When she was better, Shirley and Sylvia dressed up to the nines, Sylvia wearing one of Shirley’s mink stoles and went to watch a tennis match at Wimbledon. The reigning Wimbledon champion, American Ashley Cooper, had sent Shirley tickets. ‘I remember how very attractive Shirley looked,’ says Sylvia. ‘She just mowed the men down. That day we really felt we were the bee’s knees. I was sorry when she drove off to Dolphin Square.’
Before Shirley started serious preparations for the new revue, Blue Magic, Sullivan got together a complete variety show to do a short tour for Moss Empires. Shirley would have the second half of the show to herself, and Sylvia and her partner, the dancing sister act, would be part of the first half. ‘We opened the first half,’ laughed Sylvia in recalling that time. ‘And you can’t get much lower than that, but we loved every moment. And the show did so well. Of course Shirley was our big star, so we had full houses in every town we visited.’
Sullivan realised that Shirley had a new boyfriend, Clive Sharp. He knew vaguely that Clive Sharp and his partner Maurice King were, as he said, ‘two faces you would see around London.’ He didn’t consider them in the same league as he was professionally, but Shirley was over twenty-one and her choice of boyfriends was out of his control.
Annis Abraham found out that Shirley and Clive Sharp were more than just good friends when Clive and Shirley visited his nightclub in Cardiff. As usual Annis asked Shirley if she would sing a song. Shirley agreed quite happily but, when she got up, Clive put out a hand and held her back. He said, ‘Shirley must not sing here’, as if he had some control over her movements. His actions were noticed by a number of people and Annis was disturbed. He was a business associate of these men, he had introduced Shirley to them. ‘Who are those men sitting with Shirley Bassey and telling her what to do?’ a customer asked Annis. ‘They’re just advisers,’ he said.
The next time Annis visited The Showbiz Club, the drinking club in Soho in which he had an interest with Sharp and King, he found Shirley sitting in the lobby, waiting for Clive. Inside the club, Clive was chatting up some girls sitting around the bar. He was shocked. Like most people in Tiger Bay he took great pride in Shirley’s success, and Clive was letting her sit outside waiting for him while he joked with these women. For Annis, brought up with Tiger Bay’s strict moral code, it showed a lack of respect.
Sullivan was the next one to wonder what it was all about. He was deep in preparation for what he thought would be Shirley’s first musical. He’d met Clive Sharp; Shirley had brought him to dinner at his new house near Woking. Just another West End face who ran a drinking club in Soho he thought. Not what he’d have advised, because drinking clubs in Soho could get a bad name. But there again, if Shirley had fallen for the guy, it was not his affair.
Before rehearsals started for Blue Magic, Michael thought it would be a good idea to try out new songs from the show at a town not too far from London. Colchester in Essex was the chosen place and he went down there to see how Shirley was getting on. In her dressing room sat Clive Sharp and Maurice King. Sullivan went down a second time – to discuss business, and the same pair were once again in Shirley’s dressing room. Shirley said to him. ‘Anything you want to say, you can discuss in front of these two gentlemen.’
Clive Sharp, who Michael had thought was just another boyfriend, was now, it seemed, taking a role in her business life as well as her romantic one. He was, said Sullivan, gradually and subtly taking Shirley away from him. When Shirley failed to turn up for two rehearsals, Michael went round to see her at Dolphin Square. Shirley told him that the contract he had with her, signed when she was a minor, would now have to be reviewed.
The day of reckoning had arrived and Sullivan felt he had no one but himself to blame. He should not have been surprised either when, after two new contracts were drawn up, the first between the producer of Blue Magic and Shirley, and the second between himself and Shirley, she declined to sign the latter.
By 1959 Michael Sullivan’s reign was over. Jock Jacobson, an agent with links to MCA, the giant American monopoly, was taking his place as agent and booker, with Clive Sharp and Maurice King as Shirley’s managers. Her new managers banned Sullivan from going backstage at the Prince of Wales Theatre, but he went to the opening night of Blue Magic, and saw how well the girl he had discovered four years earlier now succeeded as the star of a big West End revue. It was a bitter pill to swallow.
