by Ray Connolly
She was brought up in Stockholm where her father had a shop that sold women’s clothes. At fifteen she fell in love for the first time, with a boy who played the drums, and they even became secretly engaged, although she didn’t dare wear her ring at home. At night she slept with it under her pillow.
‘That,’ she says, ‘was the only time I was ever engaged. He was a nice boy, but I happened to see him in the street about two years ago, and he’s got so fat, and his hair was so short that I felt he must be a car salesman. It seems such a shame, because he was from such a groovy family. When I met Peter we never had time to become engaged.
‘When I was at school I didn’t know I was going to be an actress and I was hideous. I mean I was so fat — like Harry Secombe, I promise you. And I had long rat-coloured hair, which the adverts call Swedish blonde, which hung down like strings of spaghetti around my head. I was terribly unattractive and a disgrace to my parents. And then at seventeen I became more and more normal and slimmer, too. And I learned how to make the most of myself. You know, I used to read those handbooks for women who don’t know. I still use them now and again.’
She has, she says, a wide circle of friends, mostly from the film industry, but her closest friend is still her former husband. She gets upset when he is attacked, and she’s glad she missed the television portrait of him.
She is not a rich woman: ‘How can I be rich? I think at the divorce we were very fair to each other. I have worked very hard for the past two years so now I am all right for the time being.’
But she has a Swedish film, an Italian film with Pierre Clementi called The Cannibals, one called Machine Gun McCain with John Cassavetes and an American film called Stiletto all to be released yet.
‘The Cannibals was very avant-garde, and a few days ago I got a call from New York in the middle of the night asking me to be in an Andy Warhol picture. So I told them to send me the script. It was very funny to read — all about a girl who gets obscene telephone calls, who gets hung up on them and has to find the man who’s making them and make love with him. And then there was a scene in it where an old stag movie star was auditioning lots of girls and making love to them at the rate of fifteen girls a second or something. I would have done it if it had been something new, but I can’t really see myself in that sort of film.’
POSTSCRIPT As long as I’ve known Britt, which is since this article was first published, she has been complaining about being poor, but she seems to live all right. After Patrick Lichfield, her regular companions became first Lou Adler and then Rod Stewart. Rod Stewart?!! Well, there’s no accounting for taste.
September 1970
Dusty Springfield
Dusty Springfield looks as though she’s playing at doctor-during-consulting-hours sitting there in that white walled room at Philips Records meeting the all and sundry members of the musical press.
I’ve never met Dusty before. She says: ‘You’re sinister. Would you mind if I go to the loo before we start?’ And then with her tassles tinkling like summer 1967, she goes off down the corridor in a Mini-Ha-Ha embroidered suit, and wearing a great chunk of fancy iron and brass work around her neck which looks like something she might have pinched off a Russian Orthodox altar.
She’s thirty and hasn’t really had a big hit record for some quite considerable time. It’s a cliché but it’s true. Pop does have an awful lot of obsolescence hanging all over it. She’s still singing as well as ever, dreamy and romantic, and I like her very much, but the public aren’t buying her in the volume they used to.
Her new record is called ‘How Can I Be Sure?’ and was originally a hit in America for the Rascals. She’ll be surprised if it’s a hit for her in Britain.
‘That,’ she says, ‘comes from a backlog of doubts in myself because the last few records have gone wrong. And I’m always a bit surprised to sell records anyway. It would be a souring experience if I were not to have any more hits, but I would survive. It would be a test of character for me. I very seldom think about it, but if it did happen I’d probably get out unless I could find some other direction to go in. I don’t particularly want to be a cabaret type of entertainer. Whether or not I could be defeated into accepting that type of existence I don’t know.’
She’s plumper than I’d expected (’I’m nine stone and I should be eight-two or eight-four. But I’m too lazy to bother about slimming’), and amazingly she still apparently buys her eyelashes by the yard, and mascara by the hundredweight. Her eyes aren’t as black as they were, she insists, looking short-sightedly through a pinkish coloured Perspex ruler at me.
‘This,’ she squints, ‘is the best colour in the world. It’s really erotic. I suppose I’ve got very erotic tastes. I like purple and magenta and all the tarty colours. I don’t wear them any more. I should go back to them because I’ve become very sedate. I’m all talk and no action. I’ve been very un-newsworthy recently. Haven’t been throwing any custard pies at anyone or anything.’
She was brought up a Catholic but never goes to Mass now. ‘It’s about six years since I made my Easter Duties. My mother’s going to love this. I still think that because I don’t go to confession I’m going to go to hell. I’ll be very lucky to go to purgatory. But I don’t want to go to hell because I haven’t really done anything evil. I’m just lazy and self-indulgent.’
She’s a strange lady of contradictions. She wants me to send her a copy of an old Maureen Cleave article but she won’t give me her address. She never gives it, she insists, and then in the next breath tells me. She has a pretty, lumpy little face which looks best when she smiles. I notice she has a big shiny grey filling in her pre-molar bottom left. Her hair is the colour of dried leaves.
