Tom Jones - the Life Read online

  Juliet Prowse, whose bee-sting lips revealed the widest of Hollywood smiles, did appear on This Is Tom Jones, in the pilot show recorded in the autumn of 1968. The guest list was a touch middle of the road for Tom’s taste: Juliet, the accomplished harmony group The Fifth Dimension and the French chanteuse Mireille Mathieu. The reaction from the focus groups was very positive and the go-ahead was given for the first series to begin in January 1969.

  Tom, by all accounts, tried his luck with Juliet, but was rebuffed. Despite all the headlines concerning his sex life, his success rate with some of the leading female entertainers wasn’t spectacular. Dionne Warwick, Sandie Shaw and Lulu were just three who were strike-outs. Lulu wrote in her autobiography that Tom was misled in believing she liked to fool around: ‘I think he was disappointed to discover that he was wrong. I was aware of his animal magnetism, but to be truthful he frightened the life out of me.’ He was falsely rumoured to have had an affair with Kathy Kirby, who, for a time, was the biggest British female star of the sixties and had toured with Tom. She was even said to have had Tom’s baby and was heckled about it by a member of the audience at one of her concerts. It was complete nonsense and Tom managed to laugh it off, although Kathy found the whole thing rather cruel. This sort of gossip has plagued Tom throughout his adult life.

  Just as the TV series was getting under way, Tom and Gordon had to go to the High Court in London to contest a claim from his old managers, Raymond Godfrey and John Glastonbury, who were seeking the royalties from their original contract. Eventually, the former managers settled out of court for a figure reported to be £50,000 each. Tom has always been dismissive of Myron and Byron’s efforts on his behalf, referring to them as Pinky and Perky. He wouldn’t have enjoyed giving them any money.

  The resolution of the contract with his old managers seemed to prompt a spring clean by Gordon. He gave Vernon Hopkins a lift back home from the courts and told him The Squires would not be needed for the new television series, because the Americans wanted to bring in musicians who could sight-read and accompany the guests, as well as play for Tom. In the meantime, he suggested the band record a song he had picked out, called ‘Games People Play’ by Joe South.

  They promptly recorded the song at a studio in Barnes, with new guitarist Bill Patterson on lead vocals. Gordon showed up for the session, but, according to Vernon, took little interest and made zero contribution. A few days later, the bassist was looking through the Daily Mirror and came across the headline that declared ‘Tom Jones and The Squires in amicable split’. It was the first Vernon had heard of it.

  The report quoted Tom’s management: ‘Tom will be spending most of the year making his new television series, any future tours will be with the Ted Heath Orchestra. The Squires have, for some time, wanted to branch out on their own and will soon be releasing a new single.’

  The Squires’ one and only record didn’t even make the charts in Pontypridd. Vernon says it received so little promotion that he’s not even sure if it was given a proper release. The probability is that Gordon was looking to avoid any future obligation to the band by sorting out a half-hearted single that was doomed to failure. Its poor showing gave him an excuse to sack them and they had no written contracts. Vernon received three weeks’ wages – a grand total of £120. It was especially galling in the light of the settlement paid to the former managers.

  The Squires were young men in their twenties. They had seen the world with Tom and enjoyed more than their share of willing young women, but they were still paid a pittance – £40 a week – while Tom was a millionaire. Simply, they didn’t fit in with Gordon’s vision for Tom’s future. He saw his man as a TV star, earning a fortune in Las Vegas and possibly Hollywood.

  It was the right time to let them go. Neither Gordon nor Tom has revealed the reason why the boys were apparently treated so badly. Only the group members have given their version of events. Vernon has spoken to Tom just twice since and still has a strong antipathy towards him.

  Tom, as we know, hates all forms of confrontation and Gordon was a man who liked to be in total control. Chris Hutchins, who remembers the circumstances well, observes, ‘Tom would always say, “Talk to Gordon.” He wouldn’t negotiate his way out of a paper bag; Gordon had to do all the dirty work. I don’t know if it was a sign of his early financial insecurity, but the last thing Tom would ever do is give the band a lot of money. He has never been one to do that.’ The harsh truth may be that the band members weren’t his close friends; they were just his band.

