PETULA CLARK: Why my 60-year marriage to the love of my life became an open relationship – even though it WASN'T what I ever wanted

Petula Clark is not what you think. She is not retired, she is not rich, she is not a diva, she is not a Dame and, most importantly of all, she is not dead. ‘You get to my age and people think, “Oh, I thought she had died.” It’s awful. I’ve had a few health hiccups but nothing bad, touch wood,’ she says, tapping a finger on the table.

She has just had a lunch of artichokes and roast sea bream at a favourite restaurant near her home in Geneva. Normally she would have had wine, too, but a course of antibiotics to treat an infection means the very-much-alive singer had to settle for water instead. A major blow in Petula-land. ‘Rosé is so easy to drink, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘I do enjoy it. And now and then, in a moment of madness, I’ll have a big gin and tonic.’

No doubt Clark will be raising a glass when she celebrates her – wait for it – 93rd birthday next month. ‘I can’t believe it. I never thought I would live this long,’ she says. ‘I don’t feel 93 but I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel or how I’m supposed to dress or do anything. Some people say you should cut your hair after a certain age but Jan, look at my hair. No, don’t look at it. I haven’t dyed it for years. I’m not even sure what colour it is any more. Ashy blonde? Grey?’

She can’t remember the last time she had a manicure, she never wears jewellery and here, among the chic, Chanel-clad matrons in this wealthy Swiss city, she is dressed down in a baggy jumper, linen trousers, white socks and a pair of beat-up plimsolls.

These days Clark is more mad old cat lady than living showbiz legend, but that is the way she likes it. Listen, she’s had a lifetime of silks and sequins, of double false eyelashes and being ready for her close-up. Even as she posed in her floor-length chinchilla and Cartier jewels or wore Dior to meet Queen Elizabeth, she was never really into any of it, not the fame, the fortune, the peacocking, the display.

Clark only cared about the music. ‘And although it has served me very well, I have never even liked my body very much,’ she shrugs. She remembers sharing a dressing room with Barbara Windsor in 1971. As they were getting ready for a royal gala performance theCarry On star looked over at her and said, ‘Cor, Petula, you’ve got great t*ts!’ She says: ‘I thought it was quite a compliment. Coming from her.’

We are meeting because the unstarry Clark has just written her star-studded autobiography, something she vowed she would never do, yet here we are. Is That You, Petula? runs to 300 romping pages and traces the arc of this incredible woman’s amazing existence. ‘A big life? You are telling me,’ she says. ‘My god, it has certainly been a big life.’

An erstwhile child star, radio star, 1960s pop star, 70s movie star, evergreen television star and ongoing musical theatre star, Clark has done it all and met everyone along the way. She was friends with Anthony Newley, Dean Martin, Charles Aznavour and Peter O’Toole, and was one of the 13 black-clad bridesmaids at Liza Minnelli’s 2002 wedding to David Gest. She had tea with Charles Chaplin, sang on John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s single Give Peace A Chance and gave advice to her fellow artists whether they wanted it or not. She told Tom Jones to sing ‘edgier’ material, advised Olivia Newton John to leave Australia for America and when ‘skeletal’ Karen Carpenter was ill with anorexia, she gave her a hug and told her, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing, but you have to stop it’.

In Paris she met Claude Wolff, the man who became her business manager and remains the great love of her life. She married the French record company executive in 1961, they had three children together and she adored him until his death last year – despite the famous complexities of their relationship and the fact that she coped with his affairs by taking lovers of her own.

‘Back then I was away a lot. We lived in Paris and then Geneva but I had to go to America to work and Claude didn’t like it. He was a very handsome man, very charismatic and, of course, there were always women around.’ So it was an open marriage? ‘Well, it became open. It wasn’t what I wanted but it was what Claude wanted,’ she says. One suspects he coped with this freewheeling lifestyle better than she did.

‘I don’t know if he was ever seriously in love with anyone else. I think he maybe had a couple of medium-serious affairs,’ she says. ‘I was not really into that kind of activity, but I did fall in love a few times. That was the problem, you see – I fell in love and got hurt. It was many moons ago but it took me years to get over the heartbreak.’

Clark has always been very private and even now, in the chapters of her book and here at this table, she parses out her past without supplying names or details. ‘I haven’t had a lot of lovers, but the ones I had were pretty good,’ she says and permits herself a small, throaty laugh. ‘And they probably wouldn’t want me to talk about them.’

During her dazzling heyday, when hits such as Downtown and Don’t Sleep In The Subway topped the charts across the world, Clark was linked with several sexy alpha males of the moment. She appeared on Dean Martin’s television show so often that people started to gossip. She went skiing with family friend Sacha Distel, hung out with her old pal Anthony Newley and enjoyed raucous two-bottle dinners with Peter O’Toole when they were making the film Goodbye Mr Chips together. ‘Sometimes at lunch, too, but not often, as we were working,’ she says primly.

