Tom Jones - the Life (18 page)

She had first met Tom in a Hilton hotel in Cranston, Rhode Island: ‘We asked for his autograph, told him we had all his records and all that crap, but he was very personable. He spent a lot of time talking to us. I asked him if there was something he missed that he couldn’t get in the US and he replied, “After Eight mints.” So I phoned Harrods and got them to send over a case of the mints. From then on, whenever I saw Tom, I was never without a box of After Eight.

‘Most of the fans like me would bring him gifts. I was forever combing the record stores for obscure Jerry Lee Lewis records. And he would never just say thank you. He was always very interested in everything – and wanted to know where you’d found something. He knew we weren’t interested in jumping into that bed with him – the more genuine we were with him, the more so he was with us.’

While many of the women who continued to flock to his concerts weren’t concerned about what he sang to them, both Tom and Gordon were extremely worried about his recording career, not least because an important source of revenue was running dry. He joined EMI from Decca and released ‘Say You’ll Stay until Tomorrow’, which was the start of his country period, the least musically satisfying of his career.

‘Say You’ll Stay until Tomorrow’ went to number one in the US country charts, seducing Gordon into believing that this should be Tom’s new direction. He had done plenty of country songs before, but they always had a Jones twist to them. Now, on the PolyGram label, he released album after album of dull material, which won him few new fans and disappointed those who still played the songs from his sixties heyday. Nothing registered in the UK charts.

On the 1982 album
Country
, partly recorded in Nashville, he even posed as a cowboy on the front cover. It seemed he was treading a path towards obscurity, although he was still in huge demand as a cabaret act across the US. He had a five-record deal with PolyGram and each one was a country album.

Tom’s touring schedule meant he still spent little time each year at his beautiful home in Bel Air. As a result, Mark was away too, leaving Linda to rattle around in the big house by herself. Gordon had settled in LA for tax reasons, but his marriage to Jo began to decline in the late seventies, as she grew tired of her husband’s philandering ways and the amount of time he spent in Las Vegas; she had five children to bring up in the UK. She later explained candidly how difficult it was to maintain a good marriage in the music business: ‘It’s exciting, but there are lots and lots of times when wives have to be on their own and then it’s lonely. And you can’t trust them completely because of the situation in show business – people are there for the taking.’

Tom, meanwhile, was disappointed that his father failed to settle in LA. His parents preferred to make their home in the UK, although they visited twice a year when Tom was at home. Their son remained in tax exile, so it was up to them to travel.

Tom senior found the heat, the freeways and the yes-men a little too hard to take, but he did enjoy meeting some of his celebrity heroes, like Frank Sinatra and Elvis. His favourite was Muhammad Ali, whom Tom had met when he first went to Las Vegas. They became good friends and the great boxer was one of the few celebrities that Tom entertained in his own home. They would spend hours together, talking about their early lives.

In 1980, Tom took his father with him when he visited Ali at his training camp in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania. Ali asked if Tom would like to do a little sparring. ‘C’mon, Jones, we’ll have some fun,’ although it didn’t sound too entertaining to Tom. Ali was a good sport, however, and allowed Tom to knock him to the canvas. His former business manager, Gene Kilroy, who had first introduced them in Vegas, took pictures of Tom looking jubilant as Ali pretended to be hurt. Kilroy said, ‘Tom’s a pretty tough fella. He’d be great in a street fight, I think, and if I could choose anyone to have next to me in a foxhole it’d be Tom – he’s a stand-up guy.’

The following autumn, Tom senior was taken ill on a visit to Los Angeles. The many years stuck underground, breathing black coal dust, finally took their toll. He was advised against travelling home, so he spent the last week of his life in bed at Tom’s house in Bel Air with his family around him. He died on 10 October 1981, at the age of seventy-one.

Both Freda and Sheila decided they would prefer to live in California, so they buried Tom senior in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park, a few miles from Bel Air, and close enough that Tom’s mother could visit her husband’s grave whenever she wished. They had been married forty-eight years.

Tom bought a house near his own for his mother and sister, who both loved the climate in California, although Freda was fair skinned and would never soak up the sun. She loved seeing relatives when they visited from Treforest. When Margaret and Graham Sugar called in on holiday, she enjoyed reminiscing. ‘I always remember you doing me egg and chips,’ she told them.

Sadly, Tom’s father missed the big family wedding the following year, when Mark, now twenty-five, married his girlfriend, Donna Paloma, a strong-willed woman from New York, who was five years his senior. She had been the girlfriend of one of Tom’s band members, so she had known Mark for a few years before they became romantically involved.

