Justice Marcus Edwards backed Shirley’s version of the events that night. He found Hilary Levy an unpersuasive witness. In contrast, Shirley Bassey was persuasive and Bo Mills also verified Shirley’s account of the incident.
Shirley was given a great ovation by the crowd of jubilant fans outside, and accepted a bunch of red roses. She said, ‘I’ve been so tense over the past few days. I just want to have a rest now. I’m so glad it has ended. Hilary accused me of being anti-Semitic, which is untrue. I have been in show business, which is full of Jewish people, for forty-five years, I have a Jewish manager, Jewish friends, Jewish boyfriends. I also have a daughter who is half-Jewish. Hilary thought she would get away with it. But in the end truth wins out, as it always does.’
Shirley hoped that Sharon, her daughter, wouldn’t be too surprised to hear the truth about her father at last. She had never told her. As Shirley left she threw each one of the red roses that had been given her to the well-wishers in the crowd. Then she disappeared into her black Mercedes.
Shirley’s musical achievements in the past have been prodigious. There are those twenty silver discs for sales in Holland, Britain and France and some fifty plus gold discs for international record sales. In a twenty-year period she was up in the charts in well over three hundred weeks.
She was, and is, one of Britain’s best-selling singing stars, with more best-selling singles and albums than any other female performer. The list of her achievements goes on and on:
Voted Best Singles Singer by TV Times in 1973 Awards.
Voted Best Female Solo Singer in the last fifty years of recorded music in the Brittannia Award in 1977.
Voted Best Female Entertainer for 1976 by the American Guild of Variety Artists.
Her most recent recordings include, Shirley Bassey Sings the Songs of Andrew Lloyd Webber (1993); Shirley Bassey Sings the Movies (1995); The Birthday Concert (1997) and The Diamond Collection: 1958–1998.
In 1996 she collaborated with Chris Rea to produce the very successful clubland hit, ‘La Passione’. Then in 1998 her reinvention of herself contrived with the PropellerHeads number ‘History Repeating’. The PropellerHeads, so called after their zany headgear, started out as a couple of amateur DJs from Bath, but by the time they met Shirley they had got a group together that had a soaring reputation. They provided backing for the new Bond movie and also the sound track for the film Lost in Space. Most of all they had introduced the new ‘big beat’ music scene and they wanted Shirley for their latest recording.
Big beat wasn’t new to Shirley, it was as they said, ‘history repeating itself.’ She had actually grown up with a variety of it; the frenetic rhythms, the syncopated jazz and the beat of the drums. She loved the recording she made with the PropellorHeads. Shirley, in her Diamond Concert at the Royal Festival Hall on 21 June 1998, invited her London audience to join her beating out the rhythm of ‘History Repeating’.
Backed by a superb orchestra and brilliantly lit, she stood there in a dress of silver and gold beads that showed more of Shirley than had been seen for a long time. Her figure was well worth showing off to her appreciative audience. Shirley, with the kind of body she had as a teenager about forty-five years ago, got the whole house on their feet as she belted out,
‘The next big thing is here, but to me it all seems clear
That it’s all just a little bit of history repeating . . .’
Her audience sings the beat with her as if they are chanting the history of their star. But the voice is better than ever. Shirley gets a standing ovation.
Other tempting ideas are suggested to Shirley. Would she do a chat show? Better still, how would she like a chat show of her own? But first she says, she has to get on with her summer open air concerts. After the Royal Festival Hall, she will do her tour of famous castles. Last year they were a great success, Castle Howard was breathtakingly beautiful, and then there was Althorp Park before the tragedy that turned it into a memorial park. Thousands attended the castles with alfresco family picnics before the Shirley Bassey concert. There was a touch of street party appeal about these occasions, with everyone enjoying themselves on the rolling lawns, grannies and teenagers, and Mums and Dads with babies and children.
