Elvis’s indecent proposal to me and Karen Carpenter, by Petula Clark
He begged for threesome, but British 60s pop icon ‘didn’t find him attractive’
SHE was a Sixties pop star known for her wholesome image. But Petula Clark says that did not stop Elvis Presley trying to seduce her.
According to the British actress and singer, now 86, The King tried to persuade Miss Clark and Karen Carpenter into a threesome when they visited him in his dressing room after a concert in the early Seventies.
While Elvis was ‘raring to go’, she rejected his amorous advances as she didn’t find Presley attractive and wanted to preserve Miss Carpenter’s innocence.
‘Karen was lovely, but she was kind of innocent,’ Miss Clark told The Guardian.
‘I felt sort of responsible for her, so I got her out of there.’
She had been friends with Miss Carpenter since 1969, when the American singer, then 19, performed at a party after the Los Angeles premiere of Goodbye, Mr Chips, in which Miss Clark starred opposite Peter O’Toole.
Miss Clark said she felt like a big sister to Miss Carpenter – who died in 1983 as a result of complications resulting from anorexia.
Trying to protect her from Elvis’s charms, Miss Clark made efforts to persuade her to leave but ended up shoving her out of the room, to The King’s amusement.
‘Then I looked around, and Elvis was at the door, and he looked at me, like, “I’m going to get you one day”. Some people think he did. I think he put out the rumour that he did. But he didn’t. I didn’t find him that attractive,’ she said.
By that stage Miss Clark was already a showbusiness veteran. She had first sung on BBC radio shows aged nine during the Second World War and in her teens appeared in a string of films.
She struggled initially to break away from the child star image and sing ‘grown-up’ songs on themes such as love.
‘I think it was part of a moment in people’s wartime lives that they wanted to keep precious. Me becoming a woman – they didn’t want to see that,’ she said.
But she succeeded in finding worldwide fame as a singer, recording in German, French Italian and Spanish as well as English. She went on to have a succession of worldwide hits in the Sixties – including Downtown, I Couldn’t Live Without Your Love, This Is My Song and Don’t Sleep In The Subway – becoming one of the bestselling British female solo artists of all time.
She had her own TV shows in Britain and the US and revived her film career, first in Finian’s Rainbow, with Fred Astaire, and then Goodbye, Mr Chips.
In October she will return to the West End when she appears as the Bird Woman in Mary Poppins.
Miss Clark married French publicist Claude Wolff in 1961 and they have three children but she has admitted they have ‘drifted apart’ and now lead mostly separate lives, despite still being married.
They live in Geneva but she has described their relationship as ‘difficult to explain’, adding: ‘He has his life and I have mine.’
Last year Miss Clark disclosed that she had found love again with another man, but does not appear to be set to divorce Mr Wolff any time soon.
‘There is someone and it’s very nice and Claude knows about it. There’s no secret,’ she said on ITV’s Loose Women. ‘We became friends first and the romantic side happened later. I think that’s pretty good too, because it’s not a frantic passion thing.’
Of Karen Carpenter’s death,
‘I got her out of there’
Miss Clark told The Guardian: ‘It was awful. 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.’