Welcome to Vintage Paparazzi.

Happy Day—Doris Day

Nature’s child with a champagne voice, fizzing, spontaneous and wholesome, Doris Day has the vital charm that drives men nature-minded.

She’s got Bop Hope so nature-minded he’s picking wildflowers. He went hippety-hopping alongside his car after the apple festival parade at Winchester, gathering blossoms for Doris.

“Gee, they are so beautiful, so wonderful, and to think I never noticed till you kept sounding off,” Bob burbled.

Well, gee, just looking at Doris in her sun suit gets a man nature-minded. She’s so with everything. She makes men want to pick the little wildflower. She’s got two wedding rings to show they do.



When a blonde with a couple of wedding rings advises a gentleman against marrying too hastily for love, a gentleman listens. Especially, he listens, when the voice of experience is the exciting, expensive voice of wildflower Day who started as a duck in a Mother Goose play and now is a roller canary, rolling it up via screen, radio and records.

She got those rings marrying twice. And it’s fairly safe to say that she’ll be married for a third time before the year is out. The lucky guy is Marty Melcher, who started out by managing Doris’s business affairs, and then took over in the affairs of the heart department, too. This was no hasty courtship. It had a chance to grow. Three marriages is high percentage even for a blonde. But then, Doris is double-charged. She is a blonde with a brunette voice.






A thinker, Doris suffers. Suffering, she gets philosophy.

The theme song of the siren philosopher, pre-Melcher, was that sometimes love is a rock that can wreck matrimony. She intends to be more down-to-earth about marriage this time.

“When I loved before, I loved madly madly is the word,” she says. “It was insanity, starry-eyed, blind worship.”

She was in this addled condition at nineteen when she married a band man named Al Jorden and tossed away her young career to take up with cooking.

“I started cooking at ten in the morning for dinner at six. When he came home I stood there with my mouth open, eager and palpitating, asking, is it good?”






If he made a face, her heart broke and flooded the nook. Precipitation was pretty constant in the Jorden love nest. At length, after Al shoved off with his band, Doris sawed down a wedding ring and flew home with her child to ma.

Three years later, the old illusions were back, and there she was, mad as Ophelia, in love, again, impulsively accepting another ring from Mr. George Weidler.

George was a sensational, terrific guy and still is, according to his doting ex-wife. However, the marriage did not last very long when he saw Doris heading into a movie career. He could not cope, he felt, with two careers in the family. George had childhood recollections. His sister Virginia was a movie moppet.






Like his predecessor, Mr. Jorden, George is a bandman and plays a horn. Destiny, in guise of men with horns, is in hot pursuit of Doris. Even in her last picture, “Young Man with a Horn,” she played a band vocalist with a yen for a trumpeter.

She is in total agreement with De La Rochefoucauld’s witticism: “If people couldn’t read, very few would fall in love.”

She supplements it with, “If they didn’t go to the movies, they wouldn’t fall in love so easily.”

For all her champagne ebullience and romantic frenzy, Doris is solid with common sense and that rare virtue called honesty. She sprouted up in Cincinnati among the April flowers of 1924. Her name was Doris Kappelhoff which is a bit heavy for a gay spring crocus. When she sang “Day after Day” in a radio audition, she became Day at the suggestion of bandleader Barney Rapp. (Those bandmen, always suggesting!)

Although Doris is just about out of the running, there are still some males who would like to know what Doris likes. Here are some hot tips from her own lips.



Above all you’ve got to be honest, inspire complete faith, a man a girl can talk things over with and feel security in. There must be fun and common interests. What man thinks is important; how he looks is unimportant. You need be no handsomer than Greg Peck or Monty Clift. “Well, you must admit women are drawn to gangly, hungry-looking men,” Doris claims.

Marty, however, looks well-fed. Perhaps it’s since Doris wisely has turned the art of cooking back to the hands of her capable mother.

Everyone approves instantly of Mrs. Kappelhoff. She comes into a room with a cut glass pitcher of iced tea and a tray stacked with four kinds of freshly baked cookies, and there is a pineapple-upside-down cake in the oven if you can wait. You can wait.






“This is Grand Central Terminal,” Doris says, her bare legs swinging from the arm of a chair in the flower-papered kitchen. “If I sit still long enough I always see someone I know passing through.”

As she spoke, a cowboy hat went toddling through, and from under it a boy’s small voice piped up, “Just little me passing through with a hun’rd-and-twenty marbles.”

“That one I know,” said Doris.

It was cowpoke Terry Day, age seven, on his way to the den which he keeps in order on a contract basis of twenty-five cents a week. Hardly had he vanished than another half-portion wrangler, like enough to be his stand-in, passed solemnly by and into the den.



“That,” said station-announcer Doris, Jimmy Wakeley’s boy from next door.”

Presently from the den came a shout, “Keep your feet off my mother’s antiques.”

Mother, feet on kitchen antiques, called, “Those are not antiques, they are installment-plan maple; let his feet stay.”

After a silent interval of four minutes, the Wakeley cowboy emerged and marched grimly out the back door. He was followed by Terry, toothily triumphant.

“Just little me passing through with a hun’red and twenty-four marbles.”



“Life’s too short to dwell on heartaches,” concludes Doris. “For example, I can’t imagine actors going to pieces because they lose a good part. I’m ambitious. I put my heart into it. But I’m not going to let business get me down. I am living for now. When I marry I expect to be happy. I don’t think people were put into this world to be lonely and when you’re not married, you’re lonely. Actually, I think I am a very lucky girl. I’m even spoiled, when it comes to working with Bob Hope. He’s so wonderful.”

Not even Bob, the wonderful flower picker, could spoil wildflower Day. She’s true glamour, American-style, natural as the Day is freckled.

THE END

BY HERB HOWE

 

It is a quote. PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE JUNE 1950