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A Tribute to Dusty Springfield

On the heels of the Oscar-winning success of last year’s Ray, Universal Pictures has announced plans to take on another biopic in the same musical vein, this one centering on female, white soul artist, Dusty Springfield.

In relaying the news, The Hollywood Reporter hinted the film would “focus primarily on Springfield’s life in the ’60s, culminating with the making of Dusty in Memphis,” the period during which “Dust,” as her friends called her, became a wildly popular ’60s icon nearly overnight with her blond beehive, kohl-smoldered eyelids and strong, soulful voice – a voice many couldn’t believe came from an five-foot-three Irish catholic girl from the suburbs of London.

It wasn’t until 1970, though, a bit after Dusty in Memphis (1969) hit record stores (and failed on the charts, but has since become a classic), that Springfield openly admitted she liked women as well as men, telling London’s Evening Standard, “I know I’m as perfectly capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy. More and more people feel that way and I don’t see why I shouldn’t.”

Considering how many light years ahead of her time making such a statement was then, no one can begrudge Springfield the fact that throughout much of her musical career, she either described herself as bisexual or declined to answer interrogations (which came often) about her sexuality. “My relationships have been pretty mixed,” she told The New York Times Magazine‘s Rob Hoerburger in 1995, “And I’m fine with that. Who’s to say what you are… It’s other people who want you to be something or other – this or that. I’m none of the above. I’ve never used my relationships or illnesses to be fashionable, and I don’t intend to start now.”

Will the film address the British singer’s acknowledged love affairs with women?

The project’s director seems to imply that it will. Jessica Sharzer, who previously directed a short produced by the Hollywood lesbian networking association POWER UP, Fly Cherry, and a made-for-Showtime film, Speak, which played at Sundance in 2004 to great reviews, will be directing the film. Based on Sharzer’s previous association with POWER UP and Springfield’s well-documented predilection for women, it seems very likely that Springfield’s queer side will come out in the film, despite the fact it will concentrate on the period before the recording artist was publicly out.

When contacted about it, Sharzer, who is heading off to London to research Dusty’s life in her birth country for the script, told us that while she’s still in the research phase, “with respect to Dusty’s lesbianism – we are not shying away from it at all.” She couldn’t say much more, given that the film is still in early stages of production, but this alone is enough to stir up anticipation for what will be one of few big budget biography films of legendary women that either address or explicitly imply their queer sexualities (joining the likes of 1933’s Queen Christina and 2002’s Frida).

After Springfield’s death from breast cancer in 1999, a recent biography, Dancing With Demons: The Authorized Biography of Dusty Springfield, by her friends Penny Valentine and her longtime manager Vicki Wickham (also manager of such acts as Morrissey, Marc Almond, and Patty Labelle), was crystal-clear on the subject of the music star’s lesbian sexuality.

Wickham, who is serving as a consultant on the Dusty Springfield film, met Springfield in 1962. The two women, both queer, became fast friends and stayed friends through out Springfield’s life, as Wickham reminisced to the Sunday Express in 2000: “We both knew we were gay right from the start and I think that helped enormously. We were totally platonic, though, which I think is why it lasted. We really were just mates and because of that she could tell me about her affairs and I could tell her about mine.”

Born Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien in 1939’s London, Dusty was educated in a Roman Catholic convent where she reportedly informed the nuns early on that she wanted to be a jazz singer when she grew up. Dubbed a childhood tomboy by her mum and dad in a 1965 New Musical Express interview entitled, fittingly “Mary was a Tom-Boy,” Dusty was considered something of an pariah as a youngster, who spent a lot of her time wearing out the grooves on her dad’s pop, jazz, and blues records, loving especially the tunes of Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee.

The West Wing‘s Kristin Chenoweth, who is slated to play the British singer in the upcoming biopic, referenced Springfield’s awkward childhood and resulting fragile ego as a way she found into the character: “She was very, very insecure, she grew up a chubby kid with acne in England, and was kind of an outcast who always went home and listened to her records. I understand that. Everybody tells me, ‘You seem so confident, like you have the world by a string.’ But I don’t care who you are – if you’re a creative person, you are insecure. That’s what we draw from.”

