About The Song
Hollywood icon Doris Day starred in dozens of movies and released more than 600 songs in her lifetime. But the box office star, known for her singular voice, never came around to the hit that might have been most associated with her career, “Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera).” In fact, Day never wanted to sing the song in the first place.
As it turned out, almost everyone involved with the tune was a bit reluctant to make it. Here’s what happened. Doris Day was cast in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 film The Man Who Knew Too Much alongside Jimmy Stewart. Hitchcock did not originally want Day in the film, but to get Stewart onboard, he had to agree to also hire Day and give her a song in the film penned by the famed songwriting duo Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, the writers behind such classics as “Silver Bells” and “Mona Lisa.” Hitchcock declared the song perfect. But Day was not as thrilled. In 2012, she told Terry Gross at NPR’s Fresh Air that she did not understand why such an upbeat, lilting song would be in a movie about a kidnapped boy. Martin Chilton at The Telegraph reports that Day also called it “a kiddie song,” but her third husband, Martin Melcher, who was also her manager, convinced her to record it.
Her performance won the film the 1956 Academy Award for Best Original Song and the song reached the No. 2 slot on the Billboard charts. Day reluctantly accepted the popularity the song garnered. “So maybe it isn’t a favorite song of mine but people loved it. And kids loved it,” she told Gross. The song became so associated with the star that it ultimately became the theme song for “The Doris Day Show,” a sitcom that aired between 1968 and 1973. In her 1976 autobiography, Day revealed that she was contracted to do the sitcom by Melcher and hadn’t even been aware of the arrangement before his death in 1968. She didn’t want to do a television show, much less one with that song as a theme.