Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1957)

Having twice failed in marriage, she became convinced that love was not for her. More and more she spent every free moment at Hidden Valley, shunning society with the fanaticism of a recluse. Once, on a tour of Army camps and hospitals with Bob Hope, the plane bringing them to a landing in Pittsburgh so narrowly missed a collision that even Hope turned green. As their plane zoomed skyward, shooting over the other plane by inches, Doris decided that if she ever got safely back to earth, her days of constant travel would be over. Today she will travel only if Marty and Terry can be with her, and even then, as on her trip to Marakesh, Paris, and London with “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” she is uneasy until she gets back home. “Marty and Terry are the tourists in the family,” she admits. “They love to haggle in weird Arab bazaars, or find strange shops in Paris or London, but me, if I can’t find what I want on Wilshire Boulevard, I don’t need it. I guess I got in too much traveling while I was still too young.” Another by-product of her young days that matches her unwillingness to travel is her reluctance to appear in public as an entertainer. Where once she would sing into the small hours seven nights a week for twenty-five dollars, she now flatly refuses $25,000 a week to make a couole of nightly appearances at some lavish Las Vegas casino. Except in the cause of charity, she limits her work to recording sessions and movie assignments where her audience is made up exclusively of professionals. This reluctance can be traced back to “Young Man with a Horn,” in which she co-starred with Kirk Douglas. It was a strong dramatic part. Here the studio felt safe, because Doris knew all about music, about jazz and jam sessions, about one-night stands and about young men who played horns, having been married to two of them. But it was her toughest assignment. The movie sets of night clubs and theatres were too real. The situations and dialogue were too real. They carried too many overwhelmingly painful memories. Every day Doris had to force herself to belt out a few songs she had once sung for kicks, and what the director thought was a girl coasting through a natural role was really a girl in torment. Her withdrawal from public entertainment dates from that time. Out of the eighteen pictures Doris made for Warner Brothers, only one other revealed her true dramatic ability, but this time with happier results. That was “Storm Warning,” in which she made her first venture into terror. As things turned out, it was a good break. If the studio had any doubts about Doris Day as a dramatic actress, it felt comfortably covered by having Ginger Rogers, a proven actress whose name alone could sell the picture, play the main lead while Doris supported her in the secondary role of her sister. A few days after its premiere Doris was dragged, almost forcibly, out of her seclusion at Hidden Valley to attend a party of the kind that makes Hollywood glamourous to all but Doris Day. “You have to come,” she was informed. “There’ll be some people there you simply have to meet.” Doris dutifully went to the party, was caught up by the social whirl and passed unobtrusively from one group to the next. In time, and to her immense relief, she found herself in a quiet corner where she could see without being seen. She began to relax a little. A few more minutes went by before she was aware of a silent bulk p besides her that was not, as she had previously thought, a protrusion of the woodwork. With an inward gasp she realized it was Alfred Hitchcock, a man so notoriously shy that he has been known to pass up his favorite exercise of eating rather than make a public appearance in a studio commissary. But if Mr. Hitchcock is shy, he is also the murder-master of Hollywood, whose film excursions into the more sinister aspects of crime have made him a connoisseur of sophisticated dialogue, dramatic acting and exotic sets. His first apprehension at finding Doris Day beside him dwindled as the minutes went by and she made no overtures to speak. It dawned on him that he was in the presence of a person even more shy than he, an emboldening experience. It even encouraged him to speak. “You are Doris Day, are you not?” he asked in his meticulous Oxford English. She yielded a frightened smile and a nod of assent. “You can act,” he said accusingly. A startled expression crossed her face. No one had ever accused Doris of that before. “I saw you in ‘Storm Warning.’ Quite TOP SECRETS Wish you could copy Natalie Wood's pert hairdo? Or try Doris Day's easyto-care-for shorty cut? • Photoplay has arranged to bring you complete, easy-to-follow cutting and setting instructions from the stars’ own hair stylists! See the July issue for four pages of Hollywood hairdos. PHOTOPLAY FOR JULY good, quite good indeed. I could use you in one of my pictures.” Having talked himself out in some thirty words, and being quite flustered as a result, Mr. Hitchcock bounced himself off to a more neutral corner. To this day Doris does not know if she got out more than a blurted, “Thank you.” But the die was cast. Doris took the words home with her and treasured them, and began to think about them. Could she really act? Or would she always be the girl next door until some younger candidate came along and made her obsolete? It was time, she decided, to find out. Other matters were coming to a head, as well. Down at her agency A1 Levy had his hands full just watching out for her movie contracts. Young Marty Melcher was working long hours on her radio and recording contracts. For reasons never quite clear to him, Marty was also handling such of her non-musical enterprises as balky lawnmowers, faulty plumbing, blown light fuses and the weekend shopping. It was just a convenient arrangement. As he and Doris both knew, romance was for the birds, and they got along splendidly well on a platonic basis. What was more, he, too, thought Doris could act. It was Terry who precipitated matters. Too young to be disillusioned about romance. and delighted at an occasional chance to have a man around the house, he suggested that Marty’s handyman status be made permanent. Suddenly struck by the wonderful fitness of the whole idea, Terry’s mother and her agent forgot all about platonic friendship. Love, too long held back by a bitter, we-know-better restraint, swept the two of them away like a flood. “But it’s not true that we interrupted a shopping trip, and went to find a justice of the peace with our arms loaded with packages,” laughs Doris. “We weren’t in that big a rush. We waited until my birthday, April 3, 1951, and went to get married by Justice of the Peace Leonard Hammer. We wanted a quiet marriage so we didn’t tell anybody in advance, not even Mr. Hammer. When we got there he was tied up for another hour or so. We didn’t want to be conspicuous sitting around the hall, so we went shopping for some new draperies to kill time, that’s all.” So careful were they to keep the marriage quiet that among other people they had failed to notify in advance was a witness. Needing one, Marty searched through the small town hall, closed for the noon hour, and returned with an obliging young man named Richard Turpin. The ceremony concluded, the happy young Melchers stole quietly away. They had accomplished the impossible — an unpublicized wedding of a major Hollywood star. Except — as screaming headlines informed them a couple of hours later — that the obliging Mr. Turpin was a newspaper reporter, who knew a story when he witnessed one. They had planned on no honeymoon, but with the press, radio, and television hard on their heels for interviews, they fled on what Mrs. Kappelhoff informed all callers was a long trip to the mountains, or the desert, or the beach, or someplace. A day or so later they slipped quietly back to Hidden Valley. A honeymoon involving travel and impersonal hotel rooms was not Doris’ idea of the happiest way to start her new married life. She wanted home. With a man around the house, quarters became too cramped at Hidden Valley. At this point Martha Raye decided to give up Hollywood in favor of Broadway and the night-club circuit, and her house at Toluca Lake, convenient to Warner Brothers, was so exactly what Doris and Marty wanted that they snapped it up. “Now we’ve got a house big enough to entertain in,” they told each other happily. But, once moved in, Doris did not want to entertain, nor did she want to go out to other parties. She just wanted to be with her family, with no interruptions. All her working life this girl had always been the paid entertainer, but never the hostess who entertained, and the thought terrified her. When social obligations practically forced her to throw a party, she stood out in the hall trembling, afraid to enter her own living room until Marty took her arm reassuringly. Occasionally she would run into Hitchcock at one gathering or another, but either he was too busy with his current work, or he regretted his previous loquaciousness, because he made no second mention of her dramatic ability. For the time being, that was all right. Marriage had calmed some of her restlessness, and at Warner Brothers she was being given a chance to develop her talents in still another line. She, who had been a professional dancer at fourteen and been told she could never dance again, was now becoming a dancer. The crash that had shattered her leg had not destroyed her 112