Shirley (36 page)

The months went by, and although the scars of what had happened would remain with her always, she no longer kept demanding of some unseen creator why her baby, Samantha, had been taken from her.

She tried to stop reminding herself that two of the people she loved most in the world, her mother and her youngest daughter, were gone forever. She hoped that this was what is known as ‘getting over it’; that one day she would wake up and feel that life would perhaps be worth living again.

Then, out of the blue, when she least expected it to happen, the secret dread that had started way back when she was a teenager became reality. She had always feared that one day she would stand on a stage facing a huge audience, she would open her mouth and absolutely no sound would come out. It would be a catastrophe. Her voice, after all, was everything.

Shirley always had a special affection for Sydney, Australia. Years before on her very first visit there, the Sydney audience had come to her rescue when the
Daily
Sketch
had tried to hurt and humiliate her over her secret baby, Sharon. She went on her usual winter tour of Australia in January 1986, four months after the death of Samantha and knowing it was not going to be easy. Her American and German engagements had taken a lot out of her. Every time she went on stage she had to make a conscious effort not to let go for a single moment. Only when each audience showed they were with her, when she felt they wanted to help her through, could she relax at all. She had always enjoyed singing, it was her life, but all the time it was getting harder.

Her nightmare came true at the Sydney Centre in front of 10,000 people. For the first time in her life her voice dried up. Afterwards she said, ‘The amazing thing was that nobody booed.’ She knew that they could have done. A lot of the audience had travelled a long way to get to the Centre, they had paid good money for their seats, and now Shirley Bassey was standing in front of them completely mute. Her enormous grief over her daughter’s death had finally caught up with her and going on with her work, giving herself no time to stand back and cry, bottling up her misery, had rebounded on her. She had lost her voice, and worse, she couldn’t be entirely certain that it would ever come back again as the same glorious instrument.

Her life and her career seemed to be lying in ruins around her feet. She was forty-nine years old, with fifty an approaching and unwelcome landmark. If she’d looked in the mirror she would have seen a vibrant and beautiful woman, but she didn’t look in the mirror. Suddenly she didn’t want to get up any more, she wanted to stay in bed and cry. When she stopped crying she wanted to drink and
she wanted to eat anything that would give her comfort through this bad time. In the middle of the night she would suddenly crave food and find herself with a bar of chocolate in one hand and a slice of cheese in the other.

Sharon stood by and watched it all happening. She had her own problems, she was a single mother with a six-year-old son and was bewildered and angry herself about Samantha’s death. Everyone close to Samantha was blaming themselves for what had happened. Could they have done more for her? But how do you stop a girl having a drink and walking merrily along a perilous river bank? How do you stop an accident? Even young Mark, her adopted brother, who was nineteen, was blaming himself. Maybe he should have cared more for his sister.

Sharon, and Shirley’s close friends began an unobtrusive campaign to bring Shirley back to life. It would take time to get her to face that some things in life and death have to be accepted. They tried to help her talk about Samantha. One day Shirley said to Sharon, ‘Did you know that Samantha was a vegetarian? Did you know that she would never eat meat?’ Then, sometime later, she said, ‘Samantha really didn’t like drinking. I don’t like it either. When I was young I didn’t drink at all. Do you think one glass of wine’s all right? I’m going to cut down.’ It was as if she couldn’t tell Samantha any more that she was drinking too much, but she could be tough with herself and if she put her mind to it, she could stop. Mark said, ‘It took Shirley a long time to give up heavy drinking. But she did.’

Sharon helped Shirley reorganise her life and the presence of Luke was a great comfort. Shirley ruefully remarked, ‘I make a much better grandmother than I ever
did a mother.’ The real breakthrough came when Shirley tried on one of her dresses and the zip wouldn’t close around the waist. She checked into the Pritikin clinic for eleven days. Shirley had never eaten a great deal, but now she was shown the right food to eat. She was put on a regime of carbohydrates kept separate from protein, an occasional day’s fasting on ‘cleansing juice’, and fruit and rice cakes for breakfast until she reached her desired weight.