So professional! Yet she insists none of these men were the names in the Clark frame.

‘I liked Sacha very much but never found him attractive. And I never, ever thought of Dean Martin along those lines. Other people thought there was something going on between us because we liked each other, but it wasn’t romantic. Peter and I loved each other, but not in that way. I can’t say I was ever attracted to him and I wouldn’t have thought he was attracted to me, but there was something between us. However, you have to be very careful in this business, getting into that sort of trap.’

What trap?

‘Oh, you know. I fancy him, let’s go for it.’

She was also uniterested in Elvis Presley. In the 70s, she and Karen Carpenter went to see his show in Vegas and, afterwards, visited his dressing room. In her book, she writes: ‘It was just the three of us and Elvis was coming on to us pretty heavily. The penny dropped: “Uh-oh, he’s got plans for us here!” By now, I was pretty worldly-wise but Karen was still a bit naïve – still a country girl, really. I felt very protective towards her. “Well, Elvis,” I said. “Thank you for a lovely evening but we have to go.” The King looked disappointed. “Oh, no! Really?” he replied. “Yes, we have to get our beauty sleep,” I said. “Hey, we don’t need beauty sleep,” said Elvis. “We’re beautiful – all three of us!”

‘“You have that thing tomorrow morning, Karen, remember?” I said. Karen looked at me, perplexed, as if to say, what thing? But I persisted – “Come on, let’s go!” – and steered her out of there. ‘Elvis looked disconsolate. As Karen and I walked down the corridor, I looked behind us, to see him watching us go. He gave me a smile that said one thing, and one thing only: “OK, I’ll get you next time!” But he never did.’

Perhaps the one that got away was Anthony Newley. In her book Clark chronicles how she had a crush on him since they first met in 1948 (see our extract overleaf), starring together in a Rank film called Vice Versa. ‘I was 15, he was a year older, and I was smitten with him,’ she says. ‘I was mad about him for years.’ It wasn’t until 1991, when they bumped into each other in Miami, that he confessed he had felt the same way about her. ‘If only one of us had ever dared to say how we felt – who knows what might have happened?’ she reflects in her book. Come on, I say. Could you and Anthony really have lived happily ever after?

‘Probably not. Let’s face it, he married Joan Collins, for god’s sake,’ she snorts, then remembers her manners. ‘I mean, I quite like Joan. She’s funny and she is not stupid, by any means. Tony was also very into Diana Dors. They were the kind of women he liked. So I wasn’t getting a look in.’

Newley may have been the road not taken but in the end, toutes les routes led to Wolff. He and Clark never divorced and stayed together until the end; all through their mutual affairs, their rows, raising their children, the recovery of their elder daughter from teenage heroin addiction and even through Covid. The couple spent lockdown together in her two-bedroom flat here in Geneva where, at the age of 88, she had to take a crash course in becoming a housewife.

‘You must understand that nothing in my life has been normal. I was a child star. Then I had chefs, chauffeurs, the lot. So I had never cooked or cleaned. But I went to the shops, bought a chicken and some carrots, came home and thought, now what? I didn’t even know how to turn on the cooker.’

Then she was alarmed to discover she was expected to do the same the next day and the day after: ‘I made steak and shallots and then I made something else but after a while, I said to Claude, “I can’t do this any more – why don’t we find a restaurant somewhere?”’

When he said no, because he loved her food, it was as if someone had switched on the spotlights, or the fridge lights at least. ‘That felt like a standing ovation. It felt wonderful. It is a creative process, after all.’ Clark went on to master ‘a pasta dish’ then became adept at something she gingerly calls ‘sautéing’, although ovens remain a mystery. ‘I’m still not sure about heating things up.’

Still, how cheering that, after the torrid hurly-burly of their relationship, lockdown was a tranquil, happy time for this couple of ageing star-crossed lovers. ‘We never stopped loving each other,’ she says. Yet this late-life idyll was shattered when Wolff became ill. In short order he had two hip replacements, a knee replacement and heart problems before being diagnosed with lymphoma.

‘Just one blow after another,’ Clark says. She visited him in the clinic outside Geneva every day and held his hand in the moments before he died last March at the age of 93.

‘It was just awful,’ she says. ‘A terrible emotional shock. You know, our marriage was very rocky a lot of the time. It wasn’t always easy, but I am still his wife, I am still Madame Wolff. When he died, half of me disappeared with him and I’m finding that really difficult.’

She has taken to visiting local churches, sitting quietly in the pews. ‘I pray to whoever is up there. I ask to be blessed, I ask for my family to be blessed and I talk to my husband a lot, which probably isn’t very healthy.’

What, do you still ask him for advice? She gives me a look. ‘I never asked Claude for advice. He took care of the business side of things, I took care of the artistic side. That was how it worked.’

