Daily Mail, June 21 2014
Forty years ago it was not done to enquire about a woman’s sexuality, and especially not if that woman was a famous singer much loved by the great British public. Yet that was what Dusty Springfield mischievously goaded me into asking during an interview with her in 1970.
As two lapsed Catholics we’d been talking about guilt, mortal sin and going to confession as children. From there the conversation had led to sex and promiscuity, when Dusty suddenly said: “There’s something else you should ask me now. Go on, ask me. I know you’ve heard the rumours.”
She was right. I had heard the gossip that said she preferred girls to boys. So I hesitantly put the question, and she was off. Never admitting that she was exclusively lesbian, and hating the idea that she might be thought of as a “big butch lady”, she happily talked about not being upset that girls ran after her a lot, and that she was “perfectly as capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy.
“Being a pop singer I shouldn’t even admit that I might think that way, but if the occasion (to swing either way) arose I don’t see why I shouldn’t,” she told me. There was more like this, leaving no doubt in the reader’s mind that she was talking happily about a bisexual life.
As we lived quite close to one another, I drove her home after the interview. “Do you realise,” she laughed as I dropped her off, “that what I’ve just told you could put the final seal to my doom. I don’t know, though, I might attract a whole new audience.”
And with that she got out of my car and went inside to join the American artist girl friend, Norma Tanega, with whom she was then sharing her house.
Today the sexuality of stars isn’t an issue. We regularly see photographs of actresses and women singers kissing, and we know of many who are openly in gay relationships. Back then, however, an admission of homosexuality, whether male or female, could, it was believed, kill a career in show business.
Quite why Dusty chose to come out at that moment, I’ve never discovered. Nor do I know why she selected me to make public her situation.
But, unwittingly, she’d presented me with a dilemma. I was a huge Dusty fan and we’d got on brilliantly, but I knew that professionally she was playing with fire. Did I want to be responsible for ruining her career? No, I didn’t.
At the same time she was obviously keen to clear the air. So, after consulting my editor at London’s Evening Standard where I then worked, I decided to bury the sex discussion in the middle of the article. You had to read the piece to find the candid admissions – which, however, have since been re-quoted whenever Dusty’s sex life has been written about. (As they are now in a new biography by journalist Karen Bartlett -Dusty: An Intimate Portrait Of A Musical Legend.)
Although I later learned that Dusty’s manager had a fit when he saw the interview, Dusty had no regrets – phoning the day the article was published, and leaving a message that she was quite happy with the way I’d reported our conversation.
It had been a brave step to confront the fears and prejudices of the era, but that was Dusty – a real one off. A gifted woman, she was in some ways years ahead of her time, which is why biographies are still being written about her, why her friend Vicki Wickham is planning a West End musical celebrating Dusty’s hits, and why I’ve spent much of the last three years writing and developing a Dusty Springfield movie. With Universal Music as partners, it will be produced by Kris Thykier, husband of television presenter Claudia Winkleman.
But Dusty was also a contradictory woman, and sometimes self destructive, and what has repeatedly emerged during my research is that she suffered from a profound lack of self-confidence in a life progressively beset by the darkest depressions.
It had all started so differently. When most of us first encountered Dusty on television at the beginning of the Sixties, singing with her brother Tom and a friend in the Springfields pop-folk trio, she seemed not to have a care in the world.
An ex-convent schoolgirl from Ealing, with an almost genteel accent, something quite rare in pop circles at the time, she personified a happy-go-lucky wholesomeness. She liked to enjoy herself on tour, playing zany tricks on other acts as they were performing (Kenny Lynch got a bucket of water poured over him as he sang Crying In The Rain), and off stage, too. And it was while she was with the Springfields that, she was to tell her friend singer Madeline Bell, she lost her virginity, aged 19, while appearing at a Butlins holiday camp.
But she had a steely ambition, too. Unhappy with the style of songs her brother was writing for the Springfields, she dropped him at the peak of their fame. becoming an immediate solo success with the hits I Only Want To Be With You and Burt Bacharach’s I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself.
By the mid-Sixties she was the Sixties golden girl of British song, loved and widely fancied for her charm and giggles and the way she lit up Friday night television’s Ready Steady Go with her blonde beehive, panda eyes and seemingly effervescent love for life and music.
Then, out of nowhere, she found herself at the centre of an international row. Going on a short tour of South Africa in 1964 under the impression that she would be allowed to sing to black and white audiences sitting together, she refused to sing to anyone when told black fans wouldn’t be allowed into her concerts.
Despite days of cajoling by the South African authorities, she wouldn’t give in to bullying. As a result, her visa was revoked and she was escorted to the airport and put on a plane out of South Africa.
