Shirley (38 page)

Hilary Levy rejoined Shirley as her personal assistant and secretary in 1989, and although their first tour together had been a great success, there were subsequent quarrels. The last of these took place in Cape Town, South Africa with dire consequences.

There had been trouble for Shirley before over South Africa. Way back in 1982 she had performed at Sun City, the then fabled and sumptuous casino and hotel complex in Bophuthatswana, the ‘independent’ homeland on the borders of South Africa that was effectively a satellite state of that country. During the apartheid era, Sun City was not segregated, but Shirley didn’t realise the implications of performing in a place with close links to racially segregated South Africa.

However, when she was due to sing in Cardiff later that year things became serious. ‘Call off Shirley Bassey’s Show’
was the first indication of trouble ahead. Then came, ‘All trade unions will be asked to picket and demonstrate outside St David’s Hall if Shirley Bassey performs there next month – because she has appeared in South Africa.’

On Friday 3 September 1982, the ladies of Cardiff couldn’t care less where Shirley had been as they queued for tickets. ‘You shouldn’t mix politics and entertainment,’ said one, ‘Shirley sings for everyone, black, white and yellow. Her job is to entertain people.’

Another said, ‘I’ve been drinking coffee to stay awake all night and get tickets. I first saw her at the New Theatre in 1956, she was bottom of the bill, now she’s top everywhere. Call the show off? Rubbish!’

Hundreds queued all night, it was Shirley’s first appearance there in seven years, ‘I’ve seen her twenty-two times,’ said Mrs Mules of Dinas Powys. ‘She’s fantastic.’

Shirley solved it all. She released a pledge that she would never perform in South Africa or any country which would insist on an audience being segregated for any reason of race, colour or religion. Her manager, Tony McArthur, however pressed home the point that Shirley had not realised that Sun City was an integral part of segregated South Africa – blacks and whites mixed freely there.

Shirley said, ‘I would never perform in Johannesburg, Durban or Cape Town. But I went to Sun City because it was a fantastic project, and they didn’t stop blacks from going there. If you are an entertainer, you entertain. I don’t like politicians telling us what to do.’

As she said afterwards, ‘I’m in good company, Frank Sinatra and Rod Stewart and Elton John all sang there.’
And, she might have added, so did Cher, Liza Minnelli and Johnny Mathis among others.

Her name was subsequently placed on the United Nations blacklist of stars who performed at Sun City.

Shirley has never considered herself black. Her mother who had brought her up was white and she professes she does not remember her black father. Her stepfather was black and she loved him, but he was away at sea most of the time and he died early. She was reared by a white mother in the white suburb of Splott.

The end of apartheid meant the end of all barriers to going to South Africa. In December 1993 Shirley, her PA Hilary Levy, and Bo Mills and Yves, her personal managers, went on a South African tour and stayed at the Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town. After Shirley’s performance there was a party at the hotel where a great deal of champagne was imbibed by everyone.

What happened next became the evidence in a court case. Hilary Levy sued Shirley Bassey and her trading company, SSM Productions Inc., for alleged breach of contract and seven thousand six hundred and fifty pounds in lost earnings. It appeared that Shirley and Hilary had a quarrel after the party in the early hours of the morning. Part of it was witnessed by Bo Mills and Yves. Hilary said she had been sacked and alleged she had been physically attacked by Shirley. Shirley denied that she had sacked Hilary or that she had hit her. Hilary went home to London the next day and never spoke to Shirley again. It was an unpleasant and worrying time for Shirley. ‘It’s very distressing,’ she said. Both the accused and the plaintiff knew there would be a long wait before the case came to
court. They didn’t know then just how long it would be.

‘You have your down moments,’ Shirley commented with an unpleasant court case hanging over her head. ‘Call them my vulnerable days, because you never know if people around you want you for yourself or because you are famous. I can count my real friends on one hand. Anyway at this stage in my life I’ve no time for new friends. They become acquaintances because friendship takes time to build, you need years for that. I don’t want to be around phoney people so I find myself more alone that ever before.’

