One of the most glamorous female singers to come out of the pop/rock music era of the 1960s was Dusty Springfield. She gave us songs like I Only Want To Be With You, Son of a Preacher Man and You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me. Many people wondered what the demons were that lay behind the fascinating stage persona she so carefully developed.
In Dancing With Demons: The Authorized Biography of Dusty Springfield we get all the answers. Penny Valentine, a British music writer who toured with all the leading English artists of the 60s fills us in on the music side of her life. She says, ’’You can count the women musicians who are out on the fingers of one hand: lang, Melissa Ethridge, Janis Ian . . . and lately, Sinéad O’Connor.
Vicki Wickham, Dusty’s longtime friend and manager who also wrote the lyrics for You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me, fills us in on everything else that happened to Dusty up to the time of her death of cancer in 1999. The book contains 17 pages of photographs.
Dusty Springfield was born Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien to Gerard and Catherine O’Brien a few months before the outbreak of WW II. When the Nazi bombing raids began to hit London, her parents moved to the country where they soon tired of the location and moved back to a section of West London that boasted those same charms.
The little girl with all the Saints names was a student at St. Anne’s Convent School. By age 12 she exhibited a particular gift for reproducing the tone and mood of black American vocalists. She says she had a gravely voice even then and spent her time listening to her father’s recordings of JellyRoll Morton, Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee.
One day she went into a local record shop and recorded an ’’extraordinarily mature version of Irving Berlin’s When The Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabam. In the 1950s as one of the ’’Lana Sisters, ’’ she quickly learned how to be an entertainer. By 1963 she had her own band called The Springfields. They became the first British group to ever enter the American charts.
That same year she became the host of a popular TV show called Ready, Set, Go!, which was produced live by Vicki Wickham. Dusty chatted with the likes of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and also performed her own songs. It was here that she first performed her hit, I Only Want To Be With You. By 1966, she had gone solo and recorded You Don&’t Have To Say You Love Me, which became her biggest hit.
After she became the glamorous, Dusty Springfield and a bottle-blonde, she realized there was also something else she particularly liked . . . women. Her love of women didn’t help things and she remained semi-closeted.
Throughout the book we are introduced to her lovers and friends; we even find out about her lesbian marriage. Drugs, cigarettes and alcohol abuse came later. She was desperately insecure, feared failure and had a low self-esteem. Dusty wanted to be loved . . . by her parents and her fans. As a child she would ’’go and put her hands on the boiler until they burned--it was the only way she could make anyone in the house concerned or take notice of her at all.’’
Valentine says that during her singing career, ’’the emotionally fragile Dusty was driven to succeed because her battered ego needed her audience to assure her that she was loved by all.’’ In the first chapter we are told about a 911 call that summoned the paramedics from New York’s Bellevue Hospital with their blaring sirens and flashing red lights. Bellevue was famous from coast to coast for its psychiatric department.
They found a woman in an apartment with badly cut arms. They bound them, loaded her on a stretcher and took her to the life-support unit. The woman was Dusty Springfield and she was diagnosed as Manic-Depressive; her moods were legend. This was the second time she had been there booked at Bellevue under the name Mary O’Brien. She felt secure there and said, ’’Everyone looks after you, you have no responsibilities, and someone else cleans and cooks.’’ Seems that Dusty had a grim sense of humor, too, because the first thing she unpacked in California after her release was the straitjacket she wore her first week at Bellevue.
In California, she was at Cedar Sinai in LA County so often she said she knew the first names of all the paramedics. Anyone who remembers her voice and her songs will want to read this book. It’s an exciting and sometimes painful read about one of the greatest female pop music icons of all time. ’’It’s the story of a plain girl who became a lovely woman and a star . . . a woman who hit bottom, lost it all and then found success later in life.’’ (St. Martin’s Press, ISBN: 0-312-28202-8, $24.95.)