BRUCIE’S ( MANY) BEAUTIES
Three wives, two Miss Worlds — and a blissfully happy marriage at the end
WHIRLING around the dance floor, Bruce Forsyth sang: ‘There’s a smile on my face for the whole human race, why it’s almost like being in love.’
The year was 2009 and eight million prime-time viewers were watching the astonishing spectacle of octogenarian Brucie tearing up the place at Blackpool’s Tower Ballroom, as he took to the floor for Strictly Come Dancing.
This, he showed the teenybopper hoofers around him, was how a real entertainer did it.
The lyrics were startlingly appropriate. For falling in and out of love — and not always with the women to whom he was married — was something Forsyth had done constantly in his turbulent and not-so-private life.
By his own admission, even before television’s Sunday Night At The London Palladium elevated him to star status 59 years ago, Our Brucie was a very naughty Jack the Lad where beautiful women were concerned.
Brucie’s background was not custom-built for passionate romance. His parents never discussed the facts of life with him. ‘I doubt they even knew homosexuality existed,’ he observed.
But in 1949, at the age of 21, he landed a job at London’s home of non- stop nude revue, the Windmill Theatre.
Warned to keep his eyes and hands off the Windmill’s legendary nudes, who were not allowed to move on stage, and off the scantily dressed showgirls with whom he would be dancing, Forsyth admitted he had ‘never danced with girls wearing see-through tops before . . . When I was first around the girls, I couldn’t fail to notice how lovely and sexy they were.’
He also couldn’t fail to notice a highly attractive blonde dancer at the Windmill, Penny Calvert, whom he started to date.
One of their song and dance routines on stage was the number How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Love You When You Know I’ve Been A Liar All My Life? It was make-believe, and, said Forsyth, ‘one of our best’. But it had a theme — the cheating male — that was to reverberate throughout their 20-year marriage.
They got hitched ‘ very, very quickly in 1953’, chiefly because it was their only chance of getting a cabin together on the liner Stratheden, which was taking them to a four-month cabaret tour of India. He was 25, she 23.
They were to have three daughters, Debbie, Julie and Laura, but Forsyth’s sudden escalation to national fame in 1958, when he was chosen as the new compere of television’s Sunday Night At The London Palladium, put severe pressure on the relationship. They were often apart, and as he commented: ‘Sadly, such prolonged absences eventually put a great strain on our marriage’.
AS He later reflected: ‘ There are always temptations. Whether you take them or not is up to you. It depends how happy your private life is.’ It clearly wasn’t very happy, because he embarked on an affair with pop star Kathy Kirby. In her last major interview for a DVD, Kathy Kirby — The Golden Girl Of Pop, in which she and Forsyth sing Makin’ Whoopee together, Miss Kirby admitted that the two became lovers while her recording of Secret Love rose to worldwide popularity in the charts in 1963. Their romance had to be secret, too. Forsyth was a married man, and Miss Kirby was involved in a long-term relationship with her manager, Bert Ambrose.
‘Bruce was in love with me and wanted to marry me,’ Miss Kirby was to say of Forsyth. ‘ But our affair made Bert ill, and I broke it off with Bruce because I couldn’t make Bert ill.’
‘Well, we did have a secret affair — secret by mutual consent,’ admitted Bruce. ‘Although Penny and I acknowledged that our marriage was in less than good shape, there was no need to cause her or the girls upset. We used to rendezvous in Kathy’s flat in Grosvenor Square after we’d finished work.’
Kathy added: ‘It was the saddest moment of my life as I turned my back on Bruce . . . he has always proved a gentleman and the kind of husband a woman can rely upon. I was never lucky enough to meet a man like him again.’
At the beginning of June 1964, Forsyth went to Bournemouth to star in a summer season show. ‘By now, I knew my marriage to Penny was over,’ he said.
That knowledge was confirmed beyond doubt by his meeting with Ann Sidney, a 19-year- old hairdresser who was to become Miss World 1964. She was, he recalled, ‘an exceptionally beautiful girl’. They began an affair.
Penny, alleged by Forsyth in 1979 to be a heavy drinker with an explosive temper, later told of trying to rekindle their youthful passion by wearing a negligee, spraying herself with seductive perfume and preparing a candlelit champagne supper a deux.
