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by Ida Meitlin
the ffeart is
Here at last is the warm and wonderful story of Doris Day and the men in her life!
■ She'd just turned fifteen and life was over. She was
lucky, they told her — she and the others who'd cheated death. This
was true, yet the truth failed to sustain her. Last week she'd been
dancing, now she lay like a strange block of cement in plaster casts. How
could a gay, harmless evening lead to such blackness? How could
the years of her life add up to this? Some day, when she was an ancient
eighteen, she might walk again, on crutches or with a limp — if she stayed
lucky. Against wave after sickening wave of disbelief, her face
.turned toward the wall, but monstrous contraptions held her body fast.
From under the closed lids, hopeless tears welled and soaked slowly
into the pillow.
The girl in the bed was Doris Kappelhoff, whose legs had danced from babyhood to the rhythm in her blood. The rhythm she owed to her father. A teacher of German in the Cincinnati schools, his spirit fed on music — but real music, as he called it. Anything less dignified than Brahams offended his soul. The popular records Doris loved were trash to him, and he had no patience with them. Nor much more with the vagaries of childhood. Brought up in the strict Teutonic school, he followed the same pattern with Paul and Doke. (To him she was always Doke, maybe in simple affection, maybe in protest against the foolishness of naming her after Doris Kenyon, her mother's favorite movie star.) Just as popular music spelled trash and no arguments, nightmares spelled nonsense. When she woke screaming against phantoms of terror in the dark, her screams would be choked by the voice of paternal authority. "Go right back to sleep and stop imagining things." Rigid amid the clamor of her pounding heart, she'd wait for her mother's footsteps, her mother's figure in the doorway, the blessed comfort of her mother's arms, shutting out all danger.
Why the Kappelhoffs separated is their own business, which is how they kept it. That they were temperamentally unsuited seems fairly clear. That tensions must have mounted to an intolerable pitch seems equally clear, since in their circle, man and wife stuck together, if sticking were possible. They parted in '35, when Doris was eleven. Whatever the cause, any rupture in a child's background affects the child. Alma Kappelhoff eased the break by fostering friendly relations between her estranged husband and his children. Growing older, Doris grew in understanding of her father and wrote to him regularly. But she remained the child of her sunny, outgoing mother. (Continued on page 71)
At thirteen Doris Kappelhoff and partner Jerry Doherty were dancing professionally (and successfully) in summer shows.
Turn page for pictures from Doris Day's life
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