Shirley (24 page)

IT WAS AUGUST
and holiday time. Peter Finch’s wife and children were in Italy waiting for his play to close in August so that he could join them in their rented villa at Puerto Ecole, a fashionable seaside resort down the coast road from Rome.

Peter and Shirley were as much in love as ever and optimistic about their future together. When his play closed, he was contracted to make a film with Sophia Loren in Israel. He wanted Shirley to go with him, but first he must go to Italy and ask Yolande for a divorce. Until now Peter had neglected to tell Shirley that although, as he said, married life between him and Yolande had long been as good as over, he had not told his wife about Shirley or of their plans.

And it was at this moment that everything started going wrong. The newspapers got hold of the story and decided to print in the
Evening Standard
. Peter, who knew nothing of this, arrived in Puerto Ecole to a very icy reception.
Journalists had been to see Yolande and discovered that she knew nothing. So they had told her.

Is it true, a distraught Yolande demanded to know? Peter tried to calm her down. Then a telegram arrived and Yolande opened it. ‘Who is this woman who signs herself “Cheetah” and sends you her undying love?’ she asked.

Yolande took too many sleeping pills and woke up next morning in hospital. Peter Finch was at her bedside. She looked at the man who’d done this to her, came to her senses and said, ‘You’re not worth dying for. I’m going to divorce you.’

When Finch eventually flew back to London he telephoned Shirley and asked her to meet him at the Pickwick Club. She must come at once. He greeted her with the news that he was at the end of his tether, and then ordered another drink. He always needed a drink when he was upset. His plan was that they escape together to Israel where he was to make the film. Shirley was not a great drinker, she had too much concern for her voice, but she realised that the man she loved drank too much. He had a problem.

Before Peter left for Israel he had an appointment to have dinner with Laurence Gilliam, head of BBC Features to discuss a programme he would make. Laurence Gilliam was a good friend because it was he who had given the actor his first job in London. They arranged to meet at a pub. When Gilliam arrived, with his producer, Finch was already there, sitting in a corner knocking back the whiskies. By the time they got to Wheelers for dinner he was too drunk to eat and had to be taken home to the Carlton Towers where a porter agreed to put him to bed.

‘What a tragedy,’ said Gilliam to his producer. ‘
The Seagull
will be the last time we shall have seen him on the West End stage. And he was so good, he was superb. But now it’s all over. He can’t remember his lines any more. It will be films and the idiot board from now on.’

Peter Finch went to Israel before the end of August. Shirley stayed in London, promising to follow him later but she was seriously worried. Apart from the fact that Peter was drinking more than he should he wanted her to put her career on hold and join him in Israel for the duration of the film; if she was with him, he believed, he would be happy and able to control his drinking. He was a possessive man and there was a part of him that liked the idea of being in control of the woman at his side. Shirley loved Finch but refused to jeopardise her career for him. Kenneth Hume, who was also starting divorce proceedings, was citing Peter as co-respondent, and Yolande was citing Shirley. Shirley and Peter had troubles enough without getting into financial difficulties.

In the past Shirley had always asked Kenneth Hume for advice, no matter what the problem. They were still co-directors of the company he had set up for her, and they still had to discuss finance and her future plans. When Kenneth heard what Finch had asked her to do he told her that she was crazy if she went along with it. He was emphatic that she must not sacrifice her career for Finch. ‘How can you rely on such a man?’ he asked her. ‘You earn your own money. With me you were always in charge of your own money. Be careful! You’ve worked your guts out to get where you are.’

In spite of Hume’s warning, Shirley decided to go to Israel. It was hot when she got to the northern coastal town of Nahariya. At once she sensed that all was not well; it wasn’t just the location – the crew and the company were deeply distressed. The two stars were miscast, and the script didn’t hold together.

Very loosely based on Lawrence Durrell’s novel
Justine
, the heroine was now called Judith and Sophia Loren was to play her as an international spy in very short, very tight hot-pants. Judith, hidden in a packing case unloaded from a cargo boat, arrives at a kibbutz, looking as fresh as a daisy after her long journey, to be greeted by a gloomy Aaron Stein, the leader of the kibbutz, played by Peter Finch.

