Al bought train tickets to New York for Doris and himself. Still deeply in love with George Weidler, she telephoned him every night. For the opening of the Little Club, Billy and Al had packed their friends in, making sure Doris got a good hand. This was going to be her springboard. If she succeeded here, it would be easier to make it in Hollywood.
The notices she received were encouraging. Billy engaged her for an extra four weeks, and Al returned to California to see what he could line up for her there. Ten days later she telephoned him in tears: “I can’t handle the rest of my time at the club alone. I want to get back to George. I’ve had it.” Al took it philosophically. “Come on back then,” he said. On the way, she stopped off in Cincinnati to see her son.
Meantime, Mike Curtiz, a sentimental Lothario from Hungary at Warner Brothers moved in to succeed Hal Wallis, who started in business for himself. Mike had Jack Warner breathing down his neck to start making a musical to be called Romance on the High Seas. Betty Hutton was supposed to play the girl lead, but at the last minute Curtiz wouldn’t hire her. He decided to look around for a lesser, cheaper name, though he was growing more panicky by the day with Warner starting to twist his arms.
Song writers Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, who were writing the score for Romance, had an idea that Doris might do for the picture and suggested to Al that he ought to arrange an audition for her. He called Doris to come home. The day of her promised return to Los Angeles brought no news of her, though her audition had been fixed for the following morning. In the evening, on a hunch, Al drove out to the Sepulveda camp. In the darkness he thumped on the trailer’s door until Doris put her head out the window and promised again to turn up in the morning.
When he collected her in his car, she was weeping hysterically. Her marriage was on the rocks, she said. George Weidler wanted out. “I can’t do the audition. You’ll have to cancel.”
“Look, if your marriage is breaking up, you’ll sure need a job,” said Al. “It’ll get your mind off your trouble, and you’ll have to make a living.”
She accepted the logic of that and dried her tears. He sent out to buy her new stockings, since those she was wearing were laddered, then took her to meet Curtiz. In the middle of singing for him, fresh tears trickled down her cheeks at the thought that her husband was leaving. Curtiz thought this was one of the great acting performances of all time and invited Al to talk contract. They settled on $500 a week for her, and because Jack Warner regarded television as nothing more than furniture that stares back at you, Al got her TV rights. Doris wasn’t in a mood to care much about anything. She was still pining for George, hoping she could bring them back together.
Moving out of the trailer, she was so lonely that her agent wanted some place for her to live where she could look out the window and see people; she had no more company than that. He put her in the Plaza Hotel across the street from the Brown Derby and stopped by every morning to take her to the studio. When the picture was finished, he came up with another idea. Why not see Sinatra, for whom Al had worked, and check whether Frank could use her on his radio “Hit Parade”?
Frank, who knows talent, liked that fine. She went with him to New York for the weekly shows, and life was starting to look rosy when the blight attacked again. The sponsors, the American Tobacco Company, decided that her singing style was too close to Frank’s and they dumped her. Doris was knocked off her feet again. This time she felt sure she was finished. “I guess I can always go home to Cincinnati,” she said.
Al was running into complaints from his partners. “Why do you waste your time on this dame?” they demanded. “She’s not the most beautiful girl in the world; she’s loaded with freckles; she’s got no clothes sense; she’s going nowhere.” But Al’s mind revolved around the memory of Alice Faye, another girl with a voice. “People could identify themselves with Alice, and they can with Doris,” he argued. “Because any girl in the audience could be Doris Day, and she could be any girl.”