More than 200 guests attended the wedding and reception at the house. Tom sang while the newlyweds took a turn on the dance floor. As a present, he bought them a house a few minutes’ drive from his. Once more, he had his close family around him, as he always wanted. He was even happier the following year, when he became a grandfather for the first time in June. Tom was just forty-three when Alexander Woodward was born: ‘I have a grandson, when most people would be having a son. So I’m still young enough to enjoy it.’

Soon afterwards he embarked on his first British tour since he had gone into exile. Predictably, it was a sell-out. At the beginning of September 1983, he invited more than a hundred of his Welsh relatives to a reunion party at the splendid Celtic Manor Hotel near Newport. He even laid on a coach to bring fifty or so of his cousins from Pontypridd. Many hadn’t seen him for more than ten years. One of the twins, Margaret Sugar, ran up to him, her face wreathed in smiles.

She asked excitedly, ‘Which one am I, Tom?’

‘Margaret,’ he replied.

The 1980s weren’t kind to Gordon Mills. His marriage to Jo was over, he had lost two of his great acts – Engelbert and Gilbert – Tom’s career was stuck in a country music stagnant bog, the MAM organisation was nothing like as healthy as it had been and he was spending too much time chasing his losses in Las Vegas. He had, however, met a beautiful Tahitian-born travel agent called Annie Toomaru, whom he put in charge of organising and liaising with the vast number of Tom Jones fan clubs throughout the US. They planned to marry as soon as his divorce came through.

When he visited the UK in 1986 to sort out the settlement regarding Little Rhondda, Jo Mills noticed that he wasn’t looking well. She was so shocked by his appearance that she asked if he was all right. He told her he was fine, but he wasn’t. He started to suffer excruciating abdominal pains, and was diagnosed with stomach cancer.

Annie Toomaru slept in his room at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles while his condition deteriorated. Jo and his five children flew out to see him when they realised the gravity of his situation. Tom visited him for the last time and they joked half-heartedly about his odds of pulling through. Gordon said he would take fifty–fifty, but, in reality, they were a million to one. Tom, distraught at the fate of his mentor, cried to Gordon’s daughter Beverly, ‘What am I going to do?’ Gordon died the next day, on 29 July 1986. He was fifty-one. It was a little over twenty-two years since he had first met Tommy Woodward, the ‘scruffy bastard’.

Gordon was buried in England, next to his father, in Burvale Cemetery, Hersham, in Surrey. Before the funeral, Tom and Beverly walked around the gardens of Little Rhondda, because Tom was intent on finding the right single rose to throw on Gordon’s coffin. He wasn’t ready to leave for the local St Peter’s Church until he had found the bloom he wanted.

He was full of emotion, describing Gordon as ‘the finest man I knew’ in his eulogy. He continued, ‘He took me from nowhere and gave me everything. I owe him so much, it’s incalculable.’

Gordon Mills may have been a flawed man, but he was a mercurial and immensely charismatic one. It has become fashionable to blame him for perceived faults in Tom’s character or behaviour. That is part of what made him a good manager – he protected his star and made the unpopular decisions.

Gordon liked to be in control and he had an unshakeable belief that he was right. He once cornered Prime Minister Harold Wilson at a party at Chris Hutchins’ house in Richmond and demanded to know the latest government thinking on Rhodesia, Jo’s native country. Twenty minutes later, he burst into the kitchen, where Chris and Tom had escaped to enjoy a glass of champagne, and declared, ‘Throw Wilson out! He just won’t listen.’

On another occasion, Gordon was furious with Tom when he came back to the UK after touring extensively in the US. When Chris demanded to know what the problem was, Gordon said, ‘Tom has been back three days and he hasn’t phoned me.’

Chris replied, ‘But Gordon, he’s two minutes up the road.’

Gordon was unimpressed. ‘That’s not the point,’ he shouted. ‘He should have called me.’

Gordon and Tom were, quite simply, a double act. There’s a wonderful scene in a documentary about Tom in which they are flying over Treforest in a helicopter. Tom said, ‘That’s the paper mill down there, where I used to work.’

Gordon responded, ‘Oh yes, what do they make there, then?’

Tom paused for a split second. ‘Paper,’ he said, chuckling.

