with the night club and it's about two hours before showtime. Petula is wearing a rust-colored cable-knit sweater and tweed slacks. She's rubbing the paint off the wall with her back while a buxom mamma-like agent is pitching for her to do a Broadway musical.
Petula is saying softly, "No, no, no", and the agent is psyching her with "mature artist", "don't under-estimate your talent", "perfect frame for you", and Petula is pleading that she couldn't do the same show every night. Movies, yes, she's been in 25 of them; but Broadway, no, no.
After a while the pitiful "nos" begin to sound like "maybes" because Petula doesn't want to hurt mamma's feelings, but you know she'd just fly away this minute if that wall wasn't in her way.
Finally, the agent goes away smiling, bearing the most tentative of maybes, and Petula apologizes for taking so much of "your" time. "Everybody in New York has been
calling or dropping by," she says almost sadly. It goes unsaid that Petula has made it at the Copa, and managers know she's no longer just a dime-a-dozen star. She's that more important thing - a property.
She remembers that you're writing for Canada, and that was how she got booked into the Copa in the first place. Bert Block, of General Artists Corp., flew up from New York to hear her at the Comodie Canadienne in Montreal after
her records began to get popular in the new world.
"He thought I was just another rock-'n'-roll singer," said Petula, "and he wanted to book me for one-night stands with a touring company. But he changed his mind. He said I ought to do a single, and he was going to put me in the Copa. And he did. And, you know, Jules Podell, who own the Copa, had never heard me sing, hardly knew my name, but he took Block's word for it right away. I'll be back in France fr New Year. But I'm going to tour Canada in March--Vancouver, Ottawa, Toronto and other cities."
The real Petula Clark is quiet, shy, sensitive, charming, without artifice or theatrical overtones, very baffling. All the bounce, talent, ambition hides out when she's offstage.
"I ran away from England - and my father - when I was 17," she said. "Dad had managed my career till then, but we weren't getting on. I wanted to pick my own songs, my own places to appear. I found myself singing numbers that I knew weren't right for me, just to please Dad. Business interfered with family ties. I just had to get away, from him, from London. I was tired of being a darling helpless little girl.
"One day I just packed and went to Holland, and I just kept travelling and singing for years, with time out to make a lot of movies in England. But that was a man's world. Olivier. Guinness. Ustinov, Mills - all the movies were their vehicles. It wasn't like Hollywood, where