WORCESTER TELEGRAM

Petula Clark Got U.S. Recognition in '70s
by Frank Magiera
Worcester Telegram

Monday, January 13, 2000

      Petula Clark is recalling an earlier time, when her hit song "Downtown" was so popular and her bookings were so tight, she could not even find time to appear on Ed Sullivan's TV show.
      Suddenly she realizes that she is beginning to sound a lot like Norma Desmond.
      "I was touring in French-speaking Canada," Ms. Clark explained over the phone this week. "I was so totally booked I could not even get from Montreal to New York. I was an enormous star. ..."
      Her voice trails off. "That's not the kind of thing I normally say, although it happens to be true."
      It is however, very close to the sort of thing that slips from the lips of Desmond, the character she plays in Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical "Sunset Boulevard," which opened Tuesday at The Wang Theatre in Boston.
      Ms. Clark has played the over-the-hill movie star longer than Glenn Close, longer than Patti Lupone, longer, in fact, than any other actress who has attempted it. Even though Norma has gone seriously to seed, she perpetuates the fantasy that her fame is undiminished and Cecil B. De Mille is eagerly waiting for her to say yes to another big role.
      While Ms. Clark, who is 67, might be beyond her prime as a pop singer, she has had a steady stream of offers. She continues to perform in the theater and in concert and recently released a new compact disc, "Here for You."
      "This sounds terrible, but it's a Lloyd Webber thing," she said, explaining that copies of the CD sold in the theater during performances include three extra songs from the show, which are not on copies sold in stores. "The plug is over."
      Ms. Clark said Norma Desmond was so unlike her own persona, at first she feared she would not be able to play the role.
      "I was terrified," Ms. Clark said over the telephone from her hotel room in Boston. "I didn't think I could do it. ... I had never been asked to play anyone like this before. I had always been cast in roles of nice ladies, sympathetic characters, pub ladies with seven kids. And, you know, Norma is not sympathetic. She's not a likable person.
      "First of all, I wasn't sure I could be that and I wasn't sure I wanted to go in front of an audience being something that different."
      Ms. Clark had seen "Sunset Boulevard" long before she was invited to play the role and came away disliking the way the Norma was played. (She won't name the actress who was performing the role, other than to say it was not Faye Dunaway, whose time with the show was notoriously short. "Not many people saw that one," she said.)
      "I was impressed by the production, by the scope of the thing. I loved the music. But I wasn't moved." She concluded that a big part of the problem was the overwhelming set.
      "It was an amazing set," she said. "Eventually, I worked on that set. For the first six weeks I was still trying to avoid getting run over by the set, getting in and out of my costumes with the help of five dressers " it's horrendous the speed of those changes " and remembering the very complicated music."
      The show's director, Trevor Nunn, finally convinced her to take the role.
      "I was going through London on my way to what I thought was going to be a nice holiday in the south of France, and I spent three hours with Trevor giving him all kinds of reasons why I shouldn't do it and he'd give me just as many reasons why I should do it. The next thing I knew, I was doing it."
      During rehearsals, however, Ms. Clark's fears about the role began to take over and she pleaded with Nunn to give her some guidance.
      "I said to him, 'What do you think I'm going to bring to this? Please tell me. Give me a clue.' " His answer was "humor and vulnerability."
      "Which kind of surprised me, because I hadn't seen that in the script and I hadn't seen it in any other performance. But I think he was probably right."
      Ms. Clark performed in "Sunset Boulevard" for a year in London. By the time the show closed, she said she had grown to love Norma, which might explain her success in the role.
      "It's very hard for me to talk about because I've never seen my own performance," she said. "I think what's happening here is the audience, almost despite themselves, start to feel something for the character. In the second act, when it all goes wrong, they are moved. You can't make Norma sympathetic, as such. It's a very subtle thing. I can't quite figure out what I'm doing because I don't study it. I just do it."
      For all you English fans out there, yes, Ms. Clark is still married to that Frenchman, although after 36 years, three children and a grandchild, they live largely independent lives. Her marriage to Claude Wolfe caused a clamor in Ms. Clark's native country of England. She had been her homeland's equivalent of Shirley Temple, a popular child star who entertained the troops during World War II.
      "I had been England's little girl," Ms. Clark recalled. "I did all my growing up in public, getting a little bit of bosom, the whole thing. It was a very emotional time for the Brits. They felt I really belonged to them and to important moments of their lives. So, when I ever married a foreigner and a Frenchman, to boot, this was like, 'Oh, our poor little Petula! What has she done?' "
      Wolfe became Ms. Clark's manager, replacing her father, and helped promote her into an international star, which seemed to assuage her British fans somewhat. Ms. Clark found the change important personally as well as professionally.
      "It was a great opportunity for me to shed all that childhood stuff that I had been carrying around," she said. "When I went to France, they knew nothing about that and I became a star there on my own terms, just being me, which was very good for me."
      Ms. Clark's popularity shifted easily across the Atlantic to the United States. By the early '70s, Americans as well as English fans were humming her hits "Downtown," "Don't Sleep in the Subway," and "I Know a Place."
      She played opposite Fred Astaire in the movie "Finian's Rainbow," and Peter O'Toole in "Goodbye, Mr. Chips." She became a queen of network TV specials, and inadvertently sparked one of the entertainment industry's earliest public racial controversies by touching singer Harry Belafonte on the arm during the filming of one program in 1968. An executive for the Chrysler Corp., the show's sponsor, objected to the scene and caused an uproar.
      "I was just bemused by the whole thing," Ms. Clark said. "All hell broke loose in the studio. I was from Europe and we didn't have all that stuff."
      Clark's husband was executive producer of the show and insisted on using the scene despite the sponsor's objections.
      "There was no question of our doing it any other way. That's the way it was supposed to be."