50
Fabulous Years From New Idea Magazine, by Robyn
Foyster,
Jun 2003
After 50 years on stage legendary singer
Shirley Bassey is still enthralling audiences with her unique blend of nostalgia
and raunchiness. And at 66, she remains one of the world’s most enduring stars,
with the glamour of royalty, the pomp of a national event and a wardrobe worthy
of an empress.
A consummate performer, she has sung to JFK at the White House, been awarded
dozens of gold discs and entertained millions of fans from Las Vegas and London
to Australia. But while her career has been full of glittering successes, she
has suffered many personal setbacks in her life, including two broken marriages
and the tragic death of a daughter. Born and raised in Tiger Bay near Cardiff,
Wales, in 1937. Shirley Veronica Bassey was the youngest of seven children. Her
Nigerian father Henry, a merchant seaman, walked out on the family when she was
two and she has no memory of him whatsoever. Her mother Eliza Jane struggled to
bring up the large family on little money. Her working class upbringing saw her
sleeping three in a bed with her sisters, clothed in hand-me-downs.
Even now Shirley can't bear it when she is served too much food. I hate it when
you go to a restaurant and they put too much on your plate,' she complains. It
comes from when I was a child and there was very little." When they moved to the
Welsh steel town of Splott Shirley was subjected to racist taunts. She quickly
developed a reputation as a fighter. One old friend recalls: Anyone who called
her darkie" got a real walloping.' The Welsh chanteuse left school at 15 and
took a job in a packing factory in Cardiff, then did a brief stint as a waitress
at a Greek restaurant.
Recalling her first stage performance, it's apparent that from the outset she
had a knack of courting attention whether desired or otherwise. Shirley
remembers that despite not having two cents to rub together, she was determined
to make an impact with her debut stage performance, managing to dress to
impress, something that became her trademark, I didn't have any glamorous
clothes she recalls in her mid-Atlantic accent. 'But I did manage to get my
hands on a bustier, which was black, strapless, lacy and lovely. It was meant to
be worn underneath, but I didn't care. "One of the girls lent me a long lavender
net skirt. I put them together and they looked quite smart. I looked in the
mirror and that was glamour for me - a borrowed bit from here. a borrowed bit
from there.'
The teenager from Tiger Bay, who had rehearsed in the family living room, knew
this was her big moment and typically gave it her all, but her first public
appearance didn't go according to plan. It was great until I hit the top note
and the skirt started to come down,' she says. I grabbed hold of it and started
to run off. My manager said: "Next time, you stand still and let it drop," He
was always searching for publicity. The same manager had insisted she change her
name from Shirley Bassey, but she resolutely refused, adding later: I told him
if I became famous I wanted all my school mates to know it was me.' She
certainly managed to achieve that.
This year Dame Shirley, as she became in 2000, is celebrating half a century at
the top. She may be a grandmother, but she's still touring and recording albums,
her latest being Thank You for the Years. And she's been awarded Frances highest
honour, the Legion d'Honneur. So now I'm a dame and a knight.'
Later this year she also plans to auction 50 sequinned gowns from her
larger-than-life wardrobe - one for each year she's spent in the spotlight. As
she celebrates her achievements, Shirley's only regret is that her beloved
mother cannot share in her glory. She died when Shirley was in her 40s. With
seven children - six girls and a boy - the family was very poor, but Shirley was
always showered with love. Her mother did have the thrill of seeing her daughter
rise to stardom. "She was so proud,' Shirley says. I think she felt she'd made a
mess of her life, so she was thrilled one of her children was making something
of hers. She couldn't give us much except love, which is the greatest gift of
all. In the end I was able to spoil her. I bought her a house, clothes and her
own fur coat, which she cherished.'
These days Shirley has lost touch with many of her relatives in Wales. But she
used to drive to see her mother before she died in Tiger Bay, in a white Jaguar
with blue leather upholstery, clutching a white poodle wreathed with a blue
ribbon. She'd worked hard to get where she was, and she wasn't about to keep it
a secret. Looking back on her early years as a struggling artist, one night
stands out in her mind. She was 18 when a promoter asked her to perform at the
Glasgow Empire. It was to be the toughest audience she'd ever face, and reveals
just how gutsy the dark-eyed youngster was. Standing in the wings, she watched
nervously as the crowd hissed and booed at the preceding acts, a band of
performing acrobats and a comedian.
