‘I had to hide behind a mask, and I chose mascara.’
About a month before the beginning of the Second World War a baby girl was born in Hampstead to an Irish Catholic family and named Mary Isabel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien. The O’Brien’s were a prosperous family, the father was an Income Tax accountant, and Mary was brought up with two brothers in a conservative and comfortable Hampstead, and subsequently Ealing, middle-class existence.
Mary as a child was a bit of a tomboy and often came home with grubby clothes and dirty knees and was soon always known as ‘Dusty’, she also was a bit tubby and bespectacled and recalled once that at the age of 16 she looked in the mirror and told herself “be miserable or become someone else”.
Dusty in 1958
In 1958 Dusty answered an a newspaper ad and much to her great surprise was chosen as a singer in an established girl group called The Lana Sisters. With this vocal group, she developed the art of harmonising, learned microphone technique, made records, did some television shows and played live both in the UK, and at American Air Bases.
Dusty with the Lana Sisters in 1959
After a couple of years she joined up with her brother to form a folk trio called The Springfields (this is where her stage surname came from and when she permanently adopted the name ‘Dusty’).
Dusty with The Springfields in 1962
After two years she again felt claustrophobic in a group format and struck out on her own and her first solo recording ‘I Only Want To Be With You’ became a huge hit in the UK (it was the opening song on the very first edition of Top Of The Pops) and following in the wake of The Beatles a big hit in The States. If this had been her only hit she would still have a small footnote in the history of pop music but realistically she was just getting going. She subsequently had a string of hits over the next few years including her first number one ‘You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me’, and became, arguably, Britain’s greatest female singer.
Dusty had always been a big fan of black music and hosted a programme of Ready Steady Go that featured just Motown musicians – her ability to sing and master the style of black American soul music earned from Cliff Richard the rather dated nick-name “The White Negress”. In 1964 Dusty was booked to play in South Africa but made sure that in her contract she only played to un-segregated audiences. She was arrested and deported back to the UK after just one concert in front of a mixed audience in Cape Town. Both Max Bygraves and Derek Nimmo, to their shame, complained to the press that her pig-headedness over the matter would cause problems for them and for other entertainers wanting to tour South Africa.
Dusty with Martha and the Vandellas
Dusty returning from the aborted South Africa tour.
Dusty Springfield was a huge star in her own country even recording several series of her own shows, two series for the BBC entitled Dusty and one with ITV called ‘It Must Be Dusty’ this even included a duet with Jimi Hendrix of the song ‘Mockingbird’.
By 1968 the music industry was starting to split between the progressive and hip and the pop and unfashionable. Hoping to reinvigorate her career and boost her credibility Springfield signed with Atlantic records, the same label as her idol Aretha Franklin. Her Memphis sessions for the label were produced by Jerry Wexler, Tom Dowd and Arif Mardin, the backing singers were the Sweet Inspirations and the instrumental band was The Memphis Cats. Jerry Wexler realised that her natural voice at last should be placed at the front of the recording
and shouldn’t be battling with the backing musicians, however due to what he recalled as ‘a gigantic inferiority complex’ her vocals were recorded later in New York.
Dusty In Memphis is these days widely considered as perhaps one of the greatest LPs ever recorded and it seems incredible now that although Rolling Stone magazine at the time wrote that the record had “…blazing soul and sexual honesty…that transcended both race and geography”, the recording didn’t even make the UK top 40.
In 1970, after more and more whispered rumours, Springfield spoke to Ray Connolly a journalist for the Evening Standard in London – “There’s one thing that’s always annoyed me, and I’m going to get into something nasty here. But I’ve got to say it because so many people say it to my face. A lot of people say I’m bent, and I’ve heard it so many times that I’ve almost learned to accept it…. Girls run after me a lot, and it doesn’t upset me. It upsets me when people insinuate things that aren’t true. I couldn’t stand to be thought to be a big butch lady. But I know I’m perfectly as capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy. More and more people feel that way, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t…. Being a pop star, I shouldn’t even admit that I might think that way.” This was a ridiculously bold statement for the time and and although she was brave it realistically didn’t do her any favours.
In fact all Dusty’s long term relationships were with women and at the time of the interview Dusty was living in Kensington with a black American folk singer called Norma Tanega and had been for years.
