SHIRLEY’S AMAZING LIFE... AT 85
also raggedly ground to a halt. The heckling slowly subsided, and the whole theatre was plunged into a nervous silence.
“At first, I just stared at the audience,” Shirley recalled. “Then I spoke into the microphone. ‘Now look here,’ I said, in a broad Welsh accent. ‘I’ve come here tonight to entertain you lot and if you don’t want to listen then I’ll bloody well go home. But you can at least give me a chance’.”
The silence continued. “Then I looked at the musical director, started tapping my foot and said, ‘Now’.
“Well, by the time I finished my final number, the applause was deafening.”
News of the way that Shirley had handled the Glaswegian audience filtered back to Moss Empires, who kept their word and gave her a contract. “I was a heroine,” she later said of the event.
But while her career flourished, Shirley was notoriously unlucky in love.
She was once held at gunpoint by an obsessive ex-boyfriend.
She went on to get married twice, first to Kenneth Hume. They married shortly after 9.30 on the morning of June 8, 1961, at Paddington registrar’s office. The bride arrived in Hume’s coffee-coloured Bentley and wore a pink costume with matching toque hat and veil. The groom arrived on foot two minutes after Shirley had entered the building, wearing a dark blue suit with a rose in his lapel. Approximately 14 minutes later, the couple emerged from the building arm in arm. A group of housewives with prams, shopping in the busy street wished her, “Good luck, Shirley”. When asked why she had chosen Hume, Shirley would later explain: “He made me laugh, he was incredibly romantic and he asked me six times. I was crazy about the man.” But Hume filed for divorce in February 1964 and Shirley, who kept him on as her manager, went on to remarry. On August 13, 1968, Shirley married her second husband Sergio Novak, in a brief ceremony that took place at
Dame Shirley in 2018 2.30am. The venue was the Little Church of the West in Las Vegas (where Shirley was appearing in cabaret at the Sahara Hotel).
Her two daughters were bridesmaids.
The bride wore blue and in the wedding photographs she looks extremely happy, and very much in love. Sergio, on the other hand, looks rather wooden.
“My daughters adore Sergio,” Shirley said. “He will be a wonderful father.”
As time went by, this proved to be the case, and Shirley’s daughters Sharon and Samantha both took Novak’s name.
Shirley would later blame the collapse of her marriage on the fact that she had allowed Sergio to become her manager.
She said: “My first husband was in the business, so it was more like a partnership. I didn’t learn from my mistake, I did it again and, second time, it was even worse. We were talking about contracts in bed.”
She also ruefully observed: “Money-wise, I’ve looked after all the men in my life.”
Sergio Novak, on the other hand, would later claim that the marriage finally ended because Shirley was having an affair with her Australian road manager Kenny Carter.
He later claimed: “Her stardom transferred to her private life. And Shirley has a bad temper.”
Decades later, Shirley would dismissively refer to her second husband on stage as simply “the Italian”.
While true love eluded her, Shirley’s career proved a runaway success.
Highlights included three James Bond theme tunes – and a damehood.
The first Bond film, Dr No, had had no theme song at all. Matt Monro’s rendition of Lionel Bart’s theme for
MOTHER Daughters Sharon & Samantha From Russia With Love, the next movie in the series, had been only a minor hit in Britain.