Shirley (20 page)

He rang the organiser and gave him a message that could not be ignored. Miss Shirley Bassey is very anxious to help your deserving charity and is prepared to offer her services. But it seems that her name has been overlooked. Can it be that there is some colour prejudice in operation?

Certainly not, came the answer. Sullivan was promised
a return telephone call and in a few minutes Shirley was in. Sullivan was jubilant, he knew that Shirley would walk away with the show. She simply gloried in illustrious surroundings, and the more stars that surrounded her, the more she could shine. They both worked very hard, rehearsing without let-up. Shirley would walk down a staircase. The impact of any performer coming down a staircase is always sure-fire. The dress would be beautiful and daring. She would astonish and excite as she sang ‘The Birth of the Blues’.

And that is exactly what happened. There was a great roar of approval and sympathy for this girl, whose private life and reputation had been shredded so unfairly on the front pages of the newspapers. She sang what the papers next day called the most exciting rendition of ‘Birth of the Blues’ ever heard in London. The man with the golden trumpet, Eddie Calvert, joined her, and the two of them stole the show. Shirley brought youth, glamour and, above all, her voice and Eddie Calvert his virtuosity. The audience broke into tumultous applause. Shirley had proved she was inimitable, and unbeatable. After that night, she was in demand as never before.

Johnny Franz of Phillips Records had always believed in her. Now he asked her, and not Michael Sullivan, what she wanted to record, ‘Choose a number for the other side of this record,’ he told her. She knew exactly what she wanted. Les Paul, a musician who had often played for her in the past, had played a number for her on his piano, and she had fallen instantly in love with it. ‘What’s it called?’ asked Johnny Franz.

‘“As I Love You”. It’s wonderful, Johnny. You know it
has this middle eight, which is me. I can change key and hit. Then attack! I love it.’

‘You can’t have it,’ Johnny said flatly. ‘It’s against all the rules. You can’t have two ballads on the same disc. You’ve got to give me a beat number.’

Shirley wouldn’t give up. ‘This is me. This is my song. Please Johnny. I’ve always done as you asked, now give me this song.’ She won. Shirley recorded the song and gave it everything she had. Both Johnny Franz and Shirley knew it would be a hit. When it came out that year, 1958, it was top of the charts, then it was top again in March 1959. Shirley loved it. She knew this was a song that suited her voice. At the same time she recorded, ‘Kiss Me, Honey Honey, Kiss Me.’ It was jazzy and bright, but as far as she was concerned, ‘As I Love You’ was her favourite. The two songs climbed the charts together.

As Shirley had two records right at the top she was asked to sing whichever song she preferred on the most popular music television programme,
The Top Twenty Show
with Joe Loss and his orchestra. Naturally she chose her favourite, ‘As I Love You’. This song had been her baby from the beginning, she had cosseted it, sung it on all kinds of spots, on radio and television, and accepted fees as low as five pounds just to plug it, just to get it where she knew it deserved to go, to the top of the Hit Parade.

Sullivan, however, wanted her to sing, ‘Kiss Me, Honey Honey, Kiss Me,’ on the TV show and, without telling her, deliberately sent the wrong music to Joe Loss. Expecting to sing, ‘As I Love You,’ Shirley went to the
Top Twenty
studio to give her favourite song its final accolade. She was astounded and disappointed when she discovered what
Michael had done. She was also furious, and the crack in their relationship widened further. It was, after all, a stupid and arrogant action for Sullivan to have taken. And it was one that Shirley would not forget.

Shirley had now moved into a home of her own, a furnished flat in one of the apartment blocks in Dolphin Square, near the embankment between Chelsea and Victoria. Dolphin Square was quiet and attractive, a popular and fashionable place to live. None of the apartments were particularly large or grand but they were comfortable. It was very central, and the people who lived there often just needed a ‘pied à terre’ in London: members of parliament, businessmen and women, writers, actors. It was a safe place for a woman on her own.

Shirley’s flat was in the same block where she and Bernard Hall had said goodbye the year before when he went off to Monte Carlo. One of Shirley’s favourite features in the Dolphin Square complex was its large swimming pool. Shirley was a good swimmer and she loved the sport.

She was beginning to earn big money now, but both she and Michael knew that as soon as their current agreement expired, the next contract – if there was one – would be very different.

