It was 1985, her second visit there with self inflicted wounds--and a scene that had already been played out countless times at other hospitals. When she lived in California, the ambulance dashes were so frequent that she joked of knowing the paramedics by their first names. Each time the bloody wounds that confronted the doctors were self made--carved by a woman driven by inner torment.

The moments of crisis usually happened at night. Dusty always had trouble sleeping. Four hours was her usual tally and friends were used to her telephoning them at one or two in the morning just to talk. She couldn't bear the loneliness of the dark or the unnamed terrors that seemed to overwhelm her. If there was no one to comfort her, she would take a blade and cut herself, then ring for an ambulance so she could be taken to safety. In New York that year, Dusty appeared her usual self, smiling and joking. It was all image. Underneath she was deeply depressed . . . and desperately broke.

At the age of 46 she was trying to get her career back on the road and had borrowed money to make demonstration records to hawk around. She had been calling her manager, Vicky Wickham, endlessly. But if Vicky offered her even a hint of work, Dusty would find excuses not to do it . . . she didn't feel well, she was coming down with flu, she was too tired. It was as though she was in the grip of a terrible lethargy, and endless depression from which nobody could save her. The anti-depressant pills she was taking didn't help. They just made her more anxious.

Vicky went to see Dusty in Bellevue, where she had "sectioned" herself, volunteering to be locked up in a mental ward to save her own life. She was in a communal area behind locked doors, shuffling around in a hospital gown just like the other inmates. Her pretty face, known to millions of fans across the world, was bloated by hospital medication that left her dazed and slow.

For the first week, she had been in a straightjacket which she later took home as a trophy. There was insanity all around her . . . one of her new companions introduced himself as Colonel Gadafi. Bodily contact was forbidden and Vicky could only talk to her. No, Dusty didn't want to come out. They were "looking after" her. She found the ward a haven from the harshness of real life.

Bellevue had the same attraction as a hotel to Dusty. All her life she loved hotels, and, if she was down, the thought of staying in one always perked her up. A hotel offered her the ultimate freedom: no responsibility. In the psychiatric ward someone else would take control of her life. It hadn't always been like this. In the sixties she had been acclaimed as one of the greatest women singers in the world. She had 16 hit singles to her name. Stars such as Annie Lennox, Elvis Costello, Neil Tenant and Elton John adored and admired her. What had gone so terribly wrong?

Dusty began life as Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien, the younger of the two children of Gerard and Kay O'Brien, in London in 1939, a few months before the outbreak of World War II. Her father was a tax accountant and after the war the family lived in Earling, a sedate suburb which in the early fifties still had something of the country about it. On the surface the O'Briens were a model middle-class family.

They went to church every Sunday and spent their holidays at Bognor Regis. Mary and her brother Dion (later to change his name to Tom) attended respectable Catholic schools. But beneath the surface was turmoil. The local Priest spent a lot of time at the O'Brien home, sharing such uproarious sessions with her parents that there would later be conjecture about exactly what was in the teacup Dusty's mother always had in her hand. Dusty would later say it was "like living in Father Ted", the surreal TV sitcom.

Even more oddly, the family's chaotic mealtimes would occasionally be punctuated by fits of over-exuberance in which her parents would hurl food around the room. Often a simple request to "pass the potatoes" would result in the bowl being dashed to the floor; sometimes greens would fly across the table. It was a strange habit that Dusty took into adult life. She loved the sound of breaking glass. And disintegrating crockery, and would explode into orgies of destruction whenever boredom or drunkenness got the better of her.

Her parents were a couple at odds with each other. While Kay, Irish-born from a family of journalists, was fun-loving and sparky, her husband was a solitary, quiet man and something of an intellectual. There would be ferocious rows between them while Dusty cowered at the top of the stairs, listening. "I'd sit there with my hands over my ears trying not to hear and yet, being fascinated at the same time", she recalled.

It was in her childhood that Dusty also learned some deep lessons in self-loathing. She grew up thinking of herself as a very nondescript sort of girl. At her convent school, she was not a star pupil. She was plump, mousy haired, had a square face and wore glasses. Her sense of humour seemed her only saving grace, making her popular with the other girls, but less so with the nuns.

At home, her parents doted on her brother. Mary wouldn't have minded a bit of "doting" for herself but often, it seemed, she got nothing at all. Her parents, wrapped up in their own problems and emotions, had no time for her. She would go and put her hands on the boiler until they burned . . . the only way she could make anyone in the house take notice of her. This was the first instance of the self-mutilation that would recur later in her life.