Norma Tanega – A Street That Rhymes at 6am
In 1972, ostensibly to escape from the intrusive UK press Dusty moved to Los Angeles and started to live the life of a Beverley Hills socialite. More than at home she could now move comfortably in lesbian circles and she befriended the tennis players Billie Jean King and Rosie Casals, the latter saying that although she and Dusty were close friends they were never lovers.
Dusty with Rod Stewart and Olivia Newton John in 1978
In 1973 Dusty explained to the Los Angeles Free Press: “I mean, people say that I’m gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay. I’m not anything. I’m just … People are people…. I basically want to be straight…. I go from men to women; I don’t give a shit. The catchphrase is: I can’t love a man. Now, that’s my hang-up. To love, to go to bed, fantastic; but to love a man is my prime ambition…. They frighten me.”
Incidentally she only recorded one song during her life that spoke openly about loving another woman (although I suppose it could be said to be ’self reverential’). It was called Beautiful Soul and was recorded during one of her Atlantic Record sessions that were discontinued due to ‘poor mental health’. The track was eventually released after her death.
Rapidly falling record sales, and intrusions by the press took a toll on her private life and by the mid-seventies Springfield was unable to cope without drinking heavily and taking drugs on a regular basis. She had resorted to self-harming in such a way that she was hospitalised several times including after a failed suicide attempt.
In the early eighties Dusty was making an effort to clean up and met a little known actress and singer called Teda Bracci at an AA meeting. Dusty eventually got ‘married’ to her in a backyard ceremony in San Fernando with wedding guests that were nearly all fellow inhabitants of the rehab centre. When they were asked whether there were any objections to the marriage all the guests raised their hands in jest, including Dusty who also jokingly put up her arm. The couple’s relationship was tempestuous to say the least and during one particularly heated row Bracci hit Dusty in the face with a saucepan and smashed her mouth, knocking out her teeth. Dusty responded and hit her partner around the face with a skillet. Both of them ended up in hospital with Dusty requiring plastic surgery. Unsurprisingly the marriage didn’t last long.
Dusty getting married to the actress/singer Teda Bracci in 1983
In 1987, The Pet Shop Boys, huge fans of hers, invited her to record with them for, what would become the world-wide hit “What Have I Done To Deserve This” and then a few years later her brilliant version of “Son Of A Preacher Man” was included in the Pulp Fiction soundtrack meaning that she now had a whole new generation of fans. Although at this stage of her career Dusty was tired of keeping up an expected image and said “it would have been so easy to go down the diva route, but there’s no substance to it and bores me”.
Dusty performing with the Pet Shop Boys at The Brit Awards 1988
Springfield was diagnosed with breast cancer in the early nineties and after initially seemingly to recover from the disease succumbed to it in March 1999 just before what would have been her sixtieth birthday.
Buy Dusty Springfield music here and here.
“I am guilty. I’m a little confused”
The evidence of the shooting still remains on the exterior tiled wall of the slightly old-fashioned Hampstead pub called The Magdala. The bullet holes mark the spot where Ruth Ellis shot her playboy racing-driver lover six times with a heavy British service .38 Smith and Wesson revolver. She was quickly apprehended by an off-duty policeman who had been drinking in the pub. He took the gun Ellis offered him, put it in one of his coat pockets, and heard her say, incriminatingly,”I am guilty. I’m a little confused.”
In Holloway prison on the morning of 13th July 1955 (just three months and three days after the shooting), Ruth Ellis put her spectacles on the table and told the warder guarding her, “I won’t need those any more.” She was taken out of her cell to be hanged by Albert Pierrepoint who later wrote “She died as brave as any man and she never spoke a single word.” The Bishop of Stepney visited Ellis just before her death and wrote that he “was horrified and aghast beyond words” when he learned that Ellis “could hear the hammering as the scaffold was being erected.”
The body of Ruth Ellis was buried in an unmarked grave within the walls of Prison. However in the early seventies the gaol was extensively re-built and the bodies of all the executed women were exhumed. Ellis’s body was reburied in Saint Mary Churchyard in Amersham, Buckinghamshire – the grave now completely overgrown by Yew.
Ruth Ellis was born in Rhyl in North Wales but her family moved to London in 1941 in the middle of the Blitz. In 1944, aged eighteen, she had a brief affair with a French-Canadian soldier called Clare eventually becoming pregnant and giving birth to a son called Clare Andrea, known throughout his life as ‘Andy’.
