Tom Jones - the Life (14 page)

Tom’s most serious liaison then was with a stunning Californian model called Joyce Ingalls. They had met in Vegas and he had invited her to the UK when he was filming the second season of
This Is Tom Jones
.

Joyce, who was just nineteen, was an archetypal dizzy blonde. She also thought she meant more to Tom than she actually did. He found her entertaining, called her ‘Clogs’ because of her preferred footwear, and fancied her. The back of his Rolls-Royce, the caravan and the earth all moved when they were together. She appeared to think she was going to be the second Mrs Jones, and practically moved into the caravan. She began to dictate who could and could not gain admittance. One of Tom’s entourage at the time observes, ‘Joyce was trouble. She was trying to take over from Gordon Mills. She threatened his position because she would say, “You have got to wear this or you have got to wear that.” Only Gordon was allowed to do that. Linda would never have tried to do anything like that.’ The final straw was when she refused to allow Tom’s dresser access to the caravan. It wasn’t long before she was packing her bags for her return to the US.

Joyce made a handful of movies, including
Paradise Alley
with Sylvester Stallone in 1978 and
Lethal Weapon 4
alongside Mel Gibson in 1998. She achieved some notoriety in the mid-nineties when she was linked to Sir Anthony Hopkins, whom she met at an AA meeting in Los Angeles. He declared, ‘Joyce has given me back a passion and vigour that has been dormant for years.’ Tom, it seems, also liked her passion and vigour.

To her credit, Joyce has never talked about her fling with Tom; a series of men close to him have kissed and told about her, though. Tom has always had more trouble with men than women when it comes to providing the media with lurid headlines.

The years between 1968 and 1974 were the ones when he was most indiscreet, but his marriage somehow survived. He even managed to gloss over a misplaced joke about his activities in the caravan from his friend, the Liverpool comic Jimmy Tarbuck, who was guest comedian on one show. Tarby, as he was known, was a member of Tom’s circle, because he made him laugh in a court jester sort of way. During the show, a sketch involved a series of lovely girls parading on stage carrying champagne. Tarby had to give them directions to Tom’s caravan, which was harmless enough, until he turned to the camera and declared, ‘Do you know that caravan of his has had six new sets of tyres and it hasn’t moved three feet?’ When Linda watched the show with Tom, she didn’t get the joke, which was lucky for him – or perhaps she chose not to understand it.

Tom never felt completely at ease with the scripted part of the show, the comedy sketches that were light relief. He would have been happier if every episode consisted only of him singing. The schedule was exacting because each programme had to be recorded twice on subsequent days, first for the English broadcast and secondly for the American transmission. His day off was Monday, so that was Linda’s favourite day of the week, because he was home.

The aspect of the show that Tom disliked most was the presence, throughout the recording, of a censor – a woman from the ABC network whose sole job seemed to be to make Tom sanitise things so they would be acceptable to an American audience. Tom had realised that the US wasn’t the great land of freedom when he first visited in 1965. Then it was just a case of toning down suggestive movements or altering a song lyric or two; now it was something altogether more depressing. He was singing the timeless ‘Somewhere’ from
West Side Story
with the elegant black musical star Lesley Uggams, when the censor stepped in. The show’s producer Jon Scoffield refused to go on set and relay her concerns. Instead, Gordon ambled out to tell Tom that he needed to look more into the camera and less into Lesley’s eyes. It was considered too controversial for a white man to gaze into a black woman’s eyes and sing the words ‘There’s a place for us’.

Tom was furious, especially as the song in the original was sung by a white man and a Puerto Rican girl – a racial divide was the very point of such a poignant heartfelt lyric. Ever the professional, however, Tom agreed to look into the camera more. ‘I didn’t really do it,’ he confessed.

Even worse than that, he was singing the evocative ballad ‘Passing Strangers’ with the velvet-voiced black singer Nancy Wilson, when Jon Scoffield informed him that there was a problem with clearing copyright on the song and asked if he would mind singing a different one. Jon suggested that perhaps an up-tempo number might work well at that point in the show. So they sang a dynamic duet of ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’. The following week, when Tom asked him what the problem had been with the licence for ‘Passing Strangers’, Jon revealed there wasn’t one. ‘It was the censor,’ he admitted, who had thought that the words ‘we seem like passing strangers’ suggested that white Tom and black Nancy had once been lovers.