Whenever the pressure grew too great, the adult Dusty would slash her arms and legs with a savagery born of utter hopelessness. She admitted: "When they see blood, it's the only time they listen to you." It was a compulsion that horrified her friends and lovers, but which seemed to less sympathetic observers merely a violent form of attention-seeking. In recent years, however, psychiatrists have begun to realise the full extent and complexity of the problem. It is estimated that, in America alone, two million people share Dusty's grim habit.

Diana, Princess of Wales, admitted she, too, was a sufferer . . . slashing her body because "you have too much pain inside yourself". For many "cutters", the very act of drawing blood and feeling pain makes them feel more alive. In the words of one of Dusty's friends: "I think she wanted to feel something, anything. Cutting herself was a way of getting that feeling very directly".

Without such desperate measures, it seems, there was a terrible emptiness in Dusty's heart that she had carried from early childhood. "I have no recollection of warmth or affection", she once said. "I took whatever criticism there was to heart. Our house was full of raging ambivalence . . . we none of us wanted to be there."

The O'Brien's emotions were hidden behind jokes. Throughout her life, Dusty would freeze physically when people hugged her. It was as though she never learned how to receive affection. The only time she remembered her mother being physically demonstrative to her was many years later, when Kay was dying of cancer and Dusty went to see her in hospital. There were still no hugs or kisses; instead, her mother reached up and pinched her nose.

Surprisingly, despite the emotional chasm, Dusty never lost touch with her parents. Once she was famous, she would fly them to opening nights in America and have them at her parties. She always desperately wanted them to be proud of her and adore her . . . up on stage, she could bask in their admiration at last. Even then, however, there was a central part of her life they were unable to understand.

Early in 1963, Dusty had her first love affair. It was with a woman. The conflict this produced in her was immense. Dusty always kept her sexuality shrouded in ambiguity. As a result, there were some people in her life who believed that her heart had been broken by a mysterious Italian male when she was young.

Others whispered that if songwriter Burt Bacharach had not been married to the actress Angie Dickenson, Dusty would have been overjoyed to take her place. It is likely that Dusty did have a crush on Bacharach, because he was one of the few men who understood her, was gentle, and shared her perfectionism in the recording studio. But it was to Angie that Dusty ran to pour her heart out when things got tough.

She would often say that there were footballers that she fancied and a string of men that she'd had affairs with. But if she did occasionally hop into bed with a man, it seems it was when she'd had a tiff with a girlfriend and wanted to make her jealous, or was out of control on drugs or drink, or downright lonely. The truth was that all Dusty's long-term relationships, and most of her short-term ones too, were with women.

"Because of parental influence and the segregated school system, I had gone through my growing years terrified of boys," she said. "To us, men were mysterious objects rather than people you love and with whom you feel comfortable." She would recall that when Mick Jagger and George Best asked her out in the sixties, she was petrified, and declined.

She had been brought up a Catholic but her sexual preference went against everything the Church had taught her. Dusty and the Church parted company, but her Catholic guilt never left her. As time went on, she was overwhelmed by the notion of demons: real or imaginary. When the drugs or drinking were at their worst, Dusty would curl up in a ball on the floor completely lost in panic and paranoia.

"The demons are coming," she would say, "and they're telling me to do bad things". And then the self mutilation would start again. Nor was her sexual identity a secret she could unburden to her parents. Whatever they thought about the number of "girlfriends" who shared her life, they never enquired and were not told. "Sexuality," Dusty said, "was never discussed in our house. It didn't exist".

When in the mid seventies, Dusty did finally tell her parents she was gay, it was an anti-climax. "They didn't really take her seriously," one friend recalled, thinking she was just saying it to shock them. Dusty was appalled. She had saved up this confession for more than a decade, only to have it dismissed as unimportant. Quite apart from her private happiness, this was an issue that struck at the heart of her professional career.

Although the music business likes to view itself as a liberal institution, in truth it is as conservative as any other. Over the years it has learned to accommodate gay men such as Freddie Mercury, Elton John, and George Michael, but even now you can count the women musicians who are "out" on the fingers of one hand . . . kd lang, Melissa Etheridge, Janis Ian. Four decades ago the idea was unthinkable.

It was against this background that Dusty Springfield lived and worked. People in the business wondered about her sexuality, the gay and lesbian audience she began to attract certainly guessed. But Dusty didn't want to have to define herself. Partly it was a wish not to be pigeonholed. But she was also terrified that her mainstream audiences would not love her, that her image would be shattered and that the industry would cold shoulder her. And so she hid the truth about herself, which, in turn, led to more self-hatred.

She had always been destined to be a star . . . her remarkable voice saw to that. From the age of 12, it was clear that, in the words of her brother, she had "a special gift". Her father, who introduced her to the jazz of Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee, was determined to nurture her talent. He would beat out the rhythm of tunes on her hand and force her to guess what they were.

