Shirley (34 page)

One evening in December 1978, Shirley and a party of eight went to the Country Cousins Restaurant in Fulham to have dinner and listen to a new pop group performing there. It was somebody’s birthday and Shirley got up and sang Happy Birthday. She was soon the centre of attraction and the evening turned into a party. At three a.m. they left and adjourned to a house in Eaton Square where the party continued until neighbours complained and the police arrived.

One of the women in the house kept singing a song called, ‘Quando, quando’ and the police told her to keep quiet. When she refused to be quiet the police arrested her. She became distraught and agitated when, reeking of alcohol and her speech slurred, she was led outside. At one point she had pushed a police officer in the back, causing him to fall against another officer.

It was reported that Shirley was then taken to Gerald Road police station and charged with being drunk and disorderly. She gave her name as Shirley Carter, but everyone realised that she was Shirley Bassey.

On December 21 Shirley, soberly dressed in black and wearing a hat with a veil, arrived at Horseferry Road
Magistrates Court. Her barrister said that here was a lady of unblemished character celebrating twenty-five years in show business, and she was extremely sorry that she had disturbed the neighbours. The magistrate bound her over for three months and said he was confident that it would not happen again.

Hilary Levy and Kenneth Carter were learning the hard way that although they travelled first-class, lived in luxury and were very well paid, a twenty-four-hour schedule was often on the cards, and Shirley could sometimes be a very demanding lady. Hilary says that Shirley always insisted that they had adjoining rooms and sometimes, when she couldn’t sleep and needed company, she would call out for Hilary to join her. Although their day was supposed to end at two a.m., Shirley’s staff found the biggest drawback was their lack of freedom to live their own lives. Kenneth could buy expensive clothes and drive powerful cars for Shirley in Los Angeles, but had scant time to himself. He managed this for three years before leaving.

Hilary found out that a superstar’s life can also be lonely and Shirley wanted a friend to confide in. It became even harder for Hilary when Kenneth Carter left. When all was going well Shirley was charming and the two women got on very well together. Hilary looked a lot like Shirley; she was shorter but she was slim and could get into all Shirley’s clothes. Her hair was dark and worn in the same bouffant style as Shirley’s naturally curly dark hair or her wigs. People often wondered if they were related.

Touring always sparked difficulties. Sometimes the hotel day would begin with Shirley wanting an unusual
breakfast like steamed kippers or, if she was on a diet, just vegetable juice. Then if she felt tired she would spend the hours until she had to prepare for the evening concert, watching television. Hilary was expected to stay within call, or hurry out to do some shopping for her.

Shirley would worry about her children, and whether she was a good enough mother. Sharon had suffered problems in her life, but she had always coped remarkably well. She lived in a little house in Thornbury, a pretty town near Bristol, and she’d had a baby, a little boy, who was just one year old. She was a single parent and called herself Sharon Denning, assuming the name of her foster parents. She was caring for little Luke, Shirley’s first grandchild, whilst enjoying her job as a part-time children’s nurse.

Samantha, however, was a problem. Shirley recognised that she too had been a rebel, but she’d had no money to rebel with. She often worried that Samantha was spoilt. At school they said she was too independent-minded. Was giving a girl all the things she herself had missed as child bad for her? And Mark, who Shirley wanted to gain a profession, was also having problems as school.

Then something happened that stopped Shirley in her tracks. Eliza Mendi, her mother, died.

Shirley’s mother turned eighty in 1981. A young looking eighty, who didn’t look a day over sixty-five, according to her daughter, though she did have some blood pressure trouble like most women of her age. As she’d had a hard life and was the kind of woman who would never give in, it was no surprise that perhaps her heart wasn’t as strong as it might have been. When she was taken ill, she had all the symptoms of possible heart failure, her blood pressure was
low, and she found it hard to swallow anything but liquids. She was admitted to St David’s Hospital.

Three days after Shirley’s mother’s birthday, she died suddenly. Shirley was heartbroken. ‘She only wanted to give, never to take. I was the baby of the family and I adored her,’ she wept.

