as Rodney Stone (1896) and Uncle Bernac (1897). In the
early 1900s, Doyle added to his output two works of historical
nonfiction, The Great Boer War (1900) and The War in South Africa
(1902), which sought not only to document the Boer War but to
defend the British role in it.
In 1901, Doyle published The Hound of the Baskervilles, in
which Holmes was reintroduced to solve one of his older cases. By
1903, Doyle had accepted an American offer of $5,000 per story for a
series of new tales about the great detective, regardless of how many
Doyle wrote or how often. Doyle continued to write stories of Holmes
and his companion Watson over the next 20 years, although they
tended to appear in short bursts, when they appeared at all. After
Holmes’ resurrection, Doyle’s early passion for historical fiction
sought an outlet in other genres, such as the scientific romance,
resulting in the writing of The Lost World (1912), The Poison Belt
(1913), and The Land of Mist (1926). Concurrent with these began a
spate of Spiritualist works that included The New Revelation (1918),
The Vital Message (1919), The Wanderings of a Spiritualist (1921),
The Coming of the Fairies (1922), and the two-volume History of
Spiritualism (1926).
Many consider Doyle’s turn to spiritualism at the end of his life
one of the strangest events to occur in the life of a man whose greatest
creation was a detective who drew his conclusions from a hard and
cold reality that disavowed all things supernatural. Few, however,
recognize the important nuances in Doyle’s thoughts about spiritualism,
as well as the nuances within the spiritualist movement itself, which
sought to treat spirits as a scientific reality, a view that Doyle favored.
Doyle, after all, was an agnostic, not an atheist, and there is little
doubt that notwithstanding his medical training and belief in scientif-
ic method, he remained unable to reconcile the loss of his childhood
Catholic faith with his belief in a greater good that directed human
conduct and morals. Indeed, Holmes’ own work as a detective of
‘‘setting the world to rights’’ suggests a moral imperative that is
explained more by Doyle’s faith—in goodness, in man, and perhaps
even in God—than his reason.
—Bennett Lovett-Graff
F
URTHER READING:
Carr, John Dickson. The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. New York,
Harper, 1949.
Clausen, Christopher. ‘‘Sherlock Holmes, Order, and the Late-Victo-
rian Mind.’’ Georgia Review. Vol. 38, No. 1, Spring 1984, 104-123.
Green, R.L. , editor. A Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle. London and
New York, Oxford University Press, 1983.
Nordon, Pierre. Conan Doyle: A Biography, trans. Frances Partridge.
London, John Murray, 1966.
Dr. J
See Erving, Julius ‘‘Dr. J’’
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
The phrase ‘‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’’ is a popular metaphor to
express the dual nature of human beings, who are capable of such
great goodness and almost unbelievable evil. It is derived from the
respectable Victorian doctor with a demonic alter ego who first
appeared in the eponymous novella (1886) by Scottish writer Robert
Louis Stevenson (1850-94). The tragedy of the scientist who finds the
formula to isolate his evil side but fails to control it has been
frequently transferred to the screen. The story was first filmed in
1908, and versions range from Robert Mamoulian’s 1931 film, with
Academy Award-winner Fredric March in the title role, to Stephen
Frears’ irregular Mary Reilly (1995). However, the presence of Jekyll
and Hyde can be detected in many other films, novels, and comics of
the last one hundred years only remotely inspired by Stevenson.
Stories dealing with scientists involved in fatal accidents, tormented
serial killers, and even secret superheroes are ultimately indebted to
Stevenson’s Gothic masterpiece.
—Sara Martin
F
URTHER READING:
Frayling, Christopher. Nightmare: The Birth of Horror. London,
BBC Books, 1996, 114-61.
Geduld, Harry M. The Definitive Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Compan-
ion. New York, Garland, 1983.
King, Charles. ‘‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: A Filmography.’’ The
Journal of Popular Film and Television. Vol. 25, No. 1, 1997, 9-20.
Rose, Brian A. Jekyll and Hyde Adapted: Dramatizations of Cultural
Anxiety. Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies 66. London,
Greenwood, 1996.
Skal, David. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror.
