Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1959)

DINAH SHORE Continued from page 36 fair dealings,” Solomon would always say. And in only a few years he had built up his store into a prosperous concern, even establishing branches in two nearby towns. But Frances Shore never quite had that feeling of belonging, at home or in the town. “I felt disgraced,” Dinah remembers, thinking back over her early years. An attack of poliomyelitis at eighteen months had left one leg slightly weak, an affliction which lasted only a very few years but enough to cause her concern and worry. “I was painfully selfconscious,” she says now, “and I never told anyone about it until I was grown. I thought that the rest of the kids would shy away from me if they knew. And at home it was a forbidden subject.” This was particularly so because her mother was an extremely athletic woman, and it seemed to Dinah that she didn't want to sympathize with her handicap. Like that afternoon in the park. . . . It was a pretty, warm spring day and Dinah had been taken out by her mother for a ride on her tricycle. She had wheeled it through the streets until they had reached the safety of the park, where, away from the danger of traffic, her mother had said she could ride. “I’ll just sit here for a while,” her mother said, spotting an empty park bench under the shade of a low, spreading tree. “It’s a quiet path here, so you won’t have to worry about running into anyone. Go ahead — climb on.” Lifting a leg over the center of the machine, Dinah clambered on, hugging tight to the handlebars. Slowly she pressed one of the peddles with her right foot, then the one on her left. But the tricycle hardly moved. She pressed a little harder — but still it only rolled forward very slowly. Ten minutes later she was only about six yards further on. “Come on,” shouted her mother, annoyed. “Pedal up. Your foot’s all right.” Two small children, playing with a ball nearby, stopped to listen, looking teasingly at Dinah. “Come on — pedal up!” her mother repeated. And Dinah had to struggle forward. Then, there was also the crisp winter’s day when she was playing hopscotch with friends a little way down the street from her home. Thinking her mother was busy inside the house, she began to favor one foot, now and again looking over her shoulder to make sure her mother wasn’t anywhere near to see. Then suddenly, just as she had rolled her stone into almost the last square, and was hopping along toward it, a voice shouted, “Frances!” She stopped quite still. Even her playmates, busy arguing over whether one of them had cheated, stopped their chattering at the sound of the commanding tone. “Frances!” the voice repeated. She turned her head and saw her mother standing just a little way off. “Frances,” her mother repeated a third time. “What have I always told you about that foot? What do you think your friends will think of you? You ought to be ashamed!” Dinah didn’t answer. She just looked from her mother to her friends and then back again, wishing that the ground would open up and she could disappear. “Sorry, Mommy,” was all she finally murmured. Her mother turned and walked back home. “You must hate me,” she said quietly to her friends, a few moments later, noticing their cold stares. “Maybe I should go home?” And she began walking away. “Don’t be stupid,” another small girl piped up. “My mother’s always telling me off about something. Come on, let’s finish the game. It was your turn, wasn’t it?” I often think of that day now,” Dinah says, “because I learned something very important. It was that as long as you dislike or are afraid of accepting yourself as you really are, people won’t be ready to accept or like you. You don’t have to be perfect for people to like you . . . you just have to be yourself “And I also know now that my mother’s refusal to be very sympathetic with me and her insistence that I join in sports which involved a great deal of exercise, were not because she was ashamed of my handicap but because she was determined that I shouldn’t find a psychological crutch to lean on.” Actually, Dinah’s limp was not noticeable at all, as the polio attack had not been too severe. Yet in every game she played after that, she concentrated on her stricken leg although it was much easier for her to hop and skip with the other one. Above all — she wanted to be one of them. So she began to study dancing . . . and then singing. And then came her teenage years, which, for Dinah Shore, meant another plunge into the fear of not being wanted or loved. “The boys I liked,” she says now, “didn’t even seem to notice me. And only the ones I didn’t care for seemed to want to date me. I knocked myself out trying to change into something I wasn’t, the type I thought the ones I liked would go for , . . but somehow it never came off,” She was attending Hume Fogg High School in Nashville at the time. And there was one special boy. He was tall and dark-haired, goodlooking and the captain of the football team. And they would meet on their way to school each morning, for