Viva la Diva Bassey From The Western Mail, By Hannah Jones, Jun 6 2003
With Wales' most colourful chanteuse Shirley Bassey in concert in Cardiff,
Hannah Jones wonders what makes her, and J-Lo and co real prima donnas
There aren't many singers who could claim to have nothing while standing,
dripping in diamonds and wrapped up in furs, in front of 60,000 adoring fans.
But Shirley Bassey, affectionately referred to as Burley Chassis by her legion
of fans, is up there on the diamante-encrusted podium.
She's the Tigress from Tiger Bay who can declare "I have nothing, I have no
home" dressed in a backless frock laced with gold, complete with a postcode on
Millionaires' Row in Monte Carlo.
Bassey, the big-voiced diva with even bigger hair, bigger earrings and bigger
demands than Madonna before she met her Guy and calmed down a bit, looks like a
woman that needs to be handled with care - you know, like the way you'd handle
hot coals, a Ming vase or a tetchy baby with teething problems.
She's a diva, a little word with a big name which just happens to be one of the
most overused and largely abused terms in showbiz, because when people like
Celine Dion and Christina Aguilera are being called divas you know the term is
starting to lose all its glitter. These women are merely high maintenance and a
little bit spoiled. They are not big-bosomed dears, fabulous performers,
larger-than-life girls who share heartache and pain through their music and do
it while wearing a plunging sparkly gown and four-inch heels.
A diva, says the Collins English Dictionary, is a highly distinguished female
singer or a prima donna.
But by my definition a diva is much more than that. She isn't the girl next door
with a few pounds in her pocket.
When the actress Joan Crawford was talking about what makes a diva she scoffed
at the idea that she was simply a girl from the sticks who had done well. She
said, "If you want to see the girl next door, go next door."
Because she knew divas don't live next door. They live in isolated luxury, in
penthouses, private planes and fancy hotels sans the word "hotel" in the name.
They wear Oscar de la Renta to bed, go swimming in something streamlined and
obscenely expensive that keeps them dry or cunningly moisturises their skin so
it doesn't shrivel, and don't get out of bed for anything as mundane as life.
Divas like Bassey are never seen without their make-up and, to misquote those
immortal lines of Jerry Hall, they look like they were born knowing how to
please a man.
And I think she said it had something, if not everything, to do with knowing how
to be a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom.
You can just imagine someone like Bassey spotting the one lily wilting in the
house-sized bouquet sitting in her hotel room and pointing out the bell-boy
without a proper shine to his shoes.
The singing talent almost becomes secondary to the myth of her divadom, but it's
really at the core of all that makes her a goddess.
Take some of her quotes, for example.
On men she has said, "Diamonds never leave you. Men do."
On relationships, "The first six months are wonderful. I love that intensity,
the passion, the 'can't keep away from each other', then it all starts to taper
off. They don't want to stay home and watch television, they want to go out.
They don't want to listen to what I say, they start putting me down, and I won't
take that."
On being 66, "You don't get older, you get better."
And then there are the personal traumas, when our diva pulls up at the gates of
Heartbreak Hotel and invites the world in to see her crying into her champers,
sucked through a pink bendy straw.
Bassey's have included marriage break-ups - she even married a gay man - the
death of her daughter and a widely-publicised court case after her former
assistant Hilary Levy claimed the star had sacked her after a drunken row. She
also said the Big Spender slapped her and allegedly called her a "Jewish bitch".
The case was thrown out.
It's enough to make you want to buy a laptop so you can start writing the script
to her life story and make a mint yourself, because nothing sells better than a
tragic beauty from the wrong side of the tracks who made good while making some
bad choices along the way.
With a performing style that mixed teen innocence and earthy sexuality, Bassey
recorded her first number one hit single, As I Love You, in 1958. Offstage, her
relationship to one-time boyfriend Pepe Davis was reportedly very tempestuous.
It was widely publicised that police were once called to her hotel room when, in
a fit of jealousy, he tried to stab her.
Crawford was right when she said divas don't live the typical life of a girl
next door.
Although Bassey and her diva cohorts appear to have an inflated sense of
self-importance (some might say it's a realistic sense of their own importance)
they've all qualified to be gold-card-carrying members of the Divadom Club.
With their luxury lifestyles, huge fortunes, undeniable talent and tantrums,
they have all been able to put ticks in the relevant boxes because to qualify
they need to (a) have one corker of a big voice, (b) demand the size 10 labels
on their clothes are replaced by ones saying size 6 before a fibre even caresses
their skin, and (c) fill large auditoriums with heterosexual men and not the
type of soul who's merely looking for a Judy Garland substitute.
Swansea's Queen of Glamour Catherine Zeta Jones narrowly missed out on being a
member of the club when she picked up a Bafta and shouted out, "Oggy, oggy, oggy."
Not a diva mantra, you might agree. She might have made it if she'd proclaimed,
in her curious blend of American-tinged Welsh, "Gimme, gimme, gimme, more, more,
more."
The new breed of diva, those women with a bigger entourage than Bassey's, have
age on their side and usually sport their own hair (but our Shirl has recently
started throwing out her wigs, I'm told).
The new Ds on the block - step up Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez and Mariah
Carey - display fewer diamonds than Bassey, wear pink velour tracksuits with
pride with the matching accessory of chutzpah.
Take J-Lo for instance. Her ludicrous expectations include having her coffee
stirred counter-clockwise, having her bed sheets made with a certain thread
count and expensive fragrance sprayed into her path as she walks and a fan
blowing her hair just the right way.
One of the most famous stories surrounding her diva "needs" happened when she
was booked to perform on Top of the Pops. The apparently soon-to-be Mrs Ben
Afflick, aka Jenny from the Block, demanded a suite of dressing rooms (decorated
in white silk), 10 dressing rooms for her 60 staff (decorated in white muslin
and lace), three personal chefs, a wind machine for filming and a pure-white
microphone and stand.
Makes paying the licence fee worth it, doesn't it?
And then there's warbling Mariah Carey. Her diva demands include requesting a
litter of puppies and kittens for her to play with during an MTV interview.
She also reportedly pulled out of one television interview when she found out
she would be expected to walk down some stairs, because she apparently "doesn't
do stairs". Well, would you if you had the choice?
Britney is a young diva who isn't backwards in coming forwards when it comes to
getting her own way.
While on tour her demands have included that her dressing room comes stocked
with Pop Tarts, cases of Coke, tuna salad with mayonnaise, Dorito's and breath
fresheners. She has also been known to require her daily mocha latte from the
Los Angeles Coffee Bean store, even when she's not in America. Bless her.
Divas, then, are no ordinary women, and although we mere mortals might have fun
dissing them you've got to secretly admire their balls, talent and ability to
look as if they were born singing and wearing chip- resistant nail varnish.
Maybe we really wouldn't swap our lives for theirs in the glare of the media
spotlight, always having to wear a smile and looking good when your heart is
breaking and your man's off wooing another diva with bigger hair, but what women
like Shirl and co show us is: we were all born to be adored. Even if we don't
drip diamonds and wouldn't be able to carry a tune in a Cartier carrier bag.