  Gradually the old team was breaking up. Les Reed still wrote songs for Tom, but was concentrating more on other artists. Peter Sullivan left Decca and was no longer responsible for producing his records. He had loved working with Tom, appreciating his natural talent and said dramatically, ‘I feel as if my left arm has been cut off.’

  Peter gave a fascinating insight into Tom’s attitude to the songs he recorded: ‘He has to really feel something to sing it well. If Tom was singing a particular song that really wasn’t happening, he’d lose interest. He’d get very depressed about it and want to forget all about it.’

  The vacancy for a producer for Tom Jones was filled by Gordon, which was not necessarily a good thing, as his golden age as a hit-maker was soon over.

  The television series was filmed at Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire. The schedule meant that Tom had to be ready for work early in the morning, at a time when he was usually about to go to bed after a night out. He coped well with the stop–start demands of filming, when a two-minute segment could take half a day.

  One morning, the director, Jon Scoffield, wasn’t happy with the colour of Tom’s white jeans, which he felt didn’t blend with the set. Tom had to go to his dressing room, take off his jeans, wait for them to be dyed grey and dried, put them back on and return to the set. The director still wasn’t happy, so it was back to the dressing room, slip them off, wait for them to be dyed white again and dried, then put them back on and be ready for filming to start. He had been there all morning and achieved nothing.

  Tom wasn’t a prima donna. He would sit patiently, sometimes with a glass of champagne, but more often with a mug of tea, and wait to be called. It was, after all, better than working in a glove factory.

  One incident brought home how lucky he was. He was being driven to the studios in his Rolls-Royce Phantom after a night out, and wasn’t looking forward to the production number, which involved choreography and dancing. He told Larry King, the legendary CNN host: ‘I thought, oh my God, I have to go in today and I have got to get made up and do all of this.’

  When he stepped out, he spotted a young hod carrier humping bricks up a ladder – exactly the job he had once done on a building site. The lad shouted to him, ‘Hey, Tom, you want to help me out with this?’ It opened Tom’s eyes: ‘I thought, “I’m complaining about a production number and this kid is going to be running up and down that ladder all day.”’

  Sandie Shaw was a guest on the first show and memorably duetted with Tom on ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, which was a Rolling Stones song that was hugely popular at Tom’s live show in Las Vegas. He invited her to his luxury caravan for a glass of champagne, but she turned him down, perhaps sensing that he had more on his mind than bubbly.

  Tom’s success rate in the caravan was very high, however. It was referred to as a caravan, but it was nothing you would take on holiday to Clacton. It was the size of a small apartment with several rooms and was parked out of the way so visitors could come and go unobserved.

  Production staff had to knock four times and wait to be called just in case he was ‘entertaining’. The TV producer Stewart Morris recalled that if Tom had spotted someone he liked the look of in the audience, Chris Ellis would be despatched to invite her for Dom Pérignon in the caravan. Chris would then stand guard outside the door for the duration of her visit.

  Tom’s most serious liaison then was with a stunning Californian model called Joyce Ingalls. They had met in Vegas and h
e had invited her to the UK when he was filming the second season of This Is Tom Jones.

  Joyce, who was just nineteen, was an archetypal dizzy blonde. She also thought she meant more to Tom than she actually did. He found her entertaining, called her ‘Clogs’ because of her preferred footwear, and fancied her. The back of his Rolls-Royce, the caravan and the earth all moved when they were together. She appeared to think she was going to be the second Mrs Jones, and practically moved into the caravan. She began to dictate who could and could not gain admittance. One of Tom’s entourage at the time observes, ‘Joyce was trouble. She was trying to take over from Gordon Mills. She threatened his position because she would say, “You have got to wear this or you have got to wear that.” Only Gordon was allowed to do that. Linda would never have tried to do anything like that.’ The final straw was when she refused to allow Tom’s dresser access to the caravan. It wasn’t long before she was packing her bags for her return to the US.