‘I don’t mix much with showbiz people,’ Shirley says. ‘I hate parties because someone always traps me in a corner and asks me how I became a singer.’ And the men in her life have come in for some flak. ‘It’s hard for a man to live with a successful woman – they seem to resent you so much. Very few men are generous enough to accept success in their women.’

But there is the other side when she thinks she might have found the right man. Shirley has always been enthusiastic about the romancing, the chase, the wonderful feeling of being wanted, the lovemaking. As all her partners confirm Shirley is a good lover.

‘The first six months of a relationship are wonderful,’ said Shirley. ‘I love that intensity, the passion, the “can’t keep away from each other”, then it all starts to taper off. They don’t want to stay home and watch television, they want to go out. They don’t want to listen to what I say, they start putting me down and I won’t take that.’

She decided that she really doesn’t mind not having a man in her life. ‘Maybe I’m more comfortable nowadays
not getting too close. If I find an older man, then he can’t keep up with me; if I take a younger one, they haven’t always grown up. They just look good.’

She thinks that perhaps the truth is that she’s frightened of being let down and being hurt so it’s easier to find a way of ending things before they begin. Shirley sounds horrified at the thought of getting married again. She insists that the idea of getting older on her own doesn’t worry her one bit. ‘It means that I can please myself and do the things I want.’

In spite of everything that Shirley has said, there lurks that uncertain feeling that suddenly one morning the headlines may read: ‘Shirley Bassey gets married.’

But, according to Shirley, ‘Only if Mr Wonderful comes along. I tell my life story in songs, the joys, pain, guilt, they all go into my performance. It’s my autobiography up there for my audience to listen to.’

In February 1994 Shirley took a few days leave from her American tour and flew to London for an important appointment: on 18 February she went to see the Queen at Buckingham Palace and receive a medal making her a CBE, a Commander of the British Empire. It is the honour given to those of Her Majesty’s subjects who have exceeded in good and noble works. Shirley was being recognised for the time and money she had given to charity, especially the Prince of Wales Trust.

Shirley, wearing a wide-brimmed hat trimmed with floating ostrich feathers, was accompanied by her friend and personal manager, Baudouin Mills and her daughter Sharon. She said, ‘This honour was the cherry on the cake, it means that all I have done has been recognised not only by Her Majesty but by the country where I was born.’

The Hilary Levy case took five years to get to court, but the trial lasted only two days. The hearing opened at Brentford in 13 January 1998; on 15 January, the headlines blazoned the news that, ‘Triumphant Shirley Bassey takes the applause after judge throws out allegations that she slapped her assistant in a drunken row.’

Hilary alleged that although the fateful South African tour started well, the relationship between Shirley and herself was deteriorating. The final quarrel came in the early hours of 11 December 1993. Hilary said that Shirley wanted her to go shopping for Christmas presents for her the next morning. Hilary said that meant she would hardly have any sleep as Shirley had to be woken with her breakfast at twelve-thirty. A row ensued during which, Hilary declared, Shirley called her a Jewish bitch, and she told Shirley she was anti-Semitic. Hilary then marched out to her own bedroom slamming the door. She claimed that Shirley followed her, hit her and Hilary fell on to the bed. This was when Shirley shouted, ‘You’re out tomorrow!’

Hilary was earning eight hundred and fifty pounds a week plus expenses, and agreed that until then she and Shirley had been close friends, ‘mates’ as Shirley put it. Shirley’s evidence was that she had called Hilary ‘a spoiled Jewish princess’, and she had not hit Hilary, but only pushed her. She had not sacked Hilary either, and Bo Mills had tried to persuade Hilary to stay but had failed.

Justice Marcus Edwards backed Shirley’s version of the events that night. He found Hilary Levy an unpersuasive witness. In contrast, Shirley Bassey was persuasive and Bo Mills also verified Shirley’s account of the incident.

Shirley was given a great ovation by the crowd of
jubilant fans outside, and accepted a bunch of red roses. She said, ‘I’ve been so tense over the past few days. I just want to have a rest now. I’m so glad it has ended. Hilary accused me of being anti-Semitic, which is untrue. I have been in show business, which is full of Jewish people, for forty-five years, I have a Jewish manager, Jewish friends, Jewish boyfriends. I also have a daughter who is half-Jewish. Hilary thought she would get away with it. But in the end truth wins out, as it always does.’

