‘I felt as though I belonged to other people – not to myself ’
As she prepares for ‘Mary Poppins’ on stage, Petula Clark tells Dominic Cavendish that life as a child star was not all sweetness and light
Petula Clark is regaling me about the night she got sloshed with Peter O’toole in 1969, around the time they starred in Goodbye Mr
Chips. It came at the end of a golden decade for the singer and actress – she was the biggest British female recording artist of her time – scoring hit after hit, that 1964 phenomenon Downtown putting her in a league of her own.
“It was hard not to get a bit tipsy with Peter when you were with him. That’s the way it was. And after one very merry meal in Hampstead, we set off downhill, with me sitting on his shoulders, singing at the tops of our voices. People were leaning out of their windows, complaining that they were trying to get to sleep. And he was yelling back, ‘Do you realise who you’re talking to?’” she laughs, fondly.
In spite of such recollections, Clark – who began performing in public in her early youth and is still going at 86 – tells me she hates the nostalgia trail. You look back over her extraordinary life and the word “survivor” springs to mind. “Is that what am I?” she says, briskly. “I just live my life, I think about what’s next.”
She’s now playing the small but crucial role of the feed-dispensing old “bird-woman” in Mary Poppins, the hit stage-musical version of the muchloved live-action animated 1964 film, which has just started a fresh run at the Prince Edward. She agreed to do it because the pathos of the old woman’s song (Walt Disney’s favourite ditty, granted to Andrews in the film, ) appealed: “I see her as a spiritual person who was grand once and has fallen on hard times. It’s not a song about bird feed, it’s metaphysical! It’s about being generous – that’s the way I’m playing it.” The Prince Edward theatre was the site of Clark’s big breakthrough 77 years ago (when it was home to the “Queensberry All Services Club”). And, in keeping with her dislike of dwelling on the past, she seems offhand about this totemic coming full circle.
“There’s something in the theatre’s programme – a photo of me aged 10 serving tea to a group of service people. Until I saw it, I had forgotten I had been there, it was such a long time ago.” She arrives for our interview youthful and sprightly, a little scarf trailing round her overflowing grey top. We’re in the theatre’s “Julie Andrews suite” – complete with wall-mounted photo of Andrews as Poppins, which she greets with an ironic chuckle. The pair often appeared on the same bills as kids, entertaining the troops. The country at that time was recorded in Andrews’s memoirs as rather bleak – Clark agrees but recalls those days with affection. “We weren’t friends but we got on. We slept in the luggage racks of troop trains. We would just get out and sing. There was no rivalry.” Nor since – she claims, viewing Andrews’s career and hers as distinct. She played Maria von Trapp on stage in The Sound of Music in the early Eighties – “I wasn’t intimidated by Julie’s screen performance – I gave a very different one.”
Over the decades, Clark seems often to have been at exactly the right place at the right time. A born singer, she became a national treasure, a juvenile counterpoint to Vera Lynn – “Our Pet” – during the war; her glad-making voice boosted morale. She was there at the infancy of television, given her own shows, becoming a proto “influencer” for Fifties youngsters. Taken into the bosom of film-making by the Rank organisation as a childstar, she received her first screen kiss from Alec Guinness in The Card (1952) – “It was his first, too, I think. It was very chaste, the earth didn’t move.”
There have been other firsts. She was (controversially) the first white woman to touch (merely, instinctively, on the forearm) a black man – singer Harry Belafonte – on US American television (in 1968). A Clark concert was the first colour programme to go out on BBC One in 1969. And having married a Frenchman (Claude Wolff, with whom she has three children), achieved chart success in a number of European languages and attracted a huge following on the Continent, she even compèred the TV celebrations of Britain joining the Common Market.
“I don’t think anyone could have forecast how it would turn out,” she says, diplomatically.
In France, Clark has long been regarded as a great chanteuse (she was dubbed the “Epsom nightingale”), and there is a melancholy strain in her voice that another child star, Anthony Newley, once shrewdly noted: “Even when she sings happy songs, I always get the feeling of the Piaf thing – of great sadness beneath it all.”
Tragedy? Well, there is darkness lurking in the fringes of the perpetual spotlight into which she was cast from the earliest hour. Her father Leslie, something of a frustrated actor, seized every opportunity to maximise his daughter’s chances at fame and the result finally led to a personal rift, and possibly unresolvable pain.
She confronts it now, looking straight ahead, distant-eyed. “It was complicated because my dad was my manager and my mother was very much in the background. My sister was with my mother. I was with my dad. I admired him, and thought he was it and could do no wrong. I don’t think he was aware of what was happening to me – and I didn’t have anyone to talk to. I had to wrestle with it myself, which is very hard. I felt as though I belonged to other people – not to myself. It was all about pleasing people. People looked on me as something pleasurable. I was charming and sang nicely and was well behaved. I didn’t realise I was being put into a box,” she says.
“It started getting really difficult as I got older,” she continues. “I was more valuable to the film company as a child than as an adolescent, so they would bind my bosom, make me wear ankle socks and act like a child. And I hated that, as any young girl would. I started to be unhappy – and I went through a really bad time when I thought I was going to have a breakdown. Actually, I didn’t know what a breakdown was, but I knew something really bad was happening to me. My dad would say ‘It’s ridiculous to cry’. I was taught never to show my feelings.”
I suggest that perhaps her subsequent drive – her restlessness to this day – has much to do with needing to find her sense of self, crushed in adolescence. “Yes, I think so,” she says, a few words that have the force of a bombshell. “Sometimes I stop and think, ‘Did I really get through that unharmed?’ I think I keep trying to find my own voice. I’m still trying.”
Perhaps we’re not a million miles away, then, from the world of Poppins? “Yes,” she agrees. “There’s that British stiff upper lip thing.” She also sees points of comparison with Mrs Banks – torn between being a mother and asserting her own identity. Considering herself a feminist (“Of course, I am!”), and working very hard, she hired more than a dozen nannies: “They brought things into the house a bit like Mary Poppins that we could not provide – there was a wonderful Australian girl who taught them to swim, and we had a Swiss nanny who went barefoot and was very spiritual. Saying goodbye was very difficult.”
A life so rich and varied is hard to encapsulate, but the simple truth about Clark is that her greatest emotional release seems to lie in singing. As a child – living with her Welsh grandparents to escape the Blitz – miners would stand, pickaxes and pints in hand, to hear her croon atop a table in the pub. “The very first time I sang in public was in a chapel pulpit in Wales,” she reflects. “I remember the feeling so clearly – something happened and it still happens when I go on stage now. When you sing in front of an audience, it’s like a communion.”
‘I was more valuable to the film company as a child than as an adolescent, so they would bind my bosom’