Sean Smith

How he dragged his career out of its knicker-throwing doldrums, won a new audience... then lost the love of his life

TOM JONES wasn’t happy in his work. By the mid-1980s nobody seemed to care about his voice any more. His shows had become a parody. His audience was more concerned with throwing knickers than listening to his new repertoire. He knew he had to accept it, because they had paid good money to see him, but he needed to change their perception. He later complained: “At first it was a sexy, spontaneous act. Now it’s a gimmick. For a long time, the underwear tossing – or the anticipation of underwear tossing – would overwhelm whatever else I was trying to do on-stage.

“People were beginning to think I was nothing more than a pair of tight pants and a hairy chest.”

He found it most frustrating when he launched into his most poignant hit, Green, Green Grass Of Home.

“There’s always some nutcase woman who thinks ‘now’s my chance’ and, whoosh, it ***** up the song.”

The difficulty was that he was still being paid a king’s ransom to appear in Las Vegas, earning £223,000 a week for three months out of 12 – £2.7million a year.And by the time his svengali manager Gordon Mills died from stomach cancer in 1986, Tom’s career was stuck.

A movie career – which Mills had been desperate for – had failed to take off. Tom’s dream of replacing Sean Connery as James Bond was rejected and he’d turned down an offer of male lead opposite Joan Collins in The Stud because there was too much swearing.

The 1970s had brought wealth. Tom and his wife Linda moved to Bel Air and an opulent 16-room mansion once owned by Dean Martin. But a decade on, he felt exiled.

By now he was a grandfather. Their son Mark’s wife, Donna, had given birth to Alexander in 1983, and it was to his family he turned to boost his career; Mark had spent 15 years learning the business, so it seemed natural he should become Tom’s manager.

The move would arguably save the star’s career. Mark found his father a new ballad called A Boy From Nowhere. Unexpectedly, it reached number two in the UK in April 1987, with Tom appearing on Top Of The Pops for the first time in 15 years.

Its success enabled Mark to book Tom into a round of interviews. During one, with Jonathan Ross, Tom sang a version of Prince’s hit, Kiss, an unusually contemporary choice, which again, Mark had encouraged him to try. Tom’s inspired performance impressed Anne Dudley, of synth-pop duo The Art Of Noise, who suggested they collaborate and release the song officially.

It worked, reaching number five in the charts in 1988. More importantly, it provided a blueprint for keeping Tom at the top for many years to come: put him with a fashionable act and he appeared current, while his talent made the other artists look good.

But just when Tom was beginning to enjoy a career revival, he had another issue to contend with. Part-time model Katherine Berkery, 24, with whom he had a four-day fling in 1987, claimed Tom was the father of her son, Jonathan, whom she had given birth to in June 1988.

She claimed she’d tried to reach Tom before the birth but was given the brush-off. Talking about their brief fling, she said he kept a tape recorder in a silver briefcase and would get in the mood for their lovemaking by playing his own songs. Tom at first dismissed Katherine’s claims as lies but a New York court ordered him to take a blood test, which proved with 99.7 per cent certainty he was Jonathan’s father.

A further DNA test increased the probability to 99.9 per cent. In a confidential settlement, he reportedly agreed to pay her £2,000 a month plus other expenses but, publicly, Tom wouldn’t acknowledge his son. He refused to speak about it for nearly 20 years. Then, in 2008, he revealed he felt he had been used: “It wasn’t something I had planned. If I had planned it, I would have done something more than just financially. But it wasn’t. I was tricked, really.”

Rumours started that the revelations would signal a divorce, especially when Tom bought wife Linda a house in South Wales. But Linda, as always, stood by her man. “There will be no divorce,” she said. “That is for the record. I don’t know about any tests. I prefer to take the word of my husband.”

She had given some insight into her life as

Mrs Tom Jones in a rare interview following his affair with Mary Wilson, a founder member of The Supremes whom he’d met in 1968 in Munich after a gig.

Linda declared then that she was sure of Tom because, “I always know he is coming home”. But it was undoubtedly difficult coming to terms with the gorgeous women that surrounded her husband on a daily basis. At one stage, her selfconfidence was so low she would never answer the front door without first putting on her make-up. She also had to endure sacks of letters from Tom’s female fans declaring how much they wanted to go to bed with her husband – and those were the polite ones.

Yet despite everything, she was clearly still deeply in love with the man she’d met when they were at school: “I feel alive when he comes in through the door whatever the time of day or night it is.”

And as with previous marital hiccups, Tom survived the paternity publicity and his revival continued.

He might not have made it as a movie star but, in 1996, he played himself in Tim Burton’s ensemble science-fiction comedy film Mars Attacks! and, in 1997, his version of Randy Newman’s You Can Leave Your Hat On helped The Full Monty film become an international success.

Then, in 1998, he was immortalised in The Ballad Of Tom Jones by Space and Cerys Matthews, and the following year his Reload album of collaborations with the likes of Cerys, Van Morrison, Stereophonics and RobbieWilliams became the biggest hit of his career, selling more than four million copies and hitting number one twice in the UK.

A new track, Sex Bomb, with German composer and DJ Mousse T, even reached number three in the singles charts.

CRITICS hailed Tom for bridging the years in a way other great stars did not. One lauded him thus: “Tom Jones is the music missing link between eras.” In recent years, he has become a star coach of TV reality show The Voice, introducing his incredible vocal talents to a whole new audience.

For his 2008 album 24 Hours, one standout track was The Road, inspired by his sentiment that, “no matter where I have been or what I have done, the road always leads back to Linda”.

The irony is, of course, that Tom had been on the road for most of their then 50-year marriage.They were apart for long periods of time, sometimes even living in different countries. Nevertheless, Tom always insisted he would never leave his wife. Sadly, Linda

‘People were beginning to think I was nothing more than a pair of tight pants and a hairy chest’