Petula Clark, the child prodigy who became an international singing star, has a new band and a new film

      A tired Petula Clark propped herself up under a plant in one of those luminous green departure lounges at Heathrow. She is much smaller than many people think, though to be fair the plant was in a very big pot. In a brief interval between film studio and con- cert platform she was heading home. Or, to be precise, because home to Petula is now a complex concept, to her apartment in Geneva to see her French husband Claude Wolff, also her manager, and her three children.
      Besides the apartment, the family has a chalet in Meg&ve in the French Alps - "the St Tropez of the winter", as Petula puts it - and a flat in Knightsbridge. "I feel at home in New York, in Paris and in London," she says. "But I laugh more when I am in England."

There she was leaning against the pot plant, dressed in a loose blue velvet suit, with dark glasses on her nose and fair hair frizzed for easy maintenance. She was musing about the joys of jet travel. The loudspeaker had just announced a delay.
      "The only flight I can remember that was not delayed was the one to Belfast," she said. Her musical director. Kenny Clayton. dressed in all-purpose black, looked up from his Hi-Fi News to add wryly: "This is the glamorous life."
      Whether as songwriter or superstar, Petula Clark is still ambitious for new worlds to conquer. Airport delays are a small part of the price she pays for that ambition.
      The material rewards to date have been substantial. Though her records are no longer to be found in every record shop - her last album for CBS, Destiny, was made over a year ago and no more are scheduled - the 32 records which have made the top 50 in the 25 years since her first success with The Little Shoemaker in 1954 have sold in their tens of millions. She says she has no financial need to work any more. Yet at 47. married, with two teenaged daughters and a young son, she is on the road with a new band and a new act.
      "When you think about it," she says, "I have never really got down to my career, compared with artists like Minnelli and Streisand. So it is really a miracle that I am here at all and can command what I do.
      "I have a good family life and that takes most all your energies if you want to do it well. But to do the career superbly also takes all your energies. What I am wondering now, and I probably should not say this, is `Is it too late?'
     

She had spent the previous day on a flu-struck film set at EMI's Flstree Studios shooting her new film for children. Second to the Right and On till Morning.
      The film, produced by Diane Baker, the former actress, and written by Marjorie Sigley, tells how a ten-year-old girl escapes from the misery caused by her parents divorce and re-creates a modern-day version of the Peter Pan myth. Petula stars as the aunt who takes her in.
      In between takes she has dutifully downed plastic cupfuls of lemon- flavoured Beecham's Powder in an attempt to keep the cold off her valuable larynx.
      The plans laid by Claude for his wife for the ensuing weekend were indeed ambitious and spoke volumes for her toughness and dedication. On Thursday she sped from the film set to the airport to fly home to Geneva. Friday saw her singing at a charity concert in Lausanne. On Saturday she returned to England to give two concerts in Jolly's nightclub in Stoke-on-Trent. She returned overnight down the motorway to her Knightsbridge flat and on Sunday sang to two packed and enthusiastic houses at Wimbledon Theatre.

      Yet after all that she said, "In the last three years I have hardly worked at all. It's really only in the last year that I have put a small band together and started working again. In this business it's impossible to compromise. It's very fierce: ferocious in fact. I have just been fooling around until now."
      Astonishingly, she seemed brighter and fresher after that final concert at Wimbledon than at any time in the previous four days. Maybe the `flu had gone. Or maybe it was simply because she was enjoying herself, doing what she says she loves and knows best - singing.

      "There's something about singing which is very important to me. It's a physical act which takes me out of myself completely and allows me to be myself. It's a very intense experience. When it's right and when it's all happening, it's a wonderful thing to offer yourself. There are moments when it comes together and turns to . . . I suppose the word for it is communion."
      To see her perform on stage is to give that assertion credence: audiences flock to see and hear her, and are plainly not disappointed. On stage the sweet and sincere Petula of the early years has now been peppered with the sexy provocative. She wears a white satin blouse slashed to the navel. Hips grind. But she quickly mocks all that by slipping back into the role of our- Pet-from-next-door.
      The audience's appreciation was apparent aftcr the Wimbledon shows. They queued for an autograph or a word. She had changed from her satin blouse into her more habitual teeshirt, skirt and thick woolly cardigan. Some fans were shy and sheepish. One joined the queue a second time. "Come back soon, Pet." they said. "We love you." Afterwards she explained: "I get letters from all kinds of people saying, `You really helped me get through that bit'> We ought not to forget that. So when I sing my song I do it very seriously, for what it's worth."
      It is hardly surprising she feels most at home on the stage. Her childhood gave her little knowledge of any other way of life. "I had no private life," she recalls. "The only place I belonged was on stage."
      She was born in Ewell. Surrey, the younger daughter of a "very handsome male nurse, who looked like Errol flynn". and a Welsh mother who was "musical and shy". "My father was rather disappointed that I wasn't a boy. He brought me up as if I were. He taught me to box and found an itinerant clown who taught me tumbling. I was weedy, but muscular and very acrobatic."
      Moor Lane Elementary School was followed by smart private schools - "I was a very musical littie girl, so was told, though I don't remember" - and by the age of nine she was singing for the troops. She was a sensation. "I led a weird kind of life travelling around in troop trains, a gipsy kind of life which I loved. But my schooling was very skimpy."

