Shirley (23 page)

Shirley took one look at the intruder and rapidly exited into a side room. The man came to the piano, his face creased with anger. ‘You do not play it that way,’ he shouted at Kenny. ‘You’ve got it all wrong.’ Over the man’s head Kenny saw Vic Lewis frantically signalling him to play it cool – this was the star’s husband. Kenny understood; husbands could be difficult, and this one paid the piper. He smiled at him pleasantly. ‘That’s what rehearsals are for, Mr Hume, to get it right. Now how would you . . .’ He never finished the sentence. Hume struck the top of the piano with the flat of his hand, and shouted, ‘Don’t you tell me what rehearsals are for. I tell you!’ With that he stormed off to give Vic Lewis hell at the other side of the room.

Shirley reappeared, ignored her husband, snatched up her handbag and made to leave. Shirley was going and they hadn’t even started the rehearsal. ‘What about the opening number?’ Kenny asked desperately.

Shirley rapped out instructions. ‘Play it like Johnny Mathis, 45. That’s how I want it.’ Then she was gone.

As Kenny described it, ‘My mouth just dropped open. This was the first time in my career. I’d been asked to listen to Johnny Mathis singing his song and then arranged my piano accompaniment to match. However, if Shirley wanted it this way, it was her right.’

The bad-tempered husband had now backed off and Vic Lewis hurried over to tell Kenny not to worry about ‘this bit of trouble’.

‘But Vic,’ said Kenny, now feeling very insecure about his new job, ‘He is the husband, and it is not going well.’

‘I’ll support you all the way,’ said Vic staunchly. ‘You just get through the music. He’ll leave you alone now.’

Kenny wondered if they were always like this. Two people who had everything in the world to make them happy and yet they seemed as miserable as sin . . . Kenneth Hume was now acting in a bizarre fashion, walking up and down the rehearsal room chain-smoking and muttering to himself.

If Kenny had known that Shirley had gone off to meet her lover and that her husband was apoplectic with rage it might have helped him understand the situation. Kenneth Hume, once such a complaisant husband who used to ask Shirley how she’d enjoyed her dates with other men, was now becoming a raging inferno of jealousy.

The reason was that this lover wasn’t just a business tycoon or a bronzed Adonis, he was a famous international film star and he and Shirley were so much in love that Kenneth Hume could see all his work, his energy, and his ambitions going straight down the drain. He was going to
fight tooth and nail to keep Shirley and her latest recording, ‘Goldfinger’, as his own.

In March 1964 Peter Finch was to return to the West End theatre after years in films. He had just finished making two pictures in England,
The Girl with Green Eyes
, with Rita Tushingham and Lynn Redgrave, and
The Pumpkin Eater
, with Anne Bancroft. But the theatre had become more important to Peter Finch, it was a kind of renaissance after, as he saw it, wasting time as a well-paid film star. He was now picking up the sceptre that Laurence Olivier had once promised him.

Chekhov’s
The Seagull
, was the play directed by Tony Richardson at The Queen’s Theatre, with an all-star cast: Peggy Ashcroft, Vanessa Redgrave, Peter McEnery, George Devine and, as Trigorin, Peter Finch. On opening night the critics considered that Peter Finch gave one of the finest Chekhovian performances ever, he was absolutely riveting. Audiences could now look forward to his seasons at Stratford and the Old Vic. ‘A great actor, of whom England can be justly proud, is back from films and playing on the stage.’

The Seagull
was Peter Finch’s best, and last, performance on stage. During its run he met and fell in love with Shirley Bassey.

When Shirley hurried out of the rehearsal with Kenny Clayton to get away from her husband, Kenneth Hume, the love affair between her and Peter Finch had been going strong for three months, since March. They were both ready for a big love affair and they got it; the classic
coup de foudre
, the thunderbolt that welds two people together
through hell and high water. By the time it was over, two divorces were taking place and there had been heartbreak on both sides.

Shirley met Peter Finch in a West End restaurant, when some people he was with stopped at her table to say hello. Peter went out of his way to ask Shirley to come and see his play at the Queen’s. In fact, they had met briefly before, and Shirley had been impressed. Finch was a man who captivated women. He was forty-eight at the time, tall, with a fine head and thick greying hair. He had the kind of mature good looks that seemed to improve with age.

