Shirley (13 page)

Johnny Franz, recording manager of Phillips Records in Bayswater walked into his flat late that night when Shirley was singing at the Albany Club, and on his way to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee switched on the television.

This was the Fifties and commercial television was very new. BBC producers were being poached by the score by Associated Television because BBC TV had been going for a long time, operating for the few who owned TV sets even
before the war. The public only started buying television sets seriously around 1950 and it was a mini Gold Rush. Americans with know-how were being invited over and Sir Lew Grade made his famous remark about TV being a licence to print money. Everyone in the business saw that getting into TV fast was important.

At that time TV musical shows had little of the present-day glitz. They were filmed in black and white: merely a face, half of the body, a voice, a microphone, and now and then a dancer or two in the background. Even so, Jack Hylton’s show from the Albany Club, with its new talent, was one that Johnny Franz – being in the recording business – tried never to miss.

On his way back from the kitchen Johnny could sense there was trouble at the Albany. Compère Ron Randell stood at the microphone, obviously covering up for some latecomer. He ad-libbed and joked, but all the time he was keeping a watchful eye for the missing girl singer. Then the latecomer, the rather tearful Miss Shirley Bassey, suddenly appeared. The music began, and the young girl took Ron’s place in front of the microphone. She flicked away a tear and started to sing.

Johnny Franz, coffee cup in hand, stared and listened. He was right, the girl had been crying, she still had tears in her eyes, but what a voice! The song she had chosen was ‘Stormy Weather’ and her voice went right to his heart. Instinctively he knew he could make this girl into a recording star.

That night marked Shirley’s last appearance at the Albany Club. Her contract was over. If, as she had wanted, she had gone home and failed to appear Franz would not
have heard her sing and her entrance into the world of British recording would have been, at the very least, delayed. Johnny Franz was exactly the right man to take on the fledgling star and shoot her to the top of the hit parade, which he achieved some months later with ‘The Banana Boat Song’.

Even before he heard that Johnny Franz wanted to audition Shirley, Michael Sullivan had decided that he had to change his attitude towards her – his investment.

He was ashamed of the scene at the Albany Club. Jack Hylton had said, ‘You’ve done enough harm to the girl. Leave her alone!’ After her song, Shirley had sat at Jack Hylton’s table, sipping champagne and giving Sullivan, so he thought, a look of triumph – and who could blame her?

Most of the trouble between Sullivan and Shirley was his fault after all. He still treated her as the scruffy kid from Tiger Bay he had auditioned. Yet, in less than a year, she had become a huge success. She was now a desirable young woman who would soon flower into a beauty, but Michael had never taken into account how much she had changed. He still treated her like a wilful apprentice, yet she was earning a lot of money for both of them. He took the lion’s share, and she was often too tired to appreciate what was left. Two shows a night at the Adelphi, one-night stands in cabaret around the Park Lane hotels for the annual balls of various unions and federations, social clubs in outlying suburbs and anywhere else where they could pay her price.

Sometimes there had been a hiccup in Sullivan’s schemes. A booking he made with the Savoy Social Club in Rushey Green, for example, where Shirley was to sing for twenty minutes at their dance for one hundred and seventy-five
pounds, went wrong. When she arrived, she was horrified to learn that she was expected to sing with an unknown band without rehearsal.

Shirley tried out her specially written arrangements with the band but found they were not capable of playing them. She tried them with a bass and drums accompaniment alone, but they couldn’t keep time. At that point she was stopped from continuing the rehearsal and the band was ordered to play dance music.

‘I eventually sang three songs to the best of my ability,’ she said. ‘The only three I
could
sing without a proper band accompaniment.’

The club was annoyed that she gave only a ten-minute performance instead of the twenty they had expected. They would pay her proportionately less. However, she did receive prolonged applause from the members, and the club officials would have done well to frame Sullivan’s bill for future members – a memento of the night Shirley Bassey sang not for thousands of pounds, but for seventeen pounds ten shillings a minute.

Sullivan had kept Shirley working late into most nights, promising her a white Jaguar car as a reward. There must have been times when she thought that if she ever really saw that Jaguar – and she didn’t trust him to keep his promise – she’d get into the driving seat and drive away for good.