he lived just on the next block. Dinah knew he left his house at exactly ten after eight every morning and each day she would make sure she turned the corner of his block at the very minute he left home. “Hi!” he would say each day, jumping down the front steps two by two. “You again,” he would laugh. And they would walk along to school together, Dinah feeling very proud as they passed the other kids, particularly the girls, because he was the most sought-after boy in the school. “Coming to the football game on Saturday?” he would ask her almost every week during the wmter. And she would nod her head yes, hoping he would ask to meet her at it. But he never did. Then one rainy morning he saw her turn the corner, raincoat flapping, splashing through the puddles as though a pack of wild animals were at her heels. “Hey — steady!” he called, catching her arm as she reached him. “What’s the matter?” “Nothing — really,” she spluttered, breathless from her run. “You come running around the corner as though your life were at stake, and with your eyes all red, and you say it’s nothing.” “My eyes aren’t red.” “Oh yes they are. You’ve been crying.” “No I haven’t!” “Well, don’t say I didn’t ask what was wrong,” he shrugged. “It’s that . . . that . . . I . . .” she began, hugging her schoolbooks tightly against herself as though for confidence. “It’s that since I started cheerleading this winter my voice has gone all husky from shouting and my singing teacher — remember I said I was taking singing lessons — says that I can’t do both. So I had to make a choice. And I decided to give up singing. And this morning . . she paused and sniffed . . . “this morning my mother was mad at me. She said I should have stuck to singing.” “Why didn’t you?” he asked, guiding her across the street. “I . . . well ... I prefer chcerleading,” she lied, not intending to tell him the truth, which was that cheerleading gave her a wonderful chance of being near him on Saturday afternoons, so that he would have an even better opportunity of getting to know her . . . and perhaps, she hoped, one day ask her out. From then on, each week, she would go with the cheerleaders through their performance right in front of the players’ bench where her idol sat. The new plan seemed to Dinah to be working well, for she knew she looked particularly attractive in the short circular skirt and white sweater she’d gotten when she’d joined them. But then came the day when it all went wrong. ... It was a crisp, clear, winter’s day and the first major game of the season. A large crowd had turned out to see it, and it seemed to Dinah that that day her hero could do nothing wrong. He outmaneuvered and outran almost every one on the field, making an impressive number of touchdowns. Dinah glowed more and more as the game went on. And screamed louder than ever when it came time for the cheerleaders to go on the field. Somehow, that day, he seemed to her more desirable than he’d ever been. Then, at the end, her heart seemed to skip a beat as, after the final whistle, he came running straight over to the bench where she was sitting. Me . . . she thought, as she watched him run across the grass . . . he’s coming straight over to talk to me. In front of all these people. She smiled at him, and stood up as he arrived. “Great job, old gal,” he said, giving her a friendly slap on the back. “That was a great job you did today, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you didn’t have the loudest voice in the South.” “Thank . . . thank you,” she stuttered. But her joy was too swiftly turned to .shock as suddenly she saw him walk quickly away and over to a petite and demure little blonde who was sitting in the bleachers. And she felt herself going quite numb as she watched him kiss the girl tenderly on the cheek and walk off the field with his arm around her. “That day,” Dinah says now, “I made up my mind it just couldn’t work — I couldn’t get anywhere trying to be the sort of person I wasn’t, and certainly not by staying around a football field and chasing an illusion. If I were going to be liked and loved, it would have to be for myself . . . for me as I really was.” Yet that year of cheerleading had done a great deal more to change her life than Dinah realized. Because it had changed her voice as well as her outlook. By the end of the season her original soprano had altered to a contralto. And with a new contralto voice and a determination to compete on every level (a hangover from the days when she strove to keep up with the kids so they wouldn’t pity her), she started on the road to becoming the Dinah Shore of today. “When I first started singing, I tried to be everything but myself. I had my songs over-arranged and while at the beginning I was never fired, I was just never hired. “I was so unsure of myself that sometimes I’d go home from an audition feeling there was nothing left in the world to sing about.” Nevertheless, Dinah didn’t give up, and she kept on auditioning for jobs until finally they began to give her chances . . . and she was on her way.