Shirley (5 page)

The dress basket carrying the chorus costumes was carried to the communal dressing room where some wag had chalked a welcoming message in greasepaint on the mirror: ‘Lousy houses, stinking digs, get yourself a boy who’s rich.’ Amusement was quick to dissipate when Maureen Jemmet rushed in to the dressing room to announce that the girls couldn’t use the toilets ‘because some boys have made peepholes in the doors’.

The contents of the dress basket brought a further dampening of enthusiasm. The girls removed layer after layer of paper, but there wasn’t a costume in sight. At the bottom of the basket lay a box of safety pins and nothing else. Somebody had forgotten to pack the Bay Girls’ outfits. Pamela Johnson (professional name Winters) was well-schooled in the vicissitudes of touring, and nothing that happened on a Collins tour could surprise her, but she was sensitive to these young girls from Tiger Bay who were taking
everything very seriously. ‘They’ve done it again,’ she told them with a despairing groan. ‘But don’t worry, they’ll all turn up tomorrow, we’ll all just have to wear our own clothes for tonight’s performance.’

This solution didn’t seem a happy one, especially to Shirley, who only had a skirt and jumper to offer from her own wardrobe. Pam reassured the girls, promising somehow to find them all something suitable. Reassurance, she knew, was vital, since they were bound to be in for another shock in Luton: the digs where they would be living for the next week.

Theatrical digs were, and are, the same all over Britain. Victorian houses, originally homes to the middle-classes, now converted into dingy bed-sits, flats or lodging houses. Creaky stairs, linoleum floors and, presiding over all comings and goings, a landlady in nylon overall, bedroom slippers and hair-curlers. Pam knew better than to rub these dragons up the wrong way. She was on her best behaviour on arrival at the digs, where the landlady glared in disapproval at the eager band of nubile girls.

In the double room that Shirley was to share with Iris Freeman, Pam assembled her charges and gave them a rundown of their situation. The landlady would provide breakfast, but that was all. She charged two pounds a week for an evening meal and nobody could afford that on their salaries of a fiver. ‘We all pay ten shillings a week into a kitty,’ Pam explained. ‘I’ve got a primus and we’ll cook in the bathroom every night.’

The already familiar Bassey rebellion asserted itself. ‘Count me out’, said Shirley, who preferred cake and ice cream to baked beans and mash. And anyway, she thought,
there were bound to be young men waiting at the stage door every night, only too pleased to take a pretty show girl out for a meal . . .

When the clothes skip arrived on Tuesday, the girls had another nasty surprise. The costumes were worn and shabby, and had obviously done the rounds of several chorus lines for some time. There were short, close-fitting black skirts and gaudy blouses that needed an abundance of safety pins to get them to fit, and even the floating chiffon dresses were torn and in bad shape. Only the feather bikinis fitted everybody.

For Shirley’s solo number there was a heavy green satin dress, strapless, with an ankle length skirt and a wide belt to hold it all together. It was too big, and had to be pinned to the belt. ‘Don’t fling yourself about, or you’ll lose the lot,’ Pam warned her. But Shirley could never sing without using her body, and ‘Stormy Weather’ was going down very well with the audience. Totally involved in the music, Shirley flung up one arm, then the other and the skirt responded by beginning to slither down round her ankles. She clutched at the strapless top. The audience went wild. What a show! Striptease! The applause was stupendous, but Shirley hurried off the stage humiliated. She was a singer, not a bloody stripper.

It was the first of many hard lessons learned and, throughout her career, Shirley remained fiercely protective of her status. ‘I sing. That’s all. I’m a performer . . . Don’t try and throw me in with the dinner like they do in Las Vegas. If people want to listen, I sing.’

Very quickly during this first tour of her career, Shirley was learning that she was different from the others. She
enjoyed a lot of it, particularly Eddie Reindeer’s comedy routines which had audiences, and the girls, in convulsions of laughter, but she found it difficult to muck in with the others to life on the road. Pam had told them, ‘We’ve got to live like a family, we’ve got to give and take, share and share alike’; it was good advice because life on the road with a third-rate company could be grim without some collective enthusiasm and laughter.

