Petula Clark does not like to
look back. She does not celebrate birthdays – hates nostalgia. So spending
several hours in a studio, listening to her early records – as she was recently
forced to do, for a compilation of songs from her seven-decade career – was
“kind of torture”, she says. She affects a groan, eyes rolling beneath their
spidery lashes.
Clark is among the bestselling
British female artists of all time, with one of the largest chart spans of any
artist in history. She has been on Desert Island Discs three times: in 1951
(when she was just 18); 1982; and 1995. She made her debut as a child
entertainer shortly before her tenth birthday in 1942; this October, the month
before she turns 87, she will return to the West End as the bird lady in Mary
Poppins.
It was in 1964 that she became
famous worldwide, with Downtown, the smash hit that beat the Beatles to a Grammy
and led her to be anointed “the First Lady of the British Invasion”. It went to
No 1 in the US – “There was no escaping it. It cut through absolutely
everything” – and Clark was quickly sucked into the upper echelons of American
show business.
She worked with Fred Astaire,
Dean Martin, Bobby Darin and the Muppets. Steve McQueen, the King of Cool, told
her he loved her in a restaurant. Meeting celebrities was exciting, she says,
but “the really great people” stand out – Quincy Jones was “wonderful”, and she
and Harry Belafonte “adored each other”. “I think he kind of fancied me,” she
adds, somewhat bashfully.
They inadvertently caused a media
storm in 1968, when Clark took Belafonte’s arm during a duet for her one-hour
special for NBC; a Plymouth Motors advertising executive took exception to a
white woman and a black man touching on television. Belafonte, a prominent
civil rights campaigner, was aware of the potential consequences, but Clark was
“an innocent”, she says. “I stumbled into that … I’ve never got political about
anything.”
Clark, her husband Claude Wolff
and their lawyer ordered NBC to erase the other takes so there was only the one
with them touching, Belafonte casting her in his autobiography as a gleeful
co-conspirator to “nail the bastard”. But Clark insists now it was an artistic
decision, not a political one. “I didn’t like the idea of a sponsor telling me
how to do a song … It had nothing to do with racism.
“That was the best take. That was the way that
the song was supposed to be done – with that feeling, that emotion. When it
turned into this whole race thing – it sounds silly, but I didn’t quite
understand what it was about.”
Her career decisions were handled
by other people; Clark says it is “probably true” that she could have benefited
from being more involved. Performing in Montreal in 1969, she was heckled for
singing in English and French – she had not been advised that a separatist
movement was under way. Distraught, Clark sought advice from John Lennon, who
was in Montreal for a bed-in with Yoko Ono. She recalls turning up at the door
of their hotel suite, snivelling, in the middle of a downpour.
Lennon welcomed her warmly. “They
were both still in their nighties. I sat there, dripping water all over their
bed, and told them the story. He said: ‘Oh, fuck ’em.’ I said: ‘Thank you,
John.’” Lennon was happy to play therapist, she says. “He was so funny and very
philosophical. We had a chat about the situation. Did it really matter? ‘This
too shall pass.’ That sort of stuff. Then he said: ‘I tell you what – you need
a drink’. Which was very true.”
There was a crowd in the next
room, among them Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary and one of the Smothers Brothers
– “but no drugs”, she adds, firmly. Someone handed her a lyric sheet, and she
joined the group in singing “a simple little melody: ‘All we are saying, is
give peace a chance.’ I don’t think any of us knew we were being recorded.”
Clark was a pop artist, never
part of the counterculture. “I was on the edge of it quite often. There used to
be some parties in LA where all you had to do was walk in and that was it, you
were stoned from the moment you took a breath.” She wasn’t interested in drugs,
feeling “a certain responsibility” to her family. “I touched a little bit of it
– it never impressed me at all. And I saw too much of the damage it was doing.”
One of Clark’s great friends was
Karen Carpenter, who she met in Los Angeles at the 1969 premiere of Goodbye, Mr
Chips, in which Clark starred alongside Peter O’Toole. The Carpenters, then
unsigned, were performing at the afterparty. Impressed, Clark introduced
herself and pointed them out to Herb Alpert, who went on to sign them to
A&M. She did not run into Karen often, but “we had that connection, so that
every time we did see each other, we were close”.
When Clark and Carpenter – then the two “top
girls” of the world of pop – met Elvis Presley in his dressing room after a
show, he angled for a threesome, she says. “He was raring to go. Karen was
lovely, but she was kind of innocent. I felt sort of responsible for her, so I
got her out of there. Then I looked round, and Elvis was at the door, and he
looked at me, like: ‘I’m going to get you one day.’” But he never did, she
tells my voice recorder directly. “Some people think he did. I think he put out
the rumour that he did. But he didn’t.”
Any regrets? “I didn’t find him
that attractive,” she says apparently offhandedly. But when I ask what period
of Elvis it was, she jumps at the implication. “Oh, it was when he was at his
best! But he was almost too much.”
After Carpenter died from
complications resulting from anorexia in 1983, Clark paid tribute to her “very
dear friend” and her “strange, tragic end” at the Royal Albert Hall. “It was
awful,” she says now. “I remember from the first time I met her, I saw the
different phases of this thing, I could sense that something was going on. She
got into that Beverly Hills thing, of being skinny.”
Clark worked in the studio with
Richard Carpenter after his sister’s death. “I think he was still trying to
find someone to replace her – he never will. But he was a hard taskmaster.” She
whistles, rolls her eyes. “I think that was probably the secret to it. Not a
lot of fun, no – but very, very clever.” Clark says she only had a “nightmare session”
with one producer: Bob Crewe. “He just wanted to make me sound different.”
