The gift … she may be worth $35 million, but singer Susan Boyle isn’t in it for the money.
When Susan Boyle recalled the urgings of her late mother and entered a TV talent show, she could never have dreamed of the life she enjoys now. Jane Wheatley shares tea and scones with the Scottish singing sensation.
Within minutes of my arrival at Susan Boyle's home in Blackburn, Scotland, a mug of hot tea is pressed into my hand, along with a plate of generously buttered sandwiches and chips. Would I like a wee bowl of soup, too? Later come scones with blackcurrant jam and biscuits, more tea and, on hand throughout the afternoon, a dish of foil-wrapped lollies for those in-between moments.
Boyle sits quietly on the sofa while two friends play host: Sadie Boyle (no relation) is her full-time PA; Lorraine Campbell, landlady of a local pub, is her designated shopping and travelling companion. Both women are close neighbours, living in lookalike pebble-dash homes on a grid of streets, part social housing, part privately owned. Boyle grew up here with her eight older siblings, lived on alone in the family house after her parents died, and bought it from the council with earnings from her first album.
"The posh house" … Boyle's new home. Photo: Snapper Media
On the advice of her accountant, she bought a new house nearby, with a double garage, a piano room and a back deck overlooking a stream and fields. She calls this "the posh house" and uses it only occasionally for entertaining: "We had a wee party [there] when Wills and Kate got married." She prefers to live in her old home. "I thought it best to stay here," she explains. "It has a lot of happy memories and you need those to keep you grounded." Over the fireplace is a portrait of her late mother. "She was a lady," Boyle tells me with fierce love, "a real lady." In the kitchen is a cake with the entire Glasgow Celtic football team sculpted in icing clustered around a model of Boyle in a purple evening gown.
It is four years since Boyle walked into the spotlight - a little awkwardly in unfamiliar high heels - to audition for Britain's Got Talent. On that wet January night in Glasgow, as she stood marooned on the vast, empty stage - a stout, middle-aged figure wearing a sparkly gold dress, black tights and white shoes ("What was I thinking? I looked like a doily on legs") - the audience sniggered and the trio of judges leaned back in their chairs, smirking in anticipation of sport at her expense.
Seconds later, as Boyle's voice soared into the opening bars of I Dreamed a Dream, ridicule and disgust changed to awe and amazement. Capering in the wings, comedy duo Ant and Dec turned to TV cameras to crow: "You didn't expect that, did you? Did you?" When the show screened in Britain in April that year, Boyle became an overnight sensation, prompting millions of hits on YouTube clips and a multimedia frenzy. The voice was certainly remarkable - audiences in the parish halls and pubs of West Lothian had known that well enough for 30 years - but something else was driving the intense interest. A 47-year-old woman's seemingly miraculous transformation from plain Jane to mezzo-soprano diva was the stuff of fairy stories: Cinderella, The Frog Princess and The Ugly Duckling rolled into one. But as one observer noted, "The crucial transformation occurs in us: she doesn't change, merely our perception of her.”
Humble roots … Susan Boyle outside her family home.Photo: Scope Features
Within 24 hours of the screening, TV cameras and reporters were camped outside her house. As the only S.Boyle in the local phone book, neighbour Sadie was repeatedly woken at night by international callers. "Lots were well-wishers," she says, "others were journalists offering money for interviews. I used to take the messages to Susan, running the gauntlet each time to get to her front door." In London for the talent show's semi-final, the singer's hotel was besieged and Campbell arranged for her to stay in a friend's house. The next morning Boyle went out to get a paper. "I found her mobbed by fans in Tesco," recalls Campbell. Followed into the street, they sought refuge in a church where the verger gave them tea and Boyle phoned Piers Morgan, a judge on the show who had become her confidant. "I had his number, aye," nods Boyle. "He sent a car for us.”
In the month leading up to the show's final, the fascination with Boyle intensified, not all of it benign. The Boyle family narrative was embroidered to characterise her as an unpaid skivvy to her ailing mother. There were rumours of jealousies and spats between contestants; some commentators questioned the quality of Boyle's voice, others reported tantrums.
