Shirley (28 page)

Two Chinese brothers called Wong owned the Chequers in Sydney and they advertised that they were getting the very best international talent in their shows. On Shirley’s opening night she could do no wrong. Her audiences loved her. She was ‘sinuous, tempestuous, with a voice that raises the roof’ said
The Sydney Sunday Telegraph
. Shirley wowed them with her performance. The papers were full of praise, they declared:

‘The return of Shirley the Tigress.’

‘Shirley in a peep-holed dress shimmers and simmers.’

‘Every man in the audience applauds to the last, lustful echo.’

Before they left for New Zealand Shirley told Bernard that Charlie Baxter was after her. ‘What shall I do?’ she asked. Bernard realised that must mean she was at least partly interested. Charlie had already asked Shirley why she wasted her time with Bernard. ‘I think Bernard’s gay,’ he told her.

‘Not with me, he’s not,’ said Shirley.

But soon after they arrived in New Zealand Charlie, free of his Australian ties, was getting on with Shirley like a house on fire. Bernard realised this was the moment to bow out and their affair ended. Their relationship returned to one of warm friendship. Bernard knew he would miss their nightly routines but it mattered far more that they remained good friends. As their plane landed in New Zealand, there, waiting for him, was his old friend Don from Paris.

Don was an American of mixed race. In Paris he had been a dancer with the Katherine Dunham company. When the company disbanded, Don decided that he liked English ways and would emigrate to Australia. His application was turned down because of Australia’s ‘all white’ policy. Don hated being called black. Happily, the more liberal-minded New Zealanders welcomed him. He loved his new country and while they were in Auckland, Shirley and Charlie and Bernard and Don made a foursome. Shirley was interested to meet Don because of her old ties with the Ben Johnson Ballet, which had used some of Katherine Dunham’s routines.

Shirley’s liberal attitude towards homosexuals was unusual for 1966. Don was homosexual, Bernard was bisexual and Shirley told Bernard that she liked the fact that friendship with a homosexual man could have the warmth and love of an affair without the sex.

Australia’s ‘all white’ policy offended Shirley. At this time she had seen posters encouraging people to ‘Keep Australia white.’ As Shirley and her little entourage of three men left for New Zealand, one of the Immigration officers at the airport had asked her whether she had enjoyed her stay.

Shirley remembered the ‘Keep Australia white’ posters. ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘but I’m leaving now to keep Australia white.’

After the first week in New Zealand, the heavens opened and the rain came down in buckets. Their next booking was way out in the sticks and the Civic Centre looked like a sinking ship, there was water everywhere. The electricity was down, and there were no lights for the show.

‘So we don’t play,’ said Bernard unhappily.

‘Of course we do,’ said the manager. ‘The performers in the first half won’t turn up, they’ll never get over the swollen river, so you’ll have to fill the first half yourself, Bernard. Can you manage it?’

One of Bernard’s first jobs when he was seventeen had been with a concert party at the end of Whitby pier. He even remembered all the jokes. If they had made the tough Yorkshire people laugh they ought to go down well in this hellhole.

A crew of hardy men and local well-wishers moved in to save the situation. They mopped up all the water and more
or less dried the place down. Then they hung up hurricane lanterns everywhere, and someone produced a wartime searchlight. The manager was delighted, he called Shirley to come and have a look. ‘You just stand there in this great light and everyone will see you just fine.’ The manager had never heard about the benefits of lighting a woman with a combination of rose pink and ice blue spots. Shirley shuddered.

Charlie had a fatherly talk with Bernard. ‘You’ve got thirty minutes to fill. But listen, this is not Sydney so keep it clean, they’re all rural here, no smut, keep it tidy.’ Kenny got a local orchestra band, they rehearsed hard and got the sounds right.

Only Shirley was a bit tight-lipped. They need not expect her to appear in beads and a peep-hole dress. She’d catch pneumonia. She would be well covered in a long white dress and a long white cape coat. Bernard thought she looked like a gospel singer.

That evening the audience poured in, filling the hall and shaking giant umbrellas, pulling off yellow storm coats, sou-westers and rubber boots as they took their seats. The women emerged from their covers looking pretty in their summer dresses. And still they came, although every seat was taken. Where would they go wondered Bernard? Then he saw. Into one wall was built a giant organ that hadn’t been played for years; it had more pipes and bits sticking out here and there than any organ he’d ever seen. Up they climbed, the bravest going to the top, others squeezed on to the pipes, and soon the organ was a solid mass of humanity which spilled out to every empty area on the floor.

