Which explains why female impersonators such as Danny La Rue have been doing the 1960s pop idol for decades. "Some of them were even better than Dusty," says Vicki Wickham, Springfield's former manager and long-time friend. "We were always having giggles about it."

Wickham can just imagine how Springfield would react to news of an Australian musical about her life. "She'd be absolutely thrilled that it's not a drag show," says the English radio producer, laughing, in Melbourne. "I think she would really be chuffed."

There'll only be one cameo drag queen on stage but false eyelashes aplenty when Dusty: The Original Pop Diva, celebrating Britain's beehived queen of soul, premieres in Melbourne next month.

Peppered with more than 30 Springfield favourites, including "I Only Want to Be With You," "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me," and "Son of a Preacher Man," the $6 million jukebox musical is a natural follow-up for the creators of the 2001 Johnny O'Keefe show Shout!

John-Michael Howson, who wrote Dusty with David Mitchell and Melvyn Morrow, says the choice of their next pop star was a calculated, commercial decision. "When I mention Dusty Springfield a lot of people's eyes light up; there's this wonderful reaction to her," he says. "She wasn't a victim, but people love a diva who has tragedy lurking in the background. A lot of women like her; gays love her."

Springfield's life story was just begging to be immortalised in a musical: there's the dysfunctional family, the makeover from plain convent girl to blonde pop goddess, the self-destructive battle with drink and drugs, the late-breaking comeback and, ultimately, the stoic, premature demise.

Although the musical isn't based on Wickham's biography of Springfield, Dancing with Demons, the Dusty writers enlisted Wickham as a consultant three years ago to read the eventual 16 or so drafts, offer insights into the singer's life and ensure the script was true to Springfield's personality. "It was really the idiosyncratic things," says Howson. "She gave us Dusty first-hand."

In Melbourne recently for the start of rehearsals, Wickham met the cast and crew, including star Tamsin Carroll, and declared: "They seem to have got it right."

She should know. In 36 years of friendship, a day rarely passed when she and Springfield didn't speak, and when Wickham was managing the singer in the last decade of her life, they talked on the phone up to six times a day.

They met in 1963, when Wickham was a producer on television music show Ready, Steady, Go! and Springfield was about to rocket up the charts after breaking away from folk trio, the Springfields. Both in their mid-20s, they shared a flat on London's Baker Street.

"We were totally unsophisticated," recalls Wickham, 66, who hung out with the likes of Jimi Hendrix, the Who and the Rolling Stones in the '60s. "I'd love to tell you that we had this glamorous life, but we didn't."

Springfield became a kind of transatlantic talent scout, returning from trips to the US and recommending that Wickham invite then-unknown Motown singers such as Marvin Gaye and Otis Redding on the show.

Not that Springfield would have approached them herself. Paralysed by shyness, she was so in awe of black idols such as Martha and the Vandellas she once smashed a teapot while in the same room just to break the conversational ice.

That, says Howson, was part of her charm. "There was a vulnerability that the public tapped into," he says.

"She wasn't 100 per cent self-assured and people felt that if they knew her, they would like her . . . She never thought of herself as a star. She thought she was a girl singer who got lucky."

Wickham traces that lifelong insecurity to a loveless upbringing. Growing up in England's middle-class Ealing in an Irish Catholic family, Springfield - who was then homely Mary O'Brien - always felt a poor second to her older brother.

"I think it was always a competition," says Wickham. "It's so typically English that there really isn't a lot of love at home, particularly in the '50s and '60s. So nobody ever said 'I love you', not until much later on when she had real friends."

Her faith didn't ease her feelings of unworthiness either: "She always felt the pressure of being a Catholic," says Wickham. "When you go to school with nuns, it's tough."

Later, Springfield's lack of confidence translated into a fanatical perfectionism. In the studio, she'd turn her headphones up to top volume to detect any minor flaws and she hated performing on TV because she couldn't control the lighting or the sound.

