‘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 leav
e 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.
6
MEET ME AT THE ASTOR
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.
Michael Sullivan made the first approach to Bertie Green, explaining that he was promoting a wonderful girl with an extraordinary voice. She was young and lovely and, though she was as yet unknown in London, she was a seasoned performer, even at that very moment on the last leg of a Hippodrome tour for Bernard Delfont.
‘Has she anything special to sing?’ asked Green. ‘Does she have her own songs?’
The question stymied Sullivan, but not for long. He immediately contacted a Soho connection in the music business and asked who was currently considered the best songwriter in town. The answer was Ross Parker who, among other things, had composed ‘There’ll always be an England’. ‘He’s tops,’ Michael was assured. Ross Parker turned out to be a large man with a very pleasant personality but, as he told Sullivan, his fee was three hundred pounds per song.
Michael didn’t blink. He nodded, and arranged to take Parker to see and hear Shirley in her show, which was playing not too far from London at Chatham. Shirley was enjoying a good week in Chatham, where every sailor in port was eager to get an eyeful and earful of the singer.
Shirley was catching on fast. She was at her most enchanting when she met Ross Parker after the show. Wide-eyed and admiring. ‘Oh, Mr Parker, are you really going to write a song just for me?’ The trip to Chatham had done the trick; Sullivan would worry about the money later. Meanwhile, he and Parker began working together, meeting at the flat of Juhni’s mother who had a piano. At their first session, Ross said, ‘Just tell me what you want, Mike.’
Sullivan had already given the matter some careful and canny thought. ‘Imagine that we’re in a nightclub,’ he said. ‘Imagine beautiful girls, men wanting to sow a few wild oats looking at them; getting ideas, wondering. Staying up late. Burning the candle at both ends. That kind of thing.’
‘What do you want to sell, Mike?’
‘Sex.’
‘I think Shirley Bassey has a very good voice and she’s got a great future,’ said Ross. ‘Let’s write her a very good song. Why don’t we start with your idea about burning the candle. Lovely light. Fabulous flame. Let’s think about heat . . . burning . . . sex. The girl needs help, the man needs help. Let’s call this song “Who’ll Help Me Burn My Candle”. At both ends . . .’
Ross Parker was an inspired lyric writer. It took him a little time, but when the song was finished, it was full of wit and innuendo. Shirley would need to learn fifty lines, and she still had one last booking, in Hull, before her tour was over. On the whole, the tour had gone smoothly, but in Workington an almighty row had erupted between Shirley and Michael over money. Most of their rows were over money. Shirley, it turned out, owed forty pounds in back commission to her first agent, Georgie Wood, and had held on to one of the salary cheques in order to pay it.
‘You’ve been using my money,’ declared a furious Sullivan. ‘You know you have to take your salary out and give the rest to me.’
‘I earn the money,’ argued Shirley. ‘I pay you.’
Resentment and anger escalated on both sides and led to Shirley in tears, while Sullivan insisted that he paid her and she owed him money. He drew up a balance sheet demonstrating just how much she was in debt to him. He was promoting her, he told her, and if she didn’t like the arrangement, he would tear up the contract there and then.
Never mind that she’d just had an unqualified rave review in Workington: ‘Shirley Bassey has a magnetic personality. We want to see much more of her.’
Never mind that next week she would be second-billed on her home ground, the New Theatre in Cardiff, where she would be going home to Sharon and to her mother . . . and Shirley wept because she couldn’t bear it if she didn’t go.
And so they made up. The week at Cardiff was a complete sell-out. All the Bay Girls came to the show and to Shirley’s dressing room afterwards, where she gave each of them a little keepsake that she had bought and wrapped. At last, Shirley Bassey was ‘The Rose’. In Tiger Bay the most beautiful girl in the community had always been called The Rose. The label had connotations of grace and charm and elegance. It was a great honour, far more so than simply being called the most beautiful girl, and it was an honour that had never been accorded to Shirley.
Now, at the New Theatre, wonderfully lit in her beautiful dress and full make-up, Shirley Bassey brought prestige to the community. Now she really was ‘The Rose of Tiger Bay’.
Ross Parker had gone up to see Shirley in Hull so that they could rehearse the new song and try it out in front of an audience. Shirley often remarked later in her career that, at first, she didn’t understand half the words she sang in that song. That may have been so, but Ross was very pleased with her an
d agreed that he would act as her accompanist when she opened at the Astor club. Shirley relied on his guidance for the correct phrasing and emphasis – without his help, she still lacked the experience to put the song across to its best advantage. It was as important to Ross as to Shirley and Michael that his new song should be a success.
Shirley was having a new dress made for the Astor: rich white silk, moulded to the contours of her body down to the knees, then flared out in stiffened folds to the floor. White suited her wonderfully, and this dress for her London debut was a prototype for the sort of clothes that became her trademark. Not for her the diaphanous little numbers in flimsy chiffon that reveal more than they conceal, but something beautiful, dramatic, and discreetly alluring. Her dresses have often had to withstand twenty-eight performances in a two-week booking; over the years they were designed to remain perennially fashionable.
Every outfit that Shirley has worn since her first London appearance has been made by an expert designer who understands what can happen to the dress. They have always been lined and made of resilient fabric. In the early days, Shirley had two brilliant young men, whom she called ‘the two boys’, who designed her stage clothes. She remained faithful to them and Douglas Darnell, who was one of those ‘two boys’, was still creating her outfits in the 1990s.
Agent Sonny Zahl, who negotiated the contract for Shirley’s two-week engagement at the Astor, had done well for her. Her salary was sixty-five pounds a week, a very decent sum in 1955. But, as Michael Sullivan said to her, ‘This is only a stepping stone Shirley, a stepping stone to something much better.’
One o’clock in the morning at the Astor club. By the pink glow of the shaded table-lamps, waiters are pouring champagne as music plays softly and couples in the red velvet banquettes hold hands. The cigarette girl, long legs in black fishnet tights topped by a lacy corset-style bodice, offers her tray of expensive cigars.
Shirley Page 8