The music industry has come under
a lot of scrutiny, for sexual harassment and abuse – did she ever feel
vulnerable, especially as a young woman? She considers the question carefully.
Women have changed; the world has, too. “I’ve come across all that stuff, of
course.” She pauses for a long time. “I don’t want to get into that,” she says
softly, almost to herself. Then she recaptures her train of thought. “It’s
right that women should come out and say what has to be said. It’s still a
world that’s controlled by men. I think the world would be very different if
more women were in power.”
Clark was first discovered at age
nine on It’s All Yours, a BBC show that broadcast children’s messages for the
troops. When rehearsal was interrupted by an air raid, Clark volunteered to
sing to settle the jittery audience. She found herself on stage, standing on a
box to reach a big, old-fashioned microphone – the first she had ever sung
into, in front of the first orchestra she had ever seen. “I sang, and the
orchestra joined in – just like in a movie. That was the beginning, really.”
Billed as “Britain’s Shirley
Temple” and “the Singing Sweetheart”, Clark went on to record hundreds of songs
for the forces and toured the UK by train. She recalls sleeping in the luggage
racks alongside Julie Andrews, three years her senior. “Now, she could really
sing,” says Clark. “We’d get off the train, do our little things, get back on
and go home. It was fun – and not a lot of kids were having fun.”
Vera Lynn was “the Forces’
Sweetheart”, and Clark was their “Little Girl”, representing the children they
had left behind. She was a good-luck charm for the troops, her picture
plastered on tanks. “I was sweet and had a sweet little voice – that was all
that was asked of me, really.” But her education suffered; when she did make it
to school, she was bullied for being famous.
Aged about 12, Clark was
contracted as an actor by the Rank Organisation, Britain’s largest film
company, and remained there through her teenage years. She wanted to be Ingrid
Bergman, but there were no roles for adolescents. Her chest was bound as late
as age 16, to protect her image as a child star in ankle socks. “I think I was
part of a moment in people’s wartime lives that they wanted to keep precious,”
she says. “Me becoming a woman – they didn’t want to see that.”
But Clark was growing up and
wanted to sing more grown-up songs. “And, of course, as soon as I did anything
like that, we’d get letters coming in: ‘We don’t want Our Pet singing about
LOVE’. What was I supposed to sing? The Little Shoemaker for ever?” It was a
desperately unhappy time – she has said she came close to a breakdown –
compounded by her fraught relationship with her father Leslie, who was also her
manager and a frustrated actor. “He enjoyed the so-called glamour of it,
probably more than I did, and I think he could see me slipping away. It was not
easy, for either of us.”
Clark eventually terminated their
relationship, which, she says firmly, was “necessary, but not easy”. Does she
feel any resentment towards him? She is quiet, stops and starts. “I adored my
father. He was my idol for many, many years. This is hard for me to talk
about.” There was “nothing weird going on”, she adds hurriedly; “but when we
parted, it was very, very painful”.
She was also dismayed to discover
that she was broke, her finances having been handled for her during her entire
career. “That was a surprise, put it that way.” But she had two hit records,
With All My Heart (1957) and Alone (1958), and, together with her sister, was
able to pull together enough for the two of them to rent a flat in London. Now
in her mid-20s, Clark was independent for the first time in her life – she got
herself a pink sports car, and “several boyfriends”.
Then she was called across the
Channel by her record company, which was irked that a French singer, Dalida,
had had some success covering Clark’s songs. After a successful show at the
Olympia theatre in Paris, she was persuaded to record in French by the promise
of spending time with the record company’s “gorgeous” PR man, Claude Wolff.
“They said: ‘He’ll be taking you around.’ Ça change tout.”
You knew what you wanted when you
saw it, I say. “I didn’t know I was going to get married to him!” she says.
“But he was kind of dishy.”
Clark couldn’t speak French,
Wolff couldn’t speak English, and he had an “extremely beautiful” girlfriend
(“I couldn’t stand her”). But at the end of her three weeks in Paris, the night
before she was due to go back to London, Wolff came to her hotel. “He said:
‘You come with me’ – dot dot dot.”
After a long-distance love affair
between London and Paris, they decided that she would move to Paris, where her
career was taking off. The British press was resentful, accused her of running
away from her past. Clark is adamant: she left England because she wanted to be
with the man she loved. But “it was nice to get away from being ‘Our Pet’. The
great thing about becoming a star in France was they knew nothing about my
past. They thought I was sexy. I thought that was pretty great!”
Her marriage to Wolff was
unusually feminist for the time: “It was a partnership.” They had two daughters
and a son. Clark has spoken often with regret about her “mother’s guilt”,
believing she handled neither parenthood nor her career as well as she could
have – a concern she has expressed to her children. “They say: ‘What are you
talking about? We had a great time.’” Wolff and nannies shouldered the burden,
but it required compromise all round, she says, personally and professionally.
“They weren’t always easy choices – and leaving the children was always
traumatic.”
Clark and Wolff have been married
58 years and continue to live together in Geneva – but now lead mostly separate
lives. They have “drifted apart”, says Clark, gently: “He has his life and I
have mine. How can you talk about that? Personal relationships are complicated,
and it’s very difficult to explain that to the world.”
Is she happy? She sounds
surprised to be asked, stops and starts with her answer. “Um, yeah. You know,
happiness – I actually wrote a song called Happiness.” She pauses, and it takes
me a moment to realise that she is quoting song lyrics. “It comes and goes,
it’s like a summer rose, and we settle for contentment and the status quo – and
suddenly it’s there again.”