"She was a wonderful human being, the sort of friend you could call at three in the morning and she'd be there," recalls Wickham. "[But] as an artist she could be a complete pain in the arse, because nothing was ever quite good enough, she wasn't quite good enough."

Inspired by French Vogue models, Springfield turned herself into a style maven with her towering hairdos and panda eye make-up, but she constantly struggled with her weight, and maintaining the image became a grind.

She would sometimes preen for five hours just to go out for dinner. Once, when she was meeting the head of her record label, she asked Wickham to do a recce to check the lighting. "As if I'm going to a Chinese restaurant and saying, 'Can you change your lightbulbs!"' says Wickham, with a laugh. "There were silly things like that. But it was really important to her."

They didn't call her a diva for nothing. "The good thing was she could deliver divadom at the end," says Wickham. "After all the bullshit and all the anxiety and everything that went ahead, when she actually went on stage, it was worth it."

Springfield rarely wrote her own songs, but she had a talent for picking the right material. "She had a sound in her voice that nobody else had," says Wickham, who co-wrote the lyrics for Springfield's 1966 chart-topper, "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me". "She could either inspire you or tear your heart out. I think she really touched people . . . England looked at her as Our Dusty."

Springfield had nine Top10 hits in the '60s but her popularity began to fade by the end of the decade. Her music fell out of fashion and she ended up moving to the US, hounded out of England by tabloid interest in her lesbianism. "It's so weird because the '60s were so open, so free, everybody was sleeping with everybody," says Wickham. "You'd think it wouldn't matter. But it did matter to somebody like Dusty."

Still a product of the '50s, and Catholicism, Springfield rarely talked about her sexuality to anybody beyond family or friends. "She'd just avoid it," says Wickham. "She knew that people knew, and she had no problem with that, but she didn't want to talk about it. I think that there was a real conflict with her and she just didn't know how."

In the US, her career took a nosedive and Springfield sought solace in drugs and alcohol for about 15 years. "She was playing in dreadful clubs that she shouldn't have been playing in, in a state she shouldn't have been on stage in anyway," says Wickham.

When the money ran out, she sold her houses and crashed on friends' sofas until she wore out her welcome and she moved into flea-bitten motels. She'd go to the odd Alcoholics Anonymous meeting but couldn't haul herself out of her addictions.

In the end, long-time admirers the Pet Shop Boys unwittingly threw her a lifeline, inviting her to record with them on the 1987 hit "What Have I Done to Deserve This?"

Springfield was so crippled with self-doubt, it took Wickham and another friend months to get her into the recording studio. "She was terrified: terrified that she didn't have the voice, that somehow they had an ulterior motive," says Wickham.

"By this stage we were both so frustrated, we just wanted to shake her."

The song's success revived her career and the inclusion of "Son of a Preacher Man" on the ultra-hip Pulp Fiction soundtrack introduced her to a new generation.

In 1994, though, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Oddly enough, it brought out the best in her.

"[Despite] all the stupid little things that she didn't deal with, that drove you mad, cancer she dealt with absolutely brilliantly," says Wickham. "I never heard her say, 'Why me?' You never saw her in tears; she still had a great sense of humour."

Illness, she says, was almost liberating: "A lot of the pressure was off because she didn't have to work, she didn't have to get herself ready. She could walk around the hospital in a robe. There were no expectations. Somehow, for once in her life, she could relax."

The last time Wickham saw her in hospital, Springfield asked her to go buy a pack of cigarettes. "She owes me pound stg. 10," jokes Wickham.

Springfield died in March 1999 and Wickham still misses her. After the funeral, she says she wanted to ring Springfield to tell her all about it.

"It was a great funeral," Wickham says. "Everybody applauded when the coffin came out. She would have loved it."

So Dusty Springfield was a diva to the end?

"Absolutely."

Susan Horsburgh
The Australian
December 17, 2005