Shirley (6 page)

Despairing of her friend, who didn’t appear to be in the least upset or worried, Louise rejoined Iris, who seemed rather more in need of comfort than the object of their concern had done. ‘She thinks she might do radio,’ Iris told Louise. ‘The man in Cardiff told her to come back.’

‘Why doesn’t she marry the boy?’

‘He’s already married with two kids.’

The following October, four months after the meeting on Crewe station, Louise received a card from Shirley – always an inveterate sender of postcards – saying simply, ‘Had the baby in September.’

Back home in Splott, Shirley Bassey telephoned Wyn Calvin, the
Welsh Rarebit
link man at the BBC. It was over a year since her unsuccessful audition, and he was surprised and pleased to hear from her. An appointment was made and she presented herself at the Cardiff studios once again. Calvin came to meet her in Reception, and noted that she seemed quite grown up now, and much more attractive. She radiated eager anticipation, and hadn’t forgotten the good-looking Welshman. They chatted like old friends, and Shirley, reminding him of his advice to go out and get some experience, told him that she’d been on the road in two shows, ‘real London revues’, for Joe Collins. Calvin, who knew of the popular appeal of the Collins shows, asked whether she had been given any solo numbers to sing.

‘I had my own spots in my last show,
Hot from Harlem
,’
she replied. I sang “Ebb Tide”, and then I sang “Stormy Weather”. Do you know, my two shows toured most of the English provinces, and I do believe we did every village in Wales.’

Shirley told Wyn that she had only left her show a week or two earlier, and was now seriously looking to get into radio. As he recalled, she was quite blunt about it, saying ‘you told me to come back. Well here I am.’ He was delighted by her attitude and her confidence, and saw no reason why she shouldn’t audition again, but his optimism was short-lived. When Shirley moved to shake free her loose summer coat which had snagged on the chair, the well-rounded bulge of her advanced pregnancy was revealed, to Calvin’s evident dismay. Quite unfazed by his expression, she smiled. ‘It won’t matter will it? No one will see me because it’s radio.’

It was a perfectly rational observation, but this was 1954 and the august establishment of the BBC was not ready for this, particularly not in the strict Presbyterian climate of Wales. An unmarried teenager foolish enough to fall pregnant was, in the custom of the time, expected to go into hiding at home and, if forced to go out, to cover her shame under voluminous garments. They were certainly not invited to audition for that model of rectitude, Miss Mai Jones.

Reluctantly, Wyn Calvin suggested that Shirley would do better to wait until after the birth of her child. He was terribly upset by the situation, by what he saw as the inevitable waste of a special talent. He made the assumption that this young girl would probably finish up pushing a pram round Tiger Bay, and living in one of those
dismal houses down by the docks; that she would probably marry a factory worker, and there’d be more babies and more prams and a husband who would never know that his wife had thrown away a chance in a million.

Shirley, however, didn’t strike Wyn as being in the least disappointed at being turned away, instead expressing her determination to return again at a later date. She never did go back for that audition, but they met again four years later when Shirley Bassey was a name, and Wyn Calvin had left the BBC to go on the stage himself. He was a natural comedian who eventually became known as one of the best pantomime dames in the business. On 13 May 1958, he found himself on the same bill as his former would-be protégée at the New Theatre, Cardiff. The billboards, in huge red lettering, announced ‘Cardiff’s own SHIRLEY BASSEY, direct from her success in Las Vegas and Hollywood. Phillips recording star.’ Lower down, in smaller letters, ‘Cardiff’s own WYN CALVIN, Character for laughs.’

After her meeting with Wyn at the BBC in May 1954, Shirley walked down Frederick Street in the centre of Cardiff. She was telling herself that if radio was out for the moment, she had better find another job to support herself and her baby, when she saw a ‘Waitress Wanted’ card in the window of a small restaurant. It was the kind of place that has since completely disappeared, an establishment catering for the lunch break of office workers in the neighbourhood. From midday onwards, typists and filing clerks from the nearby offices would swarm in for a cheap and wholesome hot meal that cost about two shillings and sixpence – steak
and kidney pudding or shepherd’s pie, followed by treacle tart or spotted dick. And a well-paid secretary would leave a threepenny tip under the plate.

