"I'd earn five shillings and my lunch, a bread roll and Heinz tomato soup laced with the smell of disinfectant I can smell it now. And there were little mounds of powder all over the place, which John Lennon told me later was rat poison."I invite her to comment on recent suggestions that Lennon may have had a gay relationship with Stu Sutcliffe, briefly the Beatles' bassist "It's easy to talk about dead people," she says "John was very shy of women That's why he was aggressive and very raucous He was very much a man's man. But homosexual? I don't think so."She first auditioned for Epstein, with the Beatles, at the Majestic Ballroom in Birkenhead. "I did a Sam Cook version of 'Summertime', the Porgy and Bess thing, but I did it in thur key, not mine Brian wasn't impressed I was signed nearly a year later. I was singing jazz in the Blue Angel and I didn't know Brian was in. He liked me, singing in my own key."Epstein got her on the bill with Tommy Cooper and Frankie Vaughan at the London Palladium.
"I said, 'Oh God, why couldn't you have got me the Liverpool Empire?' But if I hadn't done that I wouldn't have left Liverpool and I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing today I learnt my craft thur, watching Frankie Vaughan Nobody takes a call like I do I defy you not to give me a standing ovation I learnt so much. When I did The Ed Sullivan Show with the Beatles, I sat in the stalls during the dress run, with Debbie Reynolds and Kirk Douglas, watching Ed Sullivan talking to this comedienne called Toti Fields. He was speaking and she was mouthing 'Thank you, thank you', and I was a bit put out, wondering why she was getting special praise, but when we came to do the show, she wasn't thur."Later, when I was on at the Prince of Wales with Frankie Howerd, Toti Fields came to see me backstage. I said, 'What happened to you that night?' She said, 'Oh, he was turring a strip off me'.
I said, 'It didn't look that way.' And she said, 'I know.' That was something I learnt from her He was saying, 'You were totally rubbish. You are only in the dress run because my wife thinks you're good I think you're the pits.' And none of us knew. I've never forgotten that, although – touch wood – I've never had to use it."Epstein's death in 1967 shattered her, as it did the Beatles "I know it wasn't suicide. He was always threatening to, phoning me up saying 'You won't see me tomorrow.' But he definitely didn't do it It was that concoction of drugs and drink.