Tom has been widely reported to have had flings with both Lesley and Nancy. In fact, his best-known backing singer, Darlene Love, even wrote about the latter in her autobiography
My Name Is Love
. Both Lesley and Nancy have subsequently denied they had affairs with him.

When Tom reminisces on the television series
The Voice
about the many great artists he has sung with, many of them are from this golden three-year period, when his stature in world music grew almost as quickly as his sideburns. Despite the success of the show, Tom had to battle to have musical guests that were acceptable to the American network.

He wanted to sing with musical heroes, the great rock ’n’ roll and rhythm and blues artists he so admired, including Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Charles and Little Richard. The network wanted more middle-of-the-road, mainstream performers. In the end, there was a trade-off between Tom and ABC, which resulted in some curious line-ups that worked brilliantly.

Jerry Lee, for instance, shared a show with Barbara Eden, who at the time was the star of the popular sitcom
I Dream of Jeannie
. Tom didn’t mind. He was in heaven singing with his musical hero at last. She was a guest for a second time in the 1970 season, when she appeared with Wilson Pickett, one of Tom’s favourite soul singers. Little Richard was on the same week as the French actress and insipid singer Claudine Longet.

One show that perhaps showed how well this formula could work was the one in which the peerless Aretha Franklin appeared alongside Hollywood great Bob Hope – a television dream team. Even Hope played up Tom’s reputation as a sex symbol. In a reference to women’s liberation, he joked, ‘Tom has his own movement for women and they are watching it very carefully.’

Aretha was the one performer who inspired complete admiration in her host. He had loved her voice ever since he had bought her breakthrough single ‘I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You’ a couple of years earlier, when he was touring the north of England. She is the only singer he has ever thought could match his power.

He was awestruck when they were rehearsing without microphones: ‘We were just singing live to one another. The volume that came out … I could so appreciate what the woman has.’ Her performance of the Burt Bacharach and Hal David song ‘I Say a Little Prayer’ is arguably the highlight of the entire three series. She and Tom sang a breathtaking version of ‘The Party’s Over’. She also sang a few bars of ‘It’s Not Unusual’ in a bossa nova style, accompanying herself on the piano.

The guest list for Tom’s show read like an encyclopaedia of music greats: Ella Fitzgerald, Joni Mitchell, Dusty Springfield, Johnny Cash, Janis Joplin, Stevie Wonder and Sammy Davis, Jr were just some of the best. Ella and Tom effortlessly sang the timeless ‘Sunny’ while seated in rocking chairs. In 1969, Sammy opened season two – the first to be partly shot in Los Angeles – by sending up Tom’s performance of ‘It’s Not Unusual’, which began every show. ‘You ain’t coloured, Tom,’ he declared, before giving the song a slow and smoky treatment. Sammy also acted the part of ‘Mr Bojangles’ while Tom sang. The melancholy ballad would later become Sammy’s signature song.

The powerhouse Janis Joplin had a reputation for being prickly, and clearly didn’t rate Tom as a singer before she appeared on the show. She changed her mind after they rehearsed their duet of ‘Raise Your Hand’, a song she had made famous at the Woodstock Festival in 1969. She clearly thought she was going to wipe the floor with Tom, and asked him, ‘What key do you sing in?’

Tom responded modestly, ‘I just sing’, and proceeded to match the great blues-rock singer note for note. After the first run-through, she turned to him, smiled and said, ‘You can really sing.’ It seemed as if Tom and his glittering line-up of guests all realised they needed to be at the top of their game.

Each show ended with Tom in concert, singing a selection of his own music to an enraptured audience. It gave him the chance to showcase his new material, as well as his old favourites. During the second series, he sang ‘Daughter of Darkness’, a Les Reed composition, which was a top ten hit in the UK and was number one in the US Easy Listening Chart – a distinction that demonstrated Tom had been successfully positioned as a mainstream entertainer in America. The recording at the Decca studios in London was noteworthy because one of the backing singers was an ambitious singer-songwriter called Elton John.