Peter was drinking steadily, just enough to get through the filming, but too much to give a good performance. No script could dampen Sophia Loren’s smouldering sex appeal, but the original high motives of Durrell’s story had been lost somewhere in the desert. Originally set just before World War II, it had been updated to the present day, and it just didn’t work.

Just six months after their idyllic love affair had begun, problems were arising for the lovers. Peter still wanted to marry Shirley, but he seemed to expect her to play the devoted wife – to the exclusion of her own career. Shirley was not prepared to give up everything she had fought so long and hard to achieve. This man could easily turn their love affair into a nightmare because of his drinking. After a few days in Israel and some hard thinking, she told Peter Finch that she could not marry him and had decided to return to London. ‘I think it had been a dream for him,’ Shirley said, ‘a dream that could never have worked.’

Peter poured his heart out to whoever would listen. He told his audience that he was devastated. ‘She only came out here to tell me that it is all off,’ he wept. ‘She’s gone back to her husband.’ He sank into bouts of drunken self-pity and blamed everyone but himself. At a dinner with the company he said that his affair with Shirley was the reason for the box-office disaster of his last film in South Africa and the Southern States of America ‘Just because I fell in love with a coloured girl,’ he moaned.

Most of the company found his attitude unbearable. ‘You’re just a reverse racist, Peter,’ someone said. ‘With you black’s good, white’s bad. Shirley isn’t either, she’s Welsh.’

Peter Finch finally decided that he and Shirley were still the best of soul mates. In fact he hoped that one day she would come back to him. He even thought that this would happen when he made his next film in America. He knew that Shirley’s yearly trip to Australia would take place after the 1965 New Year, and after that she would be going to Las Vegas and Hollywood.

After the disaster of
Judith
, Finch was slated to make
The Flight of the Phoenix
on location in Yuma, Arizona, a serious story of a plane crash in the Libyan desert with a cast that included James Stewart and Richard Attenborough. After completing work in the Arizona desert the film would be finished in the Hollywood studios, and this was how Peter saw his chance of meeting up with Shirley again.

Peter and Shirley were, indeed, still friends, interested in each other’s professional lives. He telephoned her before she left on tour. Would she come and see him in Hollywood when she started the Hollywood part of her tour? Taken by surprise, Shirley laughed and said maybe,
but by the time she reached America plans had changed and she wired him in Yuma to say no.

A publicity woman working with the film company in Yuma was a close friend of Peter’s and related how, when he received the wire, he wept and drank for two days. Finally he said to her, ‘Shirley’s a fabulous person and I’m mad about her but she’s not really the sort of person I could marry. She’s too ambitious.’

The two divorce cases were down to be heard in February 1965. Yolande Finch
v
Peter Finch, and Kenneth Hume
v
Shirley Hume. Kenneth Hume’s evidence against Shirley was sensational. He alleged that Samantha, the little girl who was just over one year old, was not his child. She was the child of one of two co-respondents with whom his wife had committed adultery. One was Peter Finch, the other was an Irishman called John McAuliffe. He demanded that these two men have blood tests to decide who was the father. He had proved from his own blood test that he was not.

What he hoped to gain from this revelation is questionable. It might have been the trick he kept up his sleeve as a last desperate gesture, but Shirley had moved on.

Peter Finch spent the day after his divorce at Tickerage, the country home of Vivien Leigh. She was now divorced from Laurence Olivier and living with Jack Merivale. Vivien and Peter had retained a very high regard for each other.

There always remained a feeling of what might have been for Shirley and Peter. They met by chance in Switzerland three years later. Peter was with a girl called
Aretha, from Jamaica. A few days later, Finchy telephoned her, ‘I can’t stand it any more. I’m going back to Jamaica.’ Shirley said, ‘It was the last I ever saw of him.’

Peter Finch’s career didn’t really take off in a big way again until he made
Network
, with William Holden and Faye Dunaway, for which he won a posthumous Oscar. He had been living in Jamaica and had finally married Aretha. They moved to Hollywood, where Peter Finch died aged fifty-eight in 1977. He had walked down to the Beverly Hills Hotel for a meeting with a producer when he collapsed with a fatal heart attack in the hotel lobby.

While the divorces were going through Shirley embarked on her annual Australian–American tour, with Kenny Clayton as her musical director and Vic West as her tour manager. Kenneth Hume said he would call in to see them in Las Vegas when they began the American leg of the tour.