Shirley appreciated that Michael Sullivan had done a great deal for her, but she must have often thought that there should be more to life than a room over an Italian restaurant and late-night suppers with a succession of admiring strangers. She needed romance and tenderness and Pepe Davies, his jealousy notwithstanding, had given
her these. Now he’d been pushed out on to the fringes of her life because she was afraid of his violent tendencies.

In the early spring of 1956 a young man named Bernard Hall came into Shirley’s life. Typically, Shirley, who liked giving people nicknames, soon changed his name. She called him Balls, because she said, in the vernacular of the time, that he was ‘a ballsy guy’. He was good looking, talented, and in the same profession as herself.

Bernard Hall was twenty-seven, tall, and with the typical muscular figure of a dancer. He was born in Golders Green, north London, but lived in Monte Carlo, and when he met Shirley, he was in London to find English dancers for performances to celebrate the wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier. For him, Shirley was love at first sight.

He knew all about Olivelli’s the restaurant in Storr Street, just off the Tottenham Court Road, he’d often eaten there. Every theatrical knew you could get a good meal there after the show or, if you needed a bed in a hurry, Papa Olivelli would do his best to oblige. Papa, however, ran his establishment quite strictly and never rented a room to anyone unless they could prove they were bona fide show people; he permitted no vagabonds or fly-by-nights. The rent was cheap – between two and three pounds a week, with breakfast thrown in and supper at a special low price.

Papa Olivelli, overweight and smiling, with a large paunch, stood inside the basement restaurant to welcome the clientele, while in the kitchen behind a wide counter worked Mama Olivelli, cooking spaghetti bolognese, lasagne, gnocchi, or whatever else you fancied. When the dish was ready, she would plonk it on the counter, put her head through the opening to the restaurant and yell,
‘Pronto Angelina!’ to the Italian serving girl, another of her nieces ‘brought over from Italy to learn the language’. It could be hot and smoky in the restaurant but there was always a delicious smell of real Italian cooking.

One night, Bernard Hall was dining at Olivelli’s with two friends, Dr Carl Lambert and his blonde wife, Grace, who was leading lady to the Crazy Gang at Jack Hylton’s Victoria Palace. The three hadn’t met for some months and had much to talk and laugh about. Before Bernard had left to live in France, he had once played the juvenile with Grace in the Crazy Gang. Through her, he had met her husband Carl, a well-known Mayfair psychiatrist, and a close friendship had developed between the two men.

They had begun their meal at Olivelli’s when Carl noticed a pretty girl sitting alone at a corner table. Bernard had noticed her as soon as he sat down, and he and she had already made eye contact across the room. ‘I know who she is,’ said Carl. ‘She’s appearing at the Adelphi in
Such is Life
with Al Read. Her name is Shirley Bassey.’ Because Carl’s wife, Grace, worked in show business and was never free until the end of the second house, Carl spent a lot of his evenings going to other West End shows. ‘As soon as we finish our ravioli,’ he said, ‘I shall go over and tell her how much I enjoyed her performance. She has an extraordinary voice, by the way, and I’ll ask her to join us for a glass of wine and a cup of coffee.’

Bernard doubted that the girl would join them, she looked so young and shy. Living in France, he had never heard of Shirley Bassey. But she did accept Carl’s invitation, she did come over to their table and Bernard was delighted. Shirley seemed very pleased to meet him and
Carl was all smiles at having engineered this meeting of the two young people. ‘Now you three have a lot in common,’ Carl told them. ‘You all work, or have worked, for Jack Hylton. How do you like him?’

Bernard said he liked Jack Hylton. He was tough, but he was fair. Bernard had been dancing in Jack’s show,
Call Me Madam
at the Coliseum when he got the chance to go to Paris with The Debonairs, an American dance group who needed a replacement dancer in a hurry. ‘He could easily have refused to let me go,’ said Bernard, ‘but he didn’t.’

