Doris Day said that this was one of her favorite musicals. She loved playing the tomboy, Calamity Jane. Maybe that’s because she saw herself as bit of a tomboy, as a young girl. She said in her biography that
“I loved portraying Calamity Jane, who was a rambunctious, pistol-packing prairie girl (I lowered my voice and stuck out my chin a little).”
The prairie girl gets a makeover when her new roommate dresses her in a feminine yellow frock — tomboy goes girly. But before Wild Bill gets to enjoy the new look, Calamity falls into a muddy creek, storming into the cabin covered in mud.
Doris enjoyed the makeup/dressup for this scene, commenting on the mud bath the crew had prepared for her:
“It’s wonderfully warm, though a bit lumpy. This is like walking around in fudge. You must give me your recipe, boys.”
Then they dropped her further into the mud and the director gave her a bucket of water to further enhance the look:
“How times change. As a little girl I was scolded for getting my party dress dirty while playing in the mud. Now I get paid for doing the same thing.”
In her biography, Doris says that a woman is either an outdoorsy type or an indoorsy type, and that she is definitely an outdoorsy type.
The movie was shot in 1953 and it won an Academy Award for Best Original Song, Secret Love, which became Doris Day’s third million-plus recording.
The story was based on the life of Calamity Jane (Martha Jane Canary Burke) and her alleged romance with Wild Bill Hickok (James Butler Hickok) (played by Howard Keel.)
