Shirley (7 page)

Sullivan needed to find a star, and he needed it badly. Like all agents, he dreamed the impossible dream of discovering an unknown talent whom he could nurture and who would make them both a fortune. He was thirty-five and so far this million-dollar ticket had not turned up. Oh
well, for the moment he’d better deal with the kid from Cardiff and pray to God she had enough competence to solve his immediate problem . . .

Back in the rehearsal room, he took a good look at the girl who was running through her paces with Stanley Myers. As soon as she saw him, she moved to a position behind the piano almost as if she were trying to hide, but not before the agent noticed that she’d got a good figure, and good legs under those dusty trousers. Still, she wasn’t a patch on her friend Louise, whom Sullivan considered a knock-out beauty.

By now Shirley, cowering behind the upright, looked patently frightened as if she were about to face the executioner. Making an effort to put her at her ease, Sullivan said, ‘Just try your best, that’s all we need’ and gave Myers the go ahead to begin.

The opening bars sounded on the piano and the girl opened her mouth: ‘Don’t know why, there’s no sun up in the sky, Stormy weather . . .’ The voice was in tune. Well, that was something. And it was strong. ‘Since my man and I ain’t together, Keeps rainin’ all the ti–ime . . .’ Wait a minute, forget strong. This voice was unusually powerful. It soared, it grabbed a high note and held it, flawlessly changing key. Then it unleashed a storm of sound, passionate and exultant. It was quite extraordinary.

Michael Sullivan was suddenly scared of what he was hearing. Out of the blue he had a vision of a great orchestra playing. He could hear the strings, the brass, the drums in his head, and reaching above it all, the rich and thrilling sound of this girl’s voice. He shivered, and shook himself back to reality, wondering if he was going a little crazy. He
had never heard a voice in audition that affected him so powerfully.

Shirley followed ‘Stormy Weather’ with ‘Jezebel’. No, he hadn’t been imagining it, she sang the notes high, clear and true. Sullivan glanced round the room expecting to see the others sharing his reaction, but other than some vaguely encouraging glances from Ben, Louise and Pam, and a smile from Stanley Myers nothing happened. Pam fastened her little girl into a baby chair, and the three dancers returned to their exercises.

Sullivan was bemused and disappointed, but came down to earth as he realised that these Johnson ballet people had toured with Shirley, had heard her sing hundreds of times over and took it for granted. He hurried over to the singer, bursting with excitement but reminding himself to play it cool. He congratulated Shirley on having a good voice and told her the job was hers, then went over to Myers and said ‘Great voice.’ Stanley was one of the best musicians in London, and if anyone could judge the girl’s potential, it was he.

‘Yes. Good for a beginner, but needs a lot of work.’

Before the group repaired to the pub, Sullivan drew Shirley aside and told her he was certain he could help her with her career. She appeared strangely unresponsive and he later remembered saying to her, ‘You act as if this doesn’t mean a lot to you. Don’t you want the job? Don’t you want me to take you on?’

‘You might change your mind,’ she replied.

‘What if I say that I’ll fly out to Jersey for your first night?’

‘All right.’

‘What if I say that I’ll pay you a salary while I teach you all the things you have to know?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Like appearing on television, making a record, doing a top-notch variety tour with second billing.’

‘You’re kidding.’ But Shirley was no longer unresponsive. Her large dark eyes were alert and sparkling, and Sullivan saw what beautiful teeth she had when she allowed herself to smile.

Later that night, walking down Shaftesbury Avenue towards the Mapleton Hotel, where he and his wife lived, his head was full of the sound of Shirley Bassey singing ‘Stormy Weather’. Somebody had once told him that there were 674 theatrical agents in Britain and all but four of them were Jewish. Sullivan was a Roman Catholic and he’d certainly had to work hard to be one of those four. And now his dream was going to come true. Certain that he wasn’t making a mistake or going out of his mind, he resolved that he would make Shirley Bassey into a star, no matter what it took. The first thing it would take was money, and, at that moment, he didn’t have so much as the return fare to Jersey.