Admitting she was a bundle of nerves, she says she had to steel herself before
walking on stage. Her first song, I've Got You Under My Skin, was noisy enough
to mask the heckling, but halfway through her second number the audience
hollered for her to remove her clothes. Midway through the song she stopped.
'Now look here,' she said in her broad Welsh accent. 'I've come here tonight to
entertain you lot, but if you don't want to listen then I'll bloody well go
home.' There was a deadly hush. Grabbing her moment, she tapped her foot and
told the musical director to continue. By the end of the performance she had the
audience eating out of her hands. 'By the time I finished my final song the
applause was deafening,' she recalls. 'I was a heroine. It was a milestone.'
At 16 Shirley left home and joined a touring variety show called Hot from
Harlem. A year later she returned home and, to her mother's horror, was visibly
pregnant with daughter Sharon. She has always refused to name the father.
'Sharon gets touchy if I mention it, and I understand that,' Shirley says.
'She's in her 40s with four sons of her own.'
There have been some truly bizarre relationships in her life. At one point she
was held in a siege by besotted ex-boyfriend Terence Davies, who was given the
harmless nickname of Pepe. The incident was described in Shirley: An
Appreciation of the Life of Shirley Bassey. According to the biography the
singer, then 20, was trapped in her hotel room with a loaded gun to her stomach.
She knew it was loaded because Davies had blasted the telephone to pieces.
A male friend of Shirley's took a bullet in the incident and she was ordered to
strip naked while Frank Sinatra records were played. The siege ended when the
police - who had been anxiously watching from across the street - steamed in.
Her first marriage, to her manager Kenneth Hume, was also unusual given that he
was bisexual and she was fully aware of his sexual persuasion. Despite knowing
this, she claimed that he made her laugh, and described him as 'incredibly
romantic'. 'I was crazy about the man,' she said later. 'We laughed and laughed,
until one day we didn't laugh anymore. And that was the end of the marriage.'
During her marriage to Kenneth she had an affair with late film star Peter Finch
and one with an unnamed lover, who was the father of second daughter Samantha.
Her marriage to Kenneth was on the rocks when she heard the news that he had
committed suicide. She later discovered that he'd been receiving electric shock
treatment, and her anger towards those doctors is palpable to this very day.
Only a week after the funeral she was due to open at the old Talk of the Town in
London. Although she wasn't sure if she could hold herself together, she decided
that she owed it to Kenneth, who had worked on her act, to perform. She managed
to get through the opening performance, but recalls that she ran off stage in a
flood of tears halfway through the last track.
Unlucky in love, she married for the second time in 1968, tying the knot with
her manager Sergio Novak in a 2am Las Vegas ceremony. The marriage lasted 10
years, but she said later: 'It seemed like a good idea at the time, but you
can't take a contract to bed with you. 'Men get overawed by who I am, by the
power thing. They can't handle being Mr Bassey. It's been a hindrance.'
According to Sergio it was impossible for any man to live with Shirley because
she was prone to tantrums and had a raging temper. Her friends included Frank
Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jnr and Sean Connery, and she became too starry. 'She was
overdosing on fame,' he said later in a TV documentary. 'Her stardom transferred
to her private life. And Shirley has a bad temper. She once threatened to learn
Italian just so she could swear at me in my own language!'
This was the era of one of Shirley's biggest hits, Big Spender, and the song's
title became her favourite form of therapy. The solution to many problems was to
go shopping,' Sergio reveals. 'Shirley would disappear, then come back with
hundreds of bags, and she'd be happy again.'
Sergio claims he was often asked how he tolerated his wife's tantrums. Louis
Emanuelli, the maitre d' of Annabel's nightclub in London, recalled in his
memoirs the night Shirley was dining there with Sergio and friends, and ordered
smoked salmon and asparagus. 'None of the waiters dared tell her that the
kitchen had run out of asparagus. It was left to me,' Louis says. 'She looked me
in the eye and said: "You are such a supercilious little man. I've never liked
you." I replied: "The feeling, Miss Bassey, is mutual." Within a second I was
reeling. She had punched me on the jaw!' According to Louis, as the Bassey party
was leaving after being told they were no longer welcome, he took Sergio aside
and asked sympathetically: 'How do you put up with her?' Sergio shrugged and
admitted: 'She's impossible.'