That was how it worked with her father, too. Her career was instigated and managed by Leslie Clark, a nurse from Chichester who channelled his own frustrated dreams of stardom through his daughter’s talent. If Vera Lynn was the Forces’ Sweetheart, nine-year-old Clark became the Forces’ Favourite Child, travelling the country on troop trains to entertain soldiers far from home during the war. She was a smash from the start, her clear, piping voice a regular fixture on BBC Radio shows, and she was soon in demand as an actress, too. She says today: ‘I can hardly remember any of my life before I became famous.’

Yet some things are unforgettable, perhaps even unforgivable. During those years, Clark’s mother Doris was chronically ill. Her father would often bring his mistress, a woman called Annie, on the road when his daughter was touring. In June 1950, Clark returned home from a holiday to discover that her mother had died from tuberculosis and been buried. The house had been redecorated, Annie had moved in and she was now expected to treat her as her mother.

‘I just had to get on with it. I liked Annie but I could never bring myself to call her Mummy,’ she says of a situation that would bounce most of today’s stars into therapy for decades.

As she got older, Clark began to feel ‘crushed’ by her reputation as a child star because ‘no one wanted me to grow up’. Producers insisted on binding her breasts to keep her figure childlike. She loved her father – although today she still has ‘conflicting emotions’ about him – but somehow found it in herself to sack him as her manager when she was in her mid-20s. Then she discovered that after working flat out for 15 years she only had £500 in the bank.

She writes in her book: ‘Did my dad gamble? I didn’t know and, in all honesty, 70 years on, I still don’t. I asked my father about it, of course. It was tricky. Dad professed to be as baffled by it as me.’

Oddly enough, history has almost repeated itself. Clark is one of the most commercially successful artists in British history, with a music and film career that spans seven decades. Yet today she has very little wealth to show for her achievements. ‘I am certainly not a rich woman now,’ she says. ‘Most people seem to think I am loaded and once yes, there was lots of money coming in, but you know, it goes. All my jewellery has gone, too. Most of it from dressing rooms. My Cartier jewels, diamonds, a ten-carat brooch – they have all gone and god knows what happened to my furs.’

The cupboard is bare in other ways, too. Clark received a CBE in 1998 but it seems a strange omission that she has never been made a Dame. Julie Andrews, who travelled with her entertaining the wartime troops, is a Dame. Joan Collins, who appeared topless in films such as 1978’s The Stud – entertaining the troops in a different way – is also a Dame. Why not Petula?

‘You are asking the wrong person. I don’t know. Maybe it is because I live in Switzerland. But I don’t care. I thought the Queen was great. We met a few times at cocktail parties and she was always absolutely charming. I almost felt that under different circumstances, we could have been friends.’

Clark and Wolff once had an ‘enormous’ house in Geneva and a ski chalet in Megève with an indoor pool. Both properties have been sold and now she worries there is no ‘gathering place’ for her family at Christmas. ‘Oh, they have their own friends and plans but it would be nice for us all to be… I mean, I don’t know how much longer we will have together.’

Her children all live abroad. Barbara, 64, is in New York with her husband and Petula’s only two grandchildren Sébastien, 23, and Annabelle, 22. Kate, 62, is a yoga professor who lives in Paris and Ibiza. Paddy, 53, is in the golf world in California. And perhaps the downside of living to such a ripe old age is that one day you look around to find you are the last woman standing.

‘Geneva is a lovely place but I don’t have any friends here to speak of any more. I don’t have any family, I don’t have Claude and I feel lonely. Yes, life for me is a bit lonely now.’

The other day, she looked in her fridge and there was nothing in there. She has difficulty sleeping at nights. In the mornings she has coffee and fruit before ‘lounging around to think deep thoughts for a while’. She listens to music on the radio, puts on her plimsolls and walks to the parks where she once pushed her children in their prams and later pushed Claude in his wheelchair. There are ghosts everywhere. It seems poignant and rather haunting that the woman who sang Downtown, that perfect, iconic anthem to urban loneliness, should end up feeling so lonely herself.

Earlier I had worried that I might not spot her in the restaurant, but of course there she is by the window, those cheekbones and sweet features still instantly recognisable under her dandelion puff of hair. For someone bearing down on her own century, Clark’s recall is precise and her conversation unhesitating. She is a little stiff when standing up, a legacy from an accident last year when Wolff tripped, fell on her in hospital and cracked her spine – and if that is not a metaphor for her big, big life, I don’t know what is.

Clark somehow survived everything from child stardom to Hollywood in an age when men did exactly as they pleased and women were supposed to just put up with it. She is just a whisper over five feet tall and has the scalded air of a woman still mourning, but there is something in her that is utterly unbreakable. Look what she has endured! And she still wants more. Clark wants to get back on a stage. With an orchestra. For one last time.

‘I would like to do another concert, and do it really well. In London and Manchester maybe. I’d do Downtown, Don’t Sleep In The Subway then some of my own songs. I could do it,’ she says, balling her fists. ‘I could certainly do it.’

I don’t doubt it for a second.