When she left school and started work as a shop girl in the local Bentalls department store, she knew singing was the only career she wanted. In a music newspaper she saw an advertisement for a third member for a new all-girl singing group and went for an audition. In a black coat and high heels, her hair in a French pleat, she looked ok; when she opened her mouth to sing, she sounded great. She got the job and became one of the Lana Sisters.

She had sung in public before, at small clubs with her brother. Now the other two girls, Riss Cantelle and Lynn Abrahams, taught her how to face the audience. The three drilled themselves to perfection and, with their close harmonies, became regulars on tours of American air bases and summer seasons at Blackpool. They even produced a hit record . . . "Seven Little Girls Sitting In The Back Seat (kissin' and huggin' with Fred").

Dusty stayed with the Lana Sisters for two years, during which time her brother Tom started a folk duo with a friend. She was flattered when they asked her to join them. They wanted an American name to reflect their style of music and thumbed their way through a list of towns in the United States. There were Springfields everywhere . . . from Massachussets to Ohio, New Jersey to Illinois . . . so that was that. From now on they were The Springfields.

This was also the birth of "Dusty". Mary O'Brien got out the peroxide bottle and turned into a blonde with the name she would be known by for the rest of her life. The Springfields were a hit right from the start, aided by the spread of television. Dusty, with her infectious smile, had an immediate rapport with the camera. By 1963, she was going solo.

She hid her self-conciousness behind a mask of makeup. She later claimed that the thick, black lines she drew on her eye lids were an accident, blaming her short-sightedness. In fact, those "panda eyes" were deliberate . . . a cosmetic device to draw attention away from the rest of her face, which she thought was too round. Dusty also had a range of back-combed or smoothed out wigs, to balance her jawline, which she thought was far too heavy, and her nose, which she also considered less than perfect. She always wore trousers or long skirts to hide what she deemed her lumpy knees.

Her appearance constantly disturbed her. She thought she had "big bones" when, in fact, she was very slim with small breasts and bottom. When she looked in the mirror, what she saw was the overweight schoolgirl she had once been. Soon, as well as singing, Dusty was making her name as one of the hosts on the regular Friday night television pop show, Ready, Steady Go, interviewing the likes of The Beatles and The Dave Clark Five.

It was through the show that she met one of the big influences on her life, the American gospel singer, Madeline Bell. The white, middle class girl from Ealing and the gawky, black, working class girl from New Jersey were amazed by each other's voices.

Dusty's first solo single, I Only Want To Be With You, climbed the charts with amazing speed. It was followed by her first national tour, alongside The Searchers, The Tremeloes, Freddie and The Dreamers, and Dave Berry. This quickly established two things about her: first, that she held a stage brilliantly; second that girls in the audience liked her as much, if not more, than the boys.

But it was America that fascinated Dusty most. In 1964 she found herself appearing at New York's Fox theatre alongside the black artists she revered . . . Marvin Gaye, The Ronettes, Martha and The Vandellas and other stars from the Motown label. Dusty was so in awe of the Motown singers that she didn't know how to make contact. Instead of introducing herself, she used one of the tricks she had learned would get people's attention: she smashed things.

When the first armful of crockery went down the stairs outside their dressing-rooms, Martha And The Vandellas came rushing out to see what the noise was about. In this bizarre way, Dusty met her heroines. She became close to lead singer Martha Reeves and if one of the group, was sick, Dusty would step out on to the stage and join them singing back-up for Marvin Gaye. "It was," she recalled, "one of the great thrills of my life." But it was also in America, on a later trip, that she got the reputation for being difficult.

She was booked to appear along-side the jazz drummer Buddy Rich and his band in New York, but Rich resented a mere "pop" singer getting bigger billing than his. He sabotaged her opening night by turning his own performance into a sprawling comedy act, inviting a string of celebrities up on stage, running an hour over time and exhausting the audience.

Throughout the rest of the run, he refused to allow his band enough rehearsal time with Dusty and used his role as compere to mock her third-rate talent. After struggling through in tears every night, Dusty finally slapped Rich across the face in a fury. He threatened to sue her for assault.

The word went round that Dusty was trouble. It made her friend Madeline Bell furious. "It was just because she was a woman". When she asked for something, nobody would take any notice. She had to stamp her feet and yell just to get heard, and then of course she was a "bitch".

At the same time, it must be said that Dusty could be demanding. When she was recording, even the most easy-going producers and musicians would be gnawing their fingers down. She would spend hours re-recording what she thought was a faulty phase, the wrong breath, the incorrect note.

