“Oh, it was when he was at his best! But he was almost too much.”Īfter Carpenter died from complications resulting from anorexia in 1983, Clark paid tribute to her “very dear friend” and her “strange, tragic end” at the Royal Albert Hall. But when I ask what period of Elvis it was, she jumps at the implication. But he didn’t.”Īny regrets? “I didn’t find him that attractive,” she says apparently offhandedly. I think he put out the rumour that he did. Then I looked round, and Elvis was at the door, and he looked at me, like: ‘I’m going to get you one day.’” But he never did, she tells my voice recorder directly. I felt sort of responsible for her, so I got her out of there. Karen was lovely, but she was kind of innocent. When Clark and Carpenter – then the two “top girls” of the world of pop – met Elvis Presley in his dressing room after a show, he angled for a threesome, she says. She did not run into Karen often, but “we had that connection, so that every time we did see each other, we were close”. Impressed, Clark introduced herself and pointed them out to Herb Alpert, who went on to sign them to A&M. The Carpenters, then unsigned, were performing at the afterparty. One of Clark’s great friends was Karen Carpenter, who she met in Los Angeles at the 1969 premiere of Goodbye, Mr Chips, in which Clark starred alongside Peter O’Toole. And I saw too much of the damage it was doing.”Ĭlark with Fred Astaire in the film Finian’s Rainbow, 1968. “I touched a little bit of it – it never impressed me at all. There used to be some parties in LA where all you had to do was walk in and that was it, you were stoned from the moment you took a breath.” She wasn’t interested in drugs, feeling “a certain responsibility” to her family. Someone handed her a lyric sheet, and she joined the group in singing “a simple little melody: ‘All we are saying, is give peace a chance.’ I don’t think any of us knew we were being recorded.”Ĭlark was a pop artist, never part of the counterculture. There was a crowd in the next room, among them Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary and one of the Smothers Brothers – “but no drugs”, she adds, firmly. Then he said: ‘I tell you what – you need a drink’. Did it really matter? ‘This too shall pass.’ That sort of stuff. He said: ‘Oh, fuck ’em.’ I said: ‘Thank you, John.’” Lennon was happy to play therapist, she says.
I sat there, dripping water all over their bed, and told them the story. She recalls turning up at the door of their hotel suite, snivelling, in the middle of a downpour. Distraught, Clark sought advice from John Lennon, who was in Montreal for a bed-in with Yoko Ono. Performing in Montreal in 1969, she was heckled for singing in English and French – she had not been advised that a separatist movement was under way. Her career decisions were handled by other people Clark says it is “probably true” that she could have benefited from being more involved. When it turned into this whole race thing – it sounds silly, but I didn’t quite understand what it was about.” That was the way that the song was supposed to be done – with that feeling, that emotion. Petula Clark and Harry Belafonte in a recording studio in 1968.
“I didn’t like the idea of a sponsor telling me how to do a song … It had nothing to do with racism. But Clark insists now it was an artistic decision, not a political one. “I stumbled into that … I’ve never got political about anything.”Ĭlark, her husband Claude Wolff and their lawyer ordered NBC to erase the other takes so there was only the one with them touching, Belafonte casting her in his autobiography as a gleeful co-conspirator to “nail the bastard”. Belafonte, a prominent civil rights campaigner, was aware of the potential consequences, but Clark was “an innocent”, she says. They inadvertently caused a media storm in 1968, when Clark took Belafonte’s arm during a duet for her one-hour special for NBC a Plymouth Motors advertising executive took exception to a white woman and a black man touching on television. “I think he kind of fancied me,” she adds, somewhat bashfully. Meeting celebrities was exciting, she says, but “the really great people” stand out – Quincy Jones was “wonderful”, and she and Harry Belafonte “adored each other”. Steve McQueen, the King of Cool, told her he loved her in a restaurant.
She worked with Fred Astaire, Dean Martin, Bobby Darin and the Muppets. It cut through absolutely everything” – and Clark was quickly sucked into the upper echelons of American show business.
It went to No 1 in the US – “There was no escaping it. It was in 1964 that she became famous worldwide, with Downtown, the smash hit that beat the Beatles to a Grammy and led her to be anointed “the First Lady of the British Invasion”.