London, Plexus, 1993.
Veeder, William, and Gordon Hirsch, editors. Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde after One Hundred Years. Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 1988.
Dr. Kildare
In 1938 Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) acquired the rights to
author Max Brand’s creation, Dr. Kildare, and began a series of
popular films about a young intern in a metropolitan hospital, and his
struggle to learn his profession and earn the respect of a crusty senior
doctor in his specialty, internal medicine. In 1961 the same charac-
ters, with different actors, made a nationwide success of the television
adaptation of Dr. Kildare, becoming the forerunner of the many
medical dramas, like ER and Chicago Hope, that lit up the small
screen in the 1990s.
In the cinema version, Lew Ayres starred in the title role and
Lionel Barrymore played the senior doctor, a sharp-tongued old
curmudgeon with a heart of gold, which he tried to conceal. The first
in the series, Young Dr. Kildare (1938), presented a cast of regular
characters that included Nat Pendleton as the ambulance driver and
featured Laraine Day, who stayed in the troupe for five pictures.
MGM released three Kildare pictures in 1940 alone, including Dr.
Kildare Goes Home, Dr. Kildare’s Crisis, and Dr. Kildare’s Strange
DR. SEUSSENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
757
Case. Dr. Kildare’s Wedding Day, Laraine Day’s last in the series,
was one of the most popular and was marked by one of Red Skelton’s
early screen appearances. Lew Ayres, who had chosen to be a
conscientious objector and refuse certain military duties, left the cast
in 1941. Van Johnson and Keye Luke vied to become Dr. Gillespie’s
assistant in two films, Dr. Gillespie’s Criminal Case and Dr. Gillespie’s
New Assistant.
Finding the right stars to play Kildare and Gillespie on television
was a challenge. The first pilot shot for the series had Lew Ayres
return to his role as a more mature Kildare, but executive producer
Norman Felton said ‘‘The result was a clinical sort of film, too much
like a documentary.’’ They decided on a second pilot and quickly
signed Raymond Massey, a Canadian actor famous for his portrayal
of Lincoln, as Dr. Gillespie. More than 35 actors read for the Kildare
part, and William Shatner was the leading contender for the role until
he canceled out to accept the Captain’s chair in a new science fiction
series called Star Trek. One of the remaining actors was a nervous
newcomer named Richard Chamberlain, who had done a few minor
television roles and was then collecting $38 a week at the unemploy-
ment office. Despite his lack of experience, the producer thought he
had just the right physical appearance and decided to let him take the
lead in the pilot film.
The show was an overnight success, and Chamberlain found
himself the object of mobs of squealing women wherever he went.
His boyish blond looks attracted 4,500 fan letters a week. The
character of Dr. Kildare, however, a medical crusader and straight-
arrow idealist, did not entirely appeal to Chamberlain. He told an
interviewer in the Saturday Evening Post that Kildare is ‘‘nobler than
humans prefer other humans to be. If I were to mold Kildare, I would
make him more subject to faults and weaknesses—like the rest of us. I
might even have him pinch a nurse or two.’’ It was an attitude Dr.
Gillespie would not have endorsed.
Despite the development of the show into a world-wide hit, with
more than 80 million admirers around the globe, the series ended in
1966 after a five year run. Toward the end, the ratings declined
somewhat as the show strayed from the key relationship between
Kildare and Gillespie and focused more on the medical problems of
its guest star patients. During the final season, some of the episodes
were serialized in a 30 minute format rather than continuing in the
hour-long version that had been so effective. Following the show’s
demise, Chamberlain, rather than being forced to return to the
unemployment line as he feared, went on to become the ‘‘king of the
miniseries’’ in the 1970s and 1980s, starring in such blockbusters as
Shogun, The Thornbirds, and Centennial.
In 1972 MGM tried to revive the series in a new format called
Young Dr. Kildare, starring Mark Jenkins as Kildare and Gary Merrill
as Gillespie, but the series had a brief run, followed by a short after-
life in syndication. Many have commented on the coincidence that
two of the most successful medical shows ever to air on television
arrived in the year 1961, with Ben Casey premiering four days after
Dr. Kildare.
