Daily Mail, Friday, August 30, 2019 Page 41proof, ‘because that was what
those boys liked. I drank it down,
gagged a few times, and five
minutes later I went — Yes! This is
the answer to life.’
It was, she swore, the first time
she drank alcohol. She was 25.B
uT she could also
erupt backstage. On a
tour of Australia with
Brian Poole And The
Tremeloes, she took exception to
the number of birthday candles
the boys crammed onto her cake.
She placed it on the floor and
stamped on it. It didn’t pay to
mess with Dusty.
Even members of the public were
not safe. In the restaurant at the
top of the Post Office Tower, a mancalled out a snide remark. Dusty
threw a bread roll at him.
Yet at the height of her fame, she
was haunted by low self-esteem.
Convinced that her left side was
ugly, she insisted that only the
right half of her face could be pho-
tographed in profile. She refused
to be seen without full make-up,
even at nine in the morning, she
wore wigs that obscured her face
at all times of day.
In hotels, if she ordered a meal in
her room, she would hide in the
bathroom until it had been
delivered. ‘My body was wrong, my
face was wrong,’ she said. ‘I didn’t
look like a singer.’
It didn’t help that the press con-
stantly asked about her love life.
She was sharing a Kensington flat
with her long-time lover, the artist
Norma Tanega, and rumours flew.Dusty tried to fend them off with
vague statements: ‘I think mar-
riage, if it happens, is the most
desirable state to be in. But there
are, to be honest, no men I know
that I could live with for ever.’
She decided to tackle the
rumours directly, after a Top Ten
hit with Son of A Preacher Man.
Her relationship with Tanega was
falling apart and she was thinking
about moving to California, to take
advantage of the laid-back West
Coast attitude to sexuality.
In a 1970 newspaper interview
with Ray Connolly, she dispensed
with her cheery, family-friendly
statements and revealed her
controversial side. ‘A lot of people
say I’m bent, and I’ve heard it so
many times that I’ve almost
learned to accept it. I know I’m as
perfectly capable of being swayedby a girl as by a boy. More and
more people feel that way and I
don’t see why I shouldn’t.’
It was a bold statement for the
era. And it was probably prompted
by her affair with Julie Felix. ‘Dusty
was living in Kensington [with
Tanega] and I was on the King’s
Road, not far away,’ remembered
Felix, a beautiful woman of mixed
Mexican and Native American her-
itage. ‘We were both with other
women, so our time together was
double secret. We were naughty
and we liked the intrigue.’
But the affair had an ugly side.
Once, when Dusty became jealous
of Felix’s other lover, ‘she hit me.
We’d been drinking some wine and
she was taking Mandrax [a seda-tive], and I think the combination
was bad.’ After moving to LA,
Dusty launched into a series of les-
bian relationships, while playing
the theatrical diva and surround-
ing herself with gay male friends.
She began drinking heavily and
taking cocaine: ‘I wanted more of
life, whatever it brought,’ she said.
Her performances suffered, and
the standard of venues prepared
to book her started to slide. Play-
ing clubs that had no interest in
her art brought out all her anger
and anxieties. ‘I’d get so frustrated
that I’d find myself in hotel rooms
flinging crockery at the walls.’
Drugs and booze began to domi-
nate her life. ‘It finished me off,’
she said. ‘It just scrambled my life.
I felt I was obsolete, with a feeling
of uselessness.’
As her depression worsened, she
tried to harm herself, taking a
knife to her wrists. It would not be
her last suicide attempt.
Sometimes when she thought
she was on the up, she was at her
lowest ebb. One night, alone in the
Continental Hyatt Hotel on Sun-
set Boulevard, she rang down for
another bottle of champagne. ‘I
thought it was fine,’ she said, ‘I
was being a lady.’ And the room
service waiter said, “Haven’t you
had enough?” And I thought,
Christ, if he says that.. .’
Dusty surrounded herself with
friends whose constant job was to
give her encouragement and keep
her on the wagon. ‘It’s very easy to
stop drinking, to stop doing drugs,’
she said, ‘but it’s not easy to stay
stopped.’
Gradually, people began to
view her as an eccentric has-
been. In one interview in the
early Eighties, she emerged
in lilac silk with Dallas-
style shoulderpads, car-
rying two tiny kittens.
‘Pray, sir, be gentle with
me,’ she told the pho-
tographer, ‘the lady has
had a sleepless night.’
Perhaps she was try-
ing to play the star,
but she came across
as amiably insane.
It was the movie
Pulp Fiction that pro-
pelled her to A-list
status again. A scene
with John Travolta
and uma Thurman
played to the sound of
Son Of A Preacher
Man: it helped make
the soundtrack album
a massive hit in 1994.
That year, while record-
ing in Nashville, Dusty
began to suffer a series of
infections. Back in Lon-
don, she discovered a deep
indentation in her breast.
Cancer was diagnosed.
To her surprise she discov-
ered chemotherapy quite bear-
able. ‘I think my body liked the
chemicals. I’ve poisoned it over so
many years that it went, “Yes!
Poison!” ’
Despite a couple of remissions,
the disease was relentless. She
died in 1999, six weeks short of her
60th birthday. Shortly before her
death, she was awarded the OBE,
but was too ill to go to Bucking-
ham Palace. Instead, she received
the medal at her bedside.
Retaining her disdain for the
establishment to the last, she
remarked: ‘It’s a nice medal. But
why couldn’t they have got a bet-
ter ribbon? It’s a bit frayed.’
She had earned royal forgiveness
at the very end... as if she cared.
n Dusty by Lucy O’Brien is
published by Michael O’Mara,
£16.99 © Lucy O’Brien. to
order a copy for £13.60 call 0844
571 0640. P&P free on orders
over £15. Offer valid till
september 14, 2019.From dowdy to diva: Far left,
Young Dusty in a school snap.
Main picture, wowing the
Palladium in 1967. Bottom right,
her famous beehive hair, and
left, the budding star at 15stardom
dust
that
turned to
Booze. Drugs. Lesbian
flings. Even a run-in
with royalty. As Dusty
Springfield’s story is
turned into a movie, a
new book lays bare the
private battles beneath
that legendary beehive