In 2008, a commemorative plaque was unveiled outside his family home at 97 Brithweunydd Road, Trealaw, in the Rhondda. It said, ‘Gordon Mills, 1935–86, lived here: Songwriter and manager of Tom Jones’. Jo Mills, who attended the ceremony with her children, said, ‘I think Tom would have made something of himself sooner or later, but I doubt it would have been by the direct route he had.’ His daughter Tracy commented, ‘My dad was an extraordinary man, who was able to see talent for what it was, get tremendously excited about it and then actually act on his own excitement to turn that talent into star quality – a rare gift indeed.’

Les Reed, who had known him even longer than Tom, summed up Gordon’s talents: ‘He had many hang-ups, was very complicated and intensely sensitive of others who tried to get close to him. But as a manager he was the best there ever was.’

Tom wasn’t happy. Nobody seemed to be caring about his voice any more. His shows had become a parody. The audience was more concerned with collecting sweaty souvenirs than in listening to his new repertoire. He knew he had to do it, because that’s why they had paid good money to see him, but he needed to change their perception of him.

It wasn’t going to happen overnight. At a concert in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a woman ran the length of the auditorium to hand him a towel. He dutifully wiped under his arms and patted down the hairs on his chest, before handing it back with a kiss. He had done it thousands of times, but the delirious fan shouted, ‘I’ve been waiting eighteen years for this.’

All Tom could do was make sure that he put his point across in interviews. He told the
Chicago Sun-Times
, ‘At first it was a sexy, spontaneous act. Now it’s a gimmick. For a long time, the underwear tossing – or the anticipation of underwear tossing – would overwhelm whatever else I was trying to do onstage.

‘Reviewers never mentioned my voice, and it’s been a constant struggle to overcome that. People were beginning to think I was nothing more than a pair of tight pants and a hairy chest.’

He found it most frustrating when he launched into ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’, which required the audience to listen closely and quietly. He complained, ‘There’s always some nutcase woman who thinks “now’s my chance” and whoosh. It fucks up the song.’

The difficulty was that he was still being paid a king’s ransom to appear in Las Vegas. He was earning $250,000 a week for three months a year – that’s $3 million a year, for starters.

Both Gordon and Tom enjoyed money and the lifestyle it could bring. The former believed success and achievement were measured solely by the size of the cheque, the number of rooms in your house and the fleet of luxury cars in the driveway, but Tom wanted more that that. He needed to prove he was still a relevant artist or, at least, that he could become one again.

Gordon was a one-off and there was never going to be another like him in the music business. It turned out that Tom made a very sensible decision when he died. He chose his son to take over. Mark had spent fifteen years learning the business from top to bottom, so it seemed a natural progression for him to become his father’s manager. The move would arguably save Tom’s career.

For the last few years, Mark had been working as his father’s lighting director. He had literally been waiting in the wings, ready with his own ideas. He didn’t want Tom to be a leathery supper club act. Mark was only twenty-nine, but by coincidence that was the age at which Gordon turned to management and took over Tom’s career in 1964. Tom trusted Gordon with all his heart, and only his family, his own blood, could occupy such a place in his future.

Mark, as his father was about to discover, had very strong opinions. He was like a famous football club’s new manager who ditches anything connected with the old regime. His wife Donna was at his right hand as they swept away Gordon’s empire. The first to go was Annie Toomaru. She was fired less than two weeks after the funeral by a company accountant.

She has complained bitterly that Tom didn’t phone her, but Tom never rings anyone. It was one of his traits most influenced by his late mentor: right from the start Gordon told him, quite forcefully, not to speak to anyone. He never phoned Chris Ellis or Vernon Hopkins, or Gordon’s family back home in Britain. In fifty years, he only ever called Les Reed once: ‘Gordon was Svengali to Tom, who adhered to everything that he was told not to do. It stuck with Tom and, to this day, he has only lifted the phone to me on one occasion. I was very hurt, considering the number of years working on his behalf. But that’s life.’ Other than his immediate family, the only person Tom would call on a regular basis was Dai Perry, whom he would ring every week or two to find out what was going on down at the Wheatsheaf.

After Annie was sacked, the second to be shown the door was the PR director, John Moran. He was replaced by Donna, who had worked as the actor Bill Cosby’s secretary and promised to do her best to keep the knicker count down. Some of the older musicians were dispensed with, and most of the office staff left within a few months. Just about the only familiar face left at the newly named Tom Jones Enterprises was Lloyd Greenfield. When Lloyd began to wind down his work schedule in the nineties, his place at Tom’s side was taken by Don Archell, a former singer from Luton. Silver haired and distinguished looking, he has been at Tom’s side ever since.

