Shirley (10 page)

Somehow Shirley got through the rehearsals, and it looked as if all might be well until, in the dressing room, Juhni started helping her dress. Then the panic returned, but this time it was even worse. She began trembling and couldn’t speak. Juhni pinned the knot of curls on her head, fitted the gold earrings, pulled the long black gloves over her hands and up her arms and still Shirley didn’t say a word. Juhni and Michael helped her walk to the wings. She was icy cold and they tried rubbing her hands, but her eyes looked glazed as if she was somewhere else.

The pit orchestra struck up the intro to her first number, ‘I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby’, and here
came the voice over the loudspeakers: ‘Introducing . . . Miss Shirley Bassey . . .’ Sullivan gave her a gentle little push and Shirley pulled her hands together, straightened her back and walked on to the stage. She reached the microphone. Suddenly she smiled. She raised an arm, she spread her fingers wide, she opened her mouth in true Bassey fashion and, by God, she sang.

Tears began pouring down Juhni Sullivan’s cheeks. She couldn’t stop. Through her tears she turned to look for Michael but he had gone. He was through the pass door in a flash and standing out front. He mouthed each word Shirley sang, watching her, and nodding in silent approval, and relief. She was going well. She was holding her own. The applause when she finished was very good. And now here she was announcing her own next number very nicely, slowly and clearly. She sang very well, and the applause was even better.

Sullivan took a good look at the audience. It was a full house, some of them old, some of them young, but they liked Shirley all right. She was doing everything he had taught her to perfection. There she was, making full contact with the audience, one side at a time. But she was also doing something he had never taught her: she’d got the audience by the scruff of their necks, the real Shirley was coming through and she was magic. When she sang ‘Stormy Weather’ there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

Her act ended to tremendous applause and shouts of ‘More, more!’ And this was Yorkshire where they hated phonies. The matter-of-fact Yorkshire people were crazy about her.

Back in the dressing room Shirley couldn’t stop talking,
‘Was I all right? Did you hear me forget the first announcement? Did they like me? Did you hear them shout for more? I couldn’t believe it.’ She jerked off her gloves, ‘I hate these things, I won’t wear them again,’ she said and, turning to Juhni and Michael who stood staring at her, asked anxiously, ‘Was I really all right?’

‘You were wonderful! We’re so proud of you.’ And then the three of them clung together, their arms wrapped tightly around each other, until they all broke down and cried.

After her success at Keighley, Michael Sullivan’s original faith in Shirley Bassey was confirmed, particularly when the stolid manager of the Hippodrome, a true blue Yorkshireman, commented – after Shirley had stopped the show every night for a week with ‘Stormy Weather’ – ‘I may have heard better, you know, but I have to admit that she goes over bloody well.’

Shirley now had two weeks off and Sullivan took this opportunity to change some of her songs and adjust the stage lighting for her act. Then it was off on an eleven-week Hippodrome tour of the provinces for impresario Bernard Delfont. This was not the famous Moss Empire tour, but another circuit which could claim a certain prestige. Sullivan had always had links with the three Grade brothers, future TV boss Lew, top agent Leslie, and Bernard Delfont, the middle brother – and was able to get a better deal for Shirley with them than he might have done elsewhere.

Although Sullivan did not go on the tour with Shirley, he kept tabs on her from a distance. Any word of criticism from one of the Hippodrome managers about Shirley’s
performance and he was up in arms. Juhni was worried that he was growing obsessed with Shirley and losing his sense of objectivity, so hostile was he to any hint of negative criticism.

Money was also short. Shirley was not Michael’s only client, but she was his most important. She was earning thirty-five pounds a week, out of which he paid the train fares and twelve pounds a week to pianist Bob Wardlaw. Shirley received eighteen pounds. ‘This is only the beginning,’ he kept telling Juhni, and he was already making plans for what should follow after the Hippodrome tour.

A nice surprise awaited Shirley when she arrived for her week at Birmingham. The Hippodrome there was a smart little theatre in Hurst Street, with the trolley buses running outside, and so far, in spite of the advent of television, was still going strong with its twice nightly variety shows. As often happened on the vaudeville circuit, one of the acts had dropped out because of illness and had to be replaced at short notice. Michael Sullivan contacted Berry’s wife, Sylvia Beresford Clarke, and despatched her, with her dancing partner as the ‘fill-in’ sister act at Birmingham. ‘Give my love to Shirley,’ he said. ‘You’ll share a dressing room with her.’

