After Dark Magazine

January 1972

"They can't put the two together"

and Bassey is both.

Shirley Bassey at the start. "I was born in Wales. My mother is English - white. My Father, Nigerian and in the merchant navy - loved ships and the sea. I must inherit that from him because one thing I'd love to have is a yacht. Not necessarily an Onassis-type yacht, I'd settle for one a little bit smaller."

Shirley Bassey performing in the Empire Room of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Her supple, tan body subtly disclosed as she tosses off the glittery loose dress she wore for her first numbers, to show the clinging, bare-midriff gown beneath. Her eloquent arms and long, slender hands never leaving the air about her in peace as they move constantly, helping to sell her songs. Her bouncy dark hair falling over her face as she makes her low, grateful bow to her audience at the end of her hour on stage.
Shirley Bassey, exhausted, at the party after her first-night performance. Her brown hair miraculously free of the sweat that must surely have drenched it after her emotion-packed singing. "Take away this lousy warm champagne-it makes me want to puke." The twist of her mouth and nose as she signifies her distaste, itself a well thought-out performance.

Shirley Bassey in the large living room of her Waldorf suite. Lovelier under close scrutiny than when she was on stage protected by carefully designed lighting. Honey-colored face with the smoothest of skins; enormous, long-lashed eyes (what matter if those lashes came from God or the drugstore?); rose-colored silky outfit and a biege turban completely covering her hair and setting off the small, proud face.

"Please, would you put some sugar into this tea, dear," she asks her secretary. "I need strength." She turns to me and sighs. "I have been singing for two days with a terrible cold - it's tough. Two shows a night, which I hate anyway, because you get yourself all charged up for your first performance and the adrenalin's going and then you have something like two hours to calm down, and just as you're starting to relax, you have to gear yourself up for another performance. It's hell."

Tea finished, those pale-tipped fingers free again, Miss Bassey's hands resume their usual flights through the space surrounding her. "And I like concerts, anyway. I'm a little fed up with nightclubs because it's too long - you're in a place two or three weeks. It's better constantly moving - different houses, different audiences. You were at my opening here? The first number, 'Till Love Touches Your Life' (one of songs on her United Artists album 'Something Else'), is one of my favorites. I love the feel. I love the drive. I love the arrangement. I come out and it's all happening. But I wasn't so happy opening night. I had a lot of bad things going, music-wise. A drummer who wasn't picking up the rhythm, a bass player, too, and unless you have those people, the whole orchestra falls apart. Even with the greatest orchestra, you need that rhythm, and I came off crying, and I cried and I cried, and they got me a new drummer and a new bass player and I went on the next night and it was magic! In songs, I look for something strong. Not just a song. I suppose it's got to relate to me - to my life, because perhaps everything I sing on that stage is me."

"You do sing a lot of sad songs. Does that mean you've had a lot of sad loves?"

"Oh, yes." For a moment the small, up-turned nose turns down, the heavy lids almost cover the eyes that follow Miss Bassey's fingers that suddenly are occupied with pleating a bit of the fabric of her dress. Then the eyes look up again - quite candid, "Oh, yes - I wouldn't sing like that, I don't think , if I hadn't. But it's not necessarily only to do with love - it's childhood, too. I had as much love from my mother as she could possibly give to the youngest of eight children and not having my father around because my parents were divorced when I was two years old. So it wasn't an easy life, you know. We were living from day to day and of course this got into my heart, my soul, and, being the youngest, I had all the hand-me-downs. That was really bitter. It wasn't really a happy childhood. But, you know, it isn't always songs about love lost that I sing - it's some songs about love gained, too."

Miss Bassey's smile becomes wide, her small face, which looks a bit as though she had borrowed it from a ballerina, takes on a extra layer of radiance. "And now I see to it that I have long vacations. There was a time that I didn't know what a vacation was, but now I've reached a certain point - a rung of the ladder of success. This summer I had practically two months with the children at our villa in Sardinia. For Christmas, my husband (he's Italian) and I take the children to the mountains, in Cortina, and we ski. I have two girls, eight and seventeen years old, and a six-year-old grandnephew we're trying to adopt. And when I'm on vacation - when you see me away from my work, I'm an extrovert. Oh, yes! I play as hard as I work. Well, I liked to play around with men before I got married, you know. I was a playgirl. Now, I like to play tennis, swim and frolic on the beach with the children."