Shirley drove her white Jaguar down to Cardiff to see her mother and Sharon regularly so Annis Abraham was no longer needed to meet her train. However, she often called in at his nightclub before she returned to London, and it was there that she met his two partners, Clive Sharp and Maurice King. They were running a new discotheque-cum-drinking club in Soho, in which Annis had a share, and
Shirley promised to call and see The Showbiz Club soon.

Michael had seen a show,
The Folies Bergère
, at the Winter Garden in Blackpool and realised that this was the perfect vehicle for Shirley. It had featured a beautiful dark girl who sang and danced. He discussed the idea of renting the sets and props and turning
The Folies Bergère
into a brand new show in London. It would be retitled
Blue Magic
, and open at the Prince of Wales Theatre.

All these arrangements were put on hold when Shirley, still doing her variety tour for Leslie Grade, appeared in Birmingham. Michael had stayed in London but Berry was with her and, of course, her little poodle, whom she had named Beaujolais. In the middle of the night Shirley rang Berry to say she was in terrible pain. A doctor was called and gave the usual grumbling appendix diagnosis with assurances that she’d be all right tomorrow. Berry was not convinced, he remembered the sick girl he and Sylvia had met at London Airport. ‘I think she ought to go into hospital, and we find out once and for all what’s really wrong.’ Berry may well have saved Shirley’s life. If he hadn’t intervened it might have been too late. The appendix had ruptured and she had peritonitis. She was found to be seriously ill and needed an emergency operation. After she recovered from the surgery, she needed a long convalescence, so Berry took Shirley and Beaujolais back to Margery Hall and Sylvia in Reigate.

The warmth and kindness of that household was exactly what Shirley needed to help recovery. ‘She loved home cooking,’ remembered Sylvia. ‘Spotted Dick was one of her favourite puddings. She loved the family atmosphere of our home. My old mum and Shirley got on like a house on fire.
My sister used to bring her baby and we’d tuck her into Shirley’s bed. She was happier than I’d ever seen her. Sometimes I wondered whether what she was doing was worth all that stress and trouble. She had a great talent, no one could do it like Shirley, it had brought her fame and money but there didn’t seem time for happiness. In the end, I think I decided that she had this overwhelming need to be famous, she had a need to use her voice so she just had to get on with it.’

When she was better, Shirley and Sylvia dressed up to the nines, Sylvia wearing one of Shirley’s mink stoles and went to watch a tennis match at Wimbledon. The reigning Wimbledon champion, American Ashley Cooper, had sent Shirley tickets. ‘I remember how very attractive Shirley looked,’ says Sylvia. ‘She just mowed the men down. That day we really felt we were the bee’s knees. I was sorry when she drove off to Dolphin Square.’

Before Shirley started serious preparations for the new revue,
Blue Magic
, Sullivan got together a complete variety show to do a short tour for Moss Empires. Shirley would have the second half of the show to herself, and Sylvia and her partner, the dancing sister act, would be part of the first half. ‘We opened the first half,’ laughed Sylvia in recalling that time. ‘And you can’t get much lower than that, but we loved every moment. And the show did so well. Of course Shirley was our big star, so we had full houses in every town we visited.’

Sullivan realised that Shirley had a new boyfriend, Clive Sharp. He knew vaguely that Clive Sharp and his partner Maurice King were, as he said, ‘two faces you would see around London.’ He didn’t consider them in the same
league as he was professionally, but Shirley was over twenty-one and her choice of boyfriends was out of his control.

Annis Abraham found out that Shirley and Clive Sharp were more than just good friends when Clive and Shirley visited his nightclub in Cardiff. As usual Annis asked Shirley if she would sing a song. Shirley agreed quite happily but, when she got up, Clive put out a hand and held her back. He said, ‘Shirley must not sing here’, as if he had some control over her movements. His actions were noticed by a number of people and Annis was disturbed. He was a business associate of these men, he had introduced Shirley to them. ‘Who are those men sitting with Shirley Bassey and telling her what to do?’ a customer asked Annis. ‘They’re just advisers,’ he said.

