The Singers and Their Songs
The Rise and Fall of Little Voice by Jim Cartwright
Derby Playhouse, 1996
Shirley Bassey
… was born in the Tiger Bay district of Cardiff in January 1937, the youngest daughter of seven children. She was constantly singing as a child, entertaining her friends, family and then workmates in the enamel factory where she took her first job.
Her professional singing debut was at 16, playing the part of a soubrette in a touring Al Jolson tribute show, Memories of Jolson. This was quickly followed by another touring show, Hot from Harlem, after which she returned, exhausted and homesick, to Tiger Bay.
Her solo break came when she was seen performing at the Astor Club by the impresario Jack Hylton. He immediately gave her the lead part in Such is Life with Al Read at the Adelphi Theatre in London’s West End.
Her first hit was ‘The Banana Boat Song’ which charted in 1957, bringing her voice to a wider public. This was also the year that she made her first television appearance, in Sunday Night at the London Palladium, the first in a long relationship with television variety. In 1961 she married the show’s producer Kenneth Hume, but both this marriage and a second to the Italian Sergio Novak ended in divorce.
Shirley had three children, one son and two daughters. In 1985 her youngest daughter was found dead, aged just 21, in the River Avon in Bristol. The circumstances surrounding her death have never been uncovered and the shock of this tragic incident caused the temporary loss of the singer’s trademark belting voice.
She now lives in Monaco, coming home every now and then to perform sell-out concerts. Always including her famous torch songs. Her most famous include ‘Big Spender’ from Sweet Charity, and the classic James Bond themes ‘Goldfinger’, ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ and ‘Moonraker’. But for some her version of ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, assisted by the willing and not very able Morecambe and Wise in their 1971 Christmas show, was definitely the high point of her career.
Gracie Fields
… born Grace Stansfield above her grandmother’s chip shop in Rochdale, Lancashire, was the eldest of the four children of Fred and Jenny Stansfield. Her mother had always been stage-struck and though she had failed in her own ambitions to become a singer, Jenny was determined that one, if not all of her children would make it on the stage.
Gracie’s career began, as legend has it, when aged 10 she was overheard singing while scrubbing the toilets in the backyard. She was entered in a local talent contest and won. She then joined various touring groups, but it was not a happy start. Being the youngest, she was lonely, bullied, and when the boyfriend of one of the dancers assaulted her she became ill through the shock and had to return home. She took a job at the local mill, where she entertained her colleagues by singing over the row of the machines – an act which eventually got her the sack.
The mill’s loss was showbiz’s gain. Changing her name to Gracie Fields, she appeared in pantos and concerts, eventually joining the Manchester-based touring revue. Here she met the 35-year-old comedian Archie Pitt, who was to become her first husband. He wrote and directed the revue Mr Tower of London which Gracie appeared in for nine years from 1916. The couple were wed in 1923.
In the 1930s Gracie visited and fell in love with the island of Capri, which would become her home. Towards the end of the decade, Gracie went to Hollywood with the American film producer Monty Banks who she married after divorcing Archie in 1940. In 1950 Monty suddenly died of a heart attack on the Orient Express. Two years later she married radio engineer Boris Alperovici. He was a neighbour in Capri, who she had met when he came to fix her broken record player.
She gave her final concerts in 1978 and died of a heart attack on Capri in 1979.
Judy Garland
… was born Frances Ethel Gumm on 10 June 1922 in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. The youngest of three daughters, she had been a disappointment to her parents who had wanted a boy. Her first stage appearance was at two years old in the Christmas show at her father’s New Grand Theatre, and from that moment she was hooked on the attention. When Frances was four, her mother Ethel took her daughters on their first tour appearing as ‘The Gumm Sisters with Baby Frances’, however after being mistakenly billed as ‘The Gumm Sisters…’ they quickly changed their name to Garland, and Frances became Judy.
Her parents’ marriage was not a good one: her father was homosexual and had thought marriage might ‘cure’ him. So Ethel concentrated all her energy into her ambitions for her youngest daughter. By the time Judy was 13 in 1935, she had been signed up by MGM. A month later, her father suddenly developed spinal meningitis and died.
MGM loved Judy’s voice, but were less impressed by her appearance. She was considered too short and fat, with uneven teeth and a bent nose. They introduced her to diet pills, cigarettes and black coffee for slimming, and sleeping pills and stimulants to fit her in with filming schedules beginning her life-long battle with drug dependence.
Her big break came in 1939 when she starred as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz which featured her theme song ‘Over the Rainbow’, a hopeful dream for happiness in a better place, which Judy Garland never quite managed to reach.
She married five times in her short life to David Rose, Vincente Minnelli, Sid Luft, Mark Herron and Mickey Deans. None of these marriages were successful, and she continually sought satisfaction through numerous affairs. She had three children, Liza Minnelli, Lorna Luft and Joey Luft.
Although still popular with her loyal public she proved more and more difficult to work with due to her ever more erratic behaviour through drug and alcohol addiction. Although MGM fired her in 1950, she continued to make films with other companies, but she was more successful performing concerts. She attracted large crowds wherever she appeared, but the money she made was eaten up by massive debts caused by bad contracts and owed taxes.