February 1959 was not the happiest month for Sullivan. He was sueing Shirley for eight thousand pounds, because his contract with her was still valid, and he could not move on and manage anyone else until that action was heard in court.
Time went by, then less than a month before the court case in January 1960, Shirley rang him up and said that she wanted to see him. ‘Are you doing this to get out of the court case? he asked.
‘No, Mikey,’ she answered in the sweetest way. ‘Come round and let’s talk.’
By then Shirley had left Dolphin Square. ‘I’m fed up with furnished flats,’ she declared, and bought a house in Stanhope Place, Mayfair. Every time Shirley moved in London from then on, it was to an ever more exclusive address. She had paid twelve thousand pounds for her narrow terraced house overlooking Hyde Park and a stone’s throw from Marble Arch. It had four bedrooms, two reception rooms, dining room, two kitchens and two bathrooms (one of which had a pale pink sunken bath) and the little white poodle Beaujolais loved it. ‘Now I’ve got roots. I’ve furnished a guest room,’ said Shirley, ‘and perhaps my mother will come and stay. I’m dying to see her face when she walks in.’ Outside her house was a red Chevrolet convertible which had replaced her Jaguar.
When Sullivan rang the bell, her hit song, ‘As I Love You,’ chimed out. The door was opened by Gerda, Shirley’s German housekeeper, and Shirley was really pleased to see him. As they talked she told Sullivan that the first year of freedom had been wonderful, then she started missing the man who had devoted himself completely to Shirley Bassey. She had a good agent but he was part of a big corporation. ‘I need someone who thinks I am enough’, Shirley told him, ‘someone who will look after me and my career, like you.’
Instead of meeting in court, Michael and Shirley signed a new contract. Shirley would pay Sullivan the customary twenty per cent and she would pay her own expenses.
Three weeks later they were in Sydney at the start of a two-month Australian tour. Shirley was now used to making her own decisions and if she wanted something done she expected everyone to do it; she was no longer the girl who could be ordered about. Shirley had grown up and Sullivan found it hard to adjust. They still had one or two noisy battles, but now Shirley always won.
At one nightclub Shirley found the audience were very loud. They never stopped talking and didn’t seem to care whether she sang or not. Finally, she had enough and decided to ask her pianist to play her off. Sullivan made a scene in her dressing room. ‘The audience expect to have the whole programme . . .’ Shirley cut him short. ‘I had finished my act. As an encore I would have sung another song if they’d wanted it, but I decided that they didn’t.’ Sullivan knew finally that he was no longer in control.
On the way home from Australia they decided to spend a few days at the Americana Hotel in New York. It was always useful to renew old contacts and make fresh ones.
Shirley seemed very happy to have met a friend from London in the hotel lift. Later she introduced him to Sullivan; his name was Kenneth Hume. Sullivan remembered having met Hume once in London. He was in television, and one of his many jobs was making advertisements for ATV (Associated Television). He was a bit of an all-rounder, a bit of a mystery.
Kenneth Hume was shorter than Shirley, about five-foot-four, and sandy haired. He was in his late thirties, and had a bit of a pixie look, with a turned-up nose and rather big ears. He was obviously a Londoner and there was just a touch of the cockney barrow boy about him now and then when he raised his voice. He was making a great fuss of Shirley and she loved every moment of it.
Once back in London Sullivan was negotiating a six-week season at the Opera House in Blackpool for Shirley when the owner of the exclusive Les Ambassadeurs club in Park Lane telephoned to say that Shirley and Kenneth Hume were in the club and had just announced their engagement. Sullivan could hardly believe it. ‘Give them a bottle of champagne from me,’ he said.
Shirley herself gave an interview in which she explained in greater detail what had happened. ‘I liked Kenneth,’ she told the interviewer, ‘but I didn’t fancy him. It was one of those things that crept up on me. Then suddenly over dinner it hit me, Boing! It was magic. Sexual chemistry is the key to a relationship. It’s wonderful when it happens,’ Shirley declared. It was obviously enough to make Shirley and Kenneth announce their engagement at Les Ambassadeurs.
Sullivan had made it his business to find out what he could about Shirley’s fiancé. When he next saw Shirley alone he said to her, ‘You can’t marry Kenneth Hume.’