Sylvia, who loved her profession and all the excitement that went with it, welcomed the chance of meeting Shirley at last. The two girls, only two years apart in age (Sylvia was twenty) liked each other instantly although, as Sylvia recalled, there was one major difference between them. ‘Shirley was out of her depth,’ she said. ‘She’d been thrown in at the deep end, and I realised straight away that she was only a kid, really.’

While Sylvia had her own family living in London, her mother and her sister, Shirley had nobody to turn to. She didn’t understand money and had no idea of how much it was costing to build her career. As Berry’s wife, Sylvia had heard many of the discussions between her husband and Michael Sullivan about Shirley’s future, and was in the somewhat awkward position of knowing more about the plans for Shirley than Shirley herself did.

Michael, as Sylvia well knew, had wanted Shirley to do this Hippodrome tour in order to build her confidence, but he didn’t intend her to remain in variety much longer. The way to stardom was to shine alone, not as part of a variety bill. In his view, cabaret should be the next step – a real class act, with songs especially written for Shirley.

Young as she was, Sylvia felt that Michael Sullivan was making a mistake – the first of several as it would turn out. He was accustomed to taking the decisions about Shirley’s career without discussing things with her. She had accepted each
fait accompli
so far, but Sylvia felt badly on Shirley’s behalf. She worried that the girl was being over-controlled by two older men such as her husband and Michael Sullivan. Although she was fond of Sullivan and admired his several positive qualities – his energy and charm, his taste and vision – she knew that he could be absolutely ruthless, and wondered whether Shirley had any idea what she was in for.

She later said, ‘I sometimes wondered how Shirley managed to get through it all. What happened to her would have broken a lot of girls. Men with power, especially in show business, can do terrible things to girls, sometimes without even knowing it. They can destroy a girl’s self-esteem
with their jibes, and it’s easy to destroy fragile confidence. When I met Shirley, she was eighteen, and that’s not old enough to have enough armour to protect yourself.’

And, of course, what Sylvia didn’t know was that, overarching all other difficulties, was the shadow of a little girl named Sharon in Tiger Bay. Back there, everybody naturally speculated as to who the child’s father might be, and most thought he must have been one of the boys who had worked with Shirley at Curran’s factory. In the event, it took an unrelated court case over forty years later for Shirley to reveal any more about the identity of Sharon’s father.

In January 1998, Shirley was sued by her ex-secretary who alleged that the star was anti-Semitic and had called her a ‘Jewish bitch’. Shirley, who had many Jewish friends and business associates, passionately denied the charges. After winning the case, she let it be known that her daughter Sharon was half-Jewish. Her father, Shirley revealed, was Jewish and had been married with two children at the time of their liaison. He never knew that Sharon was his daughter. ‘I have never told him,’ Shirley said, ‘it would hurt too many people.’

Back then, on the Hippodrome tour, however, Shirley followed Michael Sullivan’s strictures, and the very existence of Sharon was a closely guarded secret. Her task was to nurture and develop what her new friend, Sylvia, agreed was a great talent. She used to watch her performance from the wings, and later said that, ‘Unless you’ve watched Shirley close up, like in cabaret, you don’t get the full impact of her performance and her magic.’
Happily, audiences worldwide who have been to Bassey concerts in vast auditoriums, have been bowled over by that magic and power.

Looking back on those early days, Sylvia recalls with amusement how she loved show business but never expected to be a star, while Shirley, much of the time, hated the business but, sure as hell, she was going to be a star! She remembered saying to Shirley, ‘You’ve done it all so quickly. Just four or five months ago you were holding the curtain in Jersey.’

‘You’ve got it wrong, Syl,’ Shirley replied. ‘I’ve been singing for fourteen years, ever since I was four. Real hard stuff, singing to rough audiences who were often paying for the privilege.’

Shirley Bassey might have imagined that her early experiences in the pubs and clubs of Tiger Bay had hardened her, but Glasgow proved to be her baptism of fire. She has since admitted that she was almost paralysed with fright as she stood in the wings waiting to go on for the kind of audience she’d never expected to encounter on a respectable Hippodrome tour.

