Modern Screen (Jan-Dec 1960)

Doris Day's Secret Son (Continued from page 31) The two people who were to become Terry's parents met one night late in 1940. The place was a small and dingy nightclub in Cincinnati. The girl — Doris (KappelhofT) Day — was sixteen, a pretty, freckle-faced and very ambitious singer. There was nothing exceptional about her voice at the time. But people who'd heard her sing at her first job, in a Chinese restaurant, had liked her. And the owner of this place, the nightclub, hearing her, liked her too, sensing her possibilities, signed her up and hoped for the best. The boy— Albert Paul Jorden — was some two years older than Doris. He was a musician who played trombone in the nightclub band. He was tall and goodlooking, "a nice guy, very friendly and intelligent" — people who knew him then recall — who had only one real ambition in life: to earn enough money playing trombone so that he could quit the band business by the end of the next five or six years and open a business of some more steady sort, in Cincinnati, his hometown, and settle down. In one of her rare statements about Al and their relationship, Doris has said: "It was one night soon after I began singing at this place that I asked him if he would give me a ride home. I was earning twenty-five dollars a week and spending it all on clothes and I didn't have the carfare. He said yes, he'd take me home. And that began it. Not that we got along at first. We really didn't. I was young and very shy with boys. And he was bored with the girl-singer type. . . . Anyway, after a couple of months the nightclub folded and we were both out of jobs. We didn't see one another for a while. Then, one day, the trombone player suddenly came around and asked for a date. Turned out he'd missed me, or something. He paid me lots of attention. And I fell in love with him." They were married early the following year, 1941, and went to New York to live. Al had gotten a good break there — a job with Jimmy Dorsey's band. Doris, too, got a break shortly after they arrived— a job singing in a little downtown nightspot. Between the two of them they earned nearly $100 a week. Life couldn't have been better for the two kids from Ohio. Then, in the spring of that year, Doris learned she was pregnant. Laughingly, she said to friends, "Well, it's good-bye career . . . time to be a mommy." These friends recall that she was serious-sounding about giving up the business; that she'd had a taste of it, had enjoyed it, but had decided that being a mother came first. "She was only seventeen," one of them says, "but you've never seen a girl with as much drive, at that age, to make good at a career. So I was surprised when she said this, about giving up the career. But she said it. And the way she did, you had to believe her." Yet when, towards the end of the following February, shortly after the birth of her son, Terry, Doris was re-offered her old job, she took it. "I've phoned Alma (her mother)," she told her husband. "She's coming to New York to help take care of the baby. It'll all work out fine. All right, Al?" Al said he'd think it over. 6C "Al," Doris went on, "I've got to do this. I can't help it. It's in me — and I've got to. "Don't worry," she said then. "It'll all work out fine ... I know." It didn't. . . . The trouble starts The trouble between Al and Doris started soon after this. Some sources state that it was Al's doing. Others that it was Doris'. Doris has always flatly refused to go into the matter. Al himself told us recently, "It's an old issue, so why bring up questions? . . . But I will tell you this. There was a religious problem. I'm Protestant and Doris was Catholic. This made for a breach between us. . . . It was, at least, a part of the whole difficulty." Whatever the full difficulty, Doris and Al reached the breaking point when Terry was a little less than one year old. They separated (Al continuing with Dorsey for a while, then returning to Cincinnati), and were officially divorced about a year later. For a time, Doris brooded. But the brooding ended, suddenly, when Les Brown, the bandleader, heard her one night at the downtown nightspot where she was singing and signed her up to become girl vocalist with his band, one of the biggest of the time. Doris was jubilant. "I'm on my way!" she shouted when she told her mother the news that night. With her first paycheck — the drive to do things big back in her again — she moved the family (her mother, her son and herself) to a nice apartment, a far cry from the "dump" they'd been living in. With her second check, she put money down on new furniture for the place. With her third — which she received the day before she was to leave New York on an extended tour with Brown and the band — she raided Macy's, Gimbel's and a few other stores and bought every imaginable kind of toy for her son. The first of the toys arrived after Doris had left for work early that evening. When she got home, the next morning, exhausted, as usual, Terry was, as usual, asleep. "The big teddy bear, the fire engine, the wooden soldier set — they all arrived, nice and unbroken," her mother told her at the door. "And Terry, he loved them. Just loved them." Doris walked into the bedroom, and over to the crib where her son lay sleeping. "Hi, Mr. Freckles," she whispered. She bent and touched the boy, who stirred a little, but did not wake. "Your Mommy's home," she whispered. Still the boy did not wake. Doris smiled. "That's right," she said, "don't let your old Mom tease you into opening your eyes . . . You get your sleep, like a good little boy. And you dream about your new toys. And about lots of nice things, all sorts of nice things. . . ." She stood upright again, and she began to unbutton the gown she was wearing. "And your Mom," she went on, as she did, "she's got to go to bed now, too. And she's got to sleep and dream, too. "About nice things, too, Terry. "About the years that are coming. "Our years, Terry. "About those years when I'll be very famous and rich — oh so rich. "And when you'll be a big boy, and the son of this rich and famous lady over here. "About when I'm not a Miss Nobody anymore. "And when you're not a sleepy little Mr. Nobody anymore. . . . "That's what I'll dream." The gown was off. She got onto the bed. Under the covers. She turned her head on the pillow and faced the crib, a few yards away, and she smiled again. "Isn't that a good kind of dream to have, Mr. Freckles?" she asked. She closed her eyes. The smile began to leave her face. "Isn't that a good kind of dream, Terry . . . Even if it means I've got to leave you for a little while, once in a while . . . Like today . . . Later . . . Later today. . . ." A long, long trip The tour Doris left on later that day — and the separation from her son — were nothing to compare with a trip she would make within the next two years, and that separation. "It was 1946," a friend recalls. "Doris had left her job with Brown to go on radio, with The Hit Parade. It all looked great at first. Except that she was fired, suddenly, after thirteen weeks, and everything looked suddenly black. . . . She'd met a man in this time, a saxophone player named George. He'd been proposing to her since they'd met, and now Doris accepted. His plan was for them to leave New York right after they were married and go to California, where both of them could get a fresh lease on life, a fresh slant on their careers. Doris assumed, of course, that her boy would come along with them. It wasn't until it was too late that she found out differently. The problem was money. 'Wait till we can afford to send for him and bring him up right,' George said. So Doris, reluctantly, sent her son and mother back to Cincinnati and went to California, to her new life, with her new husband. . . . It couldn't have been worse, right from the beginning. Jobs were few and far between. Money was at a minimum. They moved into a trailer. After a while, George bored with trailer life, and the marriage, left. Doris was alone, and broke, and miserable. I firmly believe that if she'd had the forty or fifty dollars' bus fare to get back to Ohio right then, she would have chucked everything. But this gal, lolling in dough today, didn't have beans — and when she did have a little she would go without food half that time just so she could afford to phone Cincinnati every once in a while and talk to her mother and ask about her boy. I knew her then. She was a different Doris Day from the happy face you're used to seeing on the screen, on most magazine covers. She would talk about her boy and how she missed him. And she would cry, and cry, and cry. . . ." The picture session The story of how, in late 1947, Doris cried nervously all during her interview with Warner Brothers' director Mike Curtiz is a famous one. Enough to repeat here that Curtiz was impressed with the unknown singer "mit all der freckles" and decided to take a chance on using her — using her big — in his forthcoming musical, Romance on the High Seas. The rest, professionally, is Doris Day history. What has never been recorded is what happened then between Doris and her son . . . that day a few months later. It was a Saturday.