Contrary to Shirley's claim that the men in her life had not been strong enough
to cope with being Mr Bassey, Sergio says their marriage ended when she suddenly
announced she was having an affair with her Australian road manager Kenny
Carter. Although it proved short lived, news that there were suddenly three
people in the marriage swiftly led to divorce. But the end of her second
marriage was a soft blow compared to the horror she experienced in 1985, when
her daughter Samantha was found dead, aged just 21, after plunging from the top
of Bristol's Clifton Suspension Bridge.
The tragedy marked the lowest ebb of Shirley's life. Although her daughter was
known to have emotional problems and drank heavily, Shirley always rejected any
suggestion that she took her own life. 'Samantha would never have done that,'
the singer says. 'She had my resolve. She was strong like me. We clashed, yes.
But then, we were similar.' Unsurprisingly Shirley sank in to a deep decline,
and she claims her deep distress caused her to temporarily lose her voice and
pile on weight as she ate for comfort. 'I was grieving through my vocal cords,'
she says. 'It knocked me for six.' 'That was such a terrible time for me. I'd
wake in the night and go to the fridge for a bar of chocolate and a lump of
cheese - and I mean really big. It got to the stage where I had to wear a
maternity dress. 'Eventually I checked in to a clinic in LA to get some help. It
worked wonders, like a form of brainwashing. They re-educated me to be so
careful about what I eat.'
Still, Shirley still lives with the guilt that she was somehow to blame. 'Even
now, I suddenly stop in my tracks and think: "She's dead." I feel guilt. Mothers
do. And to lose a child... you know the old saying that children should bury
their parents, and not the other way round? 'Guilt is a dreadful thing to live
with. It makes you feel ill,' she says. 'Somehow something told me to get up and
get out again on that stage. 'Sitting around feeling sorry for myself wasn't
going to help me - and it wouldn't bring back Samantha.' Just a few weeks later
she performed at Carnegie Hall in New York. Dressed in a simple black gown, she
walked out on stage and was immediately given a five-minute standing ovation by
her fans. 'It's incredible how the public can lift you,' she reveals. 'It
produces the most extraordinary adrenalin. It's like a drug. I think people have
responded to the rollercoaster of my life.'
Shirley admits her life is no longer the rollercoaster it once was. And as she's
grown older, she's become more reflective, realising, for instance, how tough it
was for her children to have a mother who was so often away on tour.
Nonetheless, she is still outspoken about her children. Of her daughter Sharon,
she complains that she only speaks to her when she is footing the phone bill.
And she has described her adopted son Mark, the grandson of sister Ella, as a
'naughty boy'. The pair are now estranged after he admitted to the press that he
had taken cocaine and ecstasy. 'I realise now that success is all about
sacrifice, especially if you're a mother,' she says. 'As my career took off I'd
sign contracts. I was under tremendous pressure. I was earning a lot of people a
lot of money. If I didn't go off touring, I'd have been sued.'
After Samantha's death Shirley moved from her home in Lugano, Switzerland, to
Monaco, where her neighbours include Ringo Starr and Boris Becker. She's filled
her home with antiques and admits she compulsively buys jewellery, especially
diamonds. She looks happy and fit, with the figure of a woman half her age. 'I
work out two hours a day at the gym and am something of a gym junkie,' she
admits. 'I miss it so much if I don't go. If I didn't exercise I'd look my age.
I defy it by staying fit.' The star, who's earned her place in James Bond
history for her theme songs to Goldfinger, Diamonds Are Forever and Moonraker,
also has a new love in her life - theatre producer Greg Smith. 'We clicked
straight away,' she says. 'He understands me. I can't believe it. I'd all but
given up on finding the man. 'But I mustn't tempt fate. I'm terrible like that.
I worry that if I talk too much about it something will make it all disappear.
I'm superstitious too. I can't help feeling that if I get too happy it will be
taken from me. That's how I've been all my life. I'm not hard-nosed, I'm
cautious. But I'm also optimistic. It's a terrible combination. 'But this is the
best,' she continues. 'I've just recorded a fabulous album, I'm celebrating 50
years at the top, and I've met my man. I can't remember a moment when I looked
forward with more hope.’
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