  Joyce made a handful of movies, including Paradise Alley with Sylvester Stallone in 1978 and Lethal Weapon 4 alongside Mel Gibson in 1998. She achieved some notoriety in the mid-nineties when she was linked to Sir Anthony Hopkins, whom she met at an AA meeting in Los Angeles. He declared, ‘Joyce has given me back a passion and vigour that has been dormant for years.’ Tom, it seems, also liked her passion and vigour.

  To her credit, Joyce has never talked about her fling with Tom; a series of men close to him have kissed and told about her, though. Tom has always had more trouble with men than women when it comes to providing the media with lurid headlines.

  The years between 1968 and 1974 were the ones when he was most indiscreet, but his marriage somehow survived. He even managed to gloss over a misplaced joke about his activities in the caravan from his friend, the Liverpool comic Jimmy Tarbuck, who was guest comedian on one show. Tarby, as he was known, was a member of Tom’s circle, because he made him laugh in a court jester sort of way. During the show, a sketch involved a series of lovely girls parading on stage carrying champagne. Tarby had to give them directions to Tom’s caravan, which was harmless enough, until he turned to the camera and declared, ‘Do you know that caravan of his has had six new sets of tyres and it hasn’t moved three feet?’ When Linda watched the show with Tom, she didn’t get the joke, which was lucky for him – or perhaps she chose not to understand it.

  Tom never felt completely at ease with the scripted part of the show, the comedy sketches that were light relief. He would have been happier if every episode consisted only of him singing. The schedule was exacting because each programme had to be recorded twice on subsequent days, first for the English broadcast and secondly for the American transmission. His day off was Monday, so that was Linda’s favourite day of the week, because he was home.

  The aspect of the show that Tom disliked most was the presence, throughout the recording, of a censor – a woman from the ABC network whose sole job seemed to be to make Tom sanitise things so they would be acceptable to an American audience. Tom had realised that the US wasn’t the great land of freedom when he first visited in 1965. Then it was just a case of toning down suggestive movements or altering a song lyric or two; now it was something altogether more depressing. He was singing the timeless ‘Somewhere’ from West Side Story with the elegant black musical star Lesley Uggams, when the censor stepped in. The show’s producer Jon Scoffield refused to go on set and relay her concerns. Instead, Gordon ambled out to tell Tom that he needed to look more into the camera and less into Lesley’s eyes. It was considered too controversial for a white man to gaze into a black woman’s eyes and sing the words ‘There’s a place for us’.

  Tom was furious, especially as the song in the original was sung by a white man and a Puerto Rican girl – a racial divide was the very point of such a poignant heartfelt lyric. Ever the professional, however, Tom agreed to look into the camera more. ‘I didn’t really do it,’ he confessed.

  Even worse than that, he was singing the evocative ballad ‘Passing Strangers’ with the velvet-voiced black singer Nancy Wilson, when Jon Scoffield informed him that there was a problem with clearing copyright on the song and asked if he would mind singing a different one. Jon suggested that perhaps an up-tempo number might work well at that point in the show. So they sang a dynamic duet of ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’. The following week, when Tom asked him what the problem had been with the licence for ‘Passing Strangers’, Jon revealed there wasn’t one. ‘It was the censor,’ he admitted, who had thought that the words ‘we seem like passing strangers’ suggested that white Tom and black Nancy had once been lovers.

  Tom has been widely reported to have had flings with both Lesley and Nancy. In fact, his best-known backing singer, Darlene Love, even wrote about the latter in her autobiography My Name Is Love. Both Lesley and Nancy have subsequently denied they had affairs with him.

  When Tom reminisces on the television series The Voice about the many great artists he has sung with, many of them are from this golden three-year period, when his stature in world music grew almost as quickly as his sideburns. Despite the success of the show, Tom had to battle to have musical guests that were acceptable to the American network.

  He wanted to sing with musical heroes, the great rock ’n’ roll and rhythm and blues artists he so admired, including Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Charles and Little Richard. The network wanted more middle-of-the-road, mainstream performers. In the end, there was a trade-off between Tom and ABC, which resulted in some curious line-ups that worked brilliantly.