—Benjamin Griffith
F
URTHER READING:
Books, Tim, and Earle Marsh. The Complete Directory of Prime Time
Network TV Shows: 1946 to Present. New York, Ballantine, 1981.
Sackett, Susan. Prime-Time Hits: Television’s Most Popular Network
Programs. New York, Billboard Books, 1993.
Dr. Seuss (1904-1991)
Author, illustrator, editor, and publisher, Dr. Seuss revolution-
ized materials directed at young readers by introducing humorous,
rhymed, and colorful books using limited vocabularies and simple,
appealing illustrations. Uniquely inventive in the annals of twentieth-
century children’s books, Seuss openly acknowledged that helping to
kill off the predictable ‘‘Dick and Jane’’ primers of the 1950s was one
of his proudest accomplishments. The bizarre creatures of his stories,
which contained subtle moral messages that could be read on different
levels, often acted with what their author termed ‘‘logical insanity.’’
For example, if an animal had two heads, he must also have
two toothbrushes.
Twice-married but childless, Seuss had not started out to be a
children’s book innovator. He was born Theodor Seuss Geisel in
Springfield, Massachusetts, the son of a German immigrant who ran a
brewery until the arrival of Prohibition. He later commented that his
father was on track to become company president until circumstances
forced him to switch his careers and become commissioner of parks.
This helped instill an early cynicism in the future Dr. Seuss, while
his frequent trips to the zoo thereafter helped to stimulate his
fertile imagination.
Theodor ‘‘Dr. Seuss’’ Geisel
DR. SEUSS ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE
758
His mother, Henrietta Seuss Geisel, unwittingly lent him her
maiden name, which he first used when writing a humorous scientific
piece. While reading for a B.A. in English from Dartmouth, Seuss
contributed to the school humor magazine, Jack O’Lantern, then
studied literature for one year at Oxford. Returning to the United
States in 1927, Seuss sold cartoons to the Saturday Evening Post,
Judge, and Vanity Fair. He always considered himself to be an artist
first and an author second. This belief received some confirmation in
many of his books for which he initially drew sketches, afterwards
devising dialogue to accompany them. When he later wrote books
without illustrating them himself, Seuss used the pseudonym Theo
LeSieg (Geisel spelled backwards.)
Seuss composed advertising illustrations for Standard Oil of
New Jersey for 15 years after a company executive saw his cartoon of
a knight trying to kill dragons with the insecticide Flit. This led to one
of the 1930s most famous ad slogans, ‘‘Quick, Henry, the Flit.’’ In
1932, Seuss wrote an ABC book for children but could not find a
publisher. In 1936, while crossing the Atlantic by ship, he composed
And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street in rhyme inspired by
the rhythm of the vessel’s engines. About a boy whose imagination
transformed a horse and wagon into various beasts, the book became
his first published monograph, bought by Vanguard Press after some
20 other publishing houses had turned it down.
Vanguard also published his next book, The 500 Hats of
Bartholomew Cubbins, in 1938. Seuss then moved on to Random
House, where he remained for the rest of his life, founding its
Beginner Books division in 1958. The year 1939 witnessed both The
King’s Stilts and Seuss’s only novel, The Seven Lady Godivas, a
commercial failure and one of only two books he wrote for adults.
From 1940 to 1942, he worked as a political cartoonist for the anti-
isolationist PM newspaper, revealing both his political concerns and
his preference for drawing. The perennial favorite Horton Hatches
the Egg appeared in 1940. Critics variously regard this first Horton
book as a parable about the virtue of intervening in crises, about
protecting unborn life, about perseverance and integrity, or as just an
amusing story.
During a stint in the army Seuss worked with Warner Brothers
cartoonist Chuck Jones (who later brought How the Grinch Stole
Christmas to television) on training films. He also collaborated on
documentaries in the Army Signal Corps with film director Frank
Capra, from whom he learned the importance of plot development,
and one could argue that the triumph of physically weak protagonists
and the essential goodness that Seuss saw in most people reflect a
Capraesque sensibility. Seuss garnered three Academy Awards in his
lifetime: for two documentaries, Hitler Lives (1946) and Design for
Death (1947, about the Japanese people), and for his animated
cartoon Gerald McBoing-Boing (1951).