‘Bruce came back and said: “It was a terrible audience tonight. I’m going to bed,” ’ she recalled. ‘He didn’t even notice.’
Rumours of Forsyth’s liaison with Ann Sidney appeared in the national Press. Penny told reporters her marriage was ‘over’ and that she was heading to Bournemouth for ‘a showdown’.
Newspapers now reported that Forsyth’s image as a ‘ happily married family entertainer’ was ‘irrevocably tarnished’.
An attempt by the Forsyths to discuss their marital problems over lunch in a hotel lasted only a matter of moments. ‘Our marriage had really turned sour,’ Forsyth later recalled. ‘Penny was up and gone from the table in a flash.’
Forsyth made the decision that they should separate, and moved out of their lavish mansion in Totteridge, North London.
He starred in the West end musical Little Me, in which he played
seven different characters with a staggering 29 costume changes. It was a major critical triumph for him. ‘ In the show there were some
stunningly beautiful girls’ he noted. ‘But I was in love with Ann Sidney, thought what we had was very special, and I never took another girl out during the whole ten months I was in the musical.’
But Sidney was becoming dissatisfied with the situation. Once she was crowned as Miss World, a clause in her contract stating that any ‘misconduct’ on her part would mean forfeiting the title made it impossible for the lovers to be seen together in public.
Forsyth, visiting Sidney at her flat in Putney, adopted a series of bizarre disguises — one night as Columbo, th the TV detective, in a dirty old m mac, another as Inspector Clo Clouseau of The Pink Panther. ‘I would put on wigs, hats, gla glasses — and even a funny litt little moustache,’ he would lat later remember. B But Ann Sidney was never to bec become Mrs Bruce Forsyth. ‘So ‘Soon the fun we had shared tog together began to wane,’ he adm admitted. She lost patience with his faltering attempts to obtain a di divorce from Penny and asked him point blank if he had any inte intention of marrying her. Th The crisis in their relationship culm culminated in an incident one night in their hotel room in Sou South Africa when Miss Sidney was alleged to have consumed a su substantial amount of alcohol toge together with some sleeping pills in what some saw as a suicid suicide attempt. Bru Brucie remembered: ‘ She flew home home, followed by loving cards, cable cables and letters from me. ‘Bu ‘But this time things were not right between us and there was no going back.’ Fors Forsyth and Sidney would last speak in 1980. Bruce had been deeply offended by a series of newspaper articles in which Sidney had discus discussed their relationship. ‘I tol told her that after the articles, which contained so much that was untrue untrue, I had nothing to say to her.’ They n never met or spoke again. In 19 1973, after nine years of living apart, Forsyth and Penny finally divorced. In spite of everything, Penny was ultimately to forgive Bruce for his infidelities, and the two remained on good terms. After suffering a stroke, Penny became a resident at Brinsworth House, the entertainment artistes’ benevolent home in Twickenham, . Forsyth was often to be seen visiting his ex-wife, in the company of their three daughters.
FIVE months after his divorce from Penny, Forsyth married Anthea Redfern, 20 years his junior and the blonde hostess of his successful TV series The Generation Game, which attracted 20 million viewers weekly.
Her sweeping skirts, voluptuous figure and Brucie’s regular catchphrase, ‘Give us a twirl, Anthea’, made her a household name. The couple had two daughters, Charlotte and Louisa, before divorcing in 1979 on the grounds of Anthea’s adultery.
Forsyth, now into his 50s, did not expect to marry again. But in 1980, on being invited to judge the Miss World contest, this incurable romantic was once again lovestruck.
His first glimpse of his fellow judge left him stunned. ‘Who is she?’ he wondered. ‘ She looks like a South American princess. She’s
absolutely gorgeous.’ She turned out to be Miss World 1975, Puerto Rican-born beauty Wilnelia Merced, 30 years his junior.
‘She had enormous dark, limpid eyes, a lovely, wide mouth, perfectly proportioned face, and her curvaceous body was every woman’s dream come true!’ he rhapsodised. ‘I was besotted.’
They married in New York in 1983, and in 1986, their son, Jonathan Joseph (‘JJ’) was born. This third and final marriage was to prove enduring, with the couple happily married for 34 years. Brucie, one of life’s eternal romantics, had found his soulmate at last.