Tom Jones - the Life (5 page)

He laughed the troubles off: ‘When the officials came to see my mother with the brasses nicely polished in the front room and a picture of granddad with his medals on, they went away saying, “No ruffian could live here!”’

Perhaps most alarmingly, he temporarily lost his appetite for singing, weighed down by his responsibilities. Linda, whose contribution to Tom’s career should never be underestimated, had to prod and cajole him into singing again, starting off while shaving in the mirror before work. She was delighted when he came home one afternoon in early 1957 with a new single in his hand.

Tom had been walking through the centre of Pontypridd, when he heard ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On’ by Jerry Lee Lewis for the first time. It was blasting out from the speakers at Freddie Feys’ record shop. He was immediately stopped in his tracks: ‘Good God. To me that was it! I loved that record and it was a white man singing boogie-woogie that he had heard black men play.’

Tom would never forget the effect Jerry Lee’s music had on him. He admired Elvis and would spend afternoons listening to Brian’s elder brother John’s collection of The King’s records. But he loved the man from Louisiana, who was known as ‘The Killer’. Tom liked his aggression and the way Lewis would chew his audience up and spit them out. He was a white man who sounded like he was black, and that was the effect Tom had always wanted.

At least money wasn’t as tight and he could buy a new Hawk guitar. He was earning £18 a week and they weren’t paying any rent. Until now, Tom had sung at school and family get-togethers. It was time for him to start singing in public.

Urged on by Linda, he approached his uncle, Albert Jones, to ask if he could perform at the Wood Road. ‘Could you put us on, Uncle Albert – you know, do a gig down there?’

Albert, who was quite a stern chap, replied, ‘It will never go down well here – rock ’n’ roll.’

Tom persevered, however, and eventually he had a lucky break, when an act they had booked failed to show one Sunday evening. Tom stepped up and sang three numbers, including the classic Elvis hit ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ and ‘Sixteen Tons’, a number one for Tennessee Ernie Ford in 1956. The reaction was much more favourable than Albert had expected, so Tom came back after an interval and sang three more. Afterwards, the club’s entertainment secretary, Charlie Ashman, was so pleased, he put his hand in the till and handed Tom a £1 note. In those days of pre-decimal money, he could buy thirty pints in the club for a quid. The only problem was that everyone knew how old he was and he could never get served there.

Tom was encouraged to think he could sing for money, or at least beer money, in the pubs and clubs around Treforest and Pontypridd. His mates supported him, especially when he started singing at one of their favourite pubs, the Wheatsheaf, at the bottom of Rickards Street. They would have a few beers in the downstairs bar before adjourning to the room upstairs, where Tom would belt out his mix of Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis and Ray Charles numbers, accompanying himself as best as he could on his guitar.

The audience loved him at the Wheatsheaf, but it was practically his local and didn’t really count. The landlady, Joan Lister, recalled that the audience wouldn’t get up for a pint when Tom was on, which may or may not be true. He needed more than that generous appreciation, however, and for a while joined a local beat group called the De Avalons. He was the drummer, not the singer, but soon tired of that arrangement, much preferring to be the centre of attention.

He joined a concert party called The Misfits. These variety ensembles, which often included a comedian and a group, were very popular. They were like a mini evening of
Britain’s Got Talent
. Tom liked the set-up, because the money was good – anything from £2 to £5 for a night’s work – and he found he could earn almost as much at a weekend as the rest of the week in the paper factory. Tom was one of three acts, which included a singer who specialised in Frankie Laine numbers.

Linda had no objection when Tom decided to quit his job at the paper factory and sign on the dole. Tom was reassured by a workmate, who told him, ‘If you fail, you can always return. It doesn’t take a genius to work in a paper mill.’ He needed to be free from shift work so he could accept evening bookings. From time to time, he would take a job selling vacuum cleaners or working on a building site, carting bricks, but his heart wasn’t in it and these jobs rarely lasted more than a few weeks. His only ticket out of the Valleys was with ‘singer’ stamped on his passport, so he was much happier concentrating on that ambition than grafting for a few pounds a week. The reality was that he had started to drift.

