Shirley (35 page)

And then there was Hilary. She, too, found touring exhausting, and in 1984, when she’d been with Shirley for six years she finally left for a rest. It was an amicable leavetaking. She returned five years later when Shirley asked her to tour Australia.

On her return from the Far East tour Shirley did some television in London and then went to see Sharon and Luke in Thornbury. They were both worried about Samantha. When she left her exclusive Swiss boarding school it was expected that she would do an external course at Bristol Technical College, but after six months she said she wanted no more of it.

Sharon, who had always played the protective big sister role with Samantha, said she’d spent a day with her recently and she seemed happy and full of chat. She loved playing with young Luke and she always made a big fuss of him. Ever since she was eighteen and had left the boarding school there’d been difficulties with Samantha. The school had complained that there had been behavioural problems,
which was understood to mean that the girl would not accept school rules.

Sharon knew that Samantha occasionally drank too much, but she wasn’t rowdy, she just went home and slept it off. She frequented pubs with a group of friends who were scruffily dressed and stayed until throwing-out time. It may have been Samantha’s reaction against expensive schooling in Switzerland, where some of the kids were sons and daughters of dukes or children of very rich members of the international set who just dumped their offspring there.

Sharon hoped it might just be a phase Samantha was going through. After all, she was only twenty and she’d probably grow out of it in time. Sharon knew of an education psychologist who would be willing to take Samantha in as a boarder and tutor her. Would her mother agree to that? She would stay with his family for a year and it would probably settle her down.

Mother and daughter parted with mutual assurances that they would keep a watchful eye on Samantha, and Shirley would go over and see her at her present lodging in Bristol.

In August 1985 Shirley was getting ready for her next American tour. She missed Hilary who had left the year before and had not replaced her, but ‘the gang’ as she called them, the hairdresser and dresser, the tour manager and the musicians, would meet her at Heathrow and they’d all fly into New York together. America had really opened up for her, she sang at Caesar’s in Atlantic City now, as well as giving her usual concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall and appearing on Long Island.

Through her glass bedroom wall, Shirley could see out over the lake. It was raining cats and dogs as it sometimes did in Lugano in the summer and she wouldn’t be sorry to leave it for a while. After her divorce she had decided to keep using the Villa Capricorn as her base. It was, after all, her property. Strangely enough, Samantha had never liked the villa very much; she had once warned Shirley, ‘be careful that this house doesn’t become your prison.’ She reminded herself she must talk to Samantha tomorrow.

Her two daughters were so different; Sharon was so much more level-headed. Although her last relationship hadn’t lasted, and she was a single mother, Luke brought them all so much happiness and Shirley believed with all her heart that Sharon would find the right man and there would be a happy marriage in her future.

She knew that Samantha was more like herself; perhaps in the end she would become an entertainer, too. If she was made of the same stuff as her mother she might also have to choose between the normal easy life, or plunge into the unknown world of show business.

Shirley had hoped that Samantha’s expensive education would help her younger daughter to enjoy a socially acceptable life, that she might become a career woman, a barrister, a politician. There was no sign of this as yet but, whatever she became, Shirley would always love and support her daughter as her own mother had done for her.

A week later Shirley left Lugano to set off on her American tour. She arrived at Heathrow where ‘the gang’ were waiting for her, and waved to her musical director who would start the tour with her at Carnegie Hall. But first she
wanted to telephone Samantha. She’d called her the day before from Lugano and her landlady had said that Samantha wasn’t there at the moment, but she’d tell her that Shirley had called. For some strange reason she’d started worrying about her daughter yesterday. She thought she’d seen her face on the television screen, but when she looked again she knew she must be wrong.

And then she saw a lovely surprise waiting for her. There was Sharon standing by the waiting group. The two women embraced, then Sharon took her mother by the arm and walked her away from the others. She said something which Shirley did not hear, and led her to a closed door. Sharon opened it as if she’d been there before. They looked inside a strange room and Shirley saw a hospital bed. It was the kind of room where someone suddenly taken ill and unable to walk might go.

