In another life, Doris Kappelhoff may have lived quietly in Cincinnati and been content. In this life, she became the singer, movie star and girl-next-door Doris Day.
"I could have happily lived my entire life in Cincinnati, married to a proper Cincinnatian, living in a big old Victorian house, raising a brood of offspring, but preordination … had other plans for me," Day said in her autobiography, "Doris Day: Her Own Story," as told to A.E. Hotchner.
In the book, Day, who turned 95 on April 3, dispelled her reputation as a "goody two shoes" and revealed the hardships she has endured, starting with her childhood in Cincinnati.
She was born in 1922 at 3475 Greenlawn Avenue in Evanston. Her father was a music teacher, her mother a hausfrau, but they weren't a good fit and they separated.
Day wrote fondly of taking dance lessons at Hessler's in Mount Adams and going to the movies at the Albee Theater with her mother.
"My roots in Cincinnati go very deep," Day wrote. "I didn't leave there wanting to escape to someplace better. I only left because the tide of events washed me away."
And she returned here when things didn't turn out.
As teenagers, Day and her dance partner Jerry Doherty performed all over town. A trip to Hollywood convinced them to move out there to start a dancing career, but their dreams were not to be.
On Oct. 13, 1937, after a farewell party in Hamilton, Day was a passenger in a car that was hit by a train. She suffered compound fractures in her right leg, and doctors doubted she would ever dance again. She spent more than a year in a cast, hobbling on crutches.
While convalescing in Price Hill, Day developed her singing talent and started performing on the radio program "Carlin's Carnival" and at Charlie Yee's Shanghai Inn restaurant.
In 1939, bandleader Barney Rapp signed Day as a singer to replace his pregnant wife at his club, the Sign of the Drum on Reading Road. He thought Kappelhoff was too long for the marquee and suggested Doris Day because of the song "Day After Day."
She told him, "It sounds like a headliner at the Gaiety Burlesque House. It sounds phony."
The name stuck, though she has never cared for it. Her close friends instead call her Clara.
Day toured as a vocalist with big bands, then quit in 1941 to marry trombonist Al Jorden and have a baby. Jorden was abusive and the marriage was a disaster.
She and her son returned to Price Hill and she started singing on WLW. She became friends with another act, the Williams Brothers, and Andy Williams asked her to sing with them.
"Every Monday night I would go to the Williamses' and his mother would fix hot chocolate and bake cookies and we'd have a songfest," Day wrote. "Those Monday nights were part of what I enjoyed about life in Cincinnati."
Day rejoined Les Brown's band and in 1945 they recorded the song "Sentimental Journey," which became a wartime hit. She went on to record a string of hit songs, including "Que Sera, Sera," and conquered Hollywood as the top female box office star in films like "Pillow Talk" and "A Touch of Mink."
Not all was sunny for Day. She told an interviewer: "All I ever wanted [was] … a baby, a husband who really loved me, a home, all the happiness that they could bring. I never got that."
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