One of Hollywood’s biggest stars of the late 1940s and the 1950s, Doris Day had to deal continually with the ironic contrast between her screen persona as an all-American girl, and her real-life physical and psychological challenges.
Doris Mary Anne von Kappelhoff was born in Cincinatti, Ohio, on April 3, 1924, to German-American parents. As a young girl Doris trained to be a dancer, but she was forced to give up dancing when she broke her leg in a car crash. During her long convalescence, she began studying music and was tutored by vocal coach Grace Raine. She also spent long hours mimicking the recordings of Ella FITZGERALD.
Doris’s first singing break came when she was only 16. Barney Rapp, a Cincinnati bandleader, hired her as the vocalist for his group and changed her stage name to “Day.” It was during this time that she met her first husband, trombonist Al Jorden. After six years with Rapp, Day joined Bob Crosby’s small band, the Bob Cats. However, the band’s musical style, referred to as dixieland or, more correctly, traditional jazz, was not suited to Day’s girlish yet emotionally engaging voice. Within a year, she had left the Bob Cats and was hired by Les Brown and his Band of Renown. Les Brown’s group played a smooth dance-hall swing far more suited to Day’s vocal style. His was a large, youthful ensemble out of Duke University, and hiring Day proved advantageous to both group and singer. George Simon, a writer for the jazz magazine Metronome, described the arrangement as “the ice-cream-soda girl with the ice-cream-soda band.” Brown himself later referred to Day as “every bandleader’s dream, a vocalist who had natural talent, a keen regard for the lyrics, and an attractive appearance.”
Day took some time off from Les Brown’s group to give birth to her son Terry and complete some radio work. Not long after Terry was born, however, Day divorced Jorden and returned to Les Brown’s group. In 1945, she recorded the enormously popular “Sentimental Journey,” which in the last year of World War II became a source of comfort to soldiers longing for home. The record sold more than a million copies, and Day became a “forces’ sweetheart.”
Day married one of Brown’s alto saxophonists, George Weidler, and followed him with her son Terry to his native state of California. She scored another No. 1 hit with “My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time,” and enjoyed a well-paid run at Billy Reed’s Little Club in New York. During this time, she divorced Weidler and was forced to return to California to settle her personal affairs.
While in California, Day met songwriters Jule STYNE and Sammy Cahn, and was subsequently recruited for the cast of a Warner Bros, musical comedy, Romance on the High Seas (1948), for which they had written the score (including the hit song “It’s Magic”). Despite her lack of experience, Day proved a natural film actress—her “girl next door” image as captivating as her pure singing voice. Following this film, Day went on to make 15 more film musicals. Her combination of high spirits and vulnerability onscreen and off resulted in lucrative roles and several associated hits. These included the thrilling ballad “Secret Love” from the movie musical Calamity Jane (1953) and the lilting “Que Sera, Sera,” from The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), which won an Academy Award for best song.
Over the next decade, Day continued to act and record, but her third husband, film producer Marty Melcher, mishandled her finances and left her deeply in debt when he died in 1968—she was eventually awarded $22 million by the courts. Although she no longer records, her major hits were re-released on a series of boxed-set CDs during the 1990s.
Jeff Kaliss
SEE ALSO:
BIG BAND JAZZ; FILM MUSICALS.
FURTHER READING
Braun, Eric. Doris Day (London: Orion, 1994);
Day, Doris, and A. E. Hotcher. Doris Day: Her Own Story (New York: Morrow, 1976).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
Sentimental Journey, Young at Heart.