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New York Daily News

May 4, 2009

The Susan Boyle story: If only she could freeze-frame this moment

By David Hinckley

Singing sensation Susan Boyle is favored to win the reality show "Britain's Got Talent."

If the world wants Susan Boyle's story to forever remain as soaring and inspiring as it feels on the video clip that more than 200 million people have watched, we need to move in right now and freeze-frame that moment.

Boyle's audition for "Britain's Got Talent," where she sang "I Dreamed a Dream," was a moment of pure unblemished exuberance. This ordinary middle-aged woman in an ordinary dress, unknown outside her small village in Scotland, catapulted herself in five minutes onto an international stage ordinarily reserved for those who meet a carefully promoted standard of elegance and glamour.

It's no mystery to anyone who watches that video clip how Susan Boyle made hundreds of millions of people just plain feel good. But no triumph comes without a cost, and for Boyle, part of the price is having her life suddenly peeled back, while just as suddenly having no idea where it will go from here.

Her life was not, it turns out, such a happy story before, and there are many ways it could become a troubling story again. Which is why the only way to ensure that one moment remains uncompromised would be to erase all the time before and stop all the time after.

That's just how life works, a fact of which Susan Boyle is well aware. She was born June 15, 1961, in the small Scottish town of Blackburn, West Lothian, and brought home to the modest "council house" where she lives today.

She says she still sleeps in the same room. Her parents were Irish Catholics who moved to Scotland so her father Patrick could work as a storeman at the British Leyland factory.

Her mother Bridget was a shorthand typist, but spent much of her time at home raising 10 children – six boys, four girls. Her mother was 47 when Susan was born, six years after her next-youngest sibling George.

A difficult birth left Susan briefly deprived of oxygen, leaving her with a learning disability. In the whirlwind of interviews she has given since her "Talent" audition aired in Britain on April 11, Boyle hasn't spoken in much detail about her childhood.

But as the baby in a family of 10, she seems to have felt distant from siblings who in some cases were old enough to be her parents and gradually over the years all moved away.

Two brothers who have since surfaced – George, now 53, and John, now 59 – remember Susan as a shy child, an inclination likely reinforced by her difficulty in learning and thus with fitting in.

In early photos, Boyle looks like a typical Scottish child, with a broad, friendly face. But her learning disability made her different and children being a cruel lot, her classmates took to calling her "Susie Simple."

In interviews, she has alternately suggested the taunts and the bullying did or didn't bother her. The former seems more likely, and George remembers she often withdrew even from the family, shutting herself in her room with her best friend, her record player.

She also liked to sing, encouraged by her mother, though she recalls being too shy to do it in public when she was young. When she was around 10, say her brothers with some chagrin, she discovered and fell in love with Donny Osmond, endlessly singing along with his hit tune "Puppy Love."

She also loved the "Grease" soundtrack, particularly "You're the One That I Want," and her later repertoire suggests she developed a fondness for both pop and show tunes. When she was 12, again at her mother's urging, she joined the choir at Lady of St. Lourdes Church in Blackburn.

Through her teenage years she sang in a number of school musicals, she told interviewers, though she said she didn't remember any of the names. At 18 she signed on for a six-month position as a trainee cook at West Lothian College.

When the six months ended she left, marking the end of her professional employment career. Otherwise, when her school days were over, she simply stayed home.

It's part of what some old-school Irish families jokingly call the quota system for large families: One daughter stays home to care for the parents, one son becomes a priest. She did continue singing.

A grainy videotape has surfaced of a 25-year-old Boyle singing for her extended family in the local Welcome Pub for her parents' wedding anniversary. She's singing "I Don't Know How To Love Him" from "Jesus Christ Superstar," and the video shows Boyle standing in what looks to be almost a random spot while children and adults wander back and forth.

She sang more formally at the Happy Valley Hotel in Blackburn, and says she became a regular at karaoke pubs around town. Contrary to the romantic notion that Boyle's lovely voice was a deeply hidden secret before "Britain's Got Talent," she worked on it and showed it off frequently.

She took lessons with voice coach Fred O'Neil and attended Edinburgh Acting School, again with the strong encouragement of her mother. She sang at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and says she did some acting, including a role in "Romeo and Juliet."