Kenny and his musicians struck up ‘There’s no Business
like Show Business’, and the show and the audience were away. Bernard made his entrance and he could have been Fred Astaire from the applause. They laughed at every joke and when he sang ‘Hello Dolly’ they all joined in. The New Zealanders wanted to enjoy themselves, they wanted to sing and dance. This was a party.

Bernard’s next song had them all on their feet, dancing in the aisles. Kenny and his orchestra could have come straight from the Hammersmith Palais de Danse the way they swung. One after another, the strong and the brave slid down the organ pipes to join in. They were all great dancers. Shirley, peeping from behind the curtain, was absolutely convulsed.

In the interval tea and coffee and sandwiches and cakes were served. When the crumbs were dusted away and the cups stacked up and everyone who had one was back in their seats, Kenny and the boys struck up ‘On a Wonderful Day Like Today’ and Shirley made her entrance.

She strode on looking for all the world as if she had come straight from the local Mormon Church. No thigh-high split dress, no bare midriff. She stood beneath the ghastly brazen glare of the wartime searchlight in a long white coat, hands clasped together as if she was about to begin a sermon. The audience went wild with delight, but first she had to sing.

The audience cheered her opening number to the rafters and Shirley bowed and approached the microphone again. Her voice was very strong and unusually serious. ‘Last year,’ she intoned. ‘Men walked on the moon.’ Shirley liked the sound of this phrase so she repeated it again. ‘Last year men walked on the moon.’ She was really going to drive that
message home. ‘Okay duckie, we know,’ shouted some wit. Everybody clapped.

‘Then why, oh why,’ demanded Shirley, ‘can you only find me this lousy searchlight?’ This one horse town should take a hint from Cape Canavarel.

The audience thought this was the funniest thing they’d heard that night. ‘Come on Shirl. Tell us another.’ They clapped and cheered. Someone zonked an organ pipe and someone fell off. Screams of joy. Shirley knew when she was beaten. She threw off the terrible Mormon white coat, gave her dress a hitch, and revealed the slit to the navel; that length of thigh. ‘Shirley, Shirley,’ the hundreds of voices chorused and Shirley gave it her all. It was Shirley in the searchlight that night – at her very best; a night none of them would ever forget.

THERE WAS USUALLY
a major disaster in every tour, and the Nile Club in Manila in the Philippines supplied as good a disaster as most. Manila was very hot and humid, and the Nile Club a stuffy smelly, pick-up joint. It was a long, narrow strip of a room with a bar and girls and a few tables. There was a small orchestra and an apology for a stage. Shirley was not the first singer ever to have appeared there, but she must have been the first one who wasn’t a hoochie-coochie dancer too. The band had never seen a sheet of European music before, being able only to play their local bar room music on their native wind instruments, lutes and Filipino balalaikas. If the Roaring Twenties club in Melbourne had been a dump, the Nile belonged up a back alley in a Cairo bazaar.

Before Kenny Clayton grasped what he’d dropped into he handed out sheet music for Shirley’s opening number. He sat down at the piano and happily started to play and sing ‘Climb Every Mountain’ to encourage the musicians.
They smiled politely, picked up their instruments and joined in. The noise was ear-splitting, a jangled unmelodious din. Then he saw that all the players had their music upside down on their stands.

This looked like another Kenneth Hume balls-up. Hume had booked the Nile Club sight unseen, presuming they’d make the best of it; it was, after all, only a three-day stopover on the way to Los Angeles . . .

But Kenny Clayton was a man who never lost his temper. He remembered that Manila was used as an American base – somewhere in this city must be one man who could play, ‘Climb Every Mountain’ on the drums or the saxophone or something. In one of the local bars he found a half-American, half-Filipino boy who said he could play the drums. Shirley was boiling with rage, but she had signed the contract and, ever the professional, she’d do the job. She appeared at the appointed time, well-dressed, beautifully coiffed and perfectly made up.