Shirley hoped that Sharon, her daughter, wouldn’t be too surprised to hear the truth about her father at last. She had never told her. As Shirley left she threw each one of the red roses that had been given her to the well-wishers in the crowd. Then she disappeared into her black Mercedes.

Shirley’s musical achievements in the past have been prodigious. There are those twenty silver discs for sales in Holland, Britain and France and some fifty plus gold discs for international record sales. In a twenty-year period she was up in the charts in well over three hundred weeks.

She was, and is, one of Britain’s best-selling singing stars, with more best-selling singles and albums than any other female performer. The list of her achievements goes on and on:

Voted Best Singles Singer by TV Times in 1973 Awards.

Voted Best Female Solo Singer in the last fifty years of recorded music in the Brittannia Award in 1977.

Voted Best Female Entertainer for 1976 by the American Guild of Variety Artists.

Her most recent recordings include,
Shirley Bassey Sings the Songs of Andrew Lloyd Webber
(1993);
Shirley Bassey Sings
the Movies
(1995);
The Birthday Concert
(1997) and
The Diamond Collection: 1958–1998
.

In 1996 she collaborated with Chris Rea to produce the very successful clubland hit, ‘La Passione’. Then in 1998 her reinvention of herself contrived with the PropellerHeads number ‘History Repeating’. The PropellerHeads, so called after their zany headgear, started out as a couple of amateur DJs from Bath, but by the time they met Shirley they had got a group together that had a soaring reputation. They provided backing for the new Bond movie and also the sound track for the film
Lost in Space.
Most of all they had introduced the new ‘big beat’ music scene and they wanted Shirley for their latest recording.

Big beat wasn’t new to Shirley, it was as they said, ‘history repeating itself.’ She had actually grown up with a variety of it; the frenetic rhythms, the syncopated jazz and the beat of the drums. She loved the recording she made with the PropellorHeads. Shirley, in her Diamond Concert at the Royal Festival Hall on 21 June 1998, invited her London audience to join her beating out the rhythm of ‘History Repeating’.

Backed by a superb orchestra and brilliantly lit, she stood there in a dress of silver and gold beads that showed more of Shirley than had been seen for a long time. Her figure was well worth showing off to her appreciative audience. Shirley, with the kind of body she had as a teenager about forty-five years ago, got the whole house on their feet as she belted out,

‘The next big thing is here, but to me it all seems clear

That it’s all just a little bit of history repeating . . .’

Her audience sings the beat with her as if they are
chanting the history of their star. But the voice is better than ever. Shirley gets a standing ovation.

Other tempting ideas are suggested to Shirley. Would she do a chat show? Better still, how would she like a chat show of her own? But first she says, she has to get on with her summer open air concerts. After the Royal Festival Hall, she will do her tour of famous castles. Last year they were a great success, Castle Howard was breathtakingly beautiful, and then there was Althorp Park before the tragedy that turned it into a memorial park. Thousands attended the castles with
alfresco
family picnics before the Shirley Bassey concert. There was a touch of street party appeal about these occasions, with everyone enjoying themselves on the rolling lawns, grannies and teenagers, and Mums and Dads with babies and children.

That is what Shirley has said she wants to do, provide entertainment from the top to the bottom of the family. And later on, when the babies are asleep, there is Shirley on the stage under the pink and blue lights, supremely confident in white, feathers from her cape fluttering in the evening breeze. She sings, ‘This is My Life’. She has survived a life of much heartache but has been strengthened by it. ‘I must have been strong as a child,’ she has said. ‘I didn’t realise how strong until I think of all these things that have happened to me.’

The girl from Tiger Bay has completely vanished; she has grown into a rich European woman, elegant in couture clothes, dining in Monte Carlo restaurants. ‘I am a champagne person,’ she once said. Her childhood friendships have gone, even her family who once lived in Bute Street,
Tiger Bay, are spread out more thinly – some dead, and some long gone elsewhere. Sharon and her family have taken their place. The men who escort the star nowadays are mostly old friends or men who work with her management. She enjoys dates but she also likes being alone.