Tiger Bay has its own much loved rituals. When someone dies who has been part of The Bay community, a person who is respected by all, they are given a great send off, a loving farewell. No matter how far away Bay people have moved, they will come back to Tiger Bay to walk behind the coffin. Like an Irish village ceremony, where mourners can stretch for a mile or more the Bay cortège wends its way down the roads and the lanes. It is a ceremony without pomp but still very impressive.

Eliza Bassey was a respected lady who had brought up seven children in Tiger Bay, and her youngest, her baby, had achieved worldwide fame as a great singer. No one had been more proud of Shirley than Eliza, and no village was more proud of its daughter than Tiger Bay. But Shirley was not the reason the cortege walked behind the coffin, it was for the English girl, Eliza, who had come down from the north and settled in Wales and loved this corner of Cardiff Bay.

Shirley said, ‘On the day of the funeral I was in the most terrible state. I felt rootless, as if my life had been torn apart. She had never doubted me, and she has always been there when I needed her.’

Shirley wept without cease. She was led away after the funeral, still sobbing. At a small gathering afterwards for the family and close friends, everyone had a drink or two and
the talk turned, naturally enough, to the time when they were all young. However the peacemaker, their mother, who held the strings of the family tight, the one who calmed them down when tensions rose, was not there any more.

An ill-chosen word or a passing recollection at a funeral can often rend a family apart, and this is what happened at the Bassey funeral.

Shirley, who knew that her mother had been the absolute salvation of the family through every trial and torment, was very angry when someone brought up the story of their father’s departure. Her mother had carved a new life for herself, she had found peace and happiness again, so why disinter the past like this? What had happened so long ago was one of the worst times in Eliza’s life – this was not the occasion to talk about such things. She was in a highly emotional state, holding herself together and trying to keep her feelings of terrible loss under control. At this moment Shirley’s composure finally broke down. People took sides and a bitter family row erupted. Shirley suddenly snapped and got up and left. She did not forget easily and remained silent and distant from her family for a long time afterwards.

Marina, her sister, has said about the affair, ‘We thought it was because Shirley was so upset over our mother’s death. I honestly don’t know why all this happened. It was just a tiff. We’d once all been so close. Now Shirley doesn’t even exchange Christmas cards or birthday cards. None even arrived for my children or grandchildren.’

Shirley’s sisters waited anxiously when she was to sing in Cardiff the following June, 1982, to see if seats would, as
usual, be left for them at St David’s Hall box office. For some reason no seats materialised, and hurt turned to disappointment and bitterness.

SHIRLEY HAD TAKEN
to spending time in the south of Spain. She was divorced, she no longer had a husband as manager, no man who said with his hand on his heart that he had only her interests at heart. She had learned many lessons in her comparatively short life, and now she wanted to try life on her own without any commitments, apart from her three children. She bought a villa. Her friend Soraya Khashoggi, the divorced wife of arms dealer, Adnan Khashoggi, had a villa there, and so did Adnan (whose sister was the mother of Dodi Fayed).

The international set who turned up in Marbella every summer to open up their villas and have fun were a lively lot and they welcomed Shirley with open arms. Between tours she would spend as much as six weeks at a time at her holiday villa. She loved the rackety night life of the town and she had various friends, including the millionaire property developer Roy Boston. He took her dancing one night, along with Soraya Khashoggi and Baron Heinrich
von Thyssen, to a new upmarket nightspot, Olivia Valere. Shirley was so carried away that she gave the customers a spontaneous three-hour singalong in the bar.

‘The guitar player and pianist were amazed when I jumped up and started singing,’ she recalled. ‘I found myself doing songs like “My Funny Valentine”, which I hadn’t sung for twenty years, and I still remembered the words.’

Sometimes, when Mark was on holiday from school, Shirley would dress him up in a white tuxedo and take him out on the town with her.