Judy Garland died in 1968 aged 47 and weighing less than five stone. She was $4 million in debt. The night before her funeral, she lay in state overnight in Manhattan where over 20,000 grieving fans lined up to pay their respects.
Billie Holiday
… was the stage name of Eleanora Gough McKay. Born in Baltimore on 7 April 1915, the daughter of teenage lovers Sadie Fagan and Clarence Holiday, she was raised by various female relatives until the early 1920s. Her mother then returned to Baltimore with her second husband to set up a boarding house. By the age of 10 Eleanora had lost her step-father, been raped bu a neighbour, and was sent to a Catholic institution for her schooling.
Her first job was in a New York brothel where she worked as a maid. When the establishment was raided she was sent to a syphilis hospital where a violent incident with a warder resulted in her being imprisoned for four months. On her release she started singing in the jazz clubs of Harlem where her emotional style and distinctive phrasing won her admirers among the audiences and musicians alike. She made her first recordings in 1933 under the name Billie Halliday, but adopted the more familiar name Holiday two years later. She was also known as Lady Day. Many of her best songs were written by herself, including ‘God Bless the Child’ and ‘Gloomy Sunday’, while among her other hits were the politically powerful ‘Strange Fruit’ and the love song ‘I Cover the Waterfront’.
She had started taking drugs in her mid-teens and by the mid-1940s had become addicted to heroin and opium. A conviction for drug possession in 1946 resulted in her being barred from performing in New York clubs.
In May 1959 she was admitted to hospital suffering from cirrhosis of the liver and heart problems. A police raid allegedly uncovered a stash of opium in her bedside table. She was arrested again, forbidden all flowers, chocolates and magazines, and was still under police guard in the hospital when she died on 17 July.
Marilyn Monroe
… was born Norma Jeane Mortenson in 1926, the third child of Gladys Pearl Baker, a film cutter in Los Angeles. She was named after the film stars Norma Talmadge and Jean Harlow and from an early age she was fiercely ambitious for similar stardom. She spent the first seven years of her life living with a neighbour’s family while her mother worked hard to provide for her upkeep. Soon after, her mother was sent to an asylum suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, the same ailment which had claimed several other members of her family.
At the age of 16, Marilyn was married for a brief period to Joe Dougherty, then started working as a model and bit-part actress. Although she sincerely believed in her acting talent, it was her unique mix of sensuality and innocence that first got her noticed. The early cameo roles in All About Eve and John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle helped her become the darling of the gossip columns. Smart, funny, beautiful and always good copy, she became as famous for being famous as for the roles she played.
In 1954 she married that other American icon, baseball player Joe DiMaggio, but they were divorced within a year. It is said he couldn’t bear to be just one of the crowd of onlookers in Times Square where she was filming the famous skirt-swirling scene from The Seven Year Itch. Still serious about her craft, Marilyn enrolled at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio in New York and set up her own company to make The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier. By now her work habits were becoming increasingly erratic and her lateness on set lost her a lot of friends. Tony Curtis, who starred with her in Some Like It Hot in 1959, told an astonished and indignant world that “kissing Marilyn was like kissing Hitler”.
Her final film, The Misfits, was written for her by third husband Arthur Miller, but that marriage too ended in divorce after five years. She was found dead at her home in 1962 having taken a drugs overdose. A theory persists that the circumstances were more sinister than this, following rumours of her association with the Kennedys.
Edith Piaf
… was the daughter of 16-year-old street singer Anetta Maillard and 33-year-old circus performer Louis-Alphonse Gassion. She was born in December 1915 and brought up in a Normandy brothel by her paternal grandmother who worked there as a cook. Throughout the early twenties Piaf toured France and Belgium with her father and learned the art of street singing. At the age of 17 she gave birth to a daughter Marcelle, who died of meningitis two years later. It was the club owner Louis Leplée who gave her the name Piaf (Parisian slang for sparrow) and helped her build up a faithful following among intellectual circles and on the cabaret circuit. His murder in 1936 and the ensuing scandal nearly destroyed her career, but tours of the provinces and fruitful associations with composer Marguerite Monnot and impresario Raymond Asso helped her back into the spotlight.
In 1937 she made her first records for Polydor which led to increasing success and international fame. During the war years she was as popular with the occupying Germans as she was with the home audience, who responded to her heartfelt renditions of songs like ‘Milord’ and ‘Mon Légionnaire’ with love and understanding. Following the war her fame spread worldwide through films like Étoile sans lumière and songs like ‘La Vie en rose’ and the defiant torch song ‘Je ne regrette rien’. In New York she became friends with Marlene Dietrich while adding to her long list of lovers Yves Montand and the boxer Marcel Cerdan. In 1949 Cerdan was killed in a plane crash and that night on stage Piaf dedicated her performance to him.
In the fifties she was married to the singer Jacques Pills for five years, but by now her health was in decline following a lifetime of hard living and alcohol abuse. She had also become dependent on painkillers for arthritis. From 1958 onwards, her concerts were frequently cut short by her collapsing on stage. Her final companion was 27-year-old Théo Sarapo, many years her junior, whom she married in 1962. She finally died on 10 October 1963 and was buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. It is said that her long-time friend and admirer Jean Cocteau suffered a heart attack and died also upon hearing the news of her death.