That is what Shirley has said she wants to do, provide entertainment from the top to the bottom of the family. And later on, when the babies are asleep, there is Shirley on the stage under the pink and blue lights, supremely confident in white, feathers from her cape fluttering in the evening breeze. She sings, ‘This is My Life’. She has survived a life of much heartache but has been strengthened by it. ‘I must have been strong as a child,’ she has said. ‘I didn’t realise how strong until I think of all these things that have happened to me.’
The girl from Tiger Bay has completely vanished; she has grown into a rich European woman, elegant in couture clothes, dining in Monte Carlo restaurants. ‘I am a champagne person,’ she once said. Her childhood friendships have gone, even her family who once lived in Bute Street, Tiger Bay, are spread out more thinly – some dead, and some long gone elsewhere. Sharon and her family have taken their place. The men who escort the star nowadays are mostly old friends or men who work with her management. She enjoys dates but she also likes being alone.
The fans remain. Hundreds, thousands, millions of fans throughout the world. They worship her, they cry, ‘I love you, Shirley,’ as they rush to the stage with their gifts of flowers, teddy bears, champagne and chocolates. This degree of adulation makes Shirley uneasy. ‘I feel like I am some goddess, and they are giving up an offering to me.’
Why do they do it? To try and understand one should stand in the foyer of the Royal Festival Hall and watch the audience stream in for a Shirley Bassey Concert. Pretty normal couples, mostly over forty, some young girls and boys, some old people all here to watch a seemingly ageless and indestructible star light up the stage with her presence and their lives with her voice.
Perhaps some of them have been watching Shirley Bassey for thirty years or more and feel they are now part of her family. They clap, they shout, they cheer, they give her standing ovations. At the end of the concert they carry their gifts to the stage to lay at her feet.
Shirley protects her special magic. The fans must not come too close. The magic works better from a distance. Yet, ever complex and contradictory, she sometimes welcomes this kind of love, this torrent of devotion that swells from her audiences, that could consume her but raises her up like a goddess. Shirley Bassey, the diva, sings of love, and from her huge following, love comes back to her. ‘It keeps me going,’ she says. ‘It’s my life.’
Shirley aged six at Moorland Road Primary School, Splott.
Loudoun Square, Tiger Bay, where Shirley played with Iris Freeman.
The famous Ship & Pilot pub down by the docks in Tiger Bay.
Shirley aged fourteen on a Moorland Road School holiday at Porthcawl, 1951.
The Ben Johnson ballet group where Shirley was engaged to sing in 1955.
Shirley’s friend Louise Benjamin was a member of The Ben Johnson ballet group.
Shirley on stage in 1956 at the Adelphi with the Al Read show, Such Is Life.
Shirley wearing the dress made for her first performance in the Hippodrome tour at Keighley.
New Theatre flier from 1958; Shirley tops the bill above the man who had auditioned her for Welsh radio in 1952, Wyn Calvin.
Shirley returns to a rapturous homecoming in Tiger Bay, and sings to her old community in 1957.
A 1958 publicity shot.
Shirley before a performance in Antwerp with Sylvia (far left).
Berry Beresford-Clarke.
Shirley with her mother and two sisters, Marina (left) and Iris.
Shirley with Pepe Davies (top) and next to him her mother holding Shirley’s daughter Sharon, and Sharon’s foster parents Bill and Iris Denning with two children, 1956.
Shirley with American singer Johnny ‘Cry’ Ray on her Belgian tour.
Shirley’s firs
t manager, Michael Sullivan, recovering from TB before leaving for the Australian tour in 1957.
Shirley with her poodle Beaujolais in her Stanhope Place house, 1958.
Shirley in Cannes, 1962.
Bernard Halls (‘Balls’) – friend, colleague and occasional lover, 1966.
Peter Finch.
Shirley with her first husband Kenneth Hume, Sharon and Samantha in 1964.
Shirley sings in cabaret, Melbourne, 1966.