The most significant member of a Tommy Woodward audience during this time was a young guitarist from Rhydyfelin called Vernon Hopkins. He had heard about a rough and ready lad with a big voice doing his time on the pub and club circuit around Pontypridd, so he turned up at the Wheatsheaf one night to watch Tom perform. Vernon was unimpressed with his act, but admired his voice.

‘His voice was great, but he would just stand there and sing. He wouldn’t even introduce a song. It was like he didn’t want to be there at all, but he had to do it, because he wanted the money. It wasn’t a good picture. He looked intimidating.’

Not everyone found Tom scary. One of his long-standing drinking pals, Alan Barratt, wasn’t overawed, even though he was the smaller man. According to local legend, he once gave Tom a fearful pasting in an argument over a girl. Tom literally had to drag himself home on his hands and knees. The pair remained good friends and Tom was later rumoured to have helped Alan buy the newsagent’s in Church Village, where he settled, just a few miles from Pontypridd.

They were together one evening eating a takeaway outside a curry house, when Tom met a curvaceous fifteen-year-old called Gill Beazer. When he came across a girl he liked, Tommy Woodward was no longer one of the lads. He acted in a completely different manner. He had been impressed when, as a boy, he walked with his father around the terraced streets where they lived. The local housewives would come to the front door just to smile and say to his dad, ‘Good morning, Thomas.’ The friendly greetings brightened his day. He learned from his father and the other men in his family that women were to be treated with respect, consideration and as equals. He didn’t swear or act the macho man in front of them, and it made no difference how pretty they were.

Gill was most definitely attractive, though. The tabloid papers of today would describe her as a stunner. Tommy’s relationship with the shy teenager was a million miles away from his later image as Tom Jones, sex-obsessed superstar.

In the early summer of 1960, the curry house had just opened in Central Square, Trallwn, on the other side of Pontypridd. It was a general store as well, and Gill was browsing there when Tom, then aged twenty, showed up with Alan Barratt. They were there for two reasons: Tom loved curry and, to this day, lamb curry remains a favourite dish; he also liked a pint. He and Alan would pop into the Llanover Arms on the corner or the Central Hotel across the square. The hotel had a music room, where Tom would appear occasionally, so he knew it well.

Gill lived with her nan, Ruth, around the corner at the top of East Street, third house down on the right. Her mother left when she was a baby, and her father, a carpenter called Elias Beazer, made a new life in Rhydyfelin, where he remarried and had a large family. Gill still saw her dad, but was brought up by her grandmother.

In the evenings, Gill, who was a bit of a loner and had few friends of her own age, would often take a stroll around the square to soak up the atmosphere and have a passing conversation or two. It was a much more innocent time, when people looked out for one another. Gill was well known in the neighbourhood and would pop in and out of the shops – a cobbler’s and a hairdresser, a sweet shop, a greengrocer and the Co-op at the end. ‘I just used to like to go out of my door, onto the square and talk to whoever was around.’ There never seemed to be any girls her age, so she usually ended up talking to the boys, who would be chatting and trying to look cool on their motorbikes.

She began joining other underage girls to sneak into pubs where they could get served, providing they stayed at the back, away from the men-only bars. Perhaps because of that and her large bust, the boys would talk about her and she developed a bad reputation that was entirely unjustified.

She knew nothing about Tom when they met. Treforest seemed a world away from Trallwn. She didn’t know he was a local singer and she had no idea he was married with a young son – information that he certainly didn’t volunteer. It would be a common theme, where Tom was concerned, that women he became involved with didn’t know his marital status. Gill told him she had just left school and was working as a shop assistant in the Star Supply Stores in Pontypridd, waiting for a better job to come up in the Aero Zip factory on the industrial estate.

One thing struck Gill at that first encounter: Alan, who was a couple of years older than Tom, was much more handsome than his friend. Gill observes, ‘Alan was a very good-looking guy. He had black curly hair and was smartly turned out. He was looked-after smart, if you know what I mean. He was slighter than Tom, although Tom was slight, mind. Tom wasn’t particularly handsome, because he had this long jawline.’