Most of the Bay Girls were very happy. They’d escaped their mothers’ clutches, and if there wasn’t enough to eat, so what. Shirley, on the other hand, refused to kow-tow to much that the others went along with – the fearsome threat that the landlady might discover them cooking sausages illicitly in the bathroom late at night; Ben Johnson ordering everyone to come straight home after the show. Shirley liked Ben, admired his dancing and frequently pleaded with him to teach her, but nobody was going to make her come straight home. Shirley Bassey had other ideas about her life. She hated the idea of being a chorus girl, and if she couldn’t be a star, then she didn’t want any part of it. The tour ground its way northwards, playing industrial towns like Coventry. Not posh dates, but places which welcomed the show and enjoyed it. They played Monday to Saturday at each venue, and spent Sundays travelling to the next stop.

The problems of communal living in digs blew up into trouble in Salford, where Ben Johnson and the ballet boys stayed in the same digs as the girls. This allowed Ben to do a nightly headcount to make sure they were all in when they ought to have been. Shirley had acquired a new boyfriend, a policeman, who took her out after the show each night.
Iris stuffed a bolster next to her and Ben was fooled until, a couple of nights on, Iris fell asleep quickly only to be awakened by somebody next to her with an arm around her. Iris, a luscious sixteen-year-old, turned to find one of the boys from the show smiling at her.

The virginal and hitherto untouched Iris let out a deafening scream that brought Ben Johnson bursting into the room at two o’clock in the morning. Iris pointed to the boy whom she had kicked out of her bed and was now trying to hide under it. ‘He tried to interfere with me.’

‘Ben, I went to the toilet. Got into the wrong room coming back,’ the now terrified dancer stuttered, at which Iris yelled, ‘As God is my judge he’s lying.’

By now, most of the company were up, crowding in at Iris and Shirley’s door to see what the fuss was all about. As they stood there gawping, the landlady, outraged by the disturbance, appeared on the scene and demanded an explanation. Ben told more or less the same story as the boy, it had all been a mistake but, just as everybody heaved a sigh of relief the landlady noticed the other bed. ‘Where’s the other one?’ she demanded. Right on cue, Shirley arrived, wearing a smart red coat which she’d borrowed from Pam’s wardrobe without her knowledge. She looked, said Louise Benjamin who later recounted the story, untroubled, happy and full of her favourite things – fish and chips, cream cake and ice cream.

The landlady turned on Shirley. ‘Two o’clock in the morning, my lady, is it? I will not have my respectable establishment turned into a bawdy house.’

Shirley drew herself up, the picture of outraged innocence. ‘I’ll have you know that my boyfriend is a
policeman. He wouldn’t like to hear you say that because tonight he took me home to meet his mother.’

There was a huge row later, but that was over Pam’s red coat. Shirley, it would seem, had a little habit of borrowing something she liked while forgetting to ask the owner’s permission. According to Louise, ‘Pam was furious and so was Shirley. Shirley yelled at Pam that she was always telling us to behave like a family, but when she treated Pam like a sister she got shouted at.’

Pamela Johnson was actually an extraordinary person. The daughter of an English mother and a Somalian father, she was tall, graceful and beautiful. She was the mainstay of the ballet company, making their costumes from materials bought in local street markets, and allowing the dancers to stay in her home between jobs. She was Ben’s wife, and the mother of a small daughter, Maria, who had either to be taken along on tour or farmed out to a suitable family. It was not easy for either the mother or the child.

Both Ben Johnson and Pam had once danced with the famously innovative Katherine Dunham company. The black American Katherine Dunham and her dancers first caused a sensation in Europe with their mixed classical and modern repertoire after World War II. Shirley Bassey was greatly influenced by the ballet dancers, whom she watched attentively, and whose grace and strength of movement she tried to emulate. However, her first touring shows did little to enhance her dancing prospects. The management had little respect for the young people they sent on the road and the life was sordid and akin to slave labour.

Nobody helped the Bay Girls, except Pam who had little time to spare. They had no instruction in how to apply
theatrical make-up, the Leichner greasepaint sticks Nos 9 and 5 that used to be standard usage in the theatre. Without black eyeliner and plenty of shadow, the eyes would look dim and washed-out under the strong stage lights, but nobody explained any of this.

