She
That Plays The Queen
From Sunday Times, Sep 21 1997
To her fans she is the great diva, almost divine.
Simon Fanshawe meets Shirley Bassey, the last grande dame of British showbiz.
"Where's the car?" Shirley Bassey asked. "The car should be here. You shouldn't have sent it away." We have to walk from the Langham Hilton in Portland Place to the BBC, which is also in Portland Place. In fact, it wasn't for the pedestrian crossing that separates the two buildings, they'd be next to each other. But for a moment Shirley Bassey is being "Ladies and Gentlemen, Miss Shirley Bassey". She is accompanied by a small posse of men - me, her manager, her assistant, her PR - and also a little drizzle. But they tell her not to worry. They sent the car away because it's only a short walk. In fact, it's much further than they thought because the reception has been temporarily moved. But with no wailing, whingeing or stamping of celebrity foot, she just gets on with it. And through the wet we walk to the BBC.
When we round the corner of Broadcasting House, I spot a pickup lorry with a two-seater cabin, a ton of rubble in the back and a huge mechanical grab. "There's your car." Everybody else laughs. She grimaces me in a "ha-ha" bigger sister sort of way, winks and then laughs herself. That's the thing about Shirley Bassey. She is half tomboy, the youngest of seven children from Tiger Bay, and half Maria Callas. It is a wonderful conjuring trick. And her magic wand is that mouth. She just has to throw it open to sing, or flash a dentally perfect shimmering smile, and she becomes Shirley Bassey, the Diva, the Star, the human embodiment of diamanté and, to her fans, almost Divine.
What is it about her, I ask, that inspires their total dedication? Without hesitation she gives the first of only two definite answers in the whole interview. "Glamour," she says. The other unequivocal answer is "No." The question was: "Would you ever think of taking a different musical direction in the future?" Bassey knows exactly what has sustained her through 44 years of showbiz, starting at 16, becoming a star at 20, and now drawing open-air crowds of 14,000 to two concerts recorded for her 60th-birthday live album, which is out this week. And she's not about to change it. "I'm not a jazz singer, I'm a ballad singer."
Many column inches have been spent recounting her personal life. Conveniently for journalists, it has been a bit of disaster and thus has contributed neatly to the cliché that it is the suffering and agony, the Judy Garland of it all, that makes her sort of woman such a great singer. To recap this life unfairly in 100 words or so: her father left when she was two and she has never seen him again; she grew up in all-white area of Cardiff; she got pregnant when she was 17, her sister Iris raising the girl for nine years; her first husband and manager, Kenneth Hume, divorced her, came back and then killed himself; her second husband, also her manager, Sergio Novak, left her; her second daughter, Samantha, killed herself, and Shirley subsequently - and dramatically - during a concert, lost her voice; her adopted son went to Spain, so that they have lost contact with each other; she doesn't see her family in Cardiff now that her mother has died; today she lives alone, in Monte Carlo, without a man in her life.
There it is, summarised for instant interpretation, the torch singer's identikit CV: a list of personal tragedies that have supposedly given her the ability to become the country's prima heart-wrenching interpreter of standards. Except that she has been singing these great big drag-queen ballads ever since she was 16. It's not her life that has made her voice; it's her voice that has made her life.
"I feel an outside," she says, "because of this incredible voice and the situation it has put me in." It has made her a full-time celebrity and her awareness of that makes her a lone figure. "I was singing at 14, professional at 16, and I don't know anything else." Many times she has been quoted as saying that the men who have left her have done so because they could not cope with her fame. "Love is a pain, it really is. I don't want it. It doesn't suit my life." And her family, how important are they? "I don't know. I left town at 16. I don't really have any contact with them. Also I was alone when I was a child. I never really had anything in common with my brothers and sisters." So is she happy? "I am at the moment. The older I get, the better it is. I'm on my own at a time in my life when it is wonderful. I shan't marry again. I'm not the marrying kind. I'm a celebrity, and that's it."
She professes disbelief at what she has achieved. And it certainly didn't have very auspicious beginnings.
At 16 she was plucked from the working men's clubs, where she could only sing at weekends "when the women where invited". This was, after all, 1953. She was cast in a show called Hot From Harlem, but swiftly decided that she hated show business. "I was the little soubrette and left after two months. I was the youngest in the show and there was a lot of bitchiness from the other girls. I didn't like that. There was only one white man in the show and I had to sing a duet with him. It was a Jolson number, By the Light of the Silvery Moon, I think. All the black people were supposed to be cotton pickers. Can you imagine? The English, what do we know about slavery? Although they do say the English started it." It's unclear whether this last remark is ironic or not. I doubt it. Shirley doesn't do irony. She is full-on and always has been. That singing style was there from the beginning.
Despite her initial misgivings, she went back into another touring show and was spotted by her first manager, the late Michael Sullivan. With him, she made it to the West End, via the Astor Club in Mayfair, in a show called Such Is Life. "I was pushed into show business, really, although obviously I allowed myself to be," she says, looking back from the heights of success. "I became my image. It's all really been out of my control. I've just gone along with it. Michael Sullivan started it and it's still going."
The reason for that is her fans. They are remarkably loyal. And, despite not having had a chart hit since the early 1970s, she has never needed to reinvent herself. She had a brief link-up with the eccentric Swiss pop duo Yello in 1987 for a record, now of some cult value, called The Rhythm Divine. But it did not catch on in the way that the dramatic rescue of Tina Turner by Heaven 17 four years earlier did with Let's Stay Together. But then Bassey has never needed rescuing from the doldrums because,
career wise, she's never been in them. She has carried on being that very typically British kind of
show business star you think doesn't exist any longer - Big Hair and A Family Audience - and her fans have gone all the way with her. What they want are those iridescent anthems - Goldfinger, I am What I am and This Is My Life. They want those characteristic lyrical rushes diving into a great swoop of a high note. And that's what they get.
At her Birthday Concert at Althorp Park, staged in July, the burghers of Middle England gathered to celebrate their idol and her mastery of the stylishly vulgar. With their M&S picnics and their hampers, and some of them even in dinner jackets, it was a middle-market Glyndebourne without the opera, but most definitely with a star. Her stagecraft is supreme. As she stood swathed in sparkling white, the feathers on the hood of her cloak fluttering in the wind around the soft brown of her face, you realised that she has made an entire career out of entrances and exits. The crowd literally worships her. They hold out gifts of flowers, champagne and soft toys.
"They overwhelm me," she says in the ordinary light of day. "I feel like I am," she pauses, "... some goddess, and they are giving up an offering. Sometimes I go home to my hotel room after the show and these thoughts come to me. Why do they do this? Why do they reach out to me like that? Why do they give me these gifts?" She seems to have no answers herself. It may seem a little silly to put it like this, but they do it because she is "Shirley Bassey". She is the creation of a life lived in public. She is their creation and, even on stage with an orchestra and in
from of thousands, she is truly alone.
Goddesses derive splendour from their isolation. Her audience is in awe but also perhaps they are offering gifts of consolation as a hedge against their own solitude. What they get in return is her total commitment. "Their applause is thrilling, incredible. And, of course, I need it. It's what keeps me going. It's my life." And, at 60, is she now in control? "I have control of it when I sing."