TV Blitz Proves Pet Now Big Girl
PETULA CLARK, singing favoite of millions via recordings, TV and films, stars in her own hour-long colorcast Dec. 9. It's a long hark back to her first appearance before a microphone.
. . .They were assembled in an underground radio studio in London while raiding Nazi bombers thundered overhead. It was a very young "Pet" who had gone to the studio to appear on a program in which youngsters were invited to speak to their relatives in the armed forces.
Before the show, the producer asked for a volunteer to sing a song to help soothe the apprehensive audience, with the blitz going on above.
"I raised my hand," Petula recalls. "They put a box up under the microphone and I started singing Mighty Lak a Rose, which my mother taught me. The people in the control room were astounded by my big voice. The orchestra picked up the melody and joined in. And they asked me to sing it again when the show went on the air."
"Pretty Pet," and "Little Pet" as she was known during the war years and after has been singing for the public ever since.
After Petula's unprecedented succsss on that '40s radio program, she was semt on tour of the army camps.
She would "come on comically with a dirty face and tell jokes." Pet recalls, "Then I'd change into an Alice-blue gown and sing sugary songs." She became the "Forces Girl!" until the war ended and then she became everybody's LITTLE girl.
ABOUT THOSE DAYS, she says "I was kept on a diet and in flat shoes. The boys were chased away. My
Petula Clark and the Everly Brothers sing up a storm in Pet's big television special, which will be presented Dec. 9.
education suffered. I was hardly ever in school.
She recalls once wearing an off-the-shoulder dress on her television program "Pet's Parlour," and receiving mail by the truckloads from outraged ladies. "When they saw me growing up, with they really saw was their own youth disappearing. So they wouldn't allow it to happen."
Finally, Pet broke away. She went to Paris, met Claude Wolff, with who she fell in love, and married. The Wolffs have two daughters, Barra, 8 and Katie, 7.
Pet's career started changing as soon as she met Claude. Songwriter Tom* [*presumably a typo] Hatch brought her "Downtown" In 1964 the song led the hit parade in every major Western European country and then made its way across the Atlantic.
The pop tune with a solid driving beat appealed to parents as well as their teenagers and Petula Clark became a sensation in America.