Shirley (37 page)

Fans, though,
have
frightened her in the past. The worst occasion was when they tried to turn her car over in Liverpool. ‘They were shaking the limo,’ she reported ‘and
I was very afraid.’ Another time they put a small child on the bonnet of her car to stop her driver moving off. ‘I may seem very controlled,’ says Shirley ‘but off stage I can be very unsure of myself.’

She has said that if she is exhausted after her performance in a big city she does tell her road manager to have a car waiting outside the stage door. This quick getaway, which does wonders for her equilibrium, can upset people. One of them was her old friend, Iris Freeman, the girl who used to slide down the slag heaps at Tiger Bay docks with bare-bottomed three-year-old Shirley Bassey. Iris’s story became another Tiger Bay legend. ‘So I ran after her car,’ she told Tiger Bay,’ and I yelled, “I knew you when you had no knickers, Shirley Bassey.”’

The legend started as a sad little story of old friends living in another country and hoping to see their old chum again. Three of them, including Iris Freeman, had once been members of The Bay Girls chorus with Shirley. Iris Freeman had been Shirley’s best friend and her family lived in ‘the nice house’ down by Loudoun Square in Tiger Bay, where Shirley often stayed overnight rather than go back to Splott. Iris had gone with Shirley to London to audition for that first long-ago touring show,
Memories of Jolson
. She had married an American and left Tiger Bay to live on the West Coast of America. One day she noticed that Shirley Bassey was soon to sing in San Francisco. She knew she’d love to see Shirley again; she hadn’t seen her for God knows how many years. She rang up her girl friends she had known in Cardiff. In the end five girls from Tiger Bay arranged to travel to San Francisco and see Shirley’s show.

Iris wrote to Shirley, and she wrote and telephoned the
management of the theatre to ask them to tell Shirley or her secretary that some friends from Shirley’s home town would be in the audience. They’d love to come backstage after the performance just to say hello.

Five excited girls sat in the front row of the stalls. At the intermission Iris went backstage, but she was stopped by a minder and she asked him to give Shirley a note. Part of it was written in Welsh, which they hoped would amuse their old girlhood friend. They wrote that they were dying to see her after the show.

After the performance the girls went round to the stage door, but this time entry was impossible. No, they couldn’t go in and see Miss Bassey. No, they couldn’t send a message. She’d be out very soon. Join the rest of the fans. The girls were surprised. But all right, if this was how it had to be, they’d wait. A large limousine drew up and blocked their view of the stage door. Then the fans started to surge forward and there was Shirley getting straight into the car. Iris stared in amazement. Something must have gone wrong, Shirley couldn’t have had their messages. She rushed to the car she pressed her face against the back window. ‘Shirley, It’s me Iris,’ she shouted. That was when Shirley looked right through her. ‘Drive on,’ she ordered the chauffeur. Iris stood in the middle of the road, disgusted and hurt as the car pulled away.

She walked disconsolately back to her friends. She looked at their woebegone expressions. It had been a long trip, a lot of money had been spent.

Although capable of enormous warmth and generosity Shirley can also be volatile and unpredictable and after an unusually exhausting performance might be just too tired
to talk. Shirley’s apparent indifference can sometimes be due to the pressures of her life on tour.

The people of Tiger Bay were riveted by this account of their one-time heroine’s behaviour. In a way it summed up what a lot of them thought. They resented it when Shirley in more recent years swanned down Bute Street, Cardiff in a big limousine with a photographer following in another car. ‘Shirley Bassey Comes Home, my eye. The bloody house was pulled down years ago.’ There is a brick wall in the middle of a row of little red council houses where it used to be, you’d never know the Basseys had ever lived there.

The history of that community in the Cardiff docks seems to have been tossed aside. Until the bulldozers moved in, Tiger Bay was a real place with its own history, a mixed-race community that had been there for well over one hundred years. Tiger Bay might be compared to the Italian community in Soho, or the Russian and Polish Jews who flooded into the East End of London after the Russian pogroms, who had all arrived as immigrants.