Shirley said that Jack had looked after her when she was in trouble. ‘I’m under contract with him until the show closes at the end of the year.’ Bernard assured her that he’d come and see her show at the Adelphi just as soon as he’d finished his arrangements for auditioning the dancers and showgirls.

Bernard fell in love with Shirley that first evening, and over coffee he was quickly trying to work out where he could take her afterwards.

Fortunately Carl and Grace understood, and when the second bottle of wine was finished, they took their leave. ‘I know you’re going to be a big star, Shirley,’ Carl said to her in farewell. Bernard remembers that he was mystified by the fuss Carl made about Shirley. To him, she was a sweet, shy, seventeen-year-old, wide-eyed and unspoiled. He’d got her age wrong, she was nineteen, but that was how he thought of her. She stroked the arm of his jacket and said, ‘It’s so soft. What’s it made of?’

‘Cashmere,’ he told her. ‘What’s that?’ she asked. So he told her. He was delighted by her. She was so pretty and desirable, and there was a strong sexual chemistry between
them. When he asked her if she would leave with him she told him it wasn’t necessary because she had a room upstairs.

He always afterwards wished that their love affair had started in more glamorous surroundings than Shirley’s modest little room at Olivelli’s with its single bed, washbasin in the corner, and creaky wardrobe, but everything else was perfect that night. Neither of them realised it, but their love affair was one that would endure over the years. They were both performers and they toured wherever there was work to be had. As Bernard described it, ‘Whenever she saw me, no matter in what part of the world, Shirley would throw up her arm and shout, “Balls, I love you.”’

Like Shirley’s, Bernard’s career had started when he was fifteen, but he’d gone to the Italia Conti school in Soho, which trained its students well, and booked professional engagements for them in between classes. He’d done repertory, radio, television, cabaret and musical theatre, and his standards were high. He went to see Shirley’s performance at a matinee, without telling her he was there. In retrospect, he realised he went to see the girl he was in love with, not the artist, but at that time he thought she needed to learn more about stagecraft. He recognised that she had a very good voice but he felt she was still a beginner. Remembering his hard work when he was young in the business, he thought Shirley lacked the confidence of a real pro.

In France and Monte Carlo Bernard Hall was well known and he earned much more money than Shirley, but he fell in love with the girl and not the performer. When he
saw her act again in another venue some months later, he realised that he had been wrong. She had stardom written all over her.

On the personal level he remembered something that surprised him at the time: Shirley was constantly telephoning her home in Cardiff. Later, when he found out about her baby Sharon, who at that time was less than two years old, he understood the reason for all those calls. He recalled that Shirley didn’t talk very much about her family or her earlier life, which is why those phone calls puzzled him. Shirley could be a very private person.

Their love affair that year in London lasted for about a month. Bernard always remembered the end of that time, when they’d been to a party given by someone who lived in Dolphin Square. At the beginning of the evening, Shirley seemed shy but, as the evening went on, relaxed, and laughed and talked to everyone. He felt proud of her and so much in love, but he knew that after they left he had to tell her he was leaving early the next morning for Monte Carlo, to prepare for the royal wedding. They’d walked down to the Thames embankment, Shirley was wearing a smart blue redingote with handbag to match and her usual high-heeled shoes. She clung to his arm as they walked and, when they reached the wall, they stood with their arms round each other, looking down at the river. Then he drew her closer, and told her when he was leaving. Shirley was furious. She hit him with her handbag. He tried to protect himself but she kept hitting him until he caught her arm and kissed her. He told her that this was
not
the end, they would write to each other. Shirley, still angry, told him he only deserved postcards.

Before he left for Monte Carlo, Bernard said to Carl, ‘I feel you had a lot to do with this’. He meant that Carl had somehow stage-managed his meeting with Shirley. Carl smiled. ‘I did it with good intentions.’

Meanwhile, in London, one of the most important events of Shirley’s career was taking place – her very first recording session with John Franz of Phillips, one of the most respected producers in the British recording industry. But Johnny Franz was also a charming man and very kind, especially to this young newcomer, Shirley Bassey. Michael Sullivan was, of course, very impressed, absolutely delighted that Johnny had taken Shirley on; the recording industry would soon make enormous fortunes for the lucky few.