Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1957)

even believed that her singing lessons were merely part of a plot to take her mind off her lost dancing career. Actually, no lessons were needed to improve the tonal quality of the voice. Miss Raine cannily set about giving Doris lessons, not so much in singing as in self-confidence. Doris had been a professional dancer and would work her heart out for an audience. She had acquired the professional performer’s slogan, “Never let the audience down.” With this thought uppermost in mind, Miss Raine set about getting Doris before an audience. Thus one night the chop suey connoisseurs of smiling Charlie Yee’s Shanghai Inn on East Fifth Street in Cincinnati were astonished to see before them a frightened girl on crutches who was trying to quaver her way into “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” which she obviously wasn’t. But in another ten minutes she was belting out the blatant “Murder, He Says,” and jiving into “The Joint Is Jumpin’ at Carnegie Hall.” She was standing on both feet and beating out the time with her crutches. In the background Charlie Yee and a whole tong of little Yees were kicking the gong around, and in the foreground a responsive audience went mad with enthusiasm. Seldom has an aspiring vocalist had a more auspicious debut, and in a less likely place. Doris continued to sing for Yee on Saturday nights, rapidly gaining confidence. Then, too, the five dollars she got for an evening’s work was very real money. Miss Raine kept her busy. To give Doris experience working with bands, she booked her for all sorts of charity dances, lodge parties, sauerkraut festivals and businessmen’s conventions. Today Miss Day cannot bring herself to sing in public, even for a fascinating offer of $50,000 a week from a Las Vegas casino, and on the set her directors find only one complaint — she speaks and sings too softly. Both inhibitions date back to the days when she sang her heart out, anywhere and everywhere, for the experience. By the time she was sixteen she had progressed to the point where she was hired by Art Dahlman to sing with his Topper Club Band for the annual ball of the Street Railway Men. Art was so impressed with her ability to build a song that he put her with Don Dunham’s band, a small combo that was being given a chance to make good on WLW. But for all WLW’s prestige and power, the combo and its juvenile vocalist vanished after sixteen weeks. “It was a good band, and popular,” explains Art, “but we didn’t have the cash to promote it.” Undaunted, Miss Raine crossed station lines to put Doris on a sustaining program over WCPO. The microphone was a hard taskmaster to please, and it had to be wooed assiduously. Miss Raine would listen to each broadcast at her home receiver, and then make such comments as, “Don’t crowd the microphone. You’re working too hard. Remember, an audience might not hear you gasp for air, but a microphone does.” The public appearances coupled with the radio experience, plus the hours of vocal exercises at home, paid off. At that time bandleader Barney Rapp opened a nightclub called the Sign of the Drum. As Barney now tells it: “I needed a vocalist. We held auditions in the Hotel Sinton. Ruby, my wife, kept the score, but we must have heard about 200 singers to my way of thinking. Doris was among the first, and no matter who we heard after that, she was our girl. We hired her at twenty-five dollars a week.” Thus before Doris reached her seventeenth birthday, she was successfully launched on her second career. Within the year it would carry her to the heights, and back to the depths again. The first crash had only broken her leg; the second would be much harder to take. From Doris herself comes this account of her first night at the Sign of the Drum. “My mother drove me there in the old family car. It was about eight miles out from town, and all the way out there I sat holding the evening gown my mother had made for me. I was so nervous my hands were sweating, and I was afraid I would wrinkle the gown. When we got there the place was already crowded, and I asked Mr. Rapp where I would find the dressing room. That stunned him. ‘A dressing room?’ he sort of gasped. ‘We all dress before we get here.’ I think I was ready to cry, but my mother just took me by the arm and pushed me into the powder room. It wasn’t even finished yet. There were paint cans and loose plaster on the floor. But my mother held the door so no one could get in, and I changed as fast as I could. Now when the studio fixes me up with an elegant dressing room, I always remember the powder room at the Sign of the Drum.” Barney Rapp remembers she came on stage for her first number looking elegant and scared to death. “She had a voice of her own, mind you, but she was too young to have developed her own style. I started her out with an easy one. ‘A Foggy Night in London Town’ it may have been. I didn’t know if she was holding up the microphone or if the mike was holding her up, but she was a real professional. By the end of the first number, I could at least hear her. And by the end of the evening she was really giving out with the lyrics. ‘Old Black Magic,’ ‘St. Louis Blues,’ ‘Beale Street Mama.’ Doesn’t sound much like the Doris Day we know now, but I want you to know that kid was a real hot singer.” Doris worked for Barney all that winter, learning just about every popular song ever written. For the first few months, Mrs. Kappelhoff drove her daughter to the club for her opening number and then returned for her at closing time. For her it was an exhausting ordeal. Finally she made a deal with a trombone player in the band. He lived not far from the Kappelhoff home and, in return for a few gallons of gas, he reluctantly agreed to pick Doris up on his way to work and bring her home on the way back. Being an excellent musician, he would have much preferred sitting in on a few jam sessions with the boys after hours instead of driving home a juvenile singer, but having made the deal, he was stuck with it. His name was A1 Jorden. The next important deal was made when Barney began broadcasting from his club several times a week. “We’ve got to shorten your name,” said Barney firmly. “How about my namesake?” suggested Doris. “Doris Kenyon?” Barney liked it. “But even if it was her own name we couldn’t use it,” he says now. “People would think we were featuring the movie queen, Doris Kenyon. Then my wife thought Doris ought to have a ‘D’ to start her last name. That gave me an idea. We used to get about a thousand cards a week asking Doris to sing ‘Day After Day,’ and the number did kind of fit her, so I said, ‘Doris Day.’ A lot of people think she was named after ‘Night and Day,’ another number she got a lot of requests for, but it was ‘Day After Day’ that did it. Ask Doris.” That’s the story, all right — I asked. When the club closed for the summer, A1 Jorden no longer had to drive Doris back and forth every night, but the habit was still there. 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