Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1955)

father. Still the baby didn’t bring the bliss with him all babies are supposed to deliver. This perfect child brought complications with him, the extra feeding, the extra housekeeping, the continual need for extra money. It just all got to be too much for dreamers, particularly to young dreamers with temperament. Heartsore, disillusioned, they agreed to divorce. Dorothy-Doris took the baby home to Mom, took herself down to WLW, her old radio station. “Give me a job,” she asked them. “But you’re a big shot now,” said the station manager. “I couldn’t afford to pay you anything but the straight fee for singing commercials, $64 a week.” “I can feed my son and me on $64 a week,” she said. “Please hire me.” One of the first nights she was back on the air she sang the lullaby her mother had sung to her, as a baby, and which she was now singing to her son, “Go to Sleep, My Baby.” The pain of the sobs she was holding back made her throat ache. For weeks thereafter the offers from bands poured in to her. She had been singing from her heart and her sorrow, and she hadn’t thought of what the result might be. Now she selected from among the offers the Stan Kenton outfit. It meant the road again. It meant leaving her son. But it also meant she could support her son in the manner in which he must be supported in order to be strong and healthy. It meant she could pay Mom’s living costs and her own. She was twenty-two. Terribly old. She told herself she had no dreams left, no time for dreams. So then she met George Weidler, who was the top saxophone man with Kenton. He was the brother of Virginia Weidler, who had been a kid movie star, and he was a fine musician. From the moment of their meeting, she loved him utterly. The emotions she had felt for A1 paled, like her high school crushes, like the passions she had once known for her dolls. She and George talked, talked, talked. They created music, they danced, they talked. The moment they got an engagement where they settled down for a solid piece of time, they gave themselves time to get married. The place was Mount Vernon, just outside of New York City, where they were playing. “I’m going to give up singing,” Doris told George. “I want to settle down, be a perfect wife and have lots of children.” “Well, as you know,” said George, “there were seven kids in our family, even if Virginia turned out to be the most talented.” Actually, it seemed that Doris and George had everything in common including their German ancestry. They had both been brought up in a household dedicated to music. They were both the same age. They both wanted the same things. And they were truly in love. But, again, things weren’t too good in the band business (they seldom are, but young lovers don’t stop to think of such things). “If I could just get to the Coast,” George said, “I’m sure things would pick up for me. There’s radio work, picture work, recording work. We wouldn’t be forever dependent on this night-club work.” “All right, darling,” said his adoring wife. When they hit Hollywood in 1946 they discovered the housing shortage. They’d left Terry back in Cincinnati until they got settled, but it wasn’t too long before they discovered if they were to have a roof over their heads they had to buy it. They didn’t have the price of a house, but they could afford the swankiest trailer you ever saw, so they got that, and had it towed out to a mighty pretty spot which overlooked the mountains and the sea. Doris adored it. One thing she’d always been in the housewife division was neat as a pin and this was like a game, keeping such a tiny place up. And she had finally learned how to fry a plate of eggs without ruining them, and to boil coffee and of course there were the frozen things really romping into market, which did save their meals. Doris trotted about in a state of bliss. George loved funny little cafes in out-ofthe-way places, loved catching different acts on the night-club circuit. Because he loved it, she loved it, too. And because his eyes would be seeing them, she loved making curtains for the trailer windows and planting window boxes of flowers for it. However, George was discovering that on the Coast he wasn’t so much George Weidler, excellent saxophonist, as he was Virginia Weidler’s young brother. He haunted the booking offices, the agency row. Nothing came up. But because of her records, Doris got many bids. “I’m retired,” she said to one and all. However, when the offer of a tenweeks engagement at New York’s Little Club came up, George told her she was out of her mind if she didn’t take it. “You’ll come with me if I do?” she asked. Sxciu&ivet WHY EVERYONE LOVES Jackie Cleason BY AUDREY MEADOWS PCcu New Stories and Pictures about LUCY AND DESI THE MARINERS Godfrey's Wonderful Quartet All in the Big JUNE TV RADIO MIRROR on sale at all newsstands “No, doll. I’ll stay here and still hunt some work.” “Then I won’t go.” “You know we need it for eating money.” So she let him persuade her. It was midwinter and the night she was due to open, it began snowing. She knew that she should be excited. It was actually the swankiest place she’d ever sung, but she simply felt cut off from California, from George, from her baby and Mom in Cincinnati. She waited around her hotel room till the last minute, hoping for the phone to ring, long distance from California, but she excused the fact that it didn’t, saying it was because they didn’t have a phone in the trailer and that George had probably told himself he shouldn’t spend the money. When she came into the club dressing room, however, she saw the telegram. She pounced on it joyously. While outside, she could hear the band about to go into her intro. Because of the weather, she’d decided she’d open with “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow.” She tore the telegram open. It was from George, but she couldn’t believe the words. Even months afterward she could not remember them exactly. Only their meaning. Only their terrible meaning. “Don’t come back,” the words screamed out at her. “Don’t come back. As far as I’m concerned it’s all over. George.” She knew it had to be some dreadful joke. She knew it had to be one of her old nightmares coming back to her. If she sat quite still, if she did nothing, she told herself, it would go away. There was a knock on her dressingroom door. “You’re on, Miss Day,” a voice told her. Then, presently, “Miss Day, you’re on. There’s your cue music.” She went out, and through one of the club windows, she could watch the snow falling. Falling on her heart, she thought. She began to sing, and she shivered, from pain, and the tears began falling down her face. The audience went mad. They thought she was acting. Her second number was “This Love of Mine.” Now she really cried. The audience adored her. Somehow she got through all the numbers, and then she was backstage, telephoning, calling Hollywood, calling all the places George might be. Only he wasn’t at any of them. She went to the management and begged them to let her out of the engagement. But she was too big a hit. They held her to the letter of her contract. The next day, she tried telephoning again, and wired and wrote. She didn’t reach George. That day or the next or the next or the ones after. When the impossible ten weeks were up, the management begged her to stay longer. She refused. She had only one thought in mind, to reach the Coast at the earliest possible moment. Once in Hollywood, she drove straight out to the trailer. There it was, right where she had left it. But the flowers in the flower boxes were all dead from lack of water, and at the open windows, the curtains blew in and out, dirtied by the dust and the rain. She unlocked the door and went in. George was not there. No one was there. Plainly, no one had been there for weeks and weeks. She drove back into town, but none of their friends had seen George. No agent knew his whereabouts. She took a room in a small hotel, a very inexpensive hotel, in the center of Hollywood and she started haunting the Boulevard. A dozen times a day she thought she saw him and would turn her head eagerly, her heart beating. Always she was wrong — and disappointed.