‘Oh yes, I can.’
‘Shirley, he’s a known homosexual. Listen to me, it never works.’
‘Oh yes it does. We love each other and he will change for me.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Mikey,’ said Shirley. ‘You don’t know Kenneth Hume. I know much more about him than you do.’ Shirley enjoyed a level of ease and familiarity with homosexuals that Sullivan could never share. Bernard Hall, one of her earlier lovers, had been bisexual. He’d been a good lover and a good friend.
Yet when Bernard Hall heard about Shirley’s engagement to Kenneth Hume he, too, could hardly believe it. He was touring in Spain when one of his girls produced an English newspaper and showed him a picture of Shirley and Kenneth. ‘Do you know him?’ she asked. ‘Yes,’ said Bernard, ‘I know him well.’
It had been a friendship that had started when Bernard was a drama student at the Italia Conti stage school in the mid-1940s. He had been seventeen and Kenneth must have been about twenty-one. ‘I was buying an apple for my lunch and Kenneth was on the other side of the barrow. I thought that Kenneth was part of the market. “Wotcha cock,” he said to me with his gap-toothed grin and bright eyes. He was soon calling me Bernie, which I hated.’
Bernard noticed that people were always stopping Kenneth in the streets of Soho, asking him if he could get them this or that. ‘“Okay, but it’ll cost you.” I knew that one day Kenneth would be rich, even though he was killing himself with sixty cigarettes a day and junk food. And he never relaxed for a moment, he was always on the go. He hardly drank wine or spirits, it was cups of tea all the time.
‘It sounds odd,’ continued Bernard, ‘but we weren’t at all jealous of each other. I was good-looking and ambitious but I also knew that I hadn’t Kenneth’s brains. I used to think he had a touch of genius. We were friends, Kenneth was kind to me when he didn’t have to be, when I was a kid without a bean.’
There was nothing sexual in their friendship. Bernard hadn’t homosexual tendencies in those days, and Kenneth’s inclinations tended towards blonds who had a touch of choirboy innocence about them. ‘Not that I even thought about things like that at the time,’ said Bernard. ‘I was young and broke and we just used to chat. I liked him. He had an East End accent in those days, and I used to think of him as “the little cockney sparrow”, but he knew everything that was going on in London, and he was crazy about the stage and the screen although he was not well-liked in the film world. I guess you could say he was a typical “wide boy” of the time.’
Even so, he found the idea that Kenneth and Shirley were in love hard to take. He could not accept that Kenneth had fallen in love with Shirley in the accepted sense. Kenneth was openly homosexual and even if he was having a bisexual fling with Shirley, he would probably revert quite quickly to the kind of encounters he preferred.
But Bernard eventually conceded that Shirley was very young, she was only twenty-two and she might believe she was in love with him. She certainly needed someone to look after her, and if Kenneth liked people he was honest with them so he might well be good to her.
The happy couple went off to Cannes for the 1961 Film Festival. They stayed for a few days at the Carlton Hotel in great style and pictures were taken of them with Shirley looking glamorous in diaphanous beachwear and Kenneth lounging in white pants and a smart towelling shirt. Kenneth played roulette at Juan les Pins, the next casino resort down the coast. Back home in Soho he was known as a gambler, a man who could always be relied on to make up the number in a game of cards. In the South of France, John Mills (not to be confused with the actor) who ran Les Ambassadeurs marvelled at the way Kenneth played three roulette tables at the same time – and actually won.
The couple drank aperitifs on the smart Carlton Terrace, and dined at the most expensive restaurant on the Côte d’Azur at La Napoule. Kenneth was in his element. A beautiful, exotic looking wife-to-be made him an object of envy for the first time in his life.
Shirley returned from France for her six-week season at the Opera House, Blackpool. There was an unhappy feeling of a ménage à trois in the air backstage. Shirley, the star of the show was driven backwards and forwards to the stage door by Kenneth Hume in his hired Rolls Royce while Sullivan, who was still Shirley’s legal partner lurked unhappily in the wings.
Kenneth told Sullivan that he thought it might be a good idea, if, now that he was managing Shirley, Sullivan could make himself useful in other ways. For instance, he could stand in the wings for Shirley’s performance holding a box of tissues and a glass of water, so that she could dab her face and take a sip of water now and then.