On the eve of the final, Boyle rang Morgan again. She was sick, she told him, and couldn't eat or sleep. She was horrified by the way some of the press coverage had turned against her. "Why can't they just leave me alone?" Within days she was booked into The Priory, an upmarket London rehab facility frequented by rock stars and heiresses; she was suffering from exhaustion.
Dreaming on … with actor Elaine C. Smith at the premiere of "I Dreamed a Dream". Photo: Getty Images
Much later, in what was by far the most revealing and warmhearted of the many, often stilted interviews that Boyle had endured, she talked to Channel Seven's Rahni Sadler about how stress had engulfed her at that time. On an anxiety scale of one to 10, she said, she would rate it a nine. "I wasn't very nice to know," she admitted. The press had a field day with her so-called breakdown and, as in a Greek tragedy, the descent seemed almost inevitable. Poor, bewildered Susan Boyle, blinking in the light, had surely become another sad casualty of capricious celebrity.
How wrong we were. Within a year, in 2010, Time magazine ranked her the seventh most influential person in the world, 14 places higher than Barack Obama. She has recorded four best-selling albums, duetted with Plácido Domingo, sung Christmas carols to millions live from New York's Rockefeller Plaza and had her life story celebrated in a musical. The single girl from a depressed Lowlands mining town now has an estimated personal fortune of £23 million ($35 million).
She says she has a personal favourite among the medley of big musical hits on Standing Ovation, her new album. Out Here on My Own is about feeling like a fish out of water and wanting desperately to belong, to fit in. It resonates powerfully and painfully with her own feelings of isolation. "It meant a lot to me," she says, "but it was a hard one to do.”
Susan Magdalene Boyle was born on April 1, 1961, the ninth child of Patrick, a coal miner, and Bridget, a former shorthand typist. The birth was difficult and the baby was briefly deprived of oxygen, leading to mild learning difficulties. "Susan will never come to anything," a doctor told her parents, "so don't expect too much of her."
Singing had been her joy as well as her solace since the day she was picked as a soloist at her primary school nativity play. As the song finished and the applause broke over her, she understood for the first time what it felt like to be good at something. Over the next 40 years she sang at her local church, at karaoke pubs and at family parties, always in demand, always the star of the show.
Watching Britain's Got Talent together one evening, her mother said, "You should go in for that, Susan." Bridget Boyle died in 2007, aged 91. For two years her daughter mourned, alone in the family house, with only her cat Pebbles for company, until one day the words came back to her: she would do it, she decided, for her mother.
In November 2010, with the trials of her debut far behind her and the world at her feet, Boyle was discovered cowering behind the locked door of her New York hotel room, terrified at the prospect of singing live on the Today show from the open-air Rockefeller Plaza. As her manager Andy Stephens pleaded with her through the door not to let her fans down, she heard her mother's voice again: "Come on Susan, pull yourself together, or I'll skelp your arse." Boyle squared her shoulders and stepped out into the crowded plaza, her breath pluming in the icy air of a New York dawn.
Now, sitting composed in her cosy lounge room, the hearth piled high with gifts from fans, Boyle admits to feeling settled and more confident. It took about three years, she says. "I have my family and my support team, the people I should have had from the start. Andy, my manager, he's my rock, and Sadie and Lorraine here, they understand me.”
One Valentine's Day the phone rang in Boyle's house. "Don't open your front door, Susan," warned the caller, a neighbour across the road. He had seen a buff young man, naked to the waist and carrying a bunch of red roses, walking up her front path. It was a set-up by The Sun newspaper. "A photographer and reporter were waiting down the street a wee bit," Boyle tells me.
The story is typical of the way Boyle's community protects and looks out for her. At the height of Boyle-mania, she hid for a few days in a room in Lorraine's pub. "If Susan is being followed, there's always a house she can slip into to escape," says Sadie Boyle. "When we're out, as soon as people see her they want a chat and to have their photo taken with her," says Campbell. "Susan never says no." Beyond the boundaries of her home town, Boyle is driven and accompanied everywhere. "Even so, she still likes to jump on a bus, don't you, eh, Susan?" says Campbell. I nod to Boyle: you give them the slip? "Aye, but I always get caught." Does she mind being spied on? "No," she says equably. "It's a good laugh.”
