Petula Clark, Happy Belated Birthday

Above, Clark, "teleconferences" with huge 60s French music star, Sasha Distel.

Born November 15, 1932, Petula Clark has had at least four careers: child star with radio program, sultry 50s singer, Pop/Rock 60s icon, movie/stage star. Certainly not as talented as fellow Brits Dusty Springfield or Cleo Laine or Shirley Bassey, she nevertheless became a bigger star than all of them, thanks in no small part to the shrewd management of her French husband with whom she lives in Switzerland.

Trivia from WikiPedia and elsewhere: She's the only pop singer to have scored a #1 hit with a song written by Charlie Chaplin — This is my song — written by him for his 60s film "A Countess From Hong Kong." Chaplin so badly wanted Al Jolson to sing the song that he had to be shown a picture of Jolson's 1950 tombstone before he abandoned the idea and had a copy sent to Petula Clark's husband/manager Claud Wolf, who, unlike Clark's regular collaborator Tony Hatch, liked the song.

After Hatch refused Wolf's invitation to arrange it for Clark to record; ultimately Ernie Freeman arranged the song and Sonny Burke produced the session - at Western Studios in Los Angeles - in which Clark recorded the song not only in English but in French as "C'est Ma Chanson" (lyrics by Pierre Delanoë who also felt the song a poor choice for Clark), German as "Love, So Heisst Mein Song" (lyrics by Joachim Relin) and Italian as "Cara Felicita" - lyrics by Ciro Bertini).

In fact Clark did not wish to record the song in English as she disliked the deliberately old fashioned lyrics which Chaplin refused to modify; however after the translated versions of the song had been recorded there happened to be some time remaining on the session which Burke coaxed Clark to use to record Chaplin's lyrics. The recording session featured the backing of the Wrecking Crew.

In 1968, NBC-TV invited Clark to host her own special in the U.S., and in doing so she inadvertently made television history. While singing a duet of "On the Path of Glory," an anti-war song that she had composed, with guest Harry Belafonte, she took hold of his arm, to the dismay of a representative from the Chrysler Corporation, the show's sponsor, who feared that the moment would incur the racist bigotry of Southern viewers. When he insisted that they substitute a different take, with Clark and Belafonte standing well away from one another, Clark and her husband Wolff the producer of the show refused, destroyed all other takes of the song and delivered the finished program to NBC with the touch intact. The program aired on 8 April 1968, with high ratings and critical acclaim.^[12] (To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the original telecast, Clark and her husband who had served as executive producer of the show, appeared at the Paley Center for Media in Manhattan on 22 September 2008, to discuss the broadcast and its impact, following a broadcast of the program.^[13])