Please Don't Eat the Daisies by Jean Kerr

'Interesting people don't want to make friends with housewives,' she explains. She'll get to make loads of interesting friends, he tells her. Giddy with the newfound power of his pen, he tries to sell Kate on the perks of the job. Meanwhile, David Niven's Larry-whose debut column of New York theater criticism slams his old friend's play-is a father so distant that it surely must surprise only him that the baby learns to say 'Daddy' while addressing the family dog. (One dress she chose turned out to be made from the same material as the curtains at the house of her husband's boss, as she discovered with chagrin at a dinner party.) Day, meanwhile, dresses better to take her children shopping for shoes than most people today do to attend a wedding. Day was one of the few leading ladies of her era willing to play an onscreen mother, which she did winningly, even breaking into 'Que Sera, Sera.'īeing portrayed by Doris Day must have been a source of amusement for Kerr though widely regarded as handsome, she apparently struggled with weight and, consequently, shopping. In the movie version, Kate and Larry Mackay-played by Doris Day and David Niven-are Manhattanites who long to flee to the country for the sake of their children, four boys who are mostly the same height but somehow sport a wide spectrum of hair colors.

She had plenty of material: The four boys immortalized in the book were joined in later works by a brother and sister. Like her other books-'The Snake Has All the Lines' (1960), 'Penny Candy' (1970), and 'How I Got to Be Perfect' (1978)-'Please Don't Eat the Daisies' is a collection of witty dispatches from the frontlines of motherhood. Kerr is best known for the 1957 book that spawned the movie (and a short-lived NBC sitcom a decade later). If she was never quite at the top of the top, she was always in the top tier, and she seems to have spent much of her time laughing. IN THE 1960 MOVIE 'Please Don't Eat the Daisies,' the theater critic Larry Mackay says of his new job at a major New York newspaper, 'There's something about getting to the top of your field, even if it's only the bottom of the top.' The author Jean Kerr, who died in January at age seventy-nine, wrote several plays and bestselling books filled with such trademark one-liners.

Please Don't Eat the Daisies by Jean Kerr