Sadie Boyle deals with the fan mail. "A pile of it every day," she nods. "This morning there were letters from Oslo, Zambia, Germany. Her biggest fan base is in the US. It's the story, triumph over adversity, that's what appeals.”
Members of Boyle's family were apprehensive about how she and they would be portrayed in the musical of her story, I Dreamed a Dream, in which the singer is played by Scottish actress Elaine C. Smith. "It was tricky," admits Smith. "We had to be true to Susan's story without sugar-sweetening it." Boyle was in the stalls for the final dress rehearsal, but slipped out in tears halfway through, overwhelmed by the emotion of it all. She returned, though, for the performance that evening, and came on stage at the end to sing two songs, taking a final curtain call with the cast to a standing ovation.
Boyle is wearing a black velvet trouser suit and I tell her she looks glamorous. "Thank you." Sadie tells her to show me her toes and she pulls off a sock to reveal nails encrusted with Swarovski crystals. "Each one put on individually," marvels Campbell. How does it feel being able to afford anything she wants? "It feels good," says Boyle, "but I've got too much now." Lorraine nods. "You still look at prices, don't you?" She winks. "Now tell us how many bottles of perfume you've got; 37, isn't it?" Boyle lifts her chin. "I like perfume. So what?"
Has she discovered other novelties apart from shopping and perfume? "I like salmon, sushi and steaks." She also has a weakness for Tiffany jewellery. Says Campbell, "We were in New York in a carriage in Central Park with all our Tiffany bags, and the Irish driver suddenly turned around and said, 'Jesus, Mary and Joseph, it's Susan Boyle. I wondered why everyone was looking at us.' " Now the initial turmoil is over, are there any downsides to being famous? This question produces Boyle's longest sentence of the afternoon. "The downside is a continuous worry about longevity," she says. "How long is it going to last? I have a constant fear that it might all be taken away." She still feels that? "Yes, I do.”
For now though, she has to admit, "the future looks rosy". Her duet with Domingo is the most frequently played track on his latest album, Songs; there is talk of a cameo role in a new film and she is already at work on a fifth album. But what really lights her up is the prospect of her appearance with Donny Osmond at London's 20,000-seat O2 Arena. Her schoolgirl passion for the eerily youthful, squeaky-clean former teen idol is undimmed. They first met when he brought red roses to her hotel room, cuddled her on a sofa and crooned Puppy Love in her ear while she stared down at her lap, demure and apparently overwhelmed. But when he changed the last line to, "... and why I love Susan Boyle so", she gave an unladylike snort of laughter and they both collapsed in giggles.
They have met several times since and performed together in Las Vegas, but despite this real-life friendship, she still treasures a blanket depicting his larger-than-life face. She takes me upstairs to show me this and other precious mementoes, including a stock of cuddly toys and a quilt hand-stitched by American fans. The blanket is spread on her bed, an impressive affair upholstered in leather with a concealed wide-screen TV that rises up at the press of a button, her most extravagant purchase yet. So Susan Boyle sleeps under Donny Osmond every night? "That's right, aye," she says.
Now she can have anything she wants, what would give her most pleasure? "I'd love to have a cat," she says, unhesitating. Pebbles, the 14-year-old family cat, went to stay with a friend when Boyle was on tour and she doesn't want to uproot him again. She could get a kitten. "I'm away too much," she says sadly.
What else gives her pleasure? "Singing," she says. "Entertaining people and making them happy.”
I confess I don't feel I've broken through Boyle's reserve. "She's shy," the others tell me when she's briefly out of the room. "If you met her again, she'd be your friend." But I am relieved that when I say goodbye and I tell her it was lovely to meet her, she gives me a hug. "You, too," she says in her soft Scottish brogue. "You're a lady."
