Miss Hope Springs takes on the Wigmore Hall
A drag act at one of London’s smartest classical music venues? Ty Jeffries – aka Miss Hope Springs – talks to Ben Lawrence
In the corner of Ty Jeffries’ sitting room, there is a painting of a boy in a raincoat and sou’wester. He looks like a mournful version of EH Shepard’s Christopher Robin but, in fact, it is Jeffries himself, though it’s hard to make a connection between the child in the painting and the strapping bloke who’s now offering me coffee and croissants.
Jeffries, 55, is a master of transformation. The ex-model, pianist and composer, son of actor and The Railway Children director Lionel Jeffries, has spent the past seven years performing as Miss Hope Springs, a former Las Vegas showgirl who has seen better days and relates tales of a sequinned life through catchy songs that hum with wistfulness, black humour and moral asperity.
It’s Marlene Dietrich meets Peggy Lee meets Dusty Springfield, with the musicianship of Burt Bacharach and Jacques Brel. Lady Helen Windsor is a fan, so is Jonathan Ross. Now, Miss Hope is coming to Wigmore Hall, in London, and you wonder just how this totem of conventional Britishness is going to cope with a man in drag.
“Some traditionalists may reach for the smelling salts, but the Wigmore has been supportive,” says Jeffries. “They get the fact that, even though it’s fun and camp, I’m a serious composer [Jeffries studied at the Purcell School]. “The venue’s artistic director, John Gilhooly, is happy to confirm this. “Ty is out of our comfort zone, but he is a quality act. What he does is very intelligent, very witty and he can sing.”
That said, Jeffries has faced discrimination while doing his act, and says it takes time to win people over. “Someone early on said, ‘Oh, it’s Lionel Jeffries’ son in a wig, miming to Hello Dolly! songs’.” But Miss Hope is a world away from the tawdry lip-synching associated with drag acts. Indeed, some people have been fooled into thinking she is an actual person: “People ask when she is going back to Las Vegas. I love that they believe it. They get disappointed when they find out she is not real.”
Talking to Jeffries now, this seems astonishing. He is 6ft 2in, bald, and a masculine sort of man who once played rugby. It takes him about three hours to transform, shaving his chest and his legs and assiduously applying varnish to his fingers and toenails.
“Everything is packed up regarding Miss Hope,” he says. “People expect me to live in some sort of frou-frou apartment but, well, as you can see …”
It’s true that Jeffries’ London flat is not frou-frou – it’s full of muted autumnal colours and bold pieces of art. A photograph on his mantelpiece shows him as a jut-jawed, shavenheaded twentysomething modelling for Comme des Garçons, in a campaign that marked the height of a career that saw him travelling the world in shoots for Vogue and Jean-paul Gaultier. But the fashion industry left him “cold”.
Jeffries has met pretty much everyone. Growing up in the Sixties during the most successful part of his father’s career, he lived, briefly, in Beverly Hills while his father filmed the 1967 musical comedy Camelot. The family rented the former home of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, and the actress used to reappear to use their swimming pool.
The young Jeffries also met Fred Astaire. “We went out for dinner and on the way home tapdanced down
‘Some traditionalists may reach for the smelling salts, but the Wigmore know I’m a serious composer’
Sunset Boulevard,” he says. Other star names used to frequent the family home, and it is irresistible to make a connection between this childhood mingling and his fading glamour puss alter ego. He agrees.
“We used to have people like Shirley Maclaine, Shelley Winters and Diana Dors come to the house. I got to see these great ladies up close without their hair and make-up.”
Despite a proximity to fame, Jeffries says he still gets star-struck. He recently sat next to Helen Mirren at a dinner and remained speechless while she declared her hatred of cooking and how she swears by a rotisserie. He worked it into a song: Helen Mirren’s Showtime Grill.
Jeffries started performing as Miss Hope in 2010, the year his father died. “Let’s not go into a big psychological unfolding about that,” he says. Jeffries senior was comfortable with drag – he dressed up for a St Trinian’s film, and was close friends with Danny La Rue. Yet Ty never opened up about his homosexuality, and there is an acute sense that his creation represents an emotional untethering.
It’s also a release for a lot of middle-aged women, who Jeffries tells me see themselves in Miss Hope’s songs of dashed dreams and wasted lives. “Everyone needs escapism at the moment,” he says. “People come up to me after the show and say: ‘I didn’t want to come out tonight. I’ve had a terrible week, but now I feel like a million dollars’.”
And Jeffries, who has forthcoming dates in such unlikely places as Deal and Milton Keynes, is keen to extend his fame beyond a liberal metropolitan elite: “I want to break boundaries. My audience is predominantly heterosexual couples. I had a table of vicars once … Miss Hope Springs is big old-fashioned entertainment.”
Miss Hope Springs’ tour begins at the Wigmore Hall on Friday June 16. For full tour details, visit misshopesprings.com