Looking back on this eventful day much later, Shirley Bassey said, ‘I wasn’t sorry when I had to leave
Hot from Harlem
and I wasn’t sorry when I went to work in the Greek restaurant, but I was very sorry when I had to leave little Sharon and go to London for that audition. She was only six months old. I
hated
leaving her. When I got to London I spent all my money on phone calls to my sister to see if the baby was all right.’

Shirley’s mother had held a conference with her
daughters as to what they would do if Shirley got the job in Jersey. Her elder sister Iris loved the baby. It was decided that she and her husband, Bill, would take care of Sharon in Shirley’s absence.

The decision was not an easy one for Shirley to take. She was worried that her sister might grow too close to the baby and not want to part with her. She was a lovely baby, and a good one. Shirley had named her Sharon in memory of her father’s pet name for her, when as a baby herself, she had been his ‘Sharon’, the pet name of the Queen of Sheba. Shirley had settled in well to her new role as mother and breadwinner and, although she was on her feet all day in the Frederick Street restaurant, when she got home, her fatigue vanished.

Fame, it had seemed, was no longer the spur to Shirley’s desires. The sleazy experience of touring with the chorus line of Bay Girls, who seemed to have little function other than to arouse and titillate male audiences with their ‘exotic’ sex appeal, had tarnished her dreams of show business. Now here she was again, about to join a show because she had auditioned only to please her mother.

This time, however, things just might be different She had met someone who appeared to be part of the ‘real’ entertainment business, an experienced agent who told her that she had a great voice and a real future, and seemed to mean it. He wasn’t just a flash guy with a big car and the line that went, ‘I’m worth a lot of money. I know someone who owns a nightclub in Soho and if I tell him to give you a job, he will.’ This genuinely looked as though it might be the breakthrough, but Shirley had suffered so much disappointment so quickly that even now, in the midst of her
excitement, she tried to protect herself, telling herself it would probably fizzle out as it had always done.

The morning after the audition, Michael Sullivan set about the business of turning Shirley Bassey into a star. It was going to be a long haul, and the first thing he needed was some ready cash. This he hoped to get from his friend and occasional business partner, Leonard Beresford Clarke, who lived in Reigate.

Berry, as he was called, was an accountant by profession, but was also completely stagestruck. During the wartime Blitz, Berry had worked in the Fire Service. One of his mates had owned a circus before the war and kept Berry enthralled with tales of circus life. The upshot was that Berry joined forces with his mate in running the circus after the war, and found it thrilling to be involved with ‘the smell of the greasepaint, the roar of the crowd’.

Michael Sullivan, then a youngster of sixteen, joined the circus for a time and met Berry there. Sullivan was bursting with ambition to become an agent, and was full of ideas. In the years that followed, when Michael came up with a good proposition, Berry would finance it. Shirley Bassey was now the proposition that Michael would have to ‘sell’ to him.

Berry was honeymooning in Guernsey with his new bride, Sylvia, who was starring as Dick Whittington on ice at the local theatre there. Sullivan had produced and directed the show, and every chorus girl on ice had come to detest him. Sylvia, who admired his skill, nonetheless admitted that he was a very hard taskmaster, something Shirley would come to learn for herself Meanwhile, Sullivan organised his trip to Jersey for Shirley’s first night,
planning to go on to Guernsey and sweet-talk Berry – always provided that his ‘discovery’ was as good as he anticipated.

While he made his plans, the Ben Johnson Ballet – Ben, Pam, Louise, Cynthia from London and the American, Elroy – plus their four musicians and their girl singer, arrived in Jersey. To Shirley’s surprise and delight, they were driven to a decent hotel in St Helier, where there would be three proper meals a day and no cooking in the landlady’s bathroom. She still, however, had to share a room, but she and Louise, both Tiger Bay girls, got along well enough.

Ben Johnson was a West Indian who had started his ballet company in 1951. Although run on a shoestring, the company was hardworking and artistic, Ben having – as he openly acknowledged – drawn much inspiration from two great inventive dancer-choreographers, Katherine Dunham and Robert Helpmann. The Australian Helpmann, a leading dancer with the Royal Ballet, had also famously danced in the films
The Red Shoes
and
Tales of Hoffman
; the American Dunham had not only opened new vistas for dance as an art form, but had forced open the doors that had been closed to black talent.