Sullivan knew perfectly well that Hume was trying to humiliate him, to insult and anger him so much that he would walk out of the theatre in a rage and perhaps lose his rights over the show completely. At last, he suggested that if Hume was so anxious to get rid of him he should meet his lawyer and buy him out.
Michael Sullivan received a cheque for ten thousand pounds and this time his relationship with Shirley Bassey was finally over. Kenneth Hume was now in charge.
11
MARRIAGE AND MEN
THURSDAY, 8 JUNE 1961, The South Wales Echo
SHIRLEY BASSEY WEDS
Shirley Bassey, the singer from Cardiff, wearing a pink costume with toque hat and veil to match arrived at the Paddington, London, Register Office just before 9.30 a.m. in Mr Hume’s light coffee coloured Bentley – registered number KH 14. About two minutes after the bride had entered the building Mr Hume arrived wearing a dark blue suit with a rose in his lapel. About fourteen minutes later bride and groom appeared arm in arm. A group of housewives with prams shopping in the busy street wished her ‘Good luck, Shirley.’
It was Shirley’s first marriage. She was twenty-four. Shirley had several times refused marriage proposals from film producer, Kenneth Hume. But now she had married him. Shirley herself offered one reason why she gave in at last. She said, ‘Kenneth was eleven years older than me. My father left my mother when I was about two and for a long time I was looking for a father figure in all my men.’
The news of Shirley’s marriage was not well received by all. Someone said, ‘All he does is strut down Wardour Street and pretend to be a film producer. He’ll spend all her money on gambling.’ Even actress Diana Dors, who was well known for her good sense of humour as well as her bad taste in men, wasn’t too keen on Kenneth Hume. ‘I haven’t always picked the right men, but I certainly was lucky when I missed that one.’
But with Shirley, Kenneth seemed to show another side. He was a better manager for her than Michael Sullivan. Apart from being her legal husband there was always an element of protectiveness in Kenneth’s attitude to Shirley. From the beginning of their marriage they would have slanging matches with each other and the air would turn blue with expletives, but Shirley was used to such scenes; her noisy quarrels with Sullivan had been well known throughout show business. If you wanted a quiet life with Shirley you let her make the decisions, but the men in her life often enjoyed the drama of an argument.
Kenneth Hume had an office of his own in Wardour Street when he married Shirley. He had staff, and connections in the profession whom he could call on. Sullivan had started his management of Shirley on a shoestring, and apart from Sylvia and Berry, never delegated anyone else to look after her. But Kenneth Hume made sure there was always someone with her on tour who would take care of her. He did not tour with her himself, although he’d sometimes make a quick visit to wherever she was, but he never put himself in the position of being at her beck and call. She could telephone him wherever she was in the world and complain and he’d listen, but he didn’t always act.
Hume was very lucky to have an exceptional office manager in Leslie Simmons, who would arrange timetables, hotels and planes to perfection. All Shirley’s tours were well planned and if the boss didn’t interfere nothing would go wrong. Kenneth Hume would negotiate her fee and make sure she was paid both well and on time. He took good advice on the best way to invest and increase Shirley’s money.
It seemed obvious why Shirley had left Sullivan for Hume. Apart from her husband’s superior business acumen, he had a more sensitive and gentle nature. Bernard Hall has said, ‘In spite of the fact that Kenneth could be a number one bastard, mean and cruel and secretive, with his eye always on the main chance, I thought that this toughness of his didn’t go all that deep. I sensed at the time that this was true and found out later that he was vulnerable in many ways. He looked after his interests and decided which company was most profitable for her.’
On Kenneth’s advice Shirley had left Phillips, and was now with EMI Records. In 1961 she made six recordings, produced by Norman Newell. They included, ‘You’ll Never Know’, ‘So in Love’, and ‘As Long as He Needs Me’ from Lionel Bart’s Oliver! This record proved to be one of Shirley’s biggest bestsellers. With Hume’s help, she was on her way to becoming a major recording star. Like Sullivan before him, he knew what enormous returns there were in the recording side of the business.
Shirley Page 16