Glasgow in the mid-Fifties was a city rife with roaring drunks. In the Gorbals, the slum district of Glasgow, fights to the death were a regular occurrence; bottles were smashed and throats were slit with the jagged edges. The place had a sinister reputation. On opening night, Shirley first realised this was going to be no ordinary performance when she heard a rumpus from the back of the stalls. Then the acrobats, who were on just before, came running off the stage giving her the thumbs-down signal.

There was nothing she could do but go on, of course, but she made her entrance shaking with nervous apprehension. Bob Wardlaw was at the piano as usual, but he wasn’t giving her any signals. As soon as she appeared on the stage, the barracking started. The drunks in the stalls took one look at Shirley’s figure in her tight black velvet dress and called for a striptease. ‘Shake your chassis, Bassey! Ger ’em off!’

She was astounded by the crudity. The worst nights in Tiger Bay had been a picnic compared to this. What should she do? If
she
couldn’t hear the music – and she couldn’t – for sure nobody was going to hear her. Should she leave the stage? Anger and pride took over. ‘Shurrup!’, she yelled, at the top of her lungs, not bothering to censor her language. ‘Lissen ta me. Whadda they call ya, behaving like this?’ She had reverted to pure dockland Cardiff such as she’d heard in the docks of Butetown, but they hadn’t thrown anything at her yet, and her knees had stopped knocking together.

Shirley held up a hand and yelled, ‘All right. If you don’t want to listen, I’m off.’ A voice from the stalls piped up, ‘Gie the lassie a chance’ and, gradually, in the face of Shirley’s verbal onslaught, the crowd quietened down, and she could hear the orchestra playing ‘When You’re Smiling’.

Bob Wardlaw gave Shirley the signal to begin, and begin she did, unleashing that powerful voice of hers at full throttle, ‘working’ that unruly Glasgow mob, section by section as Michael had taught her, until she held them in the palm of her hand. By the end of the opening number, she was worn out from the effort, but was given renewed energy by the unexpectedly deafening applause. The crowd
who, moments before, had nearly driven her away, were hooting and whistling and clapping and stamping their feet, calling for more.

Shirley’s act was twenty-five minutes long; that night, it felt more like twenty-five hours, but she got through the songs and gave them the full treatment. As the first-half curtain came down, a couple of scattered voices shouted ‘Ger ’em off!’, but Shirley Bassey didn’t care. It was the interval, they could go to the bar and get even drunker, but she didn’t give a damn because she wasn’t afraid anymore. She had won.

AFTER SHIRLEY’S SUCCESS
on the Hippodrome tour, Michael Sullivan proceeded with the next stage in his plans: to find the right cabaret venue where he could introduce her remarkable voice to the West End. During the Fifties, London’s nightclubs were doing good business. Wealthy foreigners were flooding in, the Americans were coming back, and the newly rich Arabs, donning Western dress but drinking orange juice in public, frequented the clubs to eye the pretty girls on show.

Sonny Zahl was a leading London light entertainment agent, successful, affable and a gentleman, and he loved the business. Sullivan knew it would be better for Shirley’s image if a recognised specialist agent were to negotiate her cabaret debut, and he enlisted Sonny Zahl’s help.

Michael told Shirley that he had his sights set on a Mayfair club for her after the provincial tour. She was happy with the plan; after all, it would be better than singing in a pub. Considerably better.

Sonny Zahl suggested the Astor, an exclusive club in Berkeley Square, owned by the well-known nightspot entrepreneur Bertie Green. Michael was over the moon. He knew Green, and there were few venues better suited to his purpose than the Astor. If he and Sonny could persuade Bertie Green to engage Shirley, it would enhance her prospects. In a fashionable showcase like that, Shirley Bassey would be bound to attract the notice of the press. She’d be on her way – and so, of course, would he.

The beautiful young ladies who worked as hostesses at the Astor were classy – unlike some of the other cabaret clubs in Soho where it was not unknown for girls of no more than fifteen to sometimes cater to the after-hours requirements of a very different sort of male clientele. The Astor was a serious cabaret club, where a quality singer was always featured as an element of the club’s attractions.