Kenneth Hume was fully in charge of Shirley’s career again. Their marriage was legally over but few who worked with them saw any difference. Bernard Hall, who knew them both well, said that Shirley’s conversations with Kenneth were never typical of that of husband and wife, but then they never talked like manager and star either. There was still an intimacy between them, an emotion based on familiarity, affection and forgiveness.

Shirley, Kenny and Vic got along well and enjoyed themselves together. The stopover on their way to Sydney was Singapore. They stayed at the Goodwood Park Hotel where the owner, Freddie Euwe, introduced them to Matt Monro, the well-known English singer who was having a stopover after finishing an Australian tour. ‘Two top-notch
singers in my hotel,’ said Freddie, ‘I’d love to have you sing in my cabaret.’ Then he had a better idea. ‘Let’s have a concert. Let’s all make money!’

Posters went up all over the town, and every ticket for the National Theatre was sold. Ex-pats still talk about the wonderful Shirley Bassey concert way back in 1965. No one knew how it happened but there she was, singing in Singapore.

When the Australian tour was over the trio flew to Las Vegas where Shirley was always a big hit. To Kenny Clayton’s dismay Kenneth Hume turned up as promised. Kenny had disliked Hume since their first disastrous meeting when Hume had behaved so badly. In his view, ‘Kenneth Hume was a gambler. Not the roulette kind, more the fruit machine type. I knew he’d be more at home betting on the dogs or playing cards in Soho.’ His big losses on cards were gossiped about in Denmark Street, and it was rumoured that while Shirley was singing her butt off all over the world, a lot of her money was being paid out in gambling debts to the Soho Mafia.

Kenny had his own feelings about the strange marital relationship between Shirley and Kenneth Hume. He blamed it on the common mistake women stars make when they marry a man in show business. They think the man will put them and their career first, but they don’t. ‘And Shirley’s well out of that one too,’ said Kenny, when she broke up with Peter Finch.

Long experience with female performers had made Kenny wise. It was never wise to mix business with pleasure. It was not that Shirley encouraged familiarity, but in Las Vegas Kenny was worried about the effect Kenneth
Hume was having on her. ‘She changed when he came,’ Kenny recalled. ‘She’d been a pussycat all through the tour. It was strange, but now I could hear him in her voice. Hume had this nasty habit of shouting and yelling and sometimes I could hear his rage in her voice. As I, and nearly everyone else in London couldn’t stand him, I didn’t like what I heard.’

From Las Vegas they went to Hollywood where Leslie Simmons at the office in London had rented a house for them in Coldwater Canyon. Shirley’s Scandinavian nanny, Dagmar, flew out with the two children who were going to have a great holiday with their mother. Fortunately, Kenneth Hume had little taste for lounging around swimming pools and soon left. The others, who’d been working hard in Vegas, were delighted to use this pool built out on a ledge over the canyon. Way down below they could see the yellow blanket of smog hanging over Los Angeles. ‘Shoot an arrow down there,’ Kenny told the children, ‘and it’ll get stuck in the smog.’ In Coldwater Canyon the gardens were lush and the air was clean. At night they’d hear the coyotes who came to drink at the swimming pool, and Shirley, said Kenny, ‘was just like she’d been at the beginning of the tour – lovely to be with.’

They were in Hollywood to film two television shows. Kenneth Hume had sold an idea to NBC. ‘Get the two Basseys together and let them sing.’ He was talking about Count Basie, the famous American jazz musician and Shirley Bassey. NBC were willing to take it up if Count Basie was free. The other TV spot was a song with Dean Martin on his show.

For a girl who usually stayed home and watched
television, Shirley was enjoying going out and about in Hollywood. She even accepted an invitation to a barbecue and met Sidney Poitier, and then saw Leslie Bricusse and Tony Newley again. They had written the lyrics for Shirley’s big success, ‘Goldfinger’.

Televising the Dean Martin Show went well. Martin had it in his contract that he did not have to come to rehearsals so Shirley rehearsed with a stand-in. When the big day came, Dean charmed Shirley. He put his arm around her and asked, ‘How do you like my socks?’ They were pink and thick and awful. She told him so. His wife had knitted them. Dean was such a clever and experienced performer and so expert that Shirley loved the show. She said afterwards, ‘He is the best.’