The Nile Club’s bartenders, the girls, and the trickle of clients who came in to drink were the only audience they had, but all the same every note rang out loud and clear in true Bassey form. Kenny and the drummer did their best, and at the end there was a little scattered applause. She sang two more songs, then said to Kenny. ‘Now you can play me off.’

That night at the Manila Hotel there was an invasion of spiders as big as golf balls. In the middle of the night Bernard was aroused from his sleep. ‘Balls! Balls! They’re huge. Come and catch them.’ Shirley cowered in the corridor while Bernard removed two monsters from her bed and threw them into the garden outside. When he tried
to go back to his room Shirley grabbed his arm. ‘You’re staying in my room. I’m terrified of spiders.’ There was no re-awakening of love’s young dream, nor, fortunately, more spiders. Since the advent of Australian Charlie Baxter, both of them had moved on to pastures new.

Four days later Shirley and Bernard arrived in Las Vegas. Kenny Clayton had gone back to London to fulfil a contract touring with Matt Monro. He was very surprised when Kenneth Hume gave him a thank-you present of a Rolex watch, with an engraving on the back, ‘For services rendered.’ Shirley missed Kenny. He was a top class musician, very supportive, and such an easy person to travel with. However, by then she had performed in Vegas and New York five or six times, knew the ropes, and got on well with the other musical directors of the various orchestras.

After a day’s rest Shirley opened her 1966 six-weeks’ season at the Sahara Hotel. She was, as always, a great success in Las Vegas and this year was no different. Las Vegas audiences appreciated her style of singing and not only did ‘Goldfinger’ bring gales of applause, but they loved the way she teased the concealed eroticism from typical showbiz songs such as ‘Hey, Big Spender’ from
Sweet Charity.
And of course the strident trumpet-like blast she injected into songs such as, ‘I, Who Have Nothing’, and ‘No Regrets’.

After her opening show, Shirley uncharacteristically allowed herself to sit in the Sahara lounge and enjoy a couple of glasses of champagne. In the dry desert atmosphere of Las Vegas, Shirley’s first concern was her voice. She had two humidifiers installed in her suite, and told Bernard she would not stay long downstairs. A number
of entertainers who were performing in other hotels congregated afterwards at the Sahara for a post-show drink and a chat. Bernard recognised some of the showgirls who had worked with him in London and Copenhagen, mostly English and American girls, and he was delighted to see Rudolph, an old friend from Paris, who had been a dancer at the Paris Lido.

Rudolph was tall and slim with blond hair and blue eyes and was now earning two thousand dollars a night in Las Vegas for dancing in nothing but a rather large G-string. Rudolph couldn’t take his eyes off Shirley, and she found him very personable. When she stood up to say goodnight, Rudolph was dashed.

When it happened again the next night, Rudolph demanded to know why ‘anyone so beautiful as you always goes up to her suite after her performance. Why do you not stay below talking and having a drink like the rest of us?’

‘Because,’ said Shirley honestly, ‘I love to watch television.’

‘So do I,’ exclaimed Rudolph, ‘but I hate to watch it alone.’

From then on, after their shows were over, for the rest of Shirley’s season at the Sahara, no one saw much of her or Rudolph again.

Security at the Sahara Hotel was overpowering. Rather than use the lift all the time Bernard would run up stairs to see Shirley. On every floor he was stopped by armed guards. He became quite accustomed to a gun being pointed in his direction, but in the end had to accept that Las Vegas was run by the Mafia. The Sahara Hotel had everything to offer but freedom and nothing would tempt Shirley down at
night. She and Rudolph preferred to watch TV, she told Bernard. It was the easiest way to pass the time and the safest. She’d seen how rough ‘The Mob’ could be on her first visit to New York years ago. Not even the fact that Sammy Davis Jr was often around made her change her mind and come down from her room.

Bernard was now unexpectedly engaged to an American showgirl called Jillian from the Flamingo Hotel. If he married an American citizen he could get the much sought-after Green Card that would enable him to work in the States, and Jillian would become a British subject, able to work in London.

Bernard thought he’d better ask Shirley what she thought of the idea. ‘She’s a very nice girl, probably make me a very good wife,’ he told her.

‘You must be out of your mind,’ she said. ‘You need a wife like you need a hole in the head. Forget it.’ He thought about it and realised she was right; he could only live with bad-tempered, power crazy, strong women like Shirley Bassey or Marlene Dietrich.