Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1957)

106 Both were sensitive people and artists, the one serious and classical, and the other gayer and more theatrical, and the wide gap in temperament was proving impossible to bridge. When Doris was eleven, William quietly withdrew from the family circle, and the resulting divorce passed without notice outside the family. Some writers have tried to ascribe Doris Day’s success to the frustrated drive of a girl trying to compensate for a broken home, but the theory is hardly tenable. The drive and ambition had always been with her. The difference between a great dancer and a dancing star is a subtle thing. It may be too much to say that Doris at twelve was a great dancer, but there can be no doubt that she had that subtle something that distinguishes a star. She was in demand all over Cincinnati, and at rates as high as five dollars for ten minutes’ work. Then one night she was booked to appear before a large businessman’s club, and ahead of her on the bill was a young tap dancer named Jerry Doherty. It so happened that the boy’s mother was standing next to Doris in the wings, watching her son onstage. Later Mrs. Doherty watched Doris dance, and the big idea was born. Before the evening was over, Mrs. Kappelhoff and Mrs. Doherty were watching the team of Doherty & Kappelhoff. Jerry and Doris were good. After that they got together and practiced daily by the hour. Within a year the intense concentration on teamwork paid off. In a citywide contest, against scores of adult contestants, they won a $500 prize as the best team. On the strength of their youth, they received nationwide publicity, and on the strength of the publicity Hollywood held up a weak and wavering, but nevertheless beckoning, finger. There was never any real question of what was to be done about it. The only question was, “How?” In the end it was decided that Mr. Doherty would continue to work at his job with a Cincinnati dairy and thus provide a sure income against the uncertainties of Hollywood. Mrs. Doherty and Mrs. Kappelhoff would take Jerry and Doris to the Coast. Stories about Doris Day tend to discount her first assault upon Hollywood, probably because Doris herself seldom mentions the brief career so painfully lost, but its influence was vast. The Hollywood trek of the two mothers and their gifted progeny was an exception to the rule for such wistful journeys. Famed Louis Da Pron, teacher of the best tap dancers in Hollywood, forgot his long waiting list and took them under his guidance at once. The great dance team of Fanchon & Marco, bookers of dancing acts for all the theatres and studios on the West Coast, snapped them up eagerly and booked them for a series of engagements in small clubs. By the autumn of 1938, Doris and Jerry were seasoned professional dancers, and their schedule couldn’t have looked brighter. Along with their usual club dates — many of them return engagements at higher salaries — the pair knew the studios had several big musicals on schedule, and Fanchon & Marco were confident that the big break was just around the corner. Mrs. Kappelhoff and Mrs. Doherty decided to make a rush trip to Cincinnati, sell their property there and return to Hollywood for good. On Friday, October 13, their affairs were settled. To celebrate that, and their departure for Hollywood the next day, a big family party and song fest was held at Aunt Em’s in Trenton, some thirty miles north of Cincinnati. It was a rainy, nasty day, and even though Aunt Em’s house was gay and full of song and good German food, Doris and a friend decided to go out for some hamburgers at their favorite stand in nearby Hamilton. It was dark when they arrived in Hamilton, with the driving rain further decreasing visibility. At the railroad tracks bisecting the town, the car stopped. A string of empty freight cars stood silent on a siding, but no locomotive was in sight, no warning bells were ringing and no red lights were flashing. The youngsters drove cautiously past the last freight car and started across the second track. There are many versions of what happened next. Doris recalled later in the hospital that she was frightened by the loud crash that folded in the side of the car, but except for a numbness in her leg, she felt all right. She tried to move her right foot, but it responded slowly, as though it had gone to sleep, so she helped lift it with her hands, out the door. She stepped out and her leg crumpled beneath her, throwing her on the tracks. She gave her leg an impatient shake and then, in the feeble light of a distant street lamp, she saw the white bones protruding through her blood-soaked stocking. “I guess