The super-fans were next. Many, including Glenna Stone, went to fewer concerts or stopped going altogether. ‘We felt unwelcome – limited to no access, shutting down of fan clubs, and little acknowledgment from the stage. Unwelcome is the proper term.’ They didn’t suddenly turn against Tom. They still loved him, but the attraction in following him around the country had gone. It was no fun any more.

Mark and Donna had two initial tasks: first, to change Tom’s image, so he was reaching a younger audience; second, to find and release new material and not rely on songs that were twenty years old and being sung by sixties tribute acts. Mark explained to BBC’s
Imagine
, ‘Some things were just wrong, certain choices of material were not challenging. In an ideal world, the focus of his image will shift about three feet upwards and be on his voice and nothing else.’

It was easy enough to modernise Tom’s wardrobe, give him a younger haircut and tighten up a few bags under the eyes and chin, but he needed to be in the charts and he didn’t even have a record deal. He wanted a song, but he wasn’t on the radar of the popular songwriters. Nobody was sending Tom Jones their latest composition.

Mark eventually came across a new ballad called ‘A Boy from Nowhere’, which had been written by songwriters Mike Leander and Edward Seago as part of a concept album called
Matador
. Rather like Les Reed, Leander was a much-respected figure in the music business and had worked with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Some of his best-known songs are never played these days because they were recorded by the notorious Gary Glitter in the seventies. ‘I’m the Leader of the Gang (I Am!)’ and ‘I Love You Love Me Love’ were just two of the biggest-selling songs of the glam-rock period of the early seventies – a fashion that thankfully passed Tom by while he was in his Las Vegas bubble.

‘A Boy from Nowhere’ was a song that Tom was born to sing. It was a passionate ballad that stretched every vocal chord. It may have lacked the rousing anthemic chorus of ‘Delilah’, but it matched its intensity.

Rather like ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’, audiences mistakenly thought the song was Tom’s tribute to his own humble origins.
Matador
was based on the inspiring story of the famous bullfighter El Cordobés. He had been born into poverty, but had risen above a life of petty crime and manual labour to become rich and revered doing the one thing he did best. Perhaps the story did resonate with Tom a little after all.

Tom recorded six songs for the concept album, but only ‘A Boy from Nowhere’ was released in the UK, where it reached number two in April 1987. Its success enabled Mark and Donna to book Tom into a round of interviews and performances in Britain, including
Top of the Pops
for the first time in fifteen years. By far the most significant was an appearance on the cult chat show
The Last Resort with Jonathan Ross
, then an up-and-coming television host.

Ross clearly admired Tom. In a world where talk-show hosts have to put up with many prima donna celebrities, he liked the easygoing naturalness of Tom. Jonathan loves the story of Mark and Tom flying into Los Angeles and, instead of posing for photographs, heading straight to the bar to sink a few pints before breakfast. It may or may not be true, but it gave the impression of a man who knew what his priorities in life should be.

On
The Last Resort
, guests would sing a number that they weren’t usually associated with. Jonathan, who looked about twelve next to Tom, during a rather strained piece of banter, asked him what new material he was putting in his act. Tom told him he liked Prince and was singing ‘Kiss’, which the studio band just happened to know. This was unexpectedly contemporary for Tom, but Mark had encouraged him to try it.

Tom gave an inspired performance of the hit, with just the right amount of restraint and suggestiveness when he sang the line ‘Women not girls rule my world.’ The audience were cheering and whistling at the end, proving to the British public that he still had it. Jonathan couldn’t resist interrupting to mop Tom’s brow with a pair of knickers.

One particular viewer liked what she saw. Anne Dudley, one half of the synth-pop duo The Art of Noise, observed, ‘He came out, as cool as you like, in black leather and he seemed to have a fantastic confidence about him, but he didn’t take himself so seriously. Tom Jones had fallen off my radar … I really thought the days when he would make great records were probably in the past.’

The Art of Noise were one of the most fashionable acts around and won a 1986 Grammy Award for their version of ‘Peter Gunn’, featuring Duane Eddy. They were innovative users of digital sampling technology and not the sort of group you might associate with Tom Jones, but the collaboration worked. These days, sampling has become hackneyed, but not in 1988, when ‘Kiss’ was released as The Art of Noise, featuring Tom Jones. The single reached number five in the UK and number thirty-one in the US
Billboard
chart. More importantly, it provided a blueprint for keeping Tom at the top for many years to come: put him next to a fashionable act and he appeared current, and he made the other artists look good. It paid off time and time again. ‘Kiss’ was The Art of Noise’s biggest mainstream hit, so the alliance benefited them as much as it did Tom.