Peter had come to London in 1949 from Sydney, Australia. On their first Australian tour after the war, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh had singled Peter out in a local play. He had risen to the top in Sydney with his work in radio plays, and Olivier told him that, if he decided to come to London, he should look him up. Almost at once, Peter took up the offer and, with his young Russian ballerina wife, Tamara, arrived in London. With Olivier’s help, he was given a major role in
Daphne Laureola,
starring Dame Edith Evans at Wyndham’s Theatre. Critics raved about the magic of his voice, and the yearning way he looked at Edith Evans:

Vivien Leigh always fascinated Peter. She was a breathtaking beauty; volatile, unstable, and unable to resist men despite being Olivier’s wife. Vivien and Peter began an affair in Australia – it was an item of hot gossip in theatrical Sydney – and continued it in London.

Many successful plays followed for Peter, and then came films. He was in demand as a leading romantic lead, and was cast opposite Vivien Leigh in
Elephant Walk,
filmed
mainly on location in Ceylon. Then came the two month Hollywood shoot, and Vivien suddenly lapsed into the manic depression from which she had suffered for years and was replaced by Elizabeth Taylor. Tamara, back in England, was sent out to Hollywood to look after Peter.

When she arrived, Peter told her that she had to look after Vivien as there was no one else to do it. Tamara voiced her suspicions about her husband’s relationship with Vivien, but he brushed them aside, explaining that, ‘In the English theatre we’re civilised and sophisticated. People have light affairs. That’s how it’s been with me and Vivien.’ Tamara and Peter’s marriage never really recovered. She was tired of being neglected, financially as well as emotionally, and they separated in 1956. Tamara, with their daughter Anita, returned to Australia.

Peter Finch, who made over a hundred films in his career, achieved star status and equivalent salary. He made
The Nun’s Story
with Audrey Hepburn in Hollywood,
The Trials of Oscar Wilde
in England and
A Town Like Alice
in Australia.

When Peter Finch met Shirley Bassey, he had divorced Tamara and was married to Yolande Turner, an attractive young actress from South Africa. They had two small children, Samantha born in 1960 and Charles in 1962. They lived in a country mansion called Boundary House in Mill Hill just outside north London. It had ten rooms, five acres, a vegetable garden and a swimming pool.

The Finches seemed to have everything to make them happy but psychologically they were very different people. Central London was now too far for Yolande to socialise there much, so she joined the social set and gave elegant
dinner parties in Mill Hill which Peter did not often attend. Before
The Seagull
opened in London, Peter had been known to get up in the middle of a dinner party and walk out. He was fond of telling his guests that he’d been a roustabout, and a jackaroo, and that he was really an Australian bum. This wasn’t true. Peter was a kind and decent man although he sometimes drank too much. He couldn’t spell too well and wrote phonetically, using an Australian accent, and wrote ‘good-day’ as ‘good dye.’

Peter and Yolande had married in 1959 but, within five years, it had begun to disintegrate, largely because of Peter. If he was unhappy he drank heavily and brooded about the past, but, with the success of
The Seagull
and the beginning of his love affair with Shirley, he began to dream of a new and happier life.

He told his wife that, because of the exigencies of the play, he thought it better to stay in London rather than make the long journey home to Mill Hill each night, and he would stay at the Carlton Towers Hotel in Sloane Street. As Shirley’s house in Chester Square was just round the corner, they would be almost neighbours.

Peter and Shirley were rarely apart. He called her ‘Cheetah’ because of the way she walked, and he adored her golden skin; she called him ‘Finchy’. As their love affair blossomed, Peter read poetry to Shirley in bed. Shirley, like many women before her, was spellbound. She recalled, ‘My love affair with Finchy was a thing of great passion. He was so handsome and knowledgeable, I could curl up and listen to him for hours.’

He told her about his childhood and she was fascinated. Born in London to cold-hearted upper-class parents, he was
an unwanted child who was sent to Paris to live with his eccentric grandmother. She had taken him to India to live in an ashram. Only when the little boy wandered off and was found with his head shaven, wearing a yellow robe and living with a Buddhist monk, did the old lady decide to send him to relatives in Australia.