I fainted.” Since this was the accident that turned Doris Day from a dancer into the famous jazz and ballad singer she became, she has made a habit of saying, “It was a broken leg that gave me my start. With my leg in a cast, there was nothing else I could do but sing.” Now that her records sell in the millions, with her latest, “Julie,” a nationwide hit within a week of its release, she can well say that, and might even believe it. But at the time, her ACCESSORIES SHOWN ON PAGE 79 Hat: Deep-set, narrow brim cloche in lipstick red strawrloth, grosgrain ribbon band. By Mr. John Jr. About $11 Handbag: Vagabond satchel, a handsome traveler in aniline cowhide with zippered flap, inner pockets. Red, black, navy, wheat, flax, luggage, gray, white. By Theodor of California. About $11 plus tax Gloves: White cotton shorties, fresh and untrimmed, to take in batches. By Dawnelle. About $3 Umbrella: A shaft of red with Whangee handle, matching case. By Giant. About $5 Luggage: Handsome ensemble in vinyl-covered flyweight magnesium, matching acetate taffetalined. By Samsonite Ultralite. Blue, green, gray pastel sea shades. Beauty case, $22.50; ladies’ O’Nite case, $27.50; pullman, $39.50; all plus tax broken leg was not a start. It was the end. In a daze, the Dohertys and the Kappelhoffs cancelled their Hollywood plans and did what they could about reorganizing their lives in terms of Cincinnati. Fortunately, they were all well-liked, so the affairs that had been settled were quickly unsettled and resettled again, and everything became as it was before the Hollywood dream. They were back where they started, except that Doris was in bed with a huge cast around her leg, and a steel pin through the middle of it. “Reinforced concrete,” she called it gamely. The happy part, which is the only part Doris will mention in interviews, concerns the hours she spent in bed with her radio. She began singing with her favorite stars, and because the house was quiet while her brother was in school, she let go with some loud and raucous jazz that had the same bounce and rhythm to it that she had once expressed with her dancing feet. And she had some good bandleaders to sing with; Benny Goodman, the Dorseys, Fred Waring, Paul Whiteman, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and a new one named Glenn Miller. “But I never dreamed that someday I would know them all, and sing with some of them,” she says now. “My voice didn’t mean a thing to me. I was just singing for kicks.” In the midst of her jazz interlude, she was suddenly fascinated by the rich, soulsqueezing voice of Ella Fitzgerald. Doris began to pick it up, and with the voice came a soft touch of southern accent that still can be detected in her sentimental ballads today. She didn’t drop jazz entirely, but more and more she began twisting the dial to bring in the warm ballads that today are known as the Doris Day type songs. The tragic part of those days in bed Doris recently brought herself to touch upon, and then but brieflv. She related how for months she had looked forward to the day she could return to Regina High School, where she had spent some of the happiest hours of her life. She did return, on crutches. The girl who had once merrily tapped her way through the polished corridors now inched her way along, fearing her crutches would slip and send her crashing to the floor. “I was in the way,” she says. “There was no place for my crutches under my desk, so someone was always tripping over them. They made a clatter when I put them down, and they made a clatter when I picked them up, and everyone was looking at me. Outside in the corridor between classes, everyone was rushing, and I could barely hobble. More than anything else, I was afraid someone would knock my crutches out from under me. I just couldn’t take it.” More than anything else, she could not stand being pitied. She quit school in her junior year, never to resume her formal education again, and that, too, she feels deeply. It will be the full college course for her son Terry, even if his undeniable acting talent brings him movie offers before that time. Under normal circumstances, Doris might well have returned to school once she had discarded her crutches, but by that time she was already launching her second career. And being one who always gives credit where credit is deserved, she has often told interviewers how the late Grace Raine, a gifted teacher of singing and voice coach for most of the talent at Cincinnati’s radio station WLW, launched her on that career. There were two things about Doris’ voice that struck Miss Raine at once. It was true as a Swiss bell, and Doris had no confidence in it. For a time Doris