Drinking had now become part of Shirley’s way of life. She admitted that while her marriage to Sergio was breaking up she had started drinking heavily. Sometimes she had two bottles of champagne on ice with her in her dressing room. She said that the men in her life often counted her drinks. This absolutely infuriated her. And Sergio had gone one better, often committing the unforgivable sin of putting her down verbally until he destroyed her self-confidence. All her life Shirley had been shy of making mistakes because of her lack of education. It took years before she realised that her natural intelligence could make her just as witty and clever as the smartest woman in the room. But in the immediate aftermath of Sergio she still needed a glass of champagne to give her confidence.

She has said that her life with men had a ring of the ‘Rita Hayworth’ about it; it was a reference to how Prince Aly Khan fell in love with, and married, the film star who played the lead in
Gilda
. When he took her to bed he always, according to Rita, expected to find the glamourous,
confident Gilda lying at his side next morning; instead, he got a little Spanish dancer from South of the border down Mexico way who’d been discovered and cruelly exploited by Hollywood men.

Sergio, thought Shirley, fell in love with the glamorous Shirley Bassey, a singing star in provocative gowns who held the spotlight at the Excelsior Hotel in Venice. After they married in Las Vegas, Sergio expected to find the tempestuous woman who the press had one called The Tigress of Tiger Bay, sitting in a splendid negligée at her breakfast tray next morning. He didn’t. Instead he got ‘Our Shirl from Tiger Bay’. Pretty enough, it is true, but without the luxurious glossy wig on the short brown hair, or the flattering make-up on the complexion. He’d got a star, and stars aren’t always perfect.

Soraya Khashoggi, Shirley’s close friend in Marbella at the time, was reputed to have received a twenty-million pound divorce settlement. Her Belgravia home in London was famous for the lavish parties she had there. Jack Jones, the American singer, used to be a regular, as were film stars, pop groups and Shirley.

Marbella became a base for Shirley’s preparations for her next international tour to the Far East. Well before the departure date, she played tennis, swam, took dance classes and headed for the gym. All this was to keep her body trim and slender so that the revealing gowns she wore on stage would be enhanced by her sensational figure. It was very hard work but, like an athlete, she trained herself into prime condition for the coming ordeal. Towards the end of her training ‘the gang’, the people who made up her work force, would be alerted to get ready by Tony McArthur,
who became her manager after her divorce from Sergio. He would then telephone Shirley, check all the dates, and discuss the itinerary with her.

Finally Hilary Levy would arrive from London to assist with the packing and generally help Shirley. Hilary was far more than just a secretary. They discussed taking a couple of days off in Los Angeles to go shopping for clothes. Hilary knew exactly which expensive designer clothes would suit Shirley best, though if Hilary arrived from London with something attractive she had bought at Marks & Spencer, Shirley would ask her next time she was in London to get one for her in every colour.

Once the tour began, the other side of the superstar’s life took over. She must not allow herself to become exhausted by accepting the many invitations that poured in, so must settle for loneliness. She is a star, and she must remain at the top and this can cause great stress. There are times when, after a good performance and tumultuous applause, she is very happy, but she must make a quick getaway to her hotel bedroom if she is going to shine again tomorrow night. Writing postcards home is one of Shirley Bassey’s touching habits. The pretty scenes of luxurious hotels in splendid surroundings in Australia, Malaysia, Hong Kong and America, sent to her daughters and some in her neat tidy handwriting telling them how much she missed them, concealed a great deal of angst.

She’d write to Sharon and remember the little girl who used to tour with her in Australia and worry about the slight coolness that sometimes existed between herself and her eldest daughter. The nine years Sharon had spent living with Iris and Bill had something to do with it, and yet it was
Sharon who had wanted to leave Cardiff and live with her mother in London. She’d write to Mark and tell him that if he wanted to go to university he must work harder and pass his exams. If he did do well he could come out to Marbella on the next vacation. She knew that he’d come anyway. Then there was Samantha. Why had she changed so much since she was a little girl? There was a part of Samantha that Shirley did not understand and that was a constant worry to her. Why did her daughter always dress in those dirty jeans and tee shirts? Why did she act as if those strange way-out friends of hers were the most important people in her life.