Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1952)

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MONTH later, Doris stepped off the train in Pasadena and went to Hollywood’s Roosevelt Hotel. Shortly after, her agent called about a Warner Brothers’ test and had high hopes for a contract. Two days later, she was making that test at Warners. The acting didn’t bother her because her mind wasn’t on it. But when they asked her to sing “Embraceable You” she almost couldn’t get through it. The next day when, miraculously, she was offered a seven-year contract it was the turning point for her and she knew it. “I never had any wish to be a movie star,” Doris said. “I just wanted to be an average girl with an average home and husband and children.” But she wasn’t average, ever, for she always had her talent, her charm, and more important, strength that let her rise over the blows that would have conquered many girls. She signed the contract, and moved out of the expensive Roosevelt to the less expensive Plaza so she could have Terry and Mom with her that much sooner. She worked and she slept. She ate and she played records. Then she worked and slept some more. She was grateful to Jack Carson for helping her through scenes. She was grateful to Director Mike Curtiz and to the hairdressers and the dressmakers and the make-up artists. She had one ideal in mind now, to get a home for the three of them. She grew too weary, as the weeks went by, to be aware of her loneliness. Then, too lonely to be aware of anything else. Her heart was stone within her. Yet something came through in her voice, deepening it, sweetening it, as she thought of other lonely girls. After “Romance on the High Seas” she did “My Dream Is Yours” and a couple of others. Terry and Mom arrived and she was happy again. Business details began to swamp her, so she consulted her business agents often, but barely noticed one of them, a tall man named Marty Melcher. But she was depending upon Marty Melcher’s advice and wisdom more and more. For the first time in years, she was carefree. She became aware of the sunshine flooding Hollywood Boulevard, and how warm and pleasant it was. Right after that, she purchased Martha Raye’s little white house in The Valley. It was full of mirrors, so that, as Doris said, “you came into a room and saw yourself with forty legs.” They tore the mirrors out, filled the rooms with lovely early American antiques. Marty Melcher began to call. She didn’t know she was falling in love with him. Sne only knew how much she liked him. She was deeply interested in religion and she discussed it with him. She discussed her career with him, and Terry and his problem. Talk. Talk. They talked constantly, eternally. And Marty fixed anything in the house, from broken window panes to screen doors. “Marty wooed me with a hammer in one hand and a paintbrush in the other,” Doris says. The months went by, eighteen of them. Terry took his problems to Marty. Her mother took her problems to Marty. And it gradually came over Doris that none of them could get along without him, that he smoothed out life for all of them, without ever demanding anything for himself, without ever intruding. She was not really aware that they were engaged until they set their wedding date for her birthday, last April 3rd. Terry was delighted. On their way to get their license, Doris stopped and got curtain material for the kitchen windows. On their honeymoon, which her mother insisted they take, they spent their bridal night calling Terry, and headed for home the next day knowing how foolish they were ever to have left. There is not one moment of artificial excitement in their white Valley home. Their best friends are the quiet ones of Hollywood. Today, the most popular star in the motion picture industry, Doris is also the friendliest and the realest human being. She loves to talk to people, not the grand ones, but the simple ones like the postman and the Good Humor Man. And she is simple in the way that a great piece of sculpture or a great strain of music is simple. Which is as it should be, because the way she has conquered her own life is an art, really. She looks at you from her lovely shining eyes and says, “Some people learn easily, but apparently I had to learn from experience. I had to grow up through emotion, and know what it is to be lonely, and afraid and heartbroken. But today I count my blessings and fully realize how wonderful life is. God intends it to be that way.” The End PHOTOPLAY’S Gold Medal Girl, Doris Day, with her mother, Mrs. William Kappelhoff, who always understood about Doris’s nightmares — and her wanting to be a singer 90