Susan Boyle’s New Look
It’s been a while since we’ve heard news about the British Got Talent and Youtube sensation, Susan Boyle. Finally, Boyle’s got surprises up her sleeve these days. Read this story from Harper’s Bazaar on Boyle’s first every photo shoot and makeover!
In her first major magazine interview, Susan Boyle, the Britain’s Got Talent and YouTube sensation, attempts to make sense of life in the spotlight. She might as well attend cosmetology colleges after her new look. See more photos from the Susan Boyle photo shoot, or watch the video.
Susan Boyle is at Cliveden, the luxurious Italianate mansion, once the home of Waldorf Astor and his bride, Nancy Langhorne, and now an old-world hotel just outside London. Boyle is here for her first-ever solo magazine photo shoot. It is a long way, on every level, from her hometown of Blackburn, a small former factory town (population 5,000) between Edinburgh and Glasgow. Not surprisingly, she is searching for the words to explain just how radically her life has changed since the Easter Saturday night last April when ten million viewers watched in disbelief as she sang for the first time on Britain’s Got Talent. “It does feel unreal,” she says. “It will take a bit of adjusting to because I’ve led a sheltered life, I know. I’ve got life experience, but mentally I have to adjust. But it’s all good. All good.” Is she glad she did it, auditioned for the show? She looks at me in amazement. “Come on!” she chides. “It goes without saying. Come on now!”
But there is another side to Susan Boyle, and it isn’t one that belongs to the public. “When you sing a song, you’re telling a story,” she explains. “That’s what I was doing when I sang ‘I Dreamed a Dream.’ But that wasn’t me singing about becoming a singer. It was about the position I was in after my mother died.” Boyle lived with her mom until her death at age 91 in 2007. “I did the audition for her because she always wanted me to make something of my life, but I had to wait a bit because her death prevented me from singing for a while. I couldn’t put my heart into it. So I was singing about wanting things to be like they were before she went. You know, it was a double-edged sword because it was about what I wanted to do, but it was also about wanting to turn back to when she was with me.” Boyle pauses. “Powerful stuff,” she adds, as if to make light of it.
Despite her newfound fame, there are a lot of things Susan Boyle doesn’t do. She doesn’t go on holiday or go out much. She isn’t into fashion or gourmet food. She isn’t married, doesn’t have children, and hasn’t seen the world. When I ask her if she’s been shopping, for example, she shakes her head. Not even to Selfridges? “Where?” she asks, half joking. But feeling financially secure must surely be a bonus. “Hey, you don’t just do it for the money. I don’t do it for the money, babe! Who do you think I am?” But then why do it? She isn’t expansive when she talks, but she knows how to answer this question. “I do it to entertain people,” she says firmly. “I sing to make people happy.”
Music has always been her release. Boyle was born to a 47-year-old mother. Deprived of oxygen at birth, she suffered learning difficulties as a child. “As a kid, I was in my own wee world when I listened to records in my bedroom,” she says. “I didn’t mix with other kids much. I was frightened of people because of their reactions toward me.” Boyle hurries over what she is saying. “It’s complicated,” she says quietly. Then she brightens up. “But the best way I could express myself was in the bedroom, singing along and imagining I was entertaining people.”
Now that she’s a star herself, whom does Boyle hope to meet? An unlikely combination: Madonna and Donny Osmond. Of the former, she says, “I like that she is a diverse pop star and controversial.” Of the squeaky-clean latter? “I bought all of the Osmonds’ records and liked Donny’s singing and his boyish charm.”
The youngest of nine children (“We could have been our own choir!” she notes), Boyle had a miner father who sang on Radio Hamburg during World War II when he was a young soldier. “He wanted to be a professional singer,” Boyle says, “but his duties meant he couldn’t pursue it.” Does she mean the responsibilities of raising a large family? “Aye,” she says. “You don’t have so many choices if you have nine children.” Were they close? “Get us together and all we do is blather,” she says. “Talk. A lot.” And although her siblings are scattered around the country, Boyle herself never left home.
“I’m nearly 48…and I’ve never been kissed,” she told the hosts of BGT when they asked her age. She lived, she added, on her own with her cat, Pebbles. “She’s a great cat,” Boyle recounts. “A rescue kitten. But never any trouble.” If Pebbles has been oblivious to Boyle’s recent adventures, then she must be about the only one.
“YouTube?” Boyle says when I ask her how it felt to be the subject of the most hits ever. “What’s that? A tube of candy? I don’t think so!” She laughs; Boyle laughs a lot in the flesh. “That was a shock,” she continues. “The YouTube thing was like a demolition ball. It was just overwhelming — to find TV stations camped outside your door and the phone ringing 24 hours a day.” She pauses. She seems determined not to complain. “It was good. But overwhelming. It was too big for anyone to handle.”
The British tabloids, full of love for Boyle one moment, turned on her and became nasty the next. There were reports of inappropriate behavior, bad language, and outbursts of aggression. Despite rumors that Boyle wouldn’t perform on the show’s finale, she did and came second to the dance troupe Diversity. “I lost to a good group of guys,” she offers gamely. “I think coming in second was good, actually.” Nevertheless, she immediately checked herself into the Priory clinic to recover from what the producers called exhaustion and what she describes as feeling “overwhelmed. It was a necessary thing. I’m glad I went because I feel really charged now and ready to go.”
“It was tricky,” Simon Cowell, BGT’s creator, tells me. “When the drama unfolded, we asked ourselves, What do we do now? When things calmed down, we asked her. And she said she wanted to sing. Really? I asked. Even though you’ll have to put up with all the other stuff? She said yes. I don’t believe I should be saying no, you can’t do anything because you’re not able to handle things for whatever reasons. That’s patronizing.” As for Cowell, Boyle doesn’t see him as many others do. “He’s a lovely guy,” she says. “Lovely guy. Who doesn’t get on with him?”
Today Boyle is professional to the nth degree. The hours of posing on her feet? “Not a problem.” The lack of a lunch choice that she likes? “Oh, never mind.” The fun of hair and makeup and dressing up in beautiful clothes? “You know me; I’ll go along with anything.” The process of being photographed while a large crew watches? “As long as I don’t break the camera, I’ll be fine,” she jokes. Every once in a while, she’ll give one of her customary hip wiggles. Talk of Michael Jackson inevitably arises, and Boyle moonwalks in the towering Giuseppe Zanotti heels she is wearing. (By the way, she’s pretty nifty on the heels. “Aye,” she says. “I do wear heels. Sometimes I do.”)
Now she’s stepping out into the world — slowly and tentatively. “Baby steps,” she says. She has moved to a quiet part of London where she shares a house with an assistant and is working on recording her debut album, tentatively due in November. Does she enjoy living in London? She doesn’t really know yet. She doesn’t have plans to move back to Blackburn. “I’ll go back to visit,” she says. “But you have to move on sometime.”
Source and Photo Credits: Harper’s Bazaar