After the war she supported herself by being a model at the Camera Club where she posed nude before a group of men taking photos – often with cameras that contained no film. It was at The Camera Club where she met the West End club-owner Morris Conley, a fraud, conman, ponce and described as ‘ugly as a toad’ however he was very very rich. He took Ruth under his wing as a hostess in his raffish Mayfair club ‘The Little Club. It was the sort of place that professional and upper-class men went to get drinks, entertainment and easy sex.
Ruth Ellis and a guest at The Little Club
Ruth’s reputation spread and she was sought after by the clientele as a woman who was great at sex and great fun to be with. The club was becoming more popular and Morris Conley made her manager which gave her the use of the small apartment upstairs. During her time at The Little Club she married and divorced a George Ellis an alcoholic dentist who found it impossible to hold down a job, and in 1951 she gave birth to a daughter called Georgina.
Ruth Ellis posing for photos in the flat above The Little Club
David Blakely and Ruth Ellis at The Little Club
At first their relationship was friendly, but soon public displays of arguing and even violence became common and the couple both started drinking prodigiously. At one point Blakely damaged property at the club in a drunken rage and this, as well as Ellis allowing him to run up a tab that he was never going to be able to pay back, meant that Morris Conley had no choice but to sack Ellis and therefore forced to leave the upstairs apartment.
During her tempestuous relationship with Blakely, Ellis was actually also seeing a man called Desmond Cussen – an affair that started when Blakely failed to return from racing at Le Mans in France. Cussen was a sullen, shy man and an accountant in the tobacco business and he and Blakely hated each other even before Ruth came between them. However Cussen was generous to both Ellis and her children, putting them up at his lodgings and even paying for her son’s school fees. Despite this she still continued to see Blakely – a relationship that was starting to become more and more physically abusive.
Ruth Ellis became pregnant at the beginning of 1955 and David Blakely promised to marry her, a promise on which he soon reneged. During another of their violent arguments its likely he caused her to miscarry her baby after hitting her hard in the stomach. Ellis’s love for David Blakely started to turn into an obsessive hate and she took to chasing him around his various haunts using her loyal Desmond Cussen as a chauffeur. At one point she was arrested but released when she smashed his car windows when she found it parked outside the home of some friends of his. Finally with Ellis filled with alcohol and prescribed tranquilisers she took a gun provided by Cussen and waited outside Blakely’s house until he came out. He eventually decided to to go to the pub – The Magdala – for some extra bottles of beer and she shot him several times. She held the revolver only three inches from Blakely’s body when she fired the last bullet. It was just two years after she had first met him.
The actual .38 Smith and Wesson revolver that killed David Blakely
Ruth Ellis when she was asked at her trial by the prosecution counsel what she had intended to do when she fired the revolver at David Blakely, impassively said “It’s obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him.” This reply guaranteed a guilty verdict and the jury only took 23 minutes to convict her. The trial judge Sir Cecil Havers (incidentally the actor Nigel Havers’ grandfather) had no other choice but to sentence her to death.
It was expected by most people that the sentence would be reprieved by the Conservative Home Secretary – out of the sixty women sentenced to death in the previous thirty years only seven were eventually executed; indeed a petition to the Home Office asking for clemency was signed by 50,000. However the Home Secretary Major Lloyd-George rejected all appeals.
Although the protests were to no avail, the eventual hanging of Ellis and its accompanying uproar, helped strengthen political support for the end to the death penalty and it was abolished just nine years later. Sir Cecil Havers, the judge at the trial, was said to have felt so guilty he sent money every year to help in Ruth’s son Andy’s upkeep. Andy, though, never seemed to get over his mother’s death and tragically committed suicide in 1982 soon after destroying his mother’s gravestone in Amersham.
It’s not particularly well known but Ruth Ellis was actually a friend of Diana Dors – the UK’s version of Marilyn Monroe. She had had a bit part in the Diana Dors 1951 film ‘Lady Godiva Rides Again’ and Diana frequented the same West End clubs as Ellis.
In 1956 Diana Dors made the film Yield To The Night directed by J. Lee. Thompson. It is generally accepted that it’s Dor’s most accomplished acting role where she plays a murderess who is eventually sentenced to death. The moving performance was said to be based on what she knew about her friend Ruth Ellis.