The next time Annis visited The Showbiz Club, the drinking club in Soho in which he had an interest with Sharp and King, he found Shirley sitting in the lobby, waiting for Clive. Inside the club, Clive was chatting up some girls sitting around the bar. He was shocked. Like most people in Tiger Bay he took great pride in Shirley’s success, and Clive was letting her sit outside waiting for him while he joked with these women. For Annis, brought up with Tiger Bay’s strict moral code, it showed a lack of respect.

Sullivan was the next one to wonder what it was all about. He was deep in preparation for what he thought would be Shirley’s first musical. He’d met Clive Sharp; Shirley had brought him to dinner at his new house near Woking. Just another West End face who ran a drinking club in Soho he thought. Not what he’d have advised,
because drinking clubs in Soho could get a bad name. But there again, if Shirley had fallen for the guy, it was not his affair.

Before rehearsals started for
Blue Magic,
Michael thought it would be a good idea to try out new songs from the show at a town not too far from London. Colchester in Essex was the chosen place and he went down there to see how Shirley was getting on. In her dressing room sat Clive Sharp and Maurice King. Sullivan went down a second time – to discuss business, and the same pair were once again in Shirley’s dressing room. Shirley said to him. ‘Anything you want to say, you can discuss in front of these two gentlemen.’

Clive Sharp, who Michael had thought was just another boyfriend, was now, it seemed, taking a role in her business life as well as her romantic one. He was, said Sullivan, gradually and subtly taking Shirley away from him. When Shirley failed to turn up for two rehearsals, Michael went round to see her at Dolphin Square. Shirley told him that the contract he had with her, signed when she was a minor, would now have to be reviewed.

The day of reckoning had arrived and Sullivan felt he had no one but himself to blame. He should not have been surprised either when, after two new contracts were drawn up, the first between the producer of
Blue Magic
and Shirley, and the second between himself and Shirley, she declined to sign the latter.

By 1959 Michael Sullivan’s reign was over. Jock Jacobson, an agent with links to MCA, the giant American monopoly, was taking his place as agent and booker, with Clive Sharp and Maurice King as Shirley’s managers. Her
new managers banned Sullivan from going backstage at the Prince of Wales Theatre, but he went to the opening night of
Blue Magic,
and saw how well the girl he had discovered four years earlier now succeeded as the star of a big West End revue. It was a bitter pill to swallow.

February 1959 was not the happiest month for Sullivan. He was sueing Shirley for eight thousand pounds, because his contract with her was still valid, and he could not move on and manage anyone else until that action was heard in court.

Time went by, then less than a month before the court case in January 1960, Shirley rang him up and said that she wanted to see him. ‘Are you doing this to get out of the court case? he asked.

‘No, Mikey,’ she answered in the sweetest way. ‘Come round and let’s talk.’

By then Shirley had left Dolphin Square. ‘I’m fed up with furnished flats,’ she declared, and bought a house in Stanhope Place, Mayfair. Every time Shirley moved in London from then on, it was to an ever more exclusive address. She had paid twelve thousand pounds for her narrow terraced house overlooking Hyde Park and a stone’s throw from Marble Arch. It had four bedrooms, two reception rooms, dining room, two kitchens and two bathrooms (one of which had a pale pink sunken bath) and the little white poodle Beaujolais loved it. ‘Now I’ve got roots. I’ve furnished a guest room,’ said Shirley, ‘and perhaps my mother will come and stay. I’m dying to see her face when she walks in.’ Outside her house was a red Chevrolet convertible which had replaced her Jaguar.

When Sullivan rang the bell, her hit song, ‘As I Love
You,’ chimed out. The door was opened by Gerda, Shirley’s German housekeeper, and Shirley was really pleased to see him. As they talked she told Sullivan that the first year of freedom had been wonderful, then she started missing the man who had devoted himself completely to Shirley Bassey. She had a good agent but he was part of a big corporation. ‘I need someone who thinks I am enough’, Shirley told him, ‘someone who will look after me and my career, like you.’

Instead of meeting in court, Michael and Shirley signed a new contract. Shirley would pay Sullivan the customary twenty per cent and she would pay her own expenses.

Three weeks later they were in Sydney at the start of a two-month Australian tour. Shirley was now used to making her own decisions and if she wanted something done she expected everyone to do it; she was no longer the girl who could be ordered about. Shirley had grown up and Sullivan found it hard to adjust. They still had one or two noisy battles, but now Shirley always won.