The disco queen whose hallmark was survival
Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’ is the enduring anthem of the Seventies but, 40 years on, it also describes the trials of her own life, the singer tells t’s almost 40 years since Gloria Gaynor recorded one of the most enduring songs of the disco era. An anthem for jilted women everywhere, made the girl from New Jersey a household name around the world. But its lyrics – “At first I was afraid, I was petrified…” – have proven to be something of a mantra for Gaynor throughout her almost unimaginably turbulent life.
In 1978, when she recorded the song, with its familiar singalong refrains (“Did you think I’d crumble? / Did you think I’d lay down and die…?”), Gaynor was in fact wearing a medical brace after emergency surgery on her back, following an accident that could have left her paralysed for life.
“I’d been on stage and fallen backwards over a monitor and ended up in hospital, paralysed from the waist down. But I knew I could survive, so I really related to that song,” she says.
To say that Gaynor is a survivor is something of an understatement. One of seven children, she grew up without a father, suffered abuse as a child and, once fame beckoned in the mid-Seventies, succumbed to a period of drink and drugs. She overcame those difficulties thanks to her strong Christian faith, which helped, too, when her younger sister was brutally murdered in 1995.
“Like everyone, I’ve been through difficult times,” she says. “I’ve certainly needed help to get through them.”
She was born Gloria Fowles in New Jersey, where she still lives, and her dad left home before she was born. “It can be debilitating growing up without a father,” she says. “I had no idea what a relationship between a man and a woman should be like, and also I suffered with abandonment issues throughout my life. There was a family who lived behind us who gave parties in the summer and I’d be lying in bed hearing the laughter and the music. But when winter came and the parties stopped, I remember feeling so lonely.
“I saw my father a couple of times
Iwhen I was young, but we didn’t have any kind of relationship and that definitely contributed to a feeling of low self-worth.”
Such feelings were to be horribly reinforced by the male figures who subsequently featured in her life. In her 2013 autobiography, she recalled how she was molested by a neighbour when she was just five and then at 12 by her mother’s boyfriend.
At 18, she was raped by the cousin of an ex-boyfriend. “And I just felt: ‘Well, this is what men are like and this is what life is going to be’,” she says softly. “I blamed myself and thought that if I hadn’t done this or that, then it wouldn’t have happened. I had nonsense in my head telling me that I wasn’t worthy.
“I never told anybody because I felt people would look at me like I was weird, or think that I was weak, and I didn’t tell my mother because I didn’t want to bother her. She was going through what if it maxes out her credit card and the rest of the group don’t talk to her for a month? While many midlifers have a sneaking feeling that they are becoming invisible, rocking up to the main stage in a shimmering body suit, neon trainers and a face full of Restylane dermal filler isn’t the best way to tackle this. When she starts Instagramming over-baked cleavage close-ups, it’s time to remove her from the wine tent. Water bottle? Tick. Earplugs? Tick. Mobile charger, hand sanitising gel, aspirin, water refillable rucksack, tick tick tick tick. “Come on, everybody, let’s get a move on,” is the GL’s catchphrase for the entire weekend. With military organisation, the GL has corralled the midlife group at dawn so they can find a camping spot far away from the din of the main stage. Clad head to toe in “fit-for-purpose” khaki, with long shorts exposing solid walking legs and sturdy hiking boots, the GL can sometimes be found studying the festival line-up, and bellowing “Pyramid Stage in five”, while the rest of the group are simply looking for somewhere to sit down. On the plus side, the GL is the only one who remembered to bring the Pac A Macs and flasks for hot coffee. Probably works in finance, but now dreams of retraining to be a yoga/ Pilates teacher or mindfulness coach. Festival season is the time to indulge their spiritual side and wear deeply inappropriate cheesecloth. The first thing on their agenda is to find somewhere that serves gluten-free veggie burgers, on account of their sudden midlife onset allergy. Most likely to be found pinning positive healing thoughts on the healing prayer tree. Yes, really. Gloria Gaynor, disco diva, right. Left, on stage at the height of her fame in 1980; and, below, performing last year enough of her own craziness with a man who betrayed her with another woman, so I just kept quiet. But when I wrote about it, it was cathartic because it was almost like talking to a therapist.” Music, too, has been a salvation. “I remember when I was 13, standing in the hallway waiting for my friend, when I just started singing,” she says. “My neighbour went past and said: ‘Gloria, is that you? I thought it was the radio!’ and I thought to myself: ‘Ah, maybe this is what I should do with my life.’” She started singing publicly in 1965, “when I was 22, so just old enough to go into bars”. She had her first big hit in 1975 with
With the release of three years later, her reputation as disco’s leading diva was cemented.
In 1979, she married former policeman Linwood Simon, who became her manager, but with her growing fame and fortune came excess. “I was partying too much and I wasn’t even enjoying it,” she admits. “I was doing it to not feel left out.
“Then one day, about 15 of us were having a party in our hotel suite and we were lying on the shag carpet, so you can tell how long ago this was…” she laughs. “We were doing drugs and drinking when suddenly I felt someone grab me by the collar and pull me up, saying: ‘That’s enough.’ Well, I looked around and no one was there. I was so shaken, I locked myself in the bathroom, saying ‘Oh my God’, over and over, until I realised that’s