Shirley went in to enquire about the advertisement and came out with a job. ‘You’ll need a black dress,’ the Greek owner told her, ‘and my wife will find you a nice white apron to wear.’ He smiled at her. ‘You’ll look good,
kala kala
.’ She did look good, and many an office clerk slipped threepence under his plate for her. She picked up an Americanism and referred to her work as ‘slinging hash’. Years later she said, ‘I liked that job and I was very good at slinging hash in Frederick Street.’

Shirley Bassey’s daughter was born in September 1954 and was christened Sharon. Shirley went back to work at the restaurant and remained there until the following February, leaving baby Sharon in the loving and capable care of her own mother. During the cold winter months, it was a particular pleasure to come home and sit with her mother and cuddle her baby by the warmth of the fire. It seemed to her a hundred times better than touring in a Joe Collins revue, freezing half to death in bleak digs on the sufferance of disdainful landladies who could barely contain their hostility to ‘a crowd of coloureds from God knows where.’

The glowing coal fire was one of the best things about being home again, even though it meant constantly having to go out with a shovel in the freezing cold to refill the scuttle in the coalhouse. It was a chore which Shirley did gladly in order to spare her mother. She adored her mother. There was always a strong bond between them, and whatever Shirley did was all right with Eliza.

Three of Shirley’s five sisters lived nearby. The two eldest had left Wales, Gracie to Milwaukee as a GI bride, Ella and her husband to London. The three who were left behind were all married: Iris, Eileen and Marina. Eileen and Marina both had children and Iris was eager to look after Sharon. The sisters often got together for a fireside gossip in their mother’s front room, a simple room with a minimum of furniture. There was a sideboard with a round mirror into whose edges family snapshots were tucked, a table with a chenille cloth, a sofa, a couple of stools and two chairs by the fire.

Marina, the next youngest after Shirley, was the sister to whom Shirley was closest. They had walked to school together, hand-in-hand, and both had gone off to work at Curran’s factory for three pounds a week. Marina was also the one who most resembled Shirley and, later on, when her baby sister was famous, people would stop Marina in the streets of Cardiff to ask whether she was Shirley Bassey.

During this time, Shirley’s sisters found it difficult to understand why her career was on hold. She was the only one with this enormous talent yet, at the age of eighteen, she seemed to have given up on her future. The first offer that came to return to the stage she had initially turned down flat. She had had a telegram from Ben, inviting her to audition in London for the job of girl singer with the Ben Johnson Ballet, who had a two-week booking in March at the Little Theatre in Jersey. She read the telegram and said an emphatic ‘no’.

Her mother, whose faith in Shirley’s destiny, had remained unshaken, was astonished and bewildered. Had she known how miserable Shirley had been in the Collins
revues, how she had hated touring, how she had longed for her mother and the familiar warmth of home, Eliza Mendi would have understood. But, typically, Shirley had never confessed to her unhappiness, and her mother was shocked at her refusal. ‘If you don’t go to an audition how will one of these agents ever see you?’ she asked. ‘You need an agent.’

Shirley could have set her mother straight regarding the intentions of most agents. They were usually only interested in their percentage, but it would be a waste of time explaining this to Eliza, whose knowledge of the hard facts about show business could have been written on the back of a postage stamp. Instead, she detailed the expense that would be involved in going down to London – and, what about Sharon? How could she leave her?

‘Go!’ was her mother’s urgent response. ‘I’ll look after the baby.’ And so she went. Not because she wanted to, but to please her mother. For her own part, she had decided she was thoroughly disillusioned with show business. At the great age of eighteen, with only two third-rate tours behind her, she thought she knew it all: the big talk, the big build-up, the big let-down. As far as she was concerned, she was back where she started and she would rather have stayed at home with Sharon and put the theatre behind her.

Or so she thought.

ST VALENTINE’S DAY,
14 February, 1955, turned out to be a significant date in Shirley Bassey’s life. Over the years several people in the entertainment industry have made the comment that if Michael Sullivan hadn’t discovered her, somebody else inevitably would have done, but it is undeniable that theirs was a meeting of an unusual man and an unusual girl on that day. He had rare vision, she had great talent.

Michael Sullivan was an agent whose bread and butter was the booking of acts for the variety circuit. Fine-featured and good-looking, he had the cultivated speaking voice of a West End actor that impressed the managers of variety theatres. He’d built up his own theatrical agency, controlling the bookings for many venues, and had seventy-two acts on his books, but the agency was rapidly going down the drain thanks to the advent of television.