Miss Bassey emphasizes an unusually large number of words as she speaks, many times in unpredictable parts of her sentences. This gives her speech a fantastic sense of stressing the offbeat, a lightly British-accented Latin rhythm pervades her conversation. "I've sung more or less all over, and until I started to make a name in New York, England and Australia were by far the best audiences. Now New York is definitely added to the list. The Italians are over-enthusiastic. I mean, you hit a note in the middle of the song and they applaud, they go crazy, and it's very distracting. I've never played Russia. Nearest I got was Czechoslovakia before the Russians came - in fact, I got out just in time. I found Prague terribly depressing - the people. I did a television show there in the street, so I could see the faces. People passed, and here I was on the main street doing 'Big Spender' and a man following me, out of camera range, with the tape, and there was not a look of astonishment on the faces - they were blank. They didn't laugh, they didn't say, "What's going on? Is this some kind of nut?" It was a weird feeling.
I'd love to go to Africa to perform. I've been asked many times to go to South Africa, but I won't. I was asked to got to Swaziland. I met the King in Monte Carlo and he has this Casino in his country and I was asked to appear, but, anyway, the South African press came out with a terrible story that he was sending me love letters and said I had told them this and naturally His Highness was very embarrassed and very mad. So we couldn't get a visa. They said we'd been writing to each other for a long time, and the man happens to be very happily married and of course the government said Miss Bassey would have a terrible welcome if she did try to come."

Her hands fly out in a "well, that's life" gesture, before Shirley Bassey's conversation takes a rather sharp turn to a more distant past. "When I was about ten years old I went to a tap dancing school. I was crazy for it, but I never got to do any tap dancing on the shows because suddenly the teacher discovered I could sing, and every time there was a show, I had to sing. I was furious - my mother was paying for the dancing lessons and they made me sing! I love to see tap dancing - I'm so glad it's back now, with No, No, Nanette and all. Of course, I never have time to see anything, hardly.

"I love the cinema because I can escape - it's a form of escapism to me, like television. I love to sit there and relax - anything where I don't have to talk. To save my voice. Are there any good films playing here now?" Miss Bassey puts a hand up in warning. "Not Sunday, Bloody Sunday. I saw it, and oh, I couldn't bear it - probably a personal thing, though. One of the principals, Peter Finch, is a very good friend of mine. In fact, we were lovers, and when he kissed that boy, it destroyed me. It spoiled the whole film for me. But I love films. I've never been in one and it's one of my burning ambitions to have a go at it - to get it out of my system. A straight dramatic role, I do act out my songs, you know."

Miss Bassey cocks her head to one side. "This new permissiveness in film, though - I think it's ridiculous and frightening. There isn't a film that you can take your children to see. I wouldn't appear nude in a film. "
"Even if it were valid within the context of the story?"

"I would - um, yes, if it were necessary. Yes, but I'd have to say, 'No" - I couldn't be nude, anyway. I know I couldn't do it - I happen to have a very bad scar so that nude scene would be out anyway. But if I didn't have the scar and the nude scene was very right in the film, then I would".

Miss Bassey smiles. "Soon I go home - to Switzerland. I live in Lugano a beautiful place. But I'll be coming back to the United States for a concert tour in March. I love concerts because I was brought up in the theater. From sixteen, I started in variety - in vaudeville - that's how I got my training. Unfortunately, that's gone and that's why the new artists that come on can't cope - they haven't had that training."

Miss Bassey gets up to see me to the door and I realize what most sets her apart from other women. An unusual look of serenity. Not the faintest frown lines between the brows. An open, unplanned smile.

"There can't be anything that really bugs you," I tell her, "or you couldn't look so happy.""It's silly little things that annoy me," she laughs. "That I'm being serious and somebody starts to make a joke of it. Or picking a word of mine and making fun - that I get angry about. Even my husband, he doesn't like it when I'm serious. They can't put the two together - it drives me crazy and that makes me furious. They see this glamorous girl on the stage, and then when I'm off stage, when I'm home, they see me rolling on the floor with the kids - they don't want that."

There is a soft sigh - or is it merely a soft rush of air from the corridor? - as the door closes behind me.

By Norma McLain Stoop.