Memories of Jolson
finally closed in November of 1953 after several arduous months. Neither Shirley nor Louise went back to Wales, but stayed instead at Ben and Pam’s house in Harold Wood where, it was understood, the girls would baby-sit little Maria while Ben tried to organise some more work. Shirley managed to pick up a couple of engagements singing in hotels during this time and, shortly before Christmas, she went off to entertain the soldiers at a sergeant’s mess in North London. All the troops were drunk, including the sergeant major, but she earned ten pounds for her pains and a kindly warrant officer gave her a bag full of goodies from the NAAFI and made sure she got home safely.

Then it was home to Splott for Christmas with her family. It was a wonderful interlude. She had presents for everybody and for her mother, who always said she was the most generous of present-givers, she had bought a charming locket.

Shirley turned seventeen in January 1954. She was in love, and even though he was married and his identity was a secret, she was happy. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do next in the way of furthering her career or earning a living when Georgie Wood came up with an offer for another Joe Collins tour. It was called
Hot from Harlem
and was much the mixture as before. Iris Freeman and a couple of the other Bay Girls were engaged for the show, but
Louise Benjamin had gone to work in another Joe Collins show. The good news from Shirley’s point of view was that, this time around, she would have two or even three songs, and the show would play the New Theatre in Cardiff.

Traipsing from theatre to theatre across the country in a broken-down bus no longer held any novelty, nor did slogging on stage twelve times a week hold any glamour or excitement. But it was work, it was experience, and the show did indeed arrive at the Cardiff New, where all of Shirley’s friends, relatives, and neighbours past and present turned out in force to see it. Ifor Harry, the barber from next door to the Basseys in Splott, was unimpressed with the evening. ‘It wasn’t a very nice kind of show,’ he said afterwards. ‘A bit on the rough side if you know what I mean.’ But he did acknowledge that ‘Shirley sang very well on that box’ while wondering ‘what in God’s name was Iris Freeman doing, floating around holding a candle and wearing something that looked like her nightie?’

Iris Freeman had wondered the same thing, and Shirley had had a hard time trying to get things across to Iris, who wondered why Shirley was standing on a box singing ‘Ebb Tide’. Patiently, Shirley explained that it wasn’t really a box, it was a rock, on which she was standing and looking out to sea, waiting for her lover to come back with the tide.

‘Okay,’ said Iris, ‘You’re singing “Ebb Tide”, so what am I doing buggering about with a candle?’

‘Jesus,’ exclaimed an exasperated seventeen-year-old Shirley, ‘I give up. You’re the bloody lighthouse.’

This anecdote really sums up the level of a cut-price touring road show sent out by the Joe Collins management. It was tough, but Shirley had to complete the tour.

From Cardiff,
Hot from Harlem
headed north. On occasion, the company were transferred from their bus into a train, as happened one Sunday morning when they had to change at Crewe. During the Fifties, show business people dreaded the very thought of Crewe station, where you boarded the train to arrive at yet another God-forsaken town to perform in yet another abysmal theatre. The platforms at Crewe on a Sunday were littered with the large wicker skips of various touring companies and piles and piles of battered luggage. Elderly performers trod carefully, smiled bravely, and tried to look as though they usually went by motor car.

Iris Freeman and Shirley Bassey were sitting on a wooden station seat, suitcases balanced on their knees, when somebody shouted ‘Coo-ee’. They looked up from their thoughts to see the tall, willowy Louise Benjamin running towards them. ‘Everyone meets at Crewe!’ she cried, brimming with pleasure at running into her old friends. The three girls exchanged news for a few minutes until Louise had to rush off to get her train.

As she turned to go, Iris grabbed her arm and propelled her along the station, calling out to Shirley, ‘I’ll be back before your train gets in.’ As they hurried along, Iris told the bemused Louise that Shirley was pregnant. ‘Five months gone. She’s going home to Cardiff. Left the show, walked out. Told no one about the baby.’

Louise was aghast, not only at the bombshell about Shirley’s condition, but at the threat to her professional reputation if she left the show. She raced back to the bench and, as she later described it, urged Shirley to reconsider, to go back to the company with Iris. ‘If you leave the show
without telling them, you’re finished,’ she said. Her efforts were to no avail. Shirley Bassey obeyed nobody but herself and her only response to Louise was to smile and say she knew what she was doing.