Cheat on the wife? A nice boyo like me?
HaNg on to your giddy knickers, because Tom Jones sure has a remarkable life story to tell. The problem is, he hasn’t told it in this book.
For over 500 pages of his first and only autobiography, complete with moody cover shot and stockades of showbiz photographs ( captions include: my Rolls-Royce, belt buckle competition with Elvis, poolside tea in Bel air), we get chapter and verse on Jones The Voice, Jones In Vegas, Jones The Born again Bluesman and Jones The Sir.
Most of all, we get Jones The Perfect Husband, the caring troubadour who fretted about leaving his young wife Linda alone in Pontypridd when he first went to seek fame in London in the Fifties.
We also get plenty of the respected rock statesman now paying handsome tribute to the woman he has been married to, somehow, for 58 years. Of the more scandalous side of his life, there is no mention. Not a whisper.
at the height of his fame in the Sixties and Seventies, Jones notoriously slept with hundreds of women — and carried on his marathon shagathon into the next few decades for good measure.
It is no secret that he had a string of romances, including one with Mary Wilson of the Supremes, at a time when interracial relationships were still frowned upon in much of america.
YOu don’t have to be prurient to wonder how such a highprofile couple managed their affair, or what they felt about the risks they ran. Yet chicken Tom despatches the Supreme in a fleeting paragraph about visiting New York’s Copacabana club in 1968, ‘ when I was getting to know Mary Wilson, who was a good friend in this period’.
Half-a-dozen years later, Jones was caught out in Barbados kissing Miss World Marjorie Wallace, who reportedly took an overdose when their affair became public and she lost her title. There is one single mention of extra-marital relationships, in which he denies that he ever had an affair with Raquel Welch. ‘That stuff was always flying around,’ he writes.
He also has a son from another relationship, now aged 27, whom he does not acknowledge. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
The mighty hose of whitewash has been blasted upon Jones’s past, which gives the book a sl i ghtly l opsided, ghostly atmosphere, freighted with misplaced portent. Readers are left waiting for the important guest who never arrives, mourning the spectre at the feast.
He knows that we know, we know that he knows we know and, to this end, he at least makes one attempt to address the issue.
‘There was sex in the shows, and there was sex around the shows. The air seemed to crackle with it . . . the atmosphere was alive with the possibility of sex.
‘I was going over as some kind of love god, and I was going over so strongly that occasionally I was even persuaded of it myself.
‘The road will set temptations in front of you that are hard to resist.’
Well, quite. Perhaps he has very good reasons f or the exclusion — l ate, blooming respect for his wife, a wish to protect the women involved, a keen sense of his own, hard-won dignity in old age — but to be honest, the bland steamroller of his discretion almost capsizes
the whole project. But not completely. Not entirely.
For Tom Jones really has had the most astonishing life, one which he recounts here with verve, energy and a vivid eye for detail — when it suits.
A coal miner’s son, a boy from nowhere, he had a completely untutored golden voice, a lusty baritone that took him from being a door- to- door vacuum cleaner salesman to fame, friendship with Elvis Presley and a £190 million fortune.
Like Paul O’Grady’s 2008 autobiography, At My Mother’s Knee, Jones captures the joys, the quiet deprivations and the stunted ambition of his sooty, postwar working-class family life, right down to the tea leaves his father smoked in a clay pipe and his grandmother’s habit of sitting down when she cooked because her legs were so bad.
He grew up in an oppressively tidy house without books, where his f ather toiled down the mines and his mother got the cloth on the table before he came home. Or else.
Jones escaped coal mining himself as he had TB as a child, something he felt already marked him out as special. People were talking about him, and he liked it. He and Linda married when only 16, in a registry office that smelled of ‘polish and floor cleaner’.
When he s i gned t he r egister, dyslexic Tom couldn’t recall how to write the l etter J and had to get his brother-in-law to show him.
He remembers everything. ‘I wear my best suit and Linda is in a navy- blue dress. She is eight months pregnant, and no photographs are taken.’
In 1964, Tom is singing in local pubs when he is spotted by an agent called Gordon Mills. He brings his model wife Jo to see Jones perform at Top Hat Club in a small mining village called Cwmtillery.
After the show, she said: ‘I’ve never seen anything so male in all my life.’ And in one way or another, women have been saying that about Tom Jones ever since.
OvEr The Top And Back goes on to chart his amazing rise and fall — and rise again across the six decades of his astonishing, mould-breaking career.
I like his early Sixties recollection of being taken out by his record company for dinner in a fancy New York restaurant, where he has steak and tastes Thousand Island dressing for the first time. ‘It was like an elixir!’
He comes across as a man of compassion and humour, perhaps easily stung at t i mes and s o mewhat embarrassed by the knickerchucking excesses of his life, both on and off the stage.
He takes the opportunity to settle a few scores, including one with his mortal enemy Engelbert Humperdinck.
‘ Once a pest, always a pest,’ is how Tom Jones puts it, although he doesn’t use quite such a polite word.
After all these years, his sap is still rising, his rip r emains r oaring. Even without the girls, this is a hugely enjoyable read.