One number he performed during that series, which wasn’t one of his own recordings, could have been one of his greatest-ever hits if the cards had fallen differently. He was in a fashionable club called Scotts of St James in Jermyn Street, when he bumped into Paul McCartney. Tom asked him, ‘When are you going to write me a song then, Paul?’ The Beatle said he would sort something out and a few days later sent a song round to Tom’s house. It was ‘The Long and Winding Road’.

Tom was desperate to do it, but it turned out to be a complicated process. Tom explained, ‘The one condition was that I could do it, but it had to be my next single. Paul wanted it out straight away. At that time I had a song called “Without Love” that I was going to be releasing. The record company was gearing up towards the release of it. So the timing was terrible, but I asked if we could stop everything and I could do “The Long and Winding Road”. They said it would take a lot of time and was impractical, so I ended up not doing it.’

‘Without Love’ was a top ten hit at the end of 1969, but the song that got away became one of pop’s great classics after it appeared on the
Let It Be
album. At the time, The Beatles were going through much internal strife and the song became controversial, with McCartney apparently unhappy with its production. That would explain why he’d offered it to Tom and wanted him to release it quickly. He was probably pleased in the end that Tom couldn’t record it, as the track became one of the most popular during McCartney’s solo tours.

While his TV show was a resounding success, particularly in the US, not everything that Tom touched turned to gold. He topped the bill at the Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium in November 1969. Afterwards, the Duke of Edinburgh was introduced to him and enquired, ‘What do you gargle with, pebbles?’ Tom laughed off the insult when Chris Hutchins asked him about it. He said, ‘I forgave him everything when I noticed his shirt collar was frayed.’ Tom always took huge care and pride in how he dressed, even as a young man with nothing but pennies in his pocket.

He was less pleased the following day, when the Duke followed up by telling a luncheon for the Small Businesses Association in London, ‘It’s very difficult to see how it is possible to become immensely valuable by singing what I think are the most hideous songs.’ Prince Philip is renowned for his gaffes, but at least he instructed an aide to send Tom a written apology. A year later, he sought Tom out at a Buckingham Palace function and told him he was misquoted.

The seventies began with Tom discovering he had made a profit of more than £1 million without even trying. Acting on the advice of their accountant, Bill Smith, Gordon had formed a company with Tom, Engelbert, Bill and himself as directors. The idea was that it would make them all more tax efficient. They called it MAM, which stood for Management, Agency and Music and gave a quiet acknowledgement of the importance of their mothers. When the company went public, Tom’s shares were worth close to £600,000. Within four weeks of being quoted on the stock market, they were worth £1.6 million.

Tom left money matters to Gordon. Gerry Greenberg remembers visiting him in his hotel room in Manchester and being amazed at the amount of cash lying about: ‘He was in the shower and I was in the bedroom chatting away to him. I looked around and there seemed to be money everywhere. There were wads of notes just thrown around. I could have taken anything I wanted. He either trusted me implicitly or he didn’t give a damn about his money, which I suspected he didn’t.’

He was, it seemed, more concerned with embracing the latest fashion – a haircut that covered his ears completely, so he resembled a tea cosy. He also unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a hairy chest and a large silver crucifix, which looked slightly ridiculous when he was in his rocking chair next to Ella Fitzgerald, who was old enough to be his mother.

He sang his biggest hit of the seventies in the third series in January 1971. The lyrics to ‘She’s a Lady’ were scribbled by Paul Anka on the back of an airline menu on a flight from London to New York after he had appeared on Tom’s show. Gordon had asked him to write a song, and he came up with this brash and chauvinistic lyric, which he thought suited Tom’s personality. Anka, who also wrote ‘My Way’, dislikes the song more than any he has ever written, even though it made him a fortune.

Today ‘She’s a Lady’ sounds very dated, but it reflected the trend of the early seventies, when disco was beginning to take over the world. The song reached only number thirteen in the UK, but the American audience turned it into his biggest-ever hit in the US, where it reached number two on the
Billboard
chart.

Paul Anka found Tom and Gordon quite hard to handle. He recalled in his autobiography that after one show he was taken out to dinner and then Gordon suggested they move on to a shady private club for some late entertainment. Tom was worried about the cost, because Paul observed he was very ‘thrifty’. The ‘cabaret’ was a large woman engaging in some kinky games with a sheep. The boys had just wanted to see their guest’s reaction and have a laugh at his expense.