In her teens, however, Springfield transformed herself into a glamorous blond singing sensation with the help of a whole lot of hairspray (“I used so much hair spray that I feel personally responsible for global warming” Springfield once quipped), joining the girl group The Lana Sisters. In 1960, she started belting tunes for her brother Tom’s band, The Springfields, with pal Tim Field.

It was during the successful folk trio’s tours of the US that Dusty got turned onto the sound of Motown, a sound she tried to export back with her across the Atlantic.

Springfield ran into difficulties with the British male musicians who were backing her on her first solo-efforts: “Motown hadn’t released any records in Britain… I wanted to use those influences in a country where they were still playing stand up bass and the only black music they knew about was jazz … They knew what I wanted but the last person they were going to take it from was a bee-hived bird.”

When asked why these British session men had trouble adapting the hip American R&B sound, Springfield explained, “I would say there’s a singular lack of ‘feel’ for what I can only describe as ‘funk.’ We can produce the most marvelous big, fat sounds, but we seem incapable of producing the sort of loose, uninhibited sort of funk.”

But with her first solo-single “I Only Want To Be With You,” Springfield made it clear to the world in 1963, at the age of twenty-four, that the small, free-spirited young woman not only had an undeniable feel for funk, but that she had the heart-cracking, lived-in voice to belt it out. Holding her own with Motown’s Martha Reeves in a live special for the BBC, Springfield soon won the respect of Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler, who invited her back to America to make a record in the same studio where her all-time heroine Aretha Franklin had recorded.

The album Springfield released in 1969, Dusty in Memphis, unanimously considered her greatest by critics, is perhaps best described by Hoerburger: “She rippled over and curled around the songs of carnality, of love’s psychosis (the hypnotic ‘Windmills of Your Mind’) and mostly, of love’s memory, love in exile, love as asymptote. It was some of the most emotionally literate music ever put to vinyl; while other pop singers were still wondering who wrote the book of love, Springfield was teaching a course in comparative literature.”

Springfield’s best known tune from this album is probably the toe-tapping “Son of a Preacher Man,” reinvigorated in popularity in 1994 by its inclusion on the soundtrack of Quentin Tarantino‘s hit film Pulp Fiction. Fans of The L Word will recognize another song on the album “Just a Little Lovin'” from the show’s season-two soundtrack.

Although Dusty in Memphis has since been named one of the Top 10 Coolest Records by Rolling Stone, at the time it did not do glowingly on the charts, leading Springfield to spiral into an alcoholic and cocaine-filled depression in which she stayed throughout most of the seventies. She tried throughout that decade to make multiple comebacks with successive albums A Brand New Me (1970), Cameo (1973), It Begins Again (1978), and Living Without Your Love (1979) to no avail. For years she traipsed in and out of hospitals, rehab, and rocky relationships.

Living in Los Angeles, which Springfield called “a sick place, under the cover of everyone being so healthy and sunbleached,” Dusty went into recovery from drugs and alcohol in 1983. In 1986, a comeback finally did stick, in the form of “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” a song she did with new wavers The Pet Shop Boys that soon became a worldwide hit, re-launching her career. Moving back to her native England, in 1990 she put out the fairly-popular Reputation, followed by the album A Very Fine Love (1995), before her death in 1999.

At her funeral, The Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant dubbed Dusty Springfield “fab” – a sentiment with which, despite her tragic moments, few could argue.

Immeasurably influential to vocalists to come with her characteristically vulnerable, gutsy, rawly-emotional voice, Dusty Springfield will long be remembered for breaking ground for women in music in the ’60s. It will be a delight to see Dusty’s heyday played tribute to in Jessica Sharzer’s upcoming film about her life, and satisfying, too, to see her lesbian romantic life depicted, especially if it is done so honestly.

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