Shirley and the five dancers were, of course, old colleagues, having worked together in both
Memories of Jolson
and
Hot from Harlem
. But things were a little different now. Shirley was no longer a chorus girl with a solo spot in a downmarket revue, but the featured singer in the Ben Johnson Ballet, and because Shirley passionately loved dancing, Ben had decided to give her a dancing spot in the show, partnered by him. Shirley was delighted. She
admired and respected the dancers, considering them true artists, and was awed by Louise’s dedication. That didn’t alter the fact that, while Louise’s idea of heaven was the daily dance rehearsals called by Ben, Shirley considered them a pain in the neck.

She did, however, discover the joy and freedom that came from dancing the Ben Johnson way. In the show, she and Ben glided nightly round the stage to ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon’, and she never tired of it. She was quite aware that Ben had taught her the simplest of steps so that he could always cover if she made a mistake, and that the others knew this. They felt that ‘dancers do the dancing’, but she didn’t mind. This was how she had imagined show business would be, a chance to improve herself and to learn new skills. It was in watching and working with the ballet, that Shirley originated the sinuous movements of her solo stage performances later on.

Michael Sullivan arrived in Jersey, having decided to slip in to the first matinee, unannounced and unexpected. Shirley, who had few clothes, agreed to wear on stage her bridesmaid frock from one of her sisters’ weddings. With its acid-green satin bodice and bouffant net skirt, the dress was a disaster, unappealing and doing less than nothing for its wearer’s slim and graceful body – a body which, as several designers would learn, was an absolute dream to clothe.

When she made her first entrance that afternoon, Sullivan inwardly groaned. Visually, everything about this girl standing under the stage lights, was worse than he could ever have expected. It wasn’t only the hideous dress, but she clearly had no idea about stage make-up. Her eyes had
disappeared into her head, emphasising the ill-chosen gash of bright orange lipstick she wore. Worst of all, she had no stagecraft.

Standing alone and diffident in front of the microphone, Shirley appeared so raw and untrained, her gestures so stiff and contrived, that it hurt him to watch. Her exit, in his view, was nothing short of a calamity. She marched off the stage without even a smile to the audience, as though she were leaving the show forever. The voice, which had so overcome him in the London rehearsal room, was fine, but brought only lukewarm applause. His spirits sank.

The ballet numbers were good and the girls, in their flimsy, pretty gauze costumes, looked delightful. How, wondered Sullivan, could they have allowed Shirley to wear that terrible green dress? What he didn’t yet know, was that Shirley had very much a mind of her own and since the Johnsons, whose costumes were run up by Pam on her sewing machine at home, had nothing to offer her from their wardrobe, there wasn’t much they could do about her choice.

When, later in the programme, Shirley came on with Ben for their dance number, she was wearing one of Pam’s flimsy creations. She looked very good and very professional as Ben guided her through the relaxed and intimate routine. Suddenly, the men in the audience sat up and took notice. Now that Shirley was properly on show, her sex appeal was obvious.

The applause for the dance number was generous and gave Shirley a boost. From then on, it was as though an ember had been reignited, and with each successive song, that unique voice grew in excitement, and so did the
audience. Whatever she sang – ‘Smile’, ‘Ebb Tide’, ‘The Sunny Side of the Street’ – she was a sensation, and the applause was rapturous.

But Michael Sullivan was now suffering from doubt and conflict. Yes, the audience had loved Shirley, who had come through wonderfully for the Monday matinee crowd, retired pensioners who knew what they liked. But she could just as easily have failed to captivate them. She was so clearly untrained, with little idea of how to present or pace herself. The talent was there, waiting to be exploited, the voice was extraordinary, but he knew that she would be laughed off the stage in a top spot at a number one venue.

It was obvious that Shirley Bassey was no ordinary singer but, wondered Sullivan, had he jumped the gun? Was he really capable of taking on a beginner and teaching her everything? And did she want to learn? He was suddenly beset with worries about the vastness of the undertaking. Not only would he have to pay her a salary and teach her the tricks of her trade, but he’d have to find her somewhere to live, look after her, nursemaid her. He knew that stars didn’t come ready gift-wrapped, but there were so many problems, not least the fact that he hated taking care of other people.