They didn’t call it Tiger Bay, the people who once lived there, to them it was just The Bay, but now it has been turned into green lawns overlooking the sea. Only the ghosts of all those foreign seamen who lived in the lodging houses around the docks hover over these new grassy slopes where once stood the seedy, rowdy welcoming Ship and Pilot pub; the haven where the seamen used to gossip and drink and laugh when their ships were in port all those years ago. Shirley says she feels a stranger when she comes to Cardiff; it has changed so much she feels like a foreigner. When her mother died, she no longer saw any reason to
return. Not that she forgets her family any more. When she sings in Cardiff the office now always leaves tickets for her sisters. The quarrel is forgotten, the hurt has been healed.

Sharon no longer lives in the pretty town of Thornbury. Just as Shirley predicted, she fell in love and married, – a builder from Henley-on-Thames. Her wedding day, in November 1987, marked the birthday of Samantha who had died two years earlier. It was Sharon’s decision to marry on her sister’s birthday as a remembrance of the talented little girl who once sang, ‘I’ll Be Your Sweetheart’.

The press said that Sharon stole the limelight on the day she married Steve Barton. There were fifty of Shirley’s fans waiting outside the quiet little church at Henley-on-Thames. The bride’s mother wore a beautiful wide-brimmed hat and a patterned silk dress, but the stars of the wedding day were Sharon and her husband Steve.

Sharon now has two more sons, and the relationship with her mother is close. They talk for hours on the phone though it hadn’t always been like that. There was once resentment on Sharon’s part because she felt Shirley had neglected her when she was young, but after the birth of her third son she discovered that having more than one child is not as easy as it looks. So she sat down and wrote Shirley a letter. Part of it said, ‘I understand after all these years, now that I have children of my own, that it was not your fault.’ Shirley says, ‘Wonderful letter, how I cried.’

In spite of the fans waiting quietly at Sharon’s wedding Shirley Bassey has never had a fan club. It is said that Shirley does not approve of fan clubs, but she has accepted a group founded by an American called ‘The Collector’s Club’. Not fans, as the president of the club hurries to
explain, but people who like to collect memorabilia of the star. This American enthusiast from New Jersey soon found he had over a thousand members in the UK, Europe and the United States.

They travel for miles across continents to attend Shirley’s concerts, and usually fill the first two rows of the stalls. The British contingent are dedicated people and look more like a colourfully dressed literary group than rabid fans. After the concert where they have cheered and applauded the star, they will stand in the bars and cafés to discuss Shirley’s performance, her past triumphs, concerts, recordings and videos. They are generous in their help to new fans. The ‘Chief fan’ is a hardworking lady who keeps things together.

They love standing ovations. One of their favourites was Shirley’s performance at the Royal Variety Show at the London Dominion in 1994. Shirley appeared in a gown of silver beads and tassels. Every bead and tassel had a life of its own. Tassels have never moved so erotically as they did on Shirley that night.

Shirley has made a career out of entrances. Her opening number must always raise the spirits, then there is the soft song, ‘As If We Never Say Goodbye’. No longer belting out the sound her voice had achieved a lyrical quality. The song before her finale that night at the Dominion was ‘Hey Jude’ (take a sad song and make it better . . .). And then, the Bassey magic appeared in full strength, she is up there with the greats, echoing the power and sadness of Judy Garland and Edith Piaf. The song was a ‘tour de force’. She had done what her heroine, opera diva Maria Callas, used to do, taken the audience up with her.

The applause from the audience grew as Shirley brushed away her tears. People began to stand up. Over the avalanche of applause the whole of the audience rose. It was the first standing ovation for over twenty years at the London Dominion.

Shirley Bassey had indeed come a long way since she sang in pubs at the age of thirteen where, if they didn’t like her songs, they threw things at her. Maybe luck was on her side, but her attitude was always that one day she would sing before vast audiences, just like Judy Garland. Five or ten thousand people would applaud her and her show would be called something like Shirley Bassey in Concert.

