Television: And the Pet Goes On

All by herself, Petula Clark is an international identity crisis. In a 28-year career that began when she was nine, Pet Clark has been Britain’s Shirley Temple, a French yé-yé singer and songwriter more popular at one point than Edith Piaf, and Hollywood’s heiress to the fallen halo of Julie Andrews. Along the way, Petula has sold 25 million records in five languages.

Though her first tongue was English (She was born in a London suburb), Pet was discovered last in the U.S. Downtown preceded her in 1964, but Americans did not get accustomed to the face behind that big, hard-edged voice until she became the shill trilling, “And the beat goes on . . .” in Plymouth TV commercials two years ago. Next came films (Finian’s Rainbow and Goodbye, Mr. Chips) and regular television. This week Pet stars in her third TV special, on NBC’s Kraft Music Hall; in 1971, though it is yet unannounced, she will headline a weekly series of her own on ABC.

Sorry, Mr. Agnew. That sort of show business record makes Pet sound like the frenetic creation of some monstrous manager, or Jackie Susann. But those who have seen her on the concert or club stage—her natural habitat —realize that she is a diffident, dignified woman with a whimsical intelligence. She comes on with almost no preliminary patter, precious little makeup and a gown and a hairdo she does herself. There is none of the oppressive overproduction that is now the vogue in cabaret acts—the choreography down to the last twitch, the scripting of every gasp, the obtrusive gags. Any quips are her own and perhaps a little limp, but honest. During her recent stint at Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria, she delivered herself of some extemporaneous antiwar sentiments, then added: “Mr. Agnew, I’m sorry.” What really distinguishes Petula’s performances is that voice—now throaty, now driving, and seemingly twice too powerful for a delicate five-footer.

Her range is almost two octaves, and her appeal spans all generations. Glenn Gould, the pianist and a Clark aficionado, says that she is “in many ways the complete synthesis of the American teen-ager’s scramble from the parental nest.” Of course, at an increasingly matronly 37, she will have to go beyond such material as Downtown and I Know a Place. These days she is trying to emulate her idol, Piaf. “She didn’t just sing,” recalls Petula. “She pulled her insides out. She got involved about people going crazy, about death and sex and war.”

No Vadim. Pet’s own life has been filled with more familial traumas. She had a mother who taught her to sing and a stage father who pushed her onto a BBC wartime show called It’s All Yours, followed by her own Pet’s Parlour. Dad eventually parlayed all that into an almost endless J. Arthur Rank contract. At Rank, she played in 25 films including a kind of female Andy Hardy role in the Huggett series. Thanks to a restraining bra and taut parental control of her public image (no dates or off-the-shoulder dresses), she played juvenile roles years past puberty. She says now, “I thank God to be out of the country when my old movies come back on late-night television.”

Eventually, at 25, she “exploded,” leaving home and father to take up auto-racing and mix with the Stirling Moss crowd. Finally, she left the country to try a singing career in Paris. The British promptly forgot all about her. She soon met Claude Wolff, a press-agent for a French record company, and for the past eight years they have succeeded in maintaining a flourishing husband-manager-star relationship. Pet knew that she was subject to intermittent depressions, was unable to cope with booking arrangements, and that “sometimes I would need to be treated as a child.” Claude knew just how and when to do it. But in the process, says Pet, “he didn’t do a Vadim on me” (a reference to the Svengali role French Director Roger Vadim played with his women until he ran up against Jane Fonda).

Image Problem. Aside from TV, Wolff has committed her to a few campus and concert appearances in the States and a stand at Harrah’s club at Lake Tahoe, all of which should keep her 1970 income at the $1,000,000 level to which she has become accustomed. She is fed up with period movies like Chips (“I have nothing to do with 1924, really”) and other musicals. Not that either picture was such a box-office smash that Hollywood is pressing her to do another of that genre. Right now, Pet says, she is looking for “a small contemporary film,” based perhaps on the Paris revolution of 1968. But Petula, like Julie Andrews, may have trouble in eluding her old image. “At her worst,” as one London critic observes, “she emits enough chintzy cheerfulness to upholster a three-piece suite.”

Despite, or because of her upbringing, Pet can barely abide show-biz socializing, and the Wolffs and their two daughters have relocated their home from Paris to a summer farmhouse near Antibes and a $250,000 chateau outside Geneva. “We moved,” she explains, “to get away from the ‘fun’ people.” For Pet Clark, the Downtown, rock-around-the-clock days are done.