She put the Villa Capricorn up for sale – there were too many unhappy memories there – and took up residence in a hotel suite in Lausanne. Then she made her most important decision: how to learn to sing again, how to strengthen her vocal cords so that she would never again suffer the nightmare of losing her voice on a stage. She found a wonderful teacher who gave her confidence and her voice not only came back bigger than before but she also gained an octave.

Helena Shenel, a former opera singer, was the wonderful teacher who helped Shirley find her voice again, who taught her the vocal exercises that would create an even stronger sound. They were operatic exercises that strengthened her vocal cords and gave her back the confidence to believe that she, alone on that empty stage, could sing her way out of any difficulty, as opera singers are taught to do.

Tapes were made of these lessons and Shirley always took them on tour with her. She would practice in her dressing room every day without fail. If she had an appointment for an interview, if she had to record, she would still find time to do her vocal exercises. She enjoyed doing them. ‘Going to Helena Shenel,’ said Shirley, ‘was the best thing I have ever done and her advice about vocal
exercises was the best advice I’ve ever been given.’

She has often been asked if she’d like to sing opera. Invariably, she has replied in the affirmative, saying it would be great to sing Carmen, then she tells a little story to make fun of herself. She was invited to hear an opera at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. In the interval the director invited her to have a glass of champagne and he said, ‘Oh, you would make the most marvellous Carmen.’

‘Would I?’ replied Shirley.

‘Yes, but isn’t it a pity that it’s for a soprano, the wrong key for you.’

‘Couldn’t you change the key?’

The director smiled. ‘I’m afraid not. It doesn’t work like that, here you need the voice to fit the opera.’

Hilary Levy, who hadn’t worked for Shirley since 1984, had a telephone call from her to say that she was leaving on an Australian tour the following week and she wondered if Hilary would like to come along.

Hilary was in a dead-end job and had just broken off with a boyfriend. She suddenly remembered what it was like living in a luxury hotel with someone to clear up after her. She said yes, she’d go to Australia.

After the tour Shirley went to Marbella to relax. She had another interest there now – Mark was living permanently in southern Spain. He had disappointed her very much by refusing to continue with his education and go to university. The reason she accepted his way of life without a fight was because of Samantha’s death; the young had a right to do their own thing. Mark had had a brief flirtation with drugs, but he was over that now and he’d met a nice girl.

When Shirley was in Marbella, she sometimes took Mark out with her, and she made sure he never went short of money. He seemed to have odd jobs here and there. There were a lot of rich people down on the Costa del Sol. Puerto Banus, the yachting complex next to Marbella, was
the
place to sit at a café and watch the Rolls Royces, Porsches and BMWs drive past, and in the evening you could see Rod Stewart and Jimmy Tarbuck, back from golf, drinking a pint in a local bar.

Patti Flyn, a girl from the good old days of Tiger Bay, had her own show on the local radio and Luigi, a Welsh Italian from Pontypridd ran one of the best bars in the port. It was no wonder that Mark was enjoying himself, dancing in and out of the fringes of the rich at night with his mother and sunning himself on the beach in the daytime. When she’d gone back to work he existed as best he could.

Shirley met Michael Sullivan again in Marbella. He had remarried, and his wife was the French film actress Dany Robin. They bumped into each other at a party given at the Khashoggi villa. She walked up to him, put her arms around his neck and said, ‘Hello Mikey, it’s good to see you.’

Michael didn’t see her again until 1994, when he was seventy-four and in a wheelchair. He and Dany went to the Festival Hall for one of Shirley’s concerts. After the show they went backstage to congratulate Shirley, but she was unable to see them. He supposed that she hadn’t forgiven him after all.

In January 1995 Michael was down on his luck. His health was going, he could hardly walk and he said he was broke. He had always lived it up and spent every penny he
made. In the old days when he was building Shirley’s career, he was often deep in debt. Fame and fortune came to Shirley and also to Michael. When they parted he became known as the comedian’s agent and had many big names on his books. He was prosperous and successful, but the best luck of all was his new wife, Dany Robin. When his fortunes and his health declined, Dany worked to keep him. She was a good and loving wife.