Alan may have been better looking, but it was Tom who had the charm. He had a bent, lopsided nose, crooked teeth and an elongated jaw, but he was easy to talk to. ‘He just had this lovely personality as far as I was concerned,’ recalls Gill, who readily agreed to meet up a day or two later by the railings on The Parade, the street below the curry house.

‘He told me when he wanted to meet me there, but he didn’t come. I just hung about for an hour and eventually he turned up. No matter when he made arrangements with me, it would be an hour or two later that he would turn up.’ Gill didn’t realise that he had responsibilities elsewhere.

Nothing happened between them on The Parade other than a walk and a chat. They just seemed to like each other’s company. It was very relaxed and Tom suggested that she might like to hear him sing at a gig or perhaps take in a dance one evening soon; he would call her to let her know when.

The next time she saw him, he was walking underneath the bridge by the railway station in Pontypridd, looking unrecognisable in a double-breasted navy blue pinstriped suit. Gill assumed he had paid a trip to the magistrates’ court nearby: ‘He might have been a naughty boy, but he was very smartly dressed.’ She didn’t quiz him about it. It wasn’t her business and she wasn’t a pushy sort of girl anyway. She admits, ‘I never had any confidence in myself.’

Tom’s luck with the law had, in fact, run out when, desperately short of cash, he had broken into the old tobacconist’s shop in Treforest with a pal. They were hardly criminal masterminds. The stupid petty crime was unearthed when, by all accounts, they tried to sell their haul down the Wood Road. The police, hearing the rumours of some dodgy cigarettes for sale, put two and two together and found the goods hidden in Tom’s mother’s house.

Even the dole office knew of his misdeed, noting in its records: ‘Applicant is on bail pending being heard for a charge of breaking and entering at the next quarter session.’ Tom has not denied this transgression and later admitted he had once been placed on probation.

Tom started calling Gill to suggest when they might meet up. Neither of them had a phone. Tom would step out to his red phone box and she would be in hers outside the Central Hotel, just across from the top of East Street. Tom would dial the number – 2026 – and wait for someone to answer the ringing phone. It didn’t matter who it was, he would simply ask the person to pop over the road and tell Gill that he wanted to speak to her. She would dash for the phone, pleased to hear from him.

Gill had the same routine if she was staying the night at a friend’s house. She would simply ring the phone box and ask whoever answered to go and tell her nan what she was doing, please, so she wouldn’t worry. She never knew the number of Tom’s phone box, presumably because he didn’t want to run the risk of his wife answering. Gill recalls, ‘I would have to wait for him to do things and I suppose I was patient enough to wait without even thinking about it.’

She loved it when they went jiving at Judges in Porth or the Bucket of Blood in Rhydyfelin: ‘I was a good jiver and so was he.’ But, in the main, she would just be his girl when he went to a gig. Often she had no idea where they were, although Franchies in Taff Street was one she enjoyed. Neither of them had any money – Gill used to make a lot of her clothes – so it would be a trip on the bus to the gig, where she and sometimes other friends would cheer him on. Tom would usually be paid a couple of pounds and perhaps some beer. Afterwards, there was no hanging around. He needed to get home to his family, so they would catch the bus back to Pontypridd, get off in Merthyr Road and he would set off for Treforest, while she walked back to East Street. She recalls, ‘He would do the gig and then he would be gone. We never had any money. We never had anything at all.’

Looking back with the privilege of hindsight, Gill believes Tom wanted company: ‘He needed someone when he went to these gigs – he needed someone in the audience there for him, someone whom he could focus on or relate to. He didn’t want to go on his own.’ He was clearly fond of her, however.

On one evening she was due to accompany him to a gig in Caerphilly, eight miles away. Tom suggested she get the bus, which left from the Broadway, with him and his friend Gwyn Griffiths. The bus ran only once an hour, so Tom had to catch it or he would be late. Gill and Gwyn, whom she already knew, caught the bus as arranged, but, typically, there was no sign of Tom. As they travelled down the Broadway, they saw Tom running along, clutching his guitar and trying to catch them up. He banged on the side to attract the driver’s attention and Gill started shouting to him to stop the bus as well. Thankfully, he stopped and let Tom on board.

