Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1952)

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Check desired size: Regular ( ), Super I I, Junior ( ). One package to a family. U. S. only. Then she heard the bedsprings creak as he turned over to go back to sleep. Her heartbeats began to quiet down. Now it was just a matter of waiting, and presently, it happened, as she knew it would. The door opened, soundlessly. Mother’s hand reached out for her and she slid in, to tiptoe with Mother across the room and then to creep into the warm double bed and feel Mother’s arms about her and hear Mother’s voice whispering, “There, there, Doris baby.” Day and night, it was always like that with Doris Kappelhoff, growing up in a bustling suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio. To Dad and her older brother, Paul, she was “Doke.” To Mother, she was the fancy "Doris” which she always wanted to be. They lived on the ground floor of a three story brick house in a rambling flat of nine huge rooms. There Richard had been born, and then Paul. Richard was so beautiful he won baby contests, but he died before Doris came along. “The only thing they could say about me as a baby was that I was healthy,” Doris now declares. HER father was very thoroughly the disciplinarian. He taught German in the schools, but his real love was music — German music, preferably. Late afternoons and evenings he gave lessons, piano or violin, and conducted songfests, to which very genuine music lovers of Cincinnati flocked in great numbers. So Doris grew up, naturally, loving music and rhythm. Her father’s distress when he first heard her trying to sing something called “Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries” was monumental. Doris just sang it around Mother after that and Mother loved “Just a Bowl of Cherries” because Doris loved it. Mother also loved Doris’s portraying a duck in a Mother Goose play at school. Mother was everything a good housewife of German ancestry should be — and everything a good American mother should be, too. She was frantically neat and Doris inherited this tendency — but she distinctly didn’t inherit her mother’s great talent for cooking. As a little girl, if a drop of anything got on her clothes, Doris changed them, even if it were three or four times a day. She still does that. And her mother had an interest in things outside the home, too, which Doris also has. Mom was president of the PTA. It was she who worked toward getting uniforms on the kids in school, so that you couldn’t tell who was rich or who was poor in the classrooms. She was one of the voters who got free milk .into the school cafeterias. “Oh, she was so wonderful,” Doris says, “With Paul and me growing up and her huge home to take care of, and our meals to prepare and all of that, she still had time to be the school Santa Claus. She was Santa for my first and second grade but I didn’t recognize her till I got in the third grade.” From the moment of her earliest awareness Doris had crushes on boys and fortunately, from the day she could toddle, boys had crushes on Doris. One of them lived in College Hill, the Cincinnati suburb farthest from Evanston which was the suburb where the Kappelhoffs lived. He phoned Doris so often the line was always busy. There practically wasn’t an unscarred tree in the neighborhood because he was always carving their initials. Being barely in his teens, he was not allowed to touch the family car, but one fine day he borrowed a pal’s bike and started to trundle over to his lady fair. As it was a long way, he got six fellows to go with him. It was really a big moment for the flirtatious Doris when they all hove in sight — but her father thought it all nonsense (like most fathers do) but mother invited the boys into the warm kitchen, gave then cookies and milk, made them her friends made her daughter doubly desirable. An today, in Doris’s Toluca Lake home, she’ still at it. When Marty Melcher first pro posed, Doris said, “I don’t think you’r in love with me. You just want to marr; me to get Terry and Mom.” The golden Day wasn’t able to kid abou love like that, as she grew up, or whei she was first married, or any time later until she met Marty, with whom she feel: so safe, so beloved, so fulfilled. Her parents were separated when Dori: was eleven. The first boy who ever said, “I lov< you” to Doris was a druggist’s son, quitt worldly, and from his father’s store hf was able to get Valentines at a wholesale rate. So he sent her fourteen at once But instead of overwhelming her with romance, it embarrassed her. She much preferred another boy (her brother’s i friend) because he was hard to get. In fact he ignored her, and she was always asking her brother to invite him over, to play. But she dropped him for the older brother of one of her other playmates, with whom she did her first professional acting. To her he was just one of the kids on the block but his brother remains in her memory as a man of the world. He was a “heavy spender,” the type who would pay twenty-five cents to park his Ford in a garage, when if he’d parked free in the street they would only have had to walk eight blocks to the show where they were going. Her next crush was a dance-hall bandleader, who ignored her, even though she ogled him nightly for four weeks and thought how wonderful it would be to be his wife. Then she fell for the trombone player in Barney Rapp’s band, on their very first date together, but two weeks later, he was transferred to another band — and she, all unknowingly, as the singer with Barney — was on the personal road to success. “I was sixteen,” she said, “and I knew nothing about life or love or people. I was working with Barney, who was wonderful to me, and I was doing what I’d dreamed of doing. Everybody who has ever read a line about me knows how Barney dropped off that German surname of mine and borrowed my professional surname from the song ‘Day After Day’.” She was such a success that she went from Barney Rapp’s band, which was a local Cincinnati one, to Bob Crosby, and then to Les Brown, with whose musical backgrounding she made her record of “Sentimental Journey” which sold a million pressings and which really put her across. That professional side of her life is a very open book. And that story of the automobile accident in which she was involved when she was sixteen has been often printed. One moment, she was a laughing sixteen-yearold, out for a gay and casual evening with another girl and two boys, and the next moment, a train had plowed into the sedan in which they were traveling, and she had become a girl who might never walk again, let alone dance. That left a mark on Doris, of course, because of her long recuperation, because of her fears and then her hopes, just as her parents’ separation left its mark on her. She was nineteen at the time of her first marriage and the boy was a couple of years older. He was charming and handsome and to herself, she said, “This, this is it.” She gave up her singing without so much as a thought. The road had been fun, the applause had been fun. But it wasn’t a thing true and deep and real, as love was. She wanted a home and children. She intended to be the best wife in 1 88