  Jerry Lee, for instance, shared a show with Barbara Eden, who at the time was the star of the popular sitcom I Dream of Jeannie. Tom didn’t mind. He was in heaven singing with his musical hero at last. She was a guest for a second time in the 1970 season, when she appeared with Wilson Pickett, one of Tom’s favourite soul singers. Little Richard was on the same week as the French actress and insipid singer Claudine Longet.

  One show that perhaps showed how well this formula could work was the one in which the peerless Aretha Franklin appeared alongside Hollywood great Bob Hope – a television dream team. Even Hope played up Tom’s reputation as a sex symbol. In a reference to women’s liberation, he joked, ‘Tom has his own movement for women and they are watching it very carefully.’

  Aretha was the one performer who inspired complete admiration in her host. He had loved her voice ever since he had bought her breakthrough single ‘I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You’ a couple of years earlier, when he was touring the north of England. She is the only singer he has ever thought could match his power.

  He was awestruck when they were rehearsing without microphones: ‘We were just singing live to one another. The volume that came out … I could so appreciate what the woman has.’ Her performance of the Burt Bacharach and Hal David song ‘I Say a Little Prayer’ is arguably the highlight of the entire three series. She and Tom sang a breathtaking version of ‘The Party’s Over’. She also sang a few bars of ‘It’s Not Unusual’ in a bossa nova style, accompanying herself on the piano.

  The guest list for Tom’s show read like an encyclopaedia of music greats: Ella Fitzgerald, Joni Mitchell, Dusty Springfield, Johnny Cash, Janis Joplin, Stevie Wonder and Sammy Davis, Jr were just some of the best. Ella and Tom effortlessly sang the timeless ‘Sunny’ while seated in rocking chairs. In 1969, Sammy opened season two – the first to be partly shot in Los Angeles – by sending up Tom’s performance of ‘It’s Not Unusual’, which began every show. ‘You ain’t coloured, Tom,’ he declared, before giving the song a slow and smoky treatment. Sammy also acted the part of ‘Mr Bojangles’ while Tom sang. The melancholy ballad would later become Sammy’s signature song.

  The powerhouse Janis Joplin had a reputation for being prickly, and clearly didn’t rate Tom as a singer before she appeared on the show. She changed her mind after they rehearsed their duet of ‘Raise Your Hand’, a song she had made famous at the Woodstock Festival in 1969. She clearly thought she was going to wipe the floor
with Tom, and asked him, ‘What key do you sing in?’

  Tom responded modestly, ‘I just sing’, and proceeded to match the great blues-rock singer note for note. After the first run-through, she turned to him, smiled and said, ‘You can really sing.’ It seemed as if Tom and his glittering line-up of guests all realised they needed to be at the top of their game.

  Each show ended with Tom in concert, singing a selection of his own music to an enraptured audience. It gave him the chance to showcase his new material, as well as his old favourites. During the second series, he sang ‘Daughter of Darkness’, a Les Reed composition, which was a top ten hit in the UK and was number one in the US Easy Listening Chart – a distinction that demonstrated Tom had been successfully positioned as a mainstream entertainer in America. The recording at the Decca studios in London was noteworthy because one of the backing singers was an ambitious singer-songwriter called Elton John.

  One number he performed during that series, which wasn’t one of his own recordings, could have been one of his greatest-ever hits if the cards had fallen differently. He was in a fashionable club called Scotts of St James in Jermyn Street, when he bumped into Paul McCartney. Tom asked him, ‘When are you going to write me a song then, Paul?’ The Beatle said he would sort something out and a few days later sent a song round to Tom’s house. It was ‘The Long and Winding Road’.

  Tom was desperate to do it, but it turned out to be a complicated process. Tom explained, ‘The one condition was that I could do it, but it had to be my next single. Paul wanted it out straight away. At that time I had a song called “Without Love” that I was going to be releasing. The record company was gearing up towards the release of it. So the timing was terrible, but I asked if we could stop everything and I could do “The Long and Winding Road”. They said it would take a lot of time and was impractical, so I ended up not doing it.’