I think she’s a bit sad, but she says no, not at all. The last thing she wants is to be pitied. Only occasionally, when she needs someone to lean on is she lonely. Much of the time she shares her house with songwriter/painter Norma Tanega.
She is concerned that whatever I may ask her will make her sound conceited. So I suggest that she tells me about her little vices, and with an enthusiasm which is almost self-destructive, she sets about it, giggling from time to time at her own ability to rattle me.
‘Well, I don’t pick my nose, but I burp like everyone else. I don’t cut my toe nails, but I pull at them and tear them off. And I’m promiscuous. Not often, but when I am, I really am. I’m not a nymphomaniac. In fact, I could do with a lot more action really. I think my laziness even spreads so far.
‘It’s an effort to be promiscuous. I don’t mean that I leap into bed with someone every night, but my affections are easily swayed and I can be very unfaithful. It’s fun while it’s happening, but it’s not fun afterwards because I’m filled with self-recriminations. The truth is I’m just very easily flattered by people’s attentions, and after a couple of vodkas I’m even more flattered.’
She’s giggling a lot now. ‘I suppose to say I’m promiscuous is a bit of bravado on my part. I think it’s more in thought than action. I’ve been that way ever since I discovered the meaning of the word. I used to go to confession and tell all my impure thoughts.’
Suddenly she becomes serious again, and begins to space her words out carefully and thoughtfully. ‘There’s one thing that’s always annoyed me — and I’m going to get into something nasty here. But I’ve got to say it, because so many other people say I’m bent, and I’ve heard it so many times that I’ve almost learned to accept it.
‘I don’t go leaping around to all the gay clubs but I can be very flattered. Girls run after me a lot and it doesn’t upset me. It upsets me when people insinuate things that aren’t true. I couldn’t stand to be thought of as a big butch lady. But I know that I’m as perfectly capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy. More and more people feel that way and I don’t see why I shouldn’t.
‘There was someone on television the other night who admitted that he swings either way. I suppose he could afford to say it, but I, being a pop singer, shouldn’t even admi
t that I might think that way. But if the occasion arose I don’t see why I shouldn’t.
‘And yet, I get such a charge out of walking down a street and having a guy who’s digging the road giving me a whistle. This business makes me feel very unwomanly sometimes and I love to be admired just for being a woman. I don’t feel masculine. If I did I’d have more drive. But being a woman is very precious to me, and that’s probably why I could never get mixed up in a gay scene because it would be bound to undermine my sense of being a woman.
‘I’ve had this reputation for years, but I don’t know how I got it. I’m always hearing that I’ve been down to this gay club and that gay club. But I haven’t. I sometimes wonder if it would be nice to live up to my reputation.
‘I got raided the other day by the police. But they didn’t find any drugs. I’ve hardly ever smoked as a matter of fact. As it happens I think I know who tipped them off, and it relates to what I’ve been saying. There was a rather hysterical lady who was upset because I didn’t fancy her. I think it was her.’
She is not involved with anyone at the moment, and I wonder if she fears that she may never have a family.
‘I don’t know whether I want children or not,’ she says. ‘The urge to reproduce is always there, of course, but then I think “what for?” I probably wouldn’t be a terribly good mother. It would be great spasmodic moods of affection which don’t last and that wouldn’t be very stable.
‘I would like children psychologically and physically, although there’s something which stops me from just reproducing. But there has to be something more than what I do. There just has to be something more for me.’
I offer to take her home and out we go through the doors past the Philips records executives who smile and wave goodbye to their lady star in great hearty fashion.
‘D’you realise,’ she laughs, ‘what I’ve just said could put the final seal to my doom. I don’t know, though. I might attract a whole new audience.’
POSTSCRIPT Dusty Springfield was, and is, one of my favourite singers. She was one of the true witty originals of the sixties and I hope she never regretted saying the things printed in this piece. For the past ten years she has been living largely in Los Angeles, but was reported to be distraught when a planned tour of Britain in 1979 was cancelled because tickets could not be sold.
April 1970
Paul Mccartney
Had he been a king who abdicated, the convulsions of disappointment and accusations which ran around the world with the reports that Paul McCartney had left the Beatles could have been little more acute.
The half-interested shook their heads and said ‘sad but inevitable’, a generation of young people wondered if they’d really been betrayed by one of their favourite human beings, and the media of the world rushed out their potted obituaries on the group who became the standard bearers of Western youth in the age of communication.
Yet in the rush to put the nails in the coffin, hardly anyone took the time to ask themselves if it was Paul McCartney who had actually killed the Beatles. Was it not possible that the corpse had been in deep freeze for months? Or, seen from another angle, how do you kill what doesn’t exist? Because to all intents and purposes during the last three years the Beatles only ever existed as an entity in the recording studios (where they haven’t been together since last August) or in our nostalgic fantasies.
Paul McCartney didn’t kill the Beatles. If the group is dead (and judging by what John Lennon has told me recently it is quite, quite dead) McCartney might be seen as the last survivor. If he has quit, and he still hasn’t confirmed it, he was the last to go. (John Lennon, however, told me quite definitely last December that he’d finished with the Beatles for ever — but asked me at that time not to make it known publicly.)