Shirley Bassey was in Concert at the National Exhibition Centre at Hampton in Arden outside Birmingham in the summer of 1994. Good tickets started at twenty-five pounds and there were near enough ten thousand takers. The venue has about as much glamour or atmosphere as a giant aircraft hanger: a kind of stable for Jumbo Jets that might have strayed from Birmingham Airport down the road, but the audience poured in. More women than men. Grandmas, grandpas, people in wheelchairs. The volume of people was overwhelming. Down the wide aisles came boys wearing baseball caps and selling popcorn and coke. You had to be a crazed fan to be there – it’s togetherness with popcorn and coke and Shirley Bassey. It’s raining outside and everyone but Shirley Bassey and the first two rows of the audience are wearing anoraks. The first two rows are made up of fans from the Collector’s Club, the men in dinner jackets, the ladies in evening dress.

After the interval on comes Shirley, dashing from the back of the stage as if she’s catching a train. It’s a very big
stage and it’s a long way to run. Off comes the dramatic cape and underneath is a dress of black net and ruffles. They call it ‘The Pizza Dress’ in the Collectors Club because of the two circles of black lace on the bodice. It’s an old dress, it’s been going for a long time. Unless you’re near the front you have to watch everything that Shirley does reflected on a huge screen. Shirley herself is just a little dot on the faraway stage. Even the front rows of ‘Collectors’ don’t see her very well but the songs are good and so is Shirley. For a few minutes one of her songs almost touches the heart. But not quite. This isn’t real life but big business; it is the merchandising of product Shirley Bassey. The star smiles from the cover of every large illustrated brochure lining the entrance hall.

Although Shirley had performed as a featured artist or a star in theatres all over the world from the age eighteen, it was probably not until she married Sergio Novak and became a tax-free wanderer that her ambition of taking over a theatre with her own orchestra really took shape. Early in her career in Las Vegas she had disliked the contemptuous way artists were treated, but Las Vegas paid fabulous salaries and it was difficult to refuse.

Sergio Novak has always said that he took her out of the one-night stand and cabaret circuit and made her an international concert star. But it’s difficult to believe that this man who knew nothing at all about showbiz until he married Shirley was the mastermind behind Shirley’s rise to concert stardom. Shirley’s reaction to Sergio’s claim was to state that she only wished she had finished with the Novak marriage years before the divorce was finalised. She should have left him much earlier on.

‘Neither of my husbands were at all supportive about the children,’ Shirley said, bitterly on one occasion, ‘I didn’t discipline my children, but you know the best mothers and fathers have children that go wrong.’

Shirley admits that Mark has been a bit of a worry for a long time. He still lives in Marbella on the monthly cheque for five hundred pounds which Shirley sends him.

In 1990 twenty-four-year-old Tissa Kimsey went on holiday to Marbella and fell in love with Mark Novak. At that time Mark was working as a waiter and getting over the mess he had nearly made of his life with drugs. He and Tissa lived together for two and a half years and in May 1991 Tatjana was born. Shirley wrote a letter to Mark from Adelaide, Australia, congratulating them both and expressing delight at having a granddaughter.

Tissa first met Shirley at a party at her house in Marbella and found her friendly but not completely approachable. Shirley told her that she loved babies but was always glad to hand them back to their mothers. But there was a happy moment when Mark and Tissa went to London to hear Shirley in concert at the Royal Albert Hall. After the finale, as Shirley stood at the edge of the stage receiving flowers and presents, Mark walked down and held up his daughter for Shirley to see. Smiling happily she lifted her pretty eighteen-month-old granddaughter in the air and showed her off to the audience.

Four years later Tissa and Mark had been separated for some time. Tissa was living at home in Skegness with her family and little Tatjana was going to a local school. It was a sad ending to what had begun as a happy holiday romance. In spite of Tissa’s resentment arising out of her
belief that the Bassey family don’t do more for her daughter, it is not really Shirley’s problem; Mark is now a grown man and any girl takes him on at her own risk.

Shirley had always been a generous mother. Sharon’s latest house is one of a succession bought for her by Shirley. This one is big enough for Sharon and Steve and their growing family: Luke, Sebastian and Nathan – and Nana if she wants to come.

Anyone expecting to find a calm, sweet, placid person when they meet Shirley might be disappointed. Here is a woman who carries a whole industry on her shoulders, Shirley Bassey Inc. If she wants to give it up, she’s going to hurt a lot of people and put a lot of people out of work. She’s been working ever since she can remember; she doesn’t really know how to stop working.