Diana Dors at Cannes promoting Yield To The Night
Diana Dors in a scene from Yield To The NightSome songs that were number one in the UK charts just before and around the times of David Blakely’s murder and Ruth Ellis’s hanging in 1955.
Dickie Valentine and the Stargazers – Finger Of Suspicion
Eddie Calvert – Cherry Pink And Apple Blossom White
“I looked like an angel but I was a fiend inside.”
Lee Miller and Roland Penrose at Downshire HillRoland Penrose had moved into the house in 1936 after years of travelling around the Mediterranean, meeting all kinds of artists and subsequently becoming a notable collector of their work. Downshire Hill contained works of Picasso, Braque, Magritte, Miro and Max Ernst. In the front garden he had placed Henry Moore’s ‘Mother and Child’ – the artist had given it to him saying if he got tired of it he would give him another one. Unfortunately the neighbours found the modernist sculpture rather shocking and after too many complaints to the Council it was eventually removed.
21 Devonshire Hill, Hampstead
Penrose first met Lee Miller at a surrealist party in Paris in 1937. He was dressed as a rather gaudy surrealist bandit, with green hair, a right hand that was painted blue and trousers all the colours of the rainbow. Miller, however, had just arrived in Paris and only just unpacked, and was in a beautiful dark blue gown. Penrose said that seeing her was like ‘being hit by a bolt of lightening’ and they soon became inseparable, holidaying at Penrose’s family home in Cornwall in the company of, amongst others, Max Ernst, Henry Moore, Man Ray, Leonara Carrington and Eileen Agar. Agar wrote in her biography – “It was a delightful Surrealist house party, with Roland taking the lead, ready to turn the slightest encounter into an orgy. I remember going off to watch Lee taking a bubble-bath, but there was not quite enough room in the tub for all of us.”
Lee Miller and Picasso in 1937
Picnic at Mougins in 1937 by Lee Miller
The same scene captured by Roland Penrose
Lee Miller by Man Ray 1929
Modelling in front of the camera was nothing new to Miller as she had posed many times for her father Theodore Miller, often naked and sometimes accompanied by her friends. This slightly disturbing photography went on until her early twenties. However her American modelling career came to an abrupt end when, unbeknownst to her, she was featured in an infamous Kotex campaign (magazines, but more specifically magazine advertisers, did not want to be associated with such an embarrassing private and unglamorous hygiene product) and shortly afterwards Miller moved, pretty well permanently, to Europe at the end of the 1920s. She arrived in Paris, arranged to meet Man Ray and told him she was to be his new assistant – a collaboration in more ways than one that lasted for three intense years.
Lee Miller in Sweden 1930 taken by her father.
When the war started Lee Miller and Roland Penrose decided to live permanently at Downhill Rise in Hampstead. In 1941 Miller met a fellow American and Life photographer David Scherman. He was gregarious, great fun and a youthful twenty five and she brought him home to Downshire Hill, initially as a lodger but almost immediately as a lover and a member of a happy and consensual menage a trois – the three of them actually remained friends throughout their lives.
Lee Miller in Camouflage, London 1942 by David E. Scherman
Women in Fire masks, Downshire Hill, 1941
Scene of the suicide of the Burgermeister of Leipzig and his family, 1945
Lee Miller in Hitler’s bath, Munich, 1945
Another excellent double post- Ruth Ellis is linked with lots of London nightlife, think she worked as a photographer at The Lyceum Ballroom and then there’s the nonsense about her ghost at Caesars (formerly Locarno) in Streatham By the way you’re not by any chance the Rob involved in the Coronet at Elephant & Castle?
My aunt and uncle were chambermaid and butler for Roland Penrose. I have a few photos of them in their uniforms in the garden playing with The master’s dog.
I am presently collecting details about Ruth Ellis tragedy.
I have included information on my Blog that is specialized in Cinema
(Movies) and facts involving the Stars , Actress and Actors.
Recently I have commented about the movies “Dance With a Stranger” ,
“Lady Godiva Rides Again” and “Yield to The Night” (based on Ruth Ellis
relation with David Blakely).
Thanks for the fotographs , inedit to myself…
Jorge Domingos