Doris Day: “I Have Always Been a Survivor” on Her Difficult Journey to Hollywood Stardom
Following Doris Day’s performance at a Beverly Hills party, a composer invited the 26-year-old vocalist to audition for the planned movie musical Romance on the High Seas. Doris acknowledged that she had never considered acting in films. However, her 1948 film debut brought her one step closer to becoming one of Hollywood’s most sought-after actresses of the 1950s and 1960s.
Doris struggled to arrive at that point. Doris’ security was upended by her parents’ divorce when she was 11 years old, and a car accident destroyed her dream of becoming a dancer. With more skill than life experience, she began singing with large bands as a youngster, but her inexperience led her to make bad choices in men. By age 20, she was a struggling single mother. “I think I have always been a survivor,” Doris stated.
Her mother, Alma, gave her a naturally cheerful demeanor. Doris also developed a need to please from her distant connection with her chilly father, William, a music instructor and choirmaster who required Doris begin piano lessons at a young age. She enjoyed playing, singing, and dancing for her mother’s friends. “I’d do my stuff until mother would throw up her hands and say, ‘That’s enough, Doris,'” she said in her memoir, Her Own Story.
Her childhood was not entirely pleasant. Doris found out her father was having an affair with her mother’s best friend before Alma did. When William eventually left, “there were no goodbyes,” she wrote. “My father didn’t ask for me, and all I wanted to do was hide.” Doris’ connections with men will be tainted for the rest of her life because to his isolation and adultery.
Doris Day aspired to be a dancer from a young age. After winning a $500 prize in an amateur tournament, Doris and Alma discussed moving west so she could pursue her love. Doris’ intentions were crushed when the automobile she was riding in with friends was hit by a train, fracturing her right leg. She spent her year-long rehabilitation listening to Ella Fitzgerald on the radio and improving her singing voice. Grace Raine, Doris’ vocal teacher, commented, “What struck me most about Doris was her ability to always look on the bright side.”
Doris was still on crutches the first time she sang at Charlie Yee’s Shanghai Inn, where she made $5 per night. “Sometimes my audience was little more than the overflowing Yee family,” she told me.
Doris secured a legitimate gig with local bandleader Barney Rapp in 1939, and he suggested she change her name from Doris Kappelhoff to the more marquee-friendly Doris Day. She started singing on the radio and toured with Barney’s band while she was still a teenager. “It’s difficult to act grown-up when you don’t know how,” Doris acknowledged.
Doris made some mistakes as a result of being thrown into adulthood at such a young age. At the age of 17, she married trombonist Al Jorden, who had severe jealous outbursts and brutalized his wife. Doris attempted to flee during her pregnancy with their son Terry, but Al pursued her at her radio station employment. She finally divorced him in 1943, worried he might harm their son.
She eventually fell in love with another musician, saxophonist George Weidler, but their marriage was fraught with problems since he cheated and became jealous of her talent. Despite the fact that their relationship would only last eight months, George would bring Doris to California and closer to her dream of pursuing a singing career.
Inside Doris Day’s Rocky Road to Hollywood Stardom.
Doris was living in a trailer outside Los Angeles and about to return to Cincinnati, where her mother was caring for Terry, when composer Sammy Cahn heard her sing at a party and invited her to audition for Romance on the High Seas. She hesitantly agrees. “The screen just exploded,” Cahn explained. There was no question. “A great star was born.”
Director Michael Curtiz saw it, too, despite Doris crying in front of him during her audition. He found her honesty and unpretentiousness endearing and promised to convey it to the big screen. “He refused to allow her to take acting lessons and didn’t allow her to watch the rushes of Romance on the High Seas in order to maintain her confidence,” according to Alan K. Rode, the Curtiz biographer
The film launched Doris’ career in film, and one of its songs, “It’s Magic,” became a smash. Over the next two decades, she appeared in approximately 40 films. “My life hasn’t always been like some of my happy musicals,” Doris added. “But when things in life try to knock you down, you just have to bounce right back up.”