To take on the South African Government on a matter of principle was a brave stand, and not one which went down with universal admiration among some other, mainly older, British acts who had been prepared to adhere to that country’s apartheid rules. They felt she’d spoiled it for them.
To many of her own generation, however, Dusty had been heroic, as was her championing of the black Motown stars of the day. She just loved black r and b music.
So when in 1968 she was invited to record in Memphis, the home of soul, in the studios where Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding worked, she was exultant.
Things in Memphis didn’t go well, however. Whether the laryngitis that plagued her career was the real cause, or, as she claimed, she really was intimidated to be recording where Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding sang, I don’t know, but the sessions were difficult.
Producer Jerry Wexler would tell me later that she drove him almost to distraction by her perfectionism in only wanting to record one line of a song at a time, and in the end the album, Dusty In Memphis, had to be finished in New York. It’s now considered a classic, especially its hit song Son Of A Preacher Man, but at the time it was a commercial flop.
For the first time, Dusty’s career had had a real setback, and simultaneously the cracks in her psychological make-up were beginning to widen. By the late Sixties she was beginning to secretly self harm, taking a razor to her arms. She would try to make a joke about the scars, saying that she’d never liked short sleeves anyway, but behind the sunny mask deep problems were soon to emerge.
She’d always been in love with the idea of America, from the days when her mother had taken her to see Hollywood musicals when she was a little girl, and a few months after my interview with her she abandoned London and went to live in Los Angeles.
She wanted to make a new start on a much bigger stage, she said, and was under the impression that she could become very big in America. She had the voice for it, without doubt.
But it didn’t work out. Having left behind in Britain the team and friends who had helped her rise to the top, she soon found herself unable to find the songs that would give her new hits.
Before long she began, like many a fading star in Hollywood, to slip into alcoholism, turning up unrecognised at Alcoholic Anonymous meetings in the suburbs of Los Angeles without the beehive hair and black eyes and under her real name of Mary O’Brien.
The self harming grew much worse, too. Soon her girl friend at that time, an intelligent journalist called Sue Cameron, would be calling for ambulances on a regular basis as Dusty began to gabble about seeing demons who were telling her to do bad things. And then the blood would flow again. At one point she had to be put in a straight jacket. At another it is believed she may have tried to commit suicide.
A medical journalist who has contacted me called Maggie Vandershoot is of the opinion that Dusty probably suffered from an undiagnosed bipolar disorder and that the hallucinations may have been brought on by the medication she was prescribed for depression by various doctors.
Whether this was the case I’ve no way of telling, but, whatever the reasons, Dusty’s self harming wasn’t limited only to her flesh. Splitting with Sue Cameron, she fell in, she later admitted, with bad company, and, as the consumption of alcohol, cocaine and other drugs spiralled, inevitably her beautiful voice was damaged.
At one stage, with all her savings spent on those leaching off her, her expensive house sold and her voice shot to pieces, she was prepared to mime for ready cash to a record of one of her old hits in a Los Angeles gay bar.
She would later joke that she’d never been quite on skid row, but she wasn’t that far from it, when, after several periods in rehab and the help of friends, she began her fight back.
She’d always been brave, and, banishing alcohol and drugs from her life, she won her battle. And back home in the late Eighties she found herself at the top of the charts again when her collaboration with Pet Shop Boys produced What Have I Done To Deserve This?
Around this time she gave an interview to another journalist explaining simply that she’d had sex with both men and women and enjoyed both, but as middle age wore on she became increasingly happy to live the single life. “No drugs, no alcohol and no sex,” she would say.
An avid reader, she was content with her books and her cats in her large rented house near Henley-on-Thames – quietly amused that she had become the gay icon she’d jokingly prophesied at our interview all those years earlier.
Then in 1995 while making a new album she discovered that she had breast cancer. Increasingly confined to her home, she was cared for by one of her former backing singers, Simon Bell. One night in 1999 they watched together a special video that the BBC had sent her of programmes she’d made for them in her prime in the late Sixties.
“She enjoyed it,” Simon Bell remembers. “When it was finished she fell asleep and died the following day having never woken up again.”
Had she made a mistake in coming out to me in 1970? I don’t think so. Attitudes were changing rapidly. She was simply ahead of the rest of show business in recognising it.
We’ll never know the reasons behind Dusty’s psychological problems and addictions. And it’s difficult in these more tolerant times, to really appreciate the anguish she would have gone through having to hide her sexuality from fans, some of whom who might not have understood.
But we do know that, despite some of the mistakes she made and readily owned up to, she was a brave, independent and gifted woman with a uniquely beautiful voice. That is why we still hear her records in TV commercials, why there is a new Dusty biography on sale and why I’ve written a film about her.