They moved to a one-room flat, a studio, in the Trocadero area in Paris so Dany could find work. When he was given a new publicity photograph of Shirley, he pinned it up next to his chair.

Wonderful news came very soon at the beginning of May. Dany secured a six-month TV contract in Cuba. She would find an apartment and Michael would fly over and join her. Two days before she left, in the middle of the night, there was an electrical fault and a fire swept through the tiny flat. Michael, half-paralysed, could hardly move and he and Dany both perished in the fire. His new photograph of Shirley the girl he had once discovered, still pinned to the bed drapery also went up in flames.

SHIRLEY BASSEY TURNED
sixty-one on 8 January 1998. The world’s press had not forgotten, particularly not in her home town, Cardiff, where a smiling picture of the star occupied the front page of
The Echo.
Tickets were already on sale for the International Arena concert in May.

It had been a long time – almost five decades – since fifteen-year-old Shirley Bassey started out on the long, hard road to fame and fortune. It would be futile to ask whether she ever dreamed how her life would turn out since, according to people who knew her then, she was certain from the word go that one day she would set the world on fire. Millionaires would court her and Arab sheikhs would want to snap diamond bracelets around her wrist. To impress Elizabeth Taylor, a well-known billionaire would beg Shirley to fly to New York just to sing at his party.

She probably guessed, even before she’d ever heard of Lugano or Marbella that she’d have homes all over the world; so many, that in the end she’d get so fed up with all
these houses that she’d decide one home was as much as she wanted, and it had better be an apartment in Monte Carlo.

But you can’t stay too long at a stretch in Monte Carlo. As the natives of the place will tell you, everyone gets ‘le cafard’, a touch of depression brought on by those high mountains that enclose the principality. Monte Carlo is such a small place and that big backdrop of mountains gives you a feeling of being squeezed tight. So, sometimes Shirley, resting between tours, would fly to London, perhaps for a friend’s engagement party at the Savoy Hotel. The TV cameras are always there, so pictures will be in all the tabloids. They’ll call her a sparkling butterfly in the papers next morning because of the gold and diamond jewellery glinting around her neck.

From the age of seventeen Shirley was taught that getting one’s name and face into the newspaper – or not – is the life or death of a career. Back in the Fifties Leslie Grade told her manager that they’d stayed too long in the sunshine of Australia and the public would soon be saying, ‘Shirley Who?’ So Sullivan hid Shirley in a Bath hotel and told the police she’d gone missing; Shirley’s face flashed on every front page in the land.

Kenneth Hume, her next manager spent a lot of money on a thousand red roses and a ‘second time around’ diamond engagement ring to get Shirley’s face in the papers. At the Pigalle, Shirley was persuaded to sing ‘Second Time Around’ after she announced to her delighted audience that she was remarrying her manager. But when the next man she married was not Kenneth Hume but Sergio Novak, there were more pages of publicity, and Shirley’s new record did well.

Shirley Bassey became completely relaxed about publicity. She loves the camera and the camera loves her, but in the painful moments of her life, she learned that if you really mean it, the press will understand and leave you alone,

She has said that she’s become a bit of a loner. She likes to stay in her apartment for days on end. She doesn’t want staff to live in any more. ‘I don’t want a bodyguard,’ she says, ‘because that would take all the enjoyment out of life. I really like to live out of a suitcase,’ and she likes to travel by bus. All the big female singing stars seem to do this and the idea originated in the States; stars go from concert to concert in complete safety with the crew and the star’s entourage sitting around them: the road manager, the secretary, the hairdresser and make-up, the dresser with the costumes, and the musicians. The sound and lighting men are there, too, and the publicist with the previous boxes of souvenir programmes. The whole caboodle is there, travelling together. Shirley Bassey has come a long way from the time, forty years ago, when Michael Sullivan and the kid from Tiger Bay travelled economy class.

There are always plenty of fans watching the departure of the bus from a respectful distance. Managements always warn Shirley to be on her guard; for instance, not to bend over from the stage to shake hands with the fans. But she refuses the advice. The only precaution she takes is to remove her rings because the pressure can result in bloody fingers.