The confusion about McCartney’s role in the affair was the result of an ambiguous and loosely-worded statement issued by Paul to coincide with the release of his first solo album, ‘McCartney’. In it he said that he no longer foresaw a time when he would write songs with Lennon again, and that he had no plans for recording with the Beatles again. There were no plans for recording with the Beatles again because for months there had been no Beatles.
As soon as the statement was issued (and before in the case of one newspaper) the storm broke.
‘It was all a misunderstanding,’ Paul told me. ‘I just thought “Christ, what have I done? Now we’re in for it,” and my stomach started churning up. I never intended the statement to mean “Paul McCartney quits Beatles”.’
Nor was it intended as a publicity stunt, which is something which has been widely suggested, and which has upset him deeply. When your name is McCartney you don’t need that kind of publicity to sell your record.
A few days ago Paul McCartney decided to break his year-long silence and be interviewed. He wanted to clear up the confusion about his relations with the other Beatles, and with Allen Klein, and to kill the rumours that he was now ‘a hermit living in a cave somewhere with a ten-foot beard’. He wanted to show me that he really was a happily married man with a nice family and a good life. But most of all he wanted to talk — to work things out in conversation, as much for his own personal benefit as for the sake of the interview.
We met for lunch in a Soho businessman’s restaurant. He and Linda, and me. With hardly moments for the hellos, he’d launched into his theme, talking rapidly and intently, and only occasionally allowing Linda to come in as support, and verification. He wanted to put it all straight, to show that no one was to blame for what had happened, and when after two and a half hours’ non-stop talking he had cleared up his mind and mine too, he laughed and said he felt better now, got in his car and went home.
His first point concerned the reputed struggle between his father-in-law, Lee Eastman, and Allen Klein, the man John Lennon called in to manage the Beatles.
‘Klein keeps saying that I don’t like him because I want Eastman to manage the Beatles,’ he said. ‘Well, this is how it really happened. I thought, and I still think, that Linda’s father would have been good for us all. And I decided I wanted him. But all the others wanted Klein. Well, all right, they can have Klein, but I don’t see that I have to agree with them.
‘I don’t think I need a manager in the old sense that Brian Epstein was our manager. All I want are paid advisers, who will do what I want them to do. And that’s what I’ve got. If the others want Klein, well, that’s up to them, but I’ve never signed a contract with him. He doesn’t represent me. I’m sure Eastman is better for me.
‘The real break-up in the Beatles was months ago. First Ringo left when we were doing the “White Album”, because he said he didn’t think it was any fun playing with us any more. But after two days of telling him he was the greatest drummer in the world for the Beatles — which I believe — he came back. Then George left when we were making “Abbey Road” because he didn’t think he had enough say in our records — which was fair enough. After a couple of days he came back.
‘And then last autumn I began to feel that the only way we could ever get back to the stage of playing good music again was to start behaving as a band again. But I didn’t want to go out and face two hundred thousand — because I would get nothing from it, so I thought up this idea of playing surprise one-night stands in unlikely places — just letting a hundred or so people in the village hall, so to speak, and then locking the doors. It would have been a great scene for those who saw us, and for us, too.
‘So one day when we had a meeting I told the others about my idea, and asked them what they thought of it. John said, “I think you’re daft.” I said, “What do you mean?” I mean he is John Lennon, and I’m a bit scared of all that rapier wit we hear about. And he just said, “I think you’re daft. I’m leaving the Beatles. I want a divorce.”
‘Well none of us knew what to do, but we decided to wait until about March or April of this year until our film, Let It Be, came out. But I was bored. I like to work, I’m an active person. Sit
me down with a guitar and let me go. That’s my job.
‘But, anyway, I hung on for all these months wondering whether the Beatles would ever come back together again — and let’s face it I’ve been as vague as anyone — hoping that John might come around and say, “All right lads, I’m ready to go back to work,” and naturally enough, in the meantime, I began to look for something to do. And the album, “McCartney”, turned out to be the answer in my case.
‘I’d just got a new recording machine in my house and I found that I liked working on my own. At first it wasn’t going to be anything serious, but it turned out to be a great time. When we had to go to the studios, Linda would make the booking, and we’d take some sandwiches, and a bottle of grape juice and put the baby on the floor, and it was all like a holiday. So as a natural turn of events from looking for something to do I found that I was enjoying working alone as much as I’d enjoyed the early days of the Beatles. I haven’t really enjoyed the Beatles in the last two years.’
So does he think the Beatles have broken up?
‘More than anything,’ he says, ‘I would love the Beatles to be on top of their form and for them to be as productive as they were. But things have changed. They’re all individuals. Even on “Abbey Road” we don’t do harmonies like we used to. I would have liked to have sung harmony with John, and I think he would have liked me to. But I was too embarrassed to ask him. And I don’t work to the best of my abilities in that situation.