It’s no secret why we still love Doris Day!

IT was 60 years ago that she made her first TV appearance, and from that moment on, Doris Day has been one of our all-time biggest stars.

It was at the start of 1955 that the blonde already known as a singer and star of Calamity Jane appeared on TV hit What’s My Line.

It seemed to click with her, and suddenly being a star of the big and small screens mattered more than singing. She started to take on more serious, grown-up roles.

From then onwards, Doris’s thoughts were all about Hollywood, rather than her next single or LP.

By the summer, she’d starred alongside James Cagney in Love Me Or Leave Me, a huge hit that she always said was her big breakthrough and favourite flick.

All a bit ironic, then, that she played Ruth Etting, a woman who you guessed it had been a dancer and singer but was now making her breakthrough in the movie world!

Cagney, of course, played her gangster husband, Moe “The Gimp” Snyder. There are strange parallels between Doris and the real-life Ruth.

Another blonde who tried dancing and acting along with singing, she’d been dubbed America’s Sweetheart, just as many would describe Day.

When she left Snyder for her pianist, shots had been fired and lots of drama ensued.

A frugal woman who made her own clothes despite being a superstar, Ruth just wanted to retire from fame.

Doris, too, would eventually seek to ease out of the public eye.

As for her musical inspirations, she’d grown up loving Ella Fitzgerald, like many women of her time, and like Ella, she’d do songs by Rodgers and Hart, a couple appearing on the 1955 album Day Dreams.

“There was a quality to Ella’s voice that fascinated me, and I tried to sing along with her,” Doris would admit.

Que Sera, Sera, the song first introduced in the 1956 movie The Man Who Knew Too Much, would become her own property, almost, as she sang it so memorably!

It reached No 1 in the UK, and was the theme tune for her own TV series.

The 1958 album, Hooray For Hollywood, featured more Ella classics, from the pen of Cole Porter, like In The Still Of The Night and Night And Day.

A 1962 record, Duet, showed how confident a singer she was, with a very sparse three-piece backing group. Mind you, the pianist was Andre Previn, so they were hardly an average pub band!

A funny thing happened, though, many years later.

It was in 2011 that Doris became the oldest artist to release an album with new material, and My Heart took everyone aback well, she was 89 at the time! It made the UK Top 10.

Three songs had been written by her son, Terry, and though recorded in the 1980s, had lain in a box for decades.

Terry was a big, big part of her life.

Today, Doris lives in semi-seclusion, looking after her beloved stray dogs, and has nothing to do with Tinseltown.

As good and wholesome as apple pie, she nevertheless had a difficult time with her men. She had three weddings in 10 years, and a fourth later, but was never completely fulfilled.

Her only son, Terry Melcher, died 11 years ago, aged 62. If you, like millions, have enjoyed The Beach Boys’ many hits, or The Byrds’ Mr Tambourine Man and Turn! Turn! Turn!, Terry was the guy who produced them.

Doris had named him Terry after her favourite childhood comic hero from Terry and the Pirates, but his birth led to big trouble.

She’d been set to leave Al Jorden, her trombonist first husband, when the baby was born.

Jorden demanded she get rid of the child, so she filed for divorce.

Her second hubby was another guy from the horn section, saxophonist George Weidler, and third Mr Right Martin Melcher embezzled $30 million out of her.

She only found out when he died.

Deeply in debt, she pursued his partly-responsible business partner, in the biggest civil case America had seen, getting back about a fifth of her money.

“It was awful,” Doris revealed.

“I was really not very well, and the thought of going into TV was overpowering. But he’d signed me up for a series.

“Then my son Terry explained it wasn’t the end of it. I had also been signed up for a bunch of TV specials, without anyone ever asking me.”

How this remarkable lady could put that sunshine smile on her face and continue to delight us with her songs, films and TV shows, with all this going on in the background, is the mark of the woman.

After the Doris Day Show had ended, though, she more or less retired from public life.

She had shown, in fun flicks like 1967’s The Ballad Of Josie as a kind of feminist cowgirl that she could make us smile.

In the 1962 film, That Touch Of Mink, she and Cary Grant had also shown how big they were, clinching America’s first-ever $1 million earner in just one place, Radio City Music Hall.

Doris, in fact, got into the box office Top 10 no fewer than 10 times!

At the end of the 80s, due to make a surprise appearance as a presenter at the Oscars, Doris was walking through her hotel grounds and caught her leg on a water sprinkler.

The cut was so horrible and deep that she had to cancel her big date, and it really began to seem she was fated to just disappear from the limelight.

In her own world, though, she worked away on her one true love, helping animals in need.

US President George W Bush even asked her to come and receive a special medal.

However, she had to turn him down as her fear of flying got the better of her.

“It was a good day for our fellow creatures when she gave her good heart to the cause of animal welfare,” said the President of Doris.

Today, the Doris Day Horse Rescue and Adoption Center, in Murchison, Texas, sees horses get the help they need, thanks to the work and huge donations of the one and only Doris Day.