She had dolled herself up for the occasion, wearing her long brown hair up and putting on a red dress that an aunt had brought over from Jamaica as a present. Gill will never forget that gig, because after his usual smattering of Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis, Tom turned towards her, midway through his next song, focused his gaze directly on her and sang, ‘See the girl with the red dress on …’ It was his power-packed version of ‘What’d I Say’, the song that took the legendary Ray Charles into the mainstream in 1959. Jerry Lee had made a rock ’n’ roll recording of the track at the famous Sun Studio in 1960. ‘I was elated,’ says Gill. ‘He was singing to me.’ It was lovely for Gill, but it also revealed that Tom hadn’t forgotten the advice of his Uncle George and was selling the song to his audience. It was a technique he continued to employ as a Las Vegas headliner.

Gill thought there was more to the relationship than there was. Perhaps she was naive, but she acknowledges simply: ‘Yes, I thought he was my boyfriend.’ That changed when she saw him in Pontypridd with a young blond boy who was clearly his son and turned out to be Mark. ‘I didn’t have bad feelings towards him about it. I’m a “what will be, will be” sort of person. I think that a little bit of something is better than nothing. That’s the only way to explain why I went on seeing him.’

Gill admits that she and Tom enjoyed plenty of ‘kisses and cuddles’, but she denies there was anything more. If they weren’t going to a gig or jiving, then they would simply stay and chat on a street corner or go for a walk in Trallwn or the nearby village of Ynysybwl. She strongly believes that the image of Tom as a rough and ready macho man is completely wrong. She explains: ‘I think people got the wrong impression of him. He wasn’t at all as he was portrayed. I never found him to be a forceful person. He never expected anything from me and he told me that, and it was very important to me. He said to me that whatever I wanted physically would be OK. He was never, ever nasty with me and treated me as an equal. He was a gentle person.’

Everyone assumed that Gill was sleeping with Tom, because for nearly two years they were often seen together. They never went all the way, however. Eventually Gill found a proper boyfriend, whom she would marry. She still saw Tom occasionally. He would pop in to find out how she was doing and make sure she was all right. They lost touch when Tom’s career began to move forward, although Alan Barratt would call round to catch up from time to time. When Gill had a son, Alan brought her a card from Tom on the boy’s first birthday that contained two crisp pound notes. By strange coincidence, in later life, she became the best friend of Marion Crewe, who was Dai Perry’s sister and was close to Tom, whom she adored. Gill remained on the fringes of Tom’s world and would say hello on the sad days he came home for funerals.

Gill paints a contrasting picture of the young Tom Jones from those who have portrayed him as some sort of yob. The most likely explanation is that there were two sides to Tom, fashioned from his upbringing in this quiet part of South Wales. He would act the big man over a pint or two with his mates, swear like a navvy and was quite prepared to nut someone if they were threatening him. Facially, he looked much tougher than he actually was. He wasn’t a huge man by any means, being slim and fit and about 5ft 10in tall. But his badly misshapen nose and teeth meant he could look menacing without even trying. He liked dressing as a Teddy boy because he thought he looked ‘slick’, as he put it.

The reality, at least as far as women were concerned, was entirely different. ‘I think he was quite shy underneath,’ says Gill. Her view of Tom is one endorsed by Linda: ‘He is the most mild-mannered man you could wish to meet – and so patient with everyone. He is kind and gentle.’

The real man doesn’t sound like a love-them-and-leave-them stud. Inevitably, he changed when he became a superstar and had to live up to his image as a sex god. Women were willing and readily available to him then, but at this stage of his life that happened only occasionally. Looking back on her own experience with the man who would become Tom Jones, Gill reveals the moral dilemma of Tommy Woodward: how to reconcile becoming involved with other women while being happily married. She observes, ‘He loved his wife dearly.’