Near the end of the war came her first film at British National Studios. Medal for the General. "I was Britain's Shirley Temple and pretty dreadful," she recalls. But her career blossomed in all directions - on radio, on stage and in films. "I gave Alec Guinness his first screen kiss in the film The Card."
      As she grew older, complications multiplied. She does not talk easily about some of them even now. Her parents separated and her

relationship with her father, who died two years ago, was difficult. "The problem was not knowing whether I was talking to my father or my manager." She was to discover later to her cost that he had not managed their affairs as well as he might.
      " At 17 1 was getting a bit of a bosom and wanting to wear high heels, but the Rank Organisation did not want me to grow up. Professionally they wanted to keep me young, so they bound my bosom and made me wear ankle socks, when I wanted to be beautiful and mysterious like Ingrid Bergman.
      "At 18 or so there was no one I could talk to. I was getting very confused - mature in some ways and quite immature in others. It was a very painful experience." There were other crises, "At 20 I had an appendix operation and there were complications. Eventually I was rushed back to hospital and nearly died. I was unconscious for four days."
      She tells graphically how she woke up to see a nurse in white against a blue sky and was filled with what she feels sure was a life-saving determination not to go back to sleep.
      Her career prospered with the hit record, The Little Shoemaker, made when she was 19. She gradually won her independence, got a flat in London and a red sports car. Other hit records followed, such as Alone and With All My Heart until, provoked by the success of one Dalida, who was singing Petula's material in France, her record company suggested she should promote her own work in France.
      In the record company office in Paris her whole future was transformed. "I was sitting there when the light went out. A boy stood on the desk to change the bulb. When it came on again there was Claude. `He will be taking care of you', they told me"
      Thus Petula Clark, child prodigy. Forces Favourite and English singer. married publicity man Claude Wolff and became an international star. Not that she was looking for marriage. "I had never fancied getting married. I had seen a lot of my friends breaking up and I'd had a pretty weird childhood myself."

Nor was the decision to move to France easy. "I did not want to leave England. But I was being suffocated artistically. I couldn't get away from this little girl thing. I had even thought of giving up my career completely, at one time."
      In 1961 Petula found herself in Paris, married, pregnant and broke. The change was made. One agonising night this most English of English girls, who knew no French. found herself on the stage of the Olympia Theatre "singing rather badly and with a terrible cold. I had practised Bon soir, mesdames et messieurs endlessly, but I could not get it out on stage." But the concert was a huge success.
      Within three weeks she had made her first record by learning French phonetically. The English girl with the English accent turned out to have remarkable French appeal. In a desperate attempt to assimilate French slang, she was even driven to seek the help of a hypnotist. That worked well for her, too. She had her first baby. Barbara. and then toured France. sometimes giving three shows a day. Then she went on to the rest of Europe and North Africa and Canada.
      In the process she learned much about her craft. Brought up in the English music hall tradition of "a bright dress, sequins. comedy act and big ballad", she found singers like Piaf were a complete revelation.
      "She performed from within herself. Others did, too, like Aznavour and Brel. with whom I later worked. I realised I had to find myself out.
      After three years abroad she came back to Britain to do a Sunday Night at the London Palladium programme. "Suddenly a feeling came from the audience - `so you've been away, you have done well and we are proud of you'. It was wonderful."
      In 1964 her record Downtown shot to number one in the U.S. hit parade and she made the headlines with concerts in America. Two films, Finian's Rainbow with Fred Astaire and Goodbye Mr. Chips with Peter O'Toole followed.
      But life still centred on Paris. where Claude was at the heart of French show business - one of "la vieilleeille garde", as he likes to put it. along with their great friend, Sacha Distel. And the nonstop hectic round became too much for Petula. "I used to go home late and tired to our Paris flat and find the house full of people. Very weird."
      So the family sought the quiet of Geneva

where seven years ago a son, Patrick, was born to join Barbara and their second daughter. Katherine. They now' live at the top of a luxurious apartment block complete with a nuclear fall-out shelter.
      On entering on the twelfth floor. the visitor is confronted by heaxy gold-framed paintings arrayed on the walls. But the adjoining living area. surrounded by glass and outside that by a terrace, is light with avocado green carpeting and low-slung cushion chairs. At a flick of a switch the blinds reveal Mont Blanc to the south and Lake Geneva to the north.
      Life revolves around work and the family. Both Katherine. who is now 17, and Barbara, 18. who were educated at the French International School in Geneva are set on pursuing drama careers in Paris. `They are both very beautiful," explains Petula. "They have seen the rough side of the business, the travelling, the tiredness, so if they chose it. they would know what they were letting themselves in for."
      Barbara has just recovered from a motorcycle accident in St Tropez last August. "We all ride motorbikes. says Petula. "It's nice going cross country on them in the autumn.
      They are very much an outdoor family. Claude is a keen tennis player and young Patrick is already a rather better skier than his mother A parental discussion about the merits of the girls' latest suitors, into which Patrick enters with a will, is spattered with references to their ability as tennis players.
      The family is surrounded with helpers - cook, housekeeper, nanny. secretary, au pairs. "We have always had very special people around us. people we like, people we employ who like us.' says Petula.
      Having all the appearances of wealth, the Wolffs wear it with ease swinging effortlessly from driving in the Rolls to lunch at the Restaurant Girardet in Crissier (where the cook- ing is of breath-taking delicacy), to enjoying Kentucky Fried Chicken and tea in Wimbledon.
      Whether adding to her success will become an over riding obsession remains to be seen. But the odds must be against it A show busines' marriage and family is not kept together for 19 years without much tolerance and many concessions "I have inner discipline." says Petula. "If I did not I would have gone under very early on.