The Original Mickey Mouse Club Show

Background

Doreen Isabelle Tracey was born in London, England, the daughter of entertainers Jean "Bessie" Hay and Sidney Tracey, who performed for Allied soldiers during the war. Sidney's original name was Murray Katzelnick; he was a Russian Jew whose family immigrated to the United States in 1905, when he was three. Tracey and Hay were a standout dancing team on the international circuit, touring North America, Australia, and the UK, where as early as 1927 they made a short subject called On With The Dance: The Adagio. Their performing days, courtesy of the war, outlasted the demise of vaudeville. When they realized that the British music halls were going under as well, they brought Doreen, an only child, to Los Angeles around 1947. Sidney first tried running a nightclub called "Slappy Maxie's", which was co-owned by his pal, entertainer Ben Blue. He then later opened the Rainbow Dance Studio in Hollywood, where stars like Debbie Reynolds gave Doreen free dance lessons.

The Farmer Takes A Wife

Doreen wasn't much interested in school. Though intelligent and perceptive, her lively inclinations and slight dyslexia turned her off to bookish pursuits. Her first professional work was an uncredited bit in the Betty Grable musical film The Farmer Takes a Wife (1953), which also had future Mouseketeer Nancy Abbate. Her ballet teacher was Val Froman, who taught at her father's studio.

Doreen had a guest spot on the Colgate Comedy Hour, like several other future Mouseketeers, and also did some local children's television. Doreen has said she was answering the phone in the Rainbow Studio one day at lunchtime, when a Disney casting agent called, asking for kids to audition for the Mickey Mouse Club. In her best grown-up voice she told him she knew the perfect little girl for the job. Doreen wanted to keep the audition a secret, but her father nixed that scheme and posted the information publicly in the studio. At her audition, she did a Patti Page song called Cross Over the Bridge in a comic style, and was immediately hired.

Performance

Doreen was an all-around performer, adept at dancing, singing, and acting. She excelled in displaying comical facial reactions that, though exaggerated, were never overdone. Ballet was her strongest dance style, but she could also do tap and jazz. Her singing was very good, though her voice didn't strike the hearer as particularly distinctive. She could ad-lib effectively, and her strongest selling point was her own appealing personality, which came across best in comic turns. Impulsive and action-oriented, Doreen did an aerial act at the Mickey Mouse Club Circus in Disneyland in November and December of 1955. One time she forgot the instructions not to look down, and immediately froze. The circus crew had to bring her down with a ladder.

Doreen was apparently raised as a Catholic by her mother. When her mother was hospitalized with TB, she lived for a time with her "uncle" Ben Blue, who was also Jewish. Doreen could hardly have been unaware of the reputation Walt Disney and his studio had, largely undeserved, for anti-Semitism. Though there were several Jewish employees (and two other Mouseketeers) at the studio, she must have felt some apprehension, which she may have countered by hanging out with other Catholic girls like Darlene Gillespie and Annette Funicello.

She was initially friends with Darlene, whom she regarded as smart and funny. In the winter of 1956 she was hurriedly chosen to replace her ailing friend in the Disney western film Westward Ho, the Wagons!, which also featured Karen Pendleton, Tommy Cole, and Cubby O'Brien. Doreen performed well in the few scenes she and the other kids had. Whether this led to cooling of relations between her and Darlene is unknown, but she began to hang out more with Annette, and later, Cheryl Holdridge, who became her closest friend for years after the show ended. The three girls once snuck some cigarettes from a studio hairdresser and smoked them secretly outside the sound stage.


In the third season, though she was in constant demand for the Mouseketeer production numbers, she also did voice narrations for a couple of Newsreel Specials. For the Disneyland episode promoting the film Rainbow Road to Oz she danced the part of Scraps, the Patchwork Girl, though her singing voice was dubbed by Gloria Wood. In the serial Annette she played the role of Val Abernathy, sister to Tim Considine's character.

Aftermath

Doreen was only fifteen when the show stopped filming in June 1958. Though a lot of girls admired her, her greatest popularity was with the sort of guys who don't write fan letters. Consequently she was let go by the studio along with most other Mouseketeers. However, the end of her contract did not mean the end of her employment by Disney. She and several other Mouseketeers were hired from time to time for specific public appearances. She appeared on an episode of The Donna Reed Show in April 1959, then went to Australia in May 1959, on a tour arranged by Jimmie Dodd, independent of the studio. Without Annette or Darlene to overshadow her, she was wildly popular, and for the first time really began cutting loose.

Doreen attended John Borroughs High School in Burbank, then switched to the Hollywood Professional School for a semester, while also teaching beginning dance classes at her father's studio. She dated Roy Steiner, older brother of ex-mouse Ronnie Steiner, for a while, and also dated Lonnie Burr. Sometime in late 1959 she met Robert Washburn. They shared an interest in horseback riding and show business (he performed under the name Robert Allen). In an "exclusive" interview with 'Teen Magazine in 1962, Doreen said the wedding took place May 7, 1961, about a month after she turned eighteen, but she later told Jerry Bowles that they had earlier eloped to Tijuana for a secret marriage. In his book, Paul Petersen says Doreen married at age fifteen (1958), but seventeen (1960) seems more likely to me. In early 1962 she had a son, and by fall of 1963 was divorced.

Singing was Doreen's career mainstay during the sixties. Though she didn't record, she was in demand for live performances on the teen nightclub circuit, doing both rock'n'roll and ballads. During 1962 she was a member of the 'Teen Magazine variety troupe, performing with Tommy Cole and the Addrisi Brothers, and also did separate gigs, including some at Ben Blue's nightclub, where she sang, danced, and did celebrity impersonations. She also had a few guest spots on TV shows like My Three Sons and The Donna Reed Show, while in 1963 she took on a songwriting job with Crown Records.

Doreen worked part-time for a trust company and attended classes at Pierce College in 1965. A year later, she put together an act, and headed out to the Far East to try her luck as an entertainer again. Basing herself out of Manila, she fronted a Filipino rock band called The Raiders. The group performed at hotels and resorts, then, in 1968, went on the USO circuit for Southeast Asia, including Viet Nam. After four years of this, Doreen grew weary of being constantly on the road, and returned to the United States.

Doreen's subsequent life is reputedly the most interesting (and harrowing) of all the Mouseketeers, but, with an unfortunate exception, is rarely visible in the public record. (The exception was an all too visible layout in the men's magazine Gallery during the late seventies.) Jerry Bowles, in his 1975 interview, captured some of this, but Doreen didn't seem to trust him completely. Paul Petersen, in his 1977 book, briefly described more of her experiences, but didn't provide details. In the late 1990's Doreen herself started work on an autobiography she calls Confessions of a Mouseketeer, a small excerpt of which appeared in the NPR anthology I Thought My Father Was God (2001).

For a long time after the show Doreen had nothing to do with Disney or Mouseketeer reunions, except for the 25th Anniversary Show in 1980. That changed in the nineties, when she began making herself available for personal appearances, highlighted by her joint interview with other Mouseketeers on the Disney Treasures DVD in 2004.