Brassy side of Bassey

Miss Shirley Bassey

Her story has all the elements of a rags-to-riches saga. As the author says: “Shirley Bassey’s story is a remarkable one of triumph against the odds.” It’s also a story of contradictions. “When she was born, in the late 1930s, to be a mixed-race child brought up by a white mother in Britain was highly unusual.”

Surprisingly, given this background, she remained indifferent to the race issue. “For a long period, during the radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s, her stance seemed out of place. When black Britons were fighting against racism, and for a distinct black British identity, Shirley Bassey was busy flirting with Prince Charles in a see-through blouse, and sipping cocktails with Joan Collins, almost as if denying there was such a thing as racism to worry about.”

Tiger Bay is a rough area of Cardiff that has a dodgy, red-light reputation. It’s where Bassey grew up, so she didn’t have an address to use as a calling card in life. Nor was her young life easy. The family was poor, even by Cardiff standards at the time. “This was poor poor, hand-me-down clothes, even hand-me-down underwear for Shirley.” That she went on to become, along with Tom Jones, one of Wales’ best exports, is testimony to her grit and hard-edged ambition.

Her father was Henry Bassey, a merchant seaman from Calabar, in Nigeria. He was Eliza Jane Start’s second husband, and he brought great shame to the family when, in 1938, he was sentenced to five years in prison for repeatedly raping a young girl, over a period of six years. In 1943 he was deported to Nigeria. When she became famous, it was an episode Shirley deleted from her biography. By the beginning of the 1950s, she had two things going for her – she could sing and she had sex appeal. “Gradually, if unconsciously ... she began to feel her way towards allowing these gifts to work for her, to use them in tandem, to become a performer.”

After a period singing around the pubs in Cardiff, she was barely 16 when she made her first venture into show business proper – an audition in London for a show entitled Memories of Jolson. “The time Shirley Bassey spent in the revues in 1953 and 1954 is perhaps the most confusing period of what was already a pretty confusing life. There are a few things that can be said for certain. She was in two touring reviews – Memories of Jolson and Hot From Harlem – and somewhere between the finish of one and the start of the other she became pregnant.”

This was 1954, and, as the author says, whoever the father was, he didn’t stick around. In 1998, Shirley told reporters that her daughter Sharon’s father was Jewish, but she has never named him. She returned to Cardiff, after giving birth in London, moving back in with her mother, and started waitressing at a Greek cafe. “I retired. I was 17 and I went to work as a waitress. What else could a black girl do in those days, maybe become a prostitute?”

But she had not abandoned her dream of being a singer. Her big break came in 1955, when she received a telegram from a London theatrical agent named Mike Sullivan. He was to become her Svengali. “Because she was coloured,” he wrote later in a memoir, “it would be easy to persuade people to think of her, properly presented, like Lena Horne or Eartha Kitt. It was shrewd thinking on Sullivan’s part. Shirley’s career was about to go into orbit. As luck would have it, a new television channel – ITV – had just opened. She received rave reviews for her appearance on a show called Jack Hylton Presents, where she sang Burn My Candle. Within 10 years, she would sing for the Bond movie. Real stardom meant making it in the States, and that followed with hugely successful concerts in Las Vegas and New York’s Carnegie Hall. She was also one of the stars at a gala concert to celebrate the end of President Kennedy’s second year in office, in 1962. Of JFK she said: “Oh, yes, he could have left his shoes under my bed any time.”

Other men had the pleasure of leaving their shoes under Ms Bassey’s bed – her two most famous lovers were the composer, John Barry, and the Australian actor, Peter Finch. Of her involvement with the latter, she described it as “an unbelievably beautiful affair.”

There are two curious things about this biography – the author ends the story of Shirley Bassey in 1967, when she was 30 years old and an established star. He writes: “for me it’s always the route to the top that fascinates, not life at the top...” A very lame excuse. More worryingly, he remonstrates with himself – “Why rake up all the muck?” – mainly for his revelations about her father’s crime. He hopes “it’s the case that whoever reads this will come away thinking more of her, rather than less.” It doesn’t work. The reader is left with a picture of Shirley Bassey as a self-obsessed, self-indulgent woman who, unlike Tom Jones, turned her back on her roots and largely edited her family out of her own history.