He met his father – who had married again and had three daughters – in London in 1949. He came to tea with Peter and Tamara at the Regent Palace Hotel. The conversation was understandably forced, and after half an hour, Peter’s father wished him good luck and walked out of his life. Tamara and Peter looked at each other and she said, ‘How very English.’

Shirley was thrilled to meet a man whose childhood had been as traumatic as her own, albeit rather more privileged. Peter enjoyed reading plays to Shirley and discussing them with her. She said at one time, ‘I thought, here is my knight in shining armour. The fairy story I never had. Here is the man who will give me all I have missed in life.’

Peter was quite serious about them acting together, as rivals to Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. He went so far as to ask his agent, Laurie Evans, to see if he could find them something to do together. It was two in the morning and the agent had been woken up by the lovers. ‘And what was Miss Bassey’s last play?’ enquired Evans acidly.

Shirley opened in her six-week engagement at the Talk of The Town, and Peter came round every night straight from the theatre. He was totally entranced by the performance of the woman he loved, enticed by her sexy voice, her fabulous hands and the sinuous movements of her body.

She was well aware of Finch’s reputation as one of the great Australian drinkers. She noticed that he did drink a lot, but he told her that when he was happy he could control his drinking. Others who knew him well told a different story. Hermione Baddeley, who acted with him in Hollywood, thought he was a great actor and said, ‘His was a gift from the Gods, but he drowned it in alcohol.’

Kenneth Hume knew that Shirley and Peter Finch were not only in love but were also discussing plans for a life together – plans that did not include his wife’s manager and soon to be ex-husband. He could probably bear losing Shirley Bassey the wife, but he could not bear to lose Shirley Bassey the star. He had poured his guts into the furthering of her career. He would fight for her, gamble everything. He would shame her, divorce her, but in the end she would come back to him.

Shirley said later, ‘It was all Kenneth’s fault. Our beautiful love affair began to change. He put detectives on to us. They watched every move we made. I became afraid to open the door. I could not trust anyone.’

So Peter and Shirley would go away to another hotel where they were sure no one could possibly find them. But was the knock on the door a waiter with the breakfast trolley or a detective dressed up to look like a waiter? ‘I used to throw a sheet over my head if anyone came into the bedroom. Friends, employees, whom could I trust?’ said Shirley, ‘Kenneth was turning my life into a kind of hell.’

Kenneth Hume was going to pull out all the stops. He thought he knew Shirley. He would frighten her with his army of spies, but if that didn’t work, he still had another trick up his sleeve. He thought that when this was all over
she would forgive him, she’d understand it was for her own good, he was only looking after her interests.

For years Shirley’s professional tours had been planned for her, the schedules, the bookings, the travel and accommodation arranged. Australia would begin the year; then it was home for the season at the Talk of The Town, followed by some of the smaller tours, not too far away – two weeks in Beirut, for example, some time in London, then appearances in Majorca, Monte Carlo and Belgium. Kenneth Hume’s office manager had always done a splendid job. Although her personal life was in turmoil and she had all kinds of problems with Kenneth Hume, Shirley was too much of a professional to cancel any dates.

Her 1964 season at the Talk of The Town over and her children in the excellent care of their nanny, Shirley left her house in Chester Square and Peter Finch in the Carlton Towers Hotel for an engagement in Beirut. Soon after she arrived she agreed to talk to the journalists. They wanted to know if the rumours of an impending break up of her marriage were true.

Shirley decided to let them have the truth, yes, she told them, she and her husband had separated, and no, there was no possibility of a reconciliation.

‘Are you disillusioned with marriage?’ one of them asked.

‘You bet I am,’ replied Shirley, ‘it’s my first and I don’t think I will want to try again. It’s not one of those show business bust-ups, Ken and I just didn’t get on. I am only sorry about my two children.’

Shirley stayed in Beirut for a fortnight, then returned to
London, to Peter Finch, and to a stunning appearance at the Night of a Hundred Stars at the Palladium on 23 July. For the two lovers it was an ecstatic reunion. They had both hated every day apart. Now they were back together and could start making real plans for the future. Nothing must part them ever again.