The song that was to be most closely . . . and most poignantly . . . associated with Dusty was released in April 1966. You Don't Have To Say You Love Me broadened and deepened her reputation. By then she had more hit records than any other female artist in the world. She had done three sold-out tours, starred on television and The Royal Variety Show, and garnered a clutch of awards as Britain's best female vocalist.

But stories began to circulate about her eccentric behaviour, and how she would enliven parties by throwing custard pies, whole diner services, glasses, anything that made a noise or mess. After midnight, and with the warning "Dusty's in the kitchen", any sane person who valued their clothes would leave. Martha and The Vandellas were welcomed to London by being bombarded with sardines. The American singer Gene Pitney was once seen crouching behind a chair, attempting to protect his sharp Italian-designed suit from flying chocolate and meringue.

By this time, she was living in Kensington with Norma Tanega, a painter and folk singer from California. If she went out it would be to a Spanish restaurant with a gay bar in the basement, or sometimes to see a drag act in an East End pub. "She was adored by all those queens," said her friend Lee Everett, wife of the anarchic disc jockey Kenny Everett.

Dusty was always amused and fascinated by female impersonators. She had a soft spot for Danny La Rue and they would regularly have dinner together. When he included an impersonation of her in his act, she was thrilled. Another friend was Elton John, then just starting out on his career. He idolised Dusty and, as a teenager, had pictures of her on his bedroom wall.

On the surface they had a lot in common: their taste in music, their love of Hollywood and their sense of humor. But there was a more profound, if unspoken connection. Both had grown up in the suburbs with poor self-image. Both had decided they were chubby and plain and cursed with poor eyesight, and that they had to create a more startling persona. Both hid their sexuality, terrified it would cost them their success. And, over the years, both would descend into death-defying binges of pills, booze and cocaine.

Her vulnerability, however, far outstripped his. Before Dusty went on stage her nerves were so bad that she would break out in an angry red rash across her chest. She would hurl things across the room and start shouting. It was appropriately enough, The Temptations who she said introduced her to drink by offering her vodka to calm her nerves. But time went on, a stiff drink wasn't enough. She kept people waiting or wouldn't go on stage. It was another form of self destruction.

Her personal life was also beginning to lurch. She and Norma Tanega were having bitter rows. When she found out that Norma had been having an affair, she was furious, even though Dusty herself was not averse to the odd one-night stand. Their friends would have to act as telephone referees, with Norma on one line and Dusty--usually in tears--on an extension. It all became too much. In the middle of 1970, Norma packed her bags and flew home to California. Dusty felt trapped, with her success increasingly based on the cabaret circuit, away from the black soul music where her heart lay.

She was haunted by the spectre of endlessly playing the same clubs, doing summer seasons at holiday resorts and pantomimes. She began drinking more. A reporter noticed she had three magnums of champagne and a bottle of vodka in her dressing room. "It's been one of my down days" she told him. "I seem to be having more of them lately."

Now came two events that would haunt her for the rest of her career. First, in September 1970, she admitted in a newspaper interview that she was "as capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy" It was pure Dusty . . . candid, never telling an outright lie, but never the complete truth. The line would be quoted time and again when the question of her sexuality came up.

But in the short term, far more damage was done by her last appearance at one of her favourite nightclub venues, The Talk Of The Town. She had played there often pulling in huge crowds. This time, though she was having problems with her throat. On the opening night, her usual cure of port and lemon failed to work and a Harley Street specialist had to spray her larynx with cortisone. The audience was kept waiting for 40 minutes.

It was after midnight before she finally went on and, from the opening number, she struggled. Elton John and Rod Stewart were in the audience and rushed down to the stage. "Come on Dust" they called from the footlights. "You can do it". Despite the coughs and apologies, she managed to finish her set.

But the next day she told The Talk Of The Town management she had to have three days complete rest. With full houses booked, they were outraged and sacked her. This was the first time Dusty had looked less than perfect in the public eye, and it was a major disappointment to her fans. Suddenly she seemed unreliable. It was then that friends first noticed that she was cutting herself. She showed Madeline Bell her lacerated arms and legs. Both women broke down in tears. "It was those Dusty demons," Madeline said. "She could never really explain them to you but they were there."

So far as Dusty was concerned, there was only one answer. She would follow in the footsteps of her lover Norma and move to America, the land of her Motown heroines. She hoped that it would be a new start - but there was to be no escape from her troubles.

The first installment of a 4-part serialaztion of "Dancing With Demons," -
a biography of Dusty Springfield by Penny Valentine & Vicki Wickham
The Daily Mail
August 5, 2000