In early February, he’d had a call from a theatre-owning client in Jersey who was looking for a two-week ballet
season for March. As the man had put it, ‘Something sexy, you know the kind of thing. Pretty girls with long legs and a good-looking man or two to dance with them.’ So Sullivan had done a quick tour of the West End nightclubs and had found exactly what he was looking for at Churchill’s: a group of experienced coloured dancers whose men were dark and handsome and the women pale-complexioned and beautiful.

He went backstage after the show to find that the company was available and eager to take the Jersey booking, and quick to agree with Sullivan that as it was a theatre job, not a nightclub, they could hardly be expected to dance nonstop for two hours. What was needed was a singer to fill in during the scene changes. Did anybody know a girl with a strong voice, he asked.

It was Louise Benjamin from Shirley’s old touring mates, the Ben Johnson Ballet, who suggested a friend of hers near Cardiff who had a good strong voice, and that was how Shirley was sent a telegram by Ben Johnson which, but for her mother’s insistence, she would have ignored.

About a week later, Michael Sullivan climbed the two flights of bare wooden stairs, in a rickety building in Great Newport Street, which led to the Max Rivers Rehearsal Rooms, to hold an audition with Shirley. His mind was preoccupied with the kid from Cardiff, as he thought of her – he wasn’t expecting too much, just enough to suit the package and keep the audience occupied during scene changes. All the girl had to do was stand there and sing.

He opened the door to the rehearsal room to be hit by the familiar odour of sweat from generations of dancers, and the smell of stale cigarettes from the countless butts
stubbed out by chain-smoking rehearsal pianists. Sullivan glanced round the room where Pam and Ben Johnson and Louise Benjamin were limbering up at the barre, while pianist Stanley Myers was seated at the upright, waiting to play for the audition.

A girl dressed in tight black trousers and a shabby yellow sweater sat on the floor, legs outstretched, with the Johnson’s toddler on her lap playing with the chain the girl wore around her neck. This, then, was the ‘kid from Cardiff’. He was aware of her observing him with not overly friendly dark eyes; she, with the cynicism of a world-weary eighteen-year-old, was taking in the smart suit, the immaculate white shirt, the fashionable tie of the smart London operator.

The agent crossed over to her and, holding out his hand, introduced himself. ‘I’m Michael Sullivan’. She shifted the child on to her hip, and returning his gaze without a smile, shook his hand and muttered her name.

Sullivan wasted no time in small talk, but enquired briskly what she was going to sing. In a husky voice she told him ‘Stormy Weather’. Inwardly, he blanched, convinced that she had chosen badly and that she would never cope with the complicated key changes of the Harold Arlen classic. Did the kid think she was Lena Home? Well, if she could sing in tune, she’d be worth eight pounds a week and her hotel room.

The beleaguered agent had had a long, hard and none-too-successful day and was longing to relax in the pub with a stiff scotch and a cigarette. He left pianist Stanley Myers to run through the song with the girl while he went out for ten minutes. Shirley joined Myers at the piano, telling
herself that it didn’t matter if she didn’t get the job. She’d stay the night with her sister Ella in Islington and go home to Splott in the morning.

Louise Benjamin remembered that Shirley did not look happy that day in Great Newport Street, and although she tried to cheer her up, saying they’d have a great time in Jersey, she was acutely aware that Shirley was very different from the rest of them. Louise loved everything to do with show business and as long as she had a stage to dance on, she was happy to join in with the company and endure the hardships of touring. Shirley, as she well knew from their time in the Collins revues, would never adjust to that life. As Louise saw it, ‘Shirley
knew
she was going to be a star. She didn’t need or want the camaraderie of showbiz.’

Taking a breather in the pub next door Michael Sullivan, who always chain-smoked when he was worried, lit another cigarette and reflected on his present difficulties. Variety shows, his mainstay, were already playing to half-empty houses and it was obvious to him that, as TV encroached further, half the provincial theatres would have to close. After all, people could now enjoy variety shows on the box in the comfort of their homes without paying the price of admission. One Hippodrome had already gone bust, owing him two thousand pounds, and despite the seventy-two acts he had painstakingly built up, he was broke.