Penny Valentine - Dancing With Demons: The Authorized Biography of Dusty Springfield

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Contents

For Dan and Nona with love

Acknowledgments

Although writing is a lonely business there are usually people around who can make the task less onerous. So it was with Dancing With Demons. My thanks go to the following people:

To Vicki, my partner in this project, who kept me buoyant and who began, against her better judgement, to believe in the power of re-incarnation. Vicki would like to thank Stevie and Lee for filling in large chunks of her life which she had forgotten, and Dusty for a long friendship and for introducing me to the sound of American soul singers. To our editor Rowena Webb and the women at our publishers Hodder. Also to our researcher Kim Bunce for her hard work and enthusiasm.

In memory of my mother Yolanda, and to my father Robert. To Mike Flood Page for his generosity, Mary and Colin, Julie and the American family. To Jenny and Steve Peacock, John Fordham, Alistair Hatchett, Jim Latter and Robert Lee, for their friendship. Julia Francis and Paul, Cath Blackburn and Eddie for the walks. Hermione Harris and Linda Hall who got used to me not ringing back.

To Tris Penna for the tapes and pictures. Nigel Fountain, Polly Pattullo and my colleagues at the Guardian newspaper. Sandra Hall and Phil Stafford in Australia and especially to Susie Whitehead Pope for giving me house room in Sydney.

This book could not have been written without the people across continents who so generously shared their memories of Dusty, only one of whom did not want us to use her real name and so appears as Faye Harris: In Britain Lee Everett-Alkin, Madeline Bell, Simon Bell, Riss Chantelle, Debbie Dannell, Mike Gill, Stevie Holly, Pat Rhodes. In America Peggy Albrecht, Rosie Casals, Jenny Cohen, Marv Greifinger, Billie Jean King, Barry Krost, Suzanne Lacefield, Nancy Lewis, Helene Sellery, Susan Shroeder, Norma Tanega. In Canada Carole Pope, Kevan Staples. In Holland Pieter van der Zwan. In Australia Doug Reece.

I am also indebted to Merilee Strongs A Bright Red Scream and Dominic Davies and Charles Neals Pink Therapy.

Most of all my love and thanks go to the women who have always been there for me: Ros Asquith, Sally Bradbery, Elana Dallas, Michle Roberts (who shared her knowledge of Catholicism), Diana Simmonds, Val Wilmer, Veronica Norburn and my sister from the 60s, Caroline Boucher.

Prologue

On the evening of 24 November 1999, a month before the dawn of the millennium, over five hundred people are gathered in the ballroom of the Inter-Continental Hotel in London. The event is the annual Women of the Year Awards for the music industry: a night thought up by women working in the business to celebrate the achievements of other women working in the industry. It is a sparkling evening with male statues sprayed gold, deep plushy carpets and champagne flowing. This is not 1975 at the height of the womens movement and so tonight its a mixed 1990s audience: lovely young women from the press departments; out gay male publicists; rowdy tearaways from promotion; determined women agency bosses; football besotted men who run record labels and live in Surrey with their wives and children.

Amongst the winners this year is Vicki Wickham who is receiving a lifetime achievement award. Privately she jokes that its simply for still being alive, but the truth is that shes pleased shes being recognised for having played such an important role in the rise of music. She edited the seminal 1960s TV show Ready, Steady, Go! (the weekend starts here!), went to America and was the minence grise of the revolutionary all-woman black group Labelle and for thirteen fraught and crazy years managed Dusty Springfield.

That week Vicki is interviewed by Caroline Sullivan of the Guardian and finally decides, almost accidentally, to come out in print during a conversation about why, although she fancied Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, nothing ever happened. She laughingly apologises for being such a bad lesbian: never went on marches or protests; didnt think much of a gay lifestyle. It has taken Vicki, who is not a star and not in the public eye, until her late fifties finally to say anything publicly about her sexuality. Although shed been interviewed many times over the years, Vicki never felt it was appropriate to talk about it: Mainly I was always talking about someone or something else all the time and anyway, who the hell cares about what I do? But for Dusty to have come out in the press, she says, would have been a very different matter. It would always have been too risky. She would have had everything defined by that.

Although the music business likes to view itself as a liberal institution, in truth it is after all a business: as conservative, hierarchical and, if not homophobic, certainly as lesbophobic as most. Its a business that has, over the years, learned how to accommodate the sexuality of gay men, both as business people and artists especially if it doesnt hurt the sales figures: from the careful bisexuality of David Bowie, the more overtly flamboyant Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Freddie Mercury, Elton John when he finally came out once he left his longtime manager John Reid and settled with David Furnish, to George Michael, pushed out by the Los Angeles Police Department (an event he even celebrated in his promotional video). But it remains rare, in music, film or television, for one woman to stand up and speak about her relationship with another woman as though it were the norm.

k.d. lang got it out of the way early and looking like young Elvis Presley helped because, well a girl wearing a tuxedo and greased back hair? And she knew we all got it right from the start, so getting a face shave by Cindy Crawford on the front of Esquire magazine was only an eye-opener because of the combination of an out lesbian singer and a glamorous model, all legs and dress: butch and femme personified. Even so things went quiet for k.d. for a time.

Count the women musicians who are out on the fingers of one hand lang, Melissa Etheridge, Janis Ian. They are brave souls. The rise of the religious right in America over the past twenty years has been such that the atmosphere has become closer to that once afforded to McCarthys witch hunts with roughly the same effect. TV programmes are boycotted, advertisers withdraw, people get scared for their livelihoods. And of course the really visible lesbian couple becomes an even bigger problem than the single lesbian star. When Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche announced they were together and canoodled at the White House, the public world went pear-shaped on them both. Worse for the American right, Heche had, until clapping eyes on DeGeneres across a crowded room, apparently considered herself a heterosexual. In the event she left her boyfriend for Ellen and moved straight in. And in Britain it wasnt until June 2000 that the young Irish singer Sinad OConnor finally outed herself during an interview with the lesbian magazine Curve, admitting that throughout most of my life Ive gone out with blokes because I havent been terribly comfortable about being a lesbian. But I actually am a lesbian.

It was against this background that Dusty Springfield lived her life. People in the business wondered, the gay and lesbian audience she began to attract had certainly guessed. But Dusty? She didnt want to have to define herself, be pigeonholed: I wont play that game. Truth was she was also terrified that her mainstream audiences would not love her, that the image she had spent so long building up would be shattered and that the industry would cold-shoulder her. And anyway, The closet quality of Hollywood and Los Angeles show business is overwhelming, she once said. You can be at a dinner party where you know that at least twelve of the fourteen people there are gay and listen to incredible anti-gay crap. And they play that game because a few industry heads are very anti-gay. Its very tough for most gay people and very difficult to speak out.