Glittering and provocative: a trademark Bassey performance, Bournemouth, 1974.
Shirley in Las Vegas with her husband Sergio Novak, 1968.
Shirley’s daughter Samantha Novak with a baby (not her own) not long before her death in 1985.
Shirley with her family in Monte Carlo: Samantha (left) , Mark, and Sergio (1977).
Shirley with her friend Bo Mills and her daughter Sharon, after receiving the CBE at Buckingham Palace, 1994.
Shirley curtsies to the Queen, watched by Michael Caine and Joan Collins (1998).
SOURCES
There have been no major books written about the life of Shirley Bassey. I relied upon interviews with people who knew and admired her before she became the international star that she is. Sometimes I was helped by the kindness of strangers, for instance the waitress at the Cardiff hotel who was also from Tiger Bay and lent me a book about her birthplace: The Tiger Bay Story by Neil M. G. Sinclair, (published by the Butetown History and Arts Projects, 1993); and also Ifor Harry, Shirley’s next-door neighbour when the Basseys lived in Splott. From these and many others I was able to build up a picture of Shirley’s young life.
Her steps to fame were helped by Michael Sullivan who included a chapter on Shirley in his book, There’s No People Like Show People, Quadrant Books, 1984. Through Sylvia, the wife of Sullivan’s partner, Berry I learned more about Shirley’s personality; Sylvia was always a great champion of Shirley. People who worked alongside Shirley in show business helped me understand the great pressures of public life. It wasn’t hard to find people who knew Shirley.
I offer thanks and acknowledgement to the following newspapers: The Empire News, The Sunday Chronicle, The News Chronicle, The Daily Mirror, The Sunday Mirror, The Daily Express, The Sunday Express, The Sunday People, The Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, The Times, The Sunday Times, The News of the World, The Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday, The Independent, The Cardiff Echo, The Cardiff Post, The South Wales Echo, Wales on Sunday, Cardiff and South Wales Times, The Argus, The Western Mail, Hello magazine, Ask magazine, the Radio Times, TV Times, The Sydney Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph (Sydney), The Melbourne Herald & Sun, The Las Vegas Sun, Ebony, After Dark (USA); and finally the Shirley Bassey Collector’s Club, New Jersey.
Picture credits
The plates in this book emanate from the following sources, to whom the author and publishers gratefully offer acknowledgement: Solo Syndication Limited/Daily Mail; P.A. News; Mirror Syndication International; Western Mail and Echo Limited and Redferns Music Picture Library. Also, the private collections of Sylvia Beresford Clarke, Michael Sullivan, Bernard Hall, Wyn Calvin and the author’s own collection.
The author and publishers have made all reasonable efforts to contact copyright holders for permission, and apologize for any omissions or errors in the form of credit given. Corrections may be made in future printings.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Bernard Hall most of all for giving me his reminicences about the years when he knew Shirley Bassey. He walked into my life, drank my whisky and told me about Marlene Dietrich, then he stayed on to tell me about Shirley. We had a very good friendship and I still miss him.
I would like to thank the people from Tiger Bay and Cardiff for their kindness and help in the writing of this book. They include, Bryn Jones, Neil Sinclair, Wyn Calvin, Louise Benjamin, Iris Freeman, Isabella Freeman, Olwen Watkins, Mr Wesley, Ifor Harry, Bill Barrett, Brian J. Lee, Annis Abraham and Jeanette Cockley.
And then, Emile Ilchuck from Pennsylvania, Brigit McCoppin from Melbourne, Sylvia Beresford Clarke, Kenny Clayton, Silvio Narizzano, Barbara Tieman, Rose Neighbour, Linda Scott, Paula Loveridge, and the staff of Dorking Library.
Finally I would like to thank my editor, Liz Rowlinson.
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Epub ISBN: 9781448185429
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Copyright © Muriel Burgess 1998
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First published in the United Kingdom in 1998 by Century,
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Shirley Page 30