His postwar book production continued with McElligot’s Pool
(1947), Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose (1948), Bartholomew and
the Oobleck (1949), If I Ran the Zoo (1950), Scrambled Eggs Super!
(1953), Horton Hears a Who (1954), On Beyond Zebra (1955), If I
Ran the Circus (1956), and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1957).
But the debut of The Cat in the Hat in 1957 was the event that
established Seuss’s reputation. Produced as a supplementary first-
grade reader with a controlled vocabulary of 223 words, it was the tale
of a mischief-maker who teaches children to misbehave while their
mother is away. Its success allowed Seuss to establish Beginner Books.
According to E. J. Kahn, Jr., writing in a December 1960 issue of
The New Yorker, Geisel was a perfectionist. He often labored more
than a year on a book and threw away 99 percent of his material before
he was satisfied, afterwards haunting the production department to
ensure that it got his material right. Geisel later observed that his
favorite book was The Lorax (1971), which came almost effortless-
ly to him, allegedly taking only 45 minutes to compose. This
environmentally conscious allegory about trees so loved that they are
all cut down and become extinct, was also the only one of his books
that anyone ever tried to ban. That effort occurred in 1989 in the
northern California logging town of Laytonville. Other direct mes-
sage books such as Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories (1958), about a
deceitful leader, and The Sneetches and Other Stories (1961), about a
hateful competition between two kinds of creatures, had received
uniformly welcome responses.
The characters in the Dr. Seuss books often encounter fearful
situations, but wit and good luck see them through. Even the baddies
are not irredeemably evil. The Grinch, for example, who starts out
with a heart two sizes too small, ends up with one three sizes bigger
than before. Seuss’s trademarks are nonsense, humor, mischief,
galloping rhymes, and tongue twisters. Some of his words are his own
inventions; others, such as ‘‘burp,’’ had never before been used in
children’s books. His illustrations—gangling cartoon-style figures,
generally depicted in simple primary colors—are of ordinary charac-
ters with which children readily identify. All of his people look very
much alike, which perhaps is part of the message. The lead characters
are also invariably male, if they can be identified by gender at all. The
novelist Alison Lurie asserted in the New York Review of Books in
1990 that there was an inherent sexism in his characters’ roles. One
book with a female protagonist, however, Daisy-Head Mayzie (1995),
was published posthumously. Seuss’s focus on the issues of aging,
tolerance, laziness, individuality, and persistence were usually subtly
intertwined in his stories.
In a career that spanned six decades, Dr. Seuss published 48
books, including his second for adults, this time the successful You’re
Only Old Once: A Book for Obsolete Children (1986). They sold 100
million copies in 18 languages. According to Publishers’ Weekly in
1996, of the top 10 bestselling children’s books of all time, Seuss
wrote three: The Cat in The Hat, Green Eggs and Ham (1960, written
in response to a challenge from publisher Bennett Cerf to write a book
using 50 words or less), and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish
(1960). Many others of his works were not far behind in popularity.
The last of Seuss’s books to be published in his lifetime, Oh, the
Places You’ll Go! (1990), addressed the highs and lows of human
experience—facing fear, loneliness, and confusion—and fittingly
appealed to both adults and children. With its presence on the New
York Times adult best-seller list for two years (1990-92), its author
could say: ‘‘I no longer write for children, I write for people!’’ Older
readers could appreciate the satire, younger readers the charm. In the
end, Seuss’s hegemony was challenged by lushly illustrated and more
pragmatic books with more direct messages, but his books have
retained their popularity.
—Frederick J. Augustyn, Jr.
F
URTHER READING:
Fensch, Thomas, editor. Of Sneetches and Whos and the Good Dr.
Seuss: Essays on the Writings and Life of Theodor Geisel. London,
McFarland & Company, 1997.
Lurie, Alison. ‘‘The Cabinet of Dr. Seuss.’’ The New York Review of
Books. December 20, 1990.