Shirley turned to Sharon. ‘Why here? You’ve made a mistake.’ Then she saw the tears welling in Sharon’s eyes, and the stricken look on her face ‘What’s happened?’ she asked, with a sense of dread. Sharon broke the appalling news that Samantha had been found dead the day before.

‘But I phoned yesterday,’ Shirley whispered. ‘I spoke to her landlady. She said that Samantha was all right.’

Sharon held her hand tightly. ‘The police were there. They told her what so say. They had come to tell her that Samantha had been found in the river.’ All Shirley, numb with horror, could keep saying was, ‘No, no . . . not this, not this.’

She was utterly devastated, flagellating herself with remorse. Why oh why hadn’t she come yesterday, or the
day before? Why hadn’t she come to save her daughter? ‘But she told me she was happy, everything was going well.’ She simply couldn’t begin to comprehend the situation. ‘Why this?’ she groaned, ‘children are meant to bury their parents.’

Sharon told her that no one knew what had happened. It was a mystery. Samantha had been found about a quarter of a mile downstream from the Clifton suspension bridge. Of course it was not her mother’s fault, it wouldn’t have made any difference whatever she had tried to do. But Shirley couldn’t forgive herself for not being in Bristol with her daughter. She said later, ‘Guilt is a terrible thing to carry around. It makes you ill.’

At the inquest, Samantha’s last hours were revealed as far as they were known. That last August night, she left her lodgings in Totterdown, a suburb of Bristol, and made for Hotwell’s where she always met her group of friends. She was a tall slim girl of twenty-one, with a very pretty face and dark curly hair.

Samantha kept her past secret, never revealing to her friends that she was the daughter of the star, Shirley Bassey. She called herself Samantha Novak, never ever mentioning the name Hume, which she once bore. She went in search of warmth and love of a kind she could respond to, surrounded by friends in a pub. That night she was dressed, as she usually was, in a torn leather jacket, baggy trousers and men’s steel capped shoes. She had just £1.65p in her pocket.

What happened in the next hour or so is not known, but three people, a married couple and their friend, were at a pub-restaurant down by the Bristol docks. A girl walked in as they were finishing their meal. Later they recognised
Samantha from newspaper photographs as the girl who walked into the pub just as the bar closed. She asked if she could get a drink but was told it was too late.

She asked the people finishing their meal if there was a telephone. They told her where it was and she went off to make a call. One of the men said, ‘She was not drunk, but she was definitely not sober.’ One of these three witnesses thought the tall, dark girl might be of mixed race.

When they left the pub the girl was standing outside. They had a dog with them and the four of them had a conversation about dogs and then the girl walked off. ‘The river was on the other side of the road,’ said one of the men at the inquest, ‘and there was a high metal railing.’ They were the last people to see Samantha alive, and they said she seemed quite happy as she set off along the road by the river. They speculated that she may have had a date and arrived too late, but she didn’t seem at all upset. Further along, the high railing stopped and there was a path over a bank that ran steeply down to the river.

That was the last sighting of Samantha, a smiling girl who walked off along a road by the river.

At the inquest, the coroner said, ‘It is possible that she may have walked by the river and perhaps tripped. If Samantha was slightly fuddled with drink, she may have slipped down the river bank. Samantha died from the shock of hitting the water. She was an able swimmer but the shock of hitting the cold water killed her. It seems very likely that Samantha’s death may have been accidental. There was no evidence that she was unhappy. She was fully clothed when she was found. Samantha’s body was spotted by tourists on a passing pleasure boat. She had been in the water for over a week.’

The coroner added, ‘There is no evidence to say that she was on the suspension bridge, or that she fell from the bridge. Her injuries were not consistent with her falling from a great height. Thus, that rules out the rumours that she fell from the bridge.’ He repeated once again that the cold water caused heart failure and Samantha Novak died from shock.

This was the only comfort Shirley could clutch on to, that her daughter’s death was probably an accident. Although the media had blazoned the news of her death as a suicide this theory was disputed and there was no evidence that she was unhappy. There were no suspicious circumstances or any evidence of pre-death trauma.

