Inside Doris Day’s Rocky Road to Hollywood Stardom: ‘I Have Always Been a Survivor’

After Doris Day’s performance at a party in Beverly Hills, a composer asked the 26-year-old singer to audition for an upcoming movie musical, Romance on the High Seas. “Acting in films never so much as crossed my mind,” admitted Doris. But her 1948 film debut would take her one step closer to becoming one of Hollywood’s most in-demand actresses of the 1950s and ’60s.

Getting to that moment didn’t come easy to Doris. Her parents’ divorce upended her security at age 11, and a car accident derailed Doris’ dream of becoming a dancer. With more talent than life experience, she started singing with big bands as a teenager, but her naivety led her to make poor choices in men. By 20, she was a struggling single mother. “I think I have always been a survivor,” said Doris.

She inherited her naturally sunny personality from her mother, Alma. Doris also developed a desire to please through her distant relationship with her cold father, William, a music teacher and choir-master, who insisted Doris take piano lessons from an early age. She loved 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 recalled in her memoir, Her OwnStory.

Her childhood wasn’t all happy. Doris discovered that her father was having an affair with her mother’s best friend before Alma did. When William finally left, “there were no goodbyes,” she wrote. “My father didn’t ask for me, and all I wanted to do was hide.” His remoteness and cheating would taint Doris’ relationships with men for the rest of her life.

Inside Doris Day’s Early Years

Young Doris set her sights on becoming a dancer. After she won a $500 prize in an amateur contest, she and Alma talked of moving west so Doris could pursue her passion. Those plans were dashed the night a car Doris was riding in with friends was hit by a train, shattering her right leg. She spent her yearlong recovery listening to Ella Fitzgerald on the radio and honing her singing voice. Doris’ vocal coach, Grace Raine, said, “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 earned $5 a night. “Sometimes my audience was little more than the overflowing Yee family,” she recalled.

In 1939, Doris landed a real gig with local bandleader Barney Rapp, who suggested she change her name from Doris Kappelhoff to the more marquee-friendly Doris Day. She began singing on radio and touring with Barney’s band, even though she was still a teenager. “It’s tough trying to act grown-up when you don’t know how,” Doris admitted.

Being thrust into the adult world at such a young age led Doris to make some mistakes. At 17, she married trombonist Al Jorden, who suffered violent fits of jealousy over his bride and brutalized her. Doris tried to leave during her pregnancy with their son, Terry, but Al stalked her at her radio station job. She finally divorced him in 1943, fearing that he’d hurt their son.

She fell for another musician, saxophonist George Weidler, a little while later, but it also was a troubled marriage because he cheated and grew jealous of her talent. But George would bring Doris to California and closer to her dream of a performing career — even though their union would last only eight months.

Doris Day Got Her Big Break

Doris was living in a trailer outside Los Angeles and planning her return to Cincinnati, where her mother was taking care of Terry, when composer Sammy Cahn heard her sing at a party and asked her to audition for Romance on the High Seas. She reluctantly agreed. “The screen just exploded,” Cahn recalled. “There was no question. A great star was born.”

Director Michael Curtiz saw it, too — even though Doris cried in front of him at her audition. He found her honesty and unpretentiousness charming and vowed to bring 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,” says Curtiz biographer Alan K. Rode.

The film put Doris on the path to a career in movies, and one of its songs, “It’s Magic,” became a hit. Over the next two decades, she would star in nearly 40 films. “My life hasn’t always been like some of my happy musicals,” said Doris. “But when things in life try to knock you down, you just have to bounce right back up.”