Shirley would always talk wistfully about Samantha. ‘She talked like me. I saw me in her. I thought she’d be an actress and go on the stage . . . but now we’ll never know what she was capable of.’

It was revealed after the coroner’s verdict that Samantha’s friends had been very concerned about her disappearance, but they all agreed that her death must have been an accident. The educational psychologist, Mr Alastair John Williams, with whose family Samantha had lived for the previous nine months, said she had only recently gone into lodgings in Montague Street. She had seemed a happy girl.

Mr Tony MacArthur, Shirley’s agent and manager, issued a press statement: ‘Miss Bassey is staying with friends in London. It is devastating news but she is handling the situation very well.’

Relatives living in Cardiff were greatly shocked at the news. Mrs Iris Denning of Llanrumney, who had been
Sharon’s foster mother, said, ‘Shirley must have been knocked for six. Although she worked all over the world she was very close to Samantha. She was such a normal happy girl, with everything to live for. We just can’t believe it.’

On Wednesday, 12 September 1985, a small crowd gathered outside the Chapel of Rest in Westbury near Bristol waiting to see Shirley Bassey arrive for her daughter’s funeral service. When she emerged from her car, she looked ravaged with grief. In one hand she clutched a red rose. On one side, there to help and comfort her, was her friend Soraya Khashoggi, and on the other Sharon, her elder daughter.

Many flowers were taken into the chapel, including a wreath of white lilies from Shirley. There was also a wreath from Dionne Warwick, and one from Samantha’s favourite rock group, The Grateful Dead. Samantha’s spikey-haired punk friends were present at the thirty-five minute service. After the prayer, ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’, Samantha’s friends gave her a rock send-off, playing a tape of her favourite piece of music, Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Foxy Lady’.

No other members of Shirley’s family were at the funeral. Samantha, with her Swiss education, had had little to do with Tiger Bay or with her aunts or cousins. Marina, Shirley’s sister, said later, ‘We sent a wreath but none of us were invited to come.’ Four years had gone by since the quarrel at their mother’s funeral, but it seemed that Shirley had still not forgiven them. Twice now, she had given concerts in Cardiff and twice no tickets had been left for the family at the box office.

Shirley faced a barrage of press photographers when she left the Chapel of Rest. Her manager announced that
Shirley would take a brief rest in France before embarking on her American tour, which would begin in New York at Carnegie Hall. The grief-stricken star was driven away in a black Mercedes.

In an interview given much later, Shirley recalled her devastation when she started that American tour: her dread of appearing before an audience and breaking down and being unable to sing. She remembers that when she walked on to the stage at Carnegie Hall, the whole audience rose as one for she didn’t know how long. She just stood there, willing herself to stay in control, telling herself, ‘If you cry your eyelashes will fall off, your mascara will run, the shadow will smudge. Don’t cry. Do you hear me, don’t cry!’ And then the orchestra started to play, ‘When You’re Smiling’, and the adrenalin began to flow and she was saved.

But she felt the audience were her real saviours, they comforted her, their warmth pulled her along in each song. When she looked back on that night, she said, ‘They got me through, but I hardly knew what I was doing. One part of me was quite numb. All my grief was locked away and this wonderful audience helped and comforted me with their understanding and loving support for what I was going through.’ Shirley has said, ‘To sing has always been my salvation, my closest friend. I never wanted to be a singer, but it seemed to be my destiny. Out of seven children I was the one chosen to sing.’

After a week at Carnegie Hall, she was off for four days to Westbury Music Fair in Long Island and then four days at Caesar’s in Atlantic City. She then flew to Germany for a four-week tour. Shirley believed this was the only way she
could cope with the avalanche of grief that had overwhelmed her. If she kept travelling, working, exhausting herself so that she wouldn’t spend the long nights brooding about her loss and dwelling on the past to find out where she went wrong, she might get through this misery. If she stopped she knew she would go to pieces.

Her manager, Tony MacArthur, said of Shirley, ‘She is handling it all very well, she is going on with her tour.’ Then he added. ‘But one day the finality of it all will really hit her.’