She also sang for herself just to sing, she has told interviewers. She particularly loved to sing in the shower, because of the acoustics from the echoes off the tile. That's a fondness she shares with, among others, New York's street-corner vocal harmony groups of the 1950s, who often rehearsed in school bathrooms.

In 1995, Boyle traveled to Glasgow to audition for an earlier British "reality" talent show, Michael Barrymore's "My Kind of People."

She sang "I Don't Know How to Love Him," while Barrymore clowned, pointed, and fell on the floor. With her rowdy hair all pulled on top, corralled by a thick band, she did look a strange sight, and Barrymore clearly figured this was another goofy, deluded singer whose only value was to become his comic foil.

A short amateur video of that audition suggests she didn't sound bad.

It also suggests Barrymore was paying no attention, and she was sent home. Perhaps the most interesting moment in the tape comes when he lies on the floor in back of her and she gives a couple of short backward kicks, as if to get rid of this pest while she's doing something important, singing.

Four years later, after her father died, she spent what she calls a good part of her savings to record a professional demo tape that included two songs, "Cry Me a River" and "Killing Me Softly With His Song." She shopped the tapes with no apparent success, eventually donating "Cry Me A River" for a local CD commemorating the millennium. A thousand copies were pressed.

After she failed to get past Barrymore on "My Kind of People," her former voice coach O'Neil says Boyle declined her mother's suggestion that she try out for "The X-Factor," another Simon Cowell talent show.

She had concluded, said O'Neil, that the winners of these competitions were chosen for looks and style, not singing ability. As years went by, and the vestiges of Susie Simple never quite faded away, Boyle became known to some in her village as the odd if harmless lady who stayed home to care for her mother. That changed, she has said, when her mother died in 2007, at the age of 91.

Boyle was left alone in the house with her cat, Pebbles, and a deep depression. Her brother George says she would go three or four days without leaving the house or answering the phone. She also says that over those months the teasing from village youths picked up.

They would dare each other to go knock on the crazy lady's door, and then run away. For a time she stopped singing, she said, until she decided in August 2008 to sign up for the "Britain's Got Talent" audition because her mother would have wanted her to.

She passed a preliminary audition and in January made her way to the regional round in Glasgow, where she sang the five minutes that changed her life. The Susan Boyle who has chatted with dozens of interviewers since then was clearly "gobsmacked" at first by her instant celebrity.

When she was asked if she'd never been kissed, she agreed, like someone eager to please a questioner who seemed to want that answer. Later, when that and similarly catty questions came up, she said her earlier remarks were "just banter" and politely declined to respond – clearly realizing that if she were to maintain any sort of privacy, she needed to get some "no trespassing" signs up fast.

Sure enough, the British papers soon found a neighbor, 59-year-old Walter Smith, who said he had hugged and kissed her a number of times, all quite innocently, when she needed comfort after the death of her mother.

She picked up the press game pretty quickly, cheerfully doled out harmless quirky details like her habit of keeping money in an empty whiskey bottle, her preference for vinyl records over CDs and the fact that while she occasionally enjoys a glass of wine, she prefers lemonade.

As a faithful Catholic who always attended daily Mass, she now says one of the worst downsides of celebrity is that some days she just can't wade through the media camped outside her door to get there. In general, though, she has come across as a cheerful, pleasant, accommodating woman.

She may find the attention at times overwhelming and a touch bewildering, but after years on stages, from karaoke pubs to church choir risers to "Britain's Got Talent," she doesn't mind at all that people are interested in listening to her. Nor, village louts notwithstanding, does she come across as even slightly crazy. Her taste in dresses may seem mundane and her hairstyle free-form, but the home where she has done some of her interviews looks well-tended, clean and orderly. Not a Grey Garden in sight.

In an odd sense, Susan Boyle has taken a very traditional path to her present position. She began singing early and through lean and unpromising times never gave it up. She's a study in persistence, among other things, and she hardly came from nowhere.

She put in her time. Where she goes next is an open question. She's had a modest makeover in hair, clothing and eyebrows, and like her every move right now, that act has sparked heated discussion. Cowell cautioned her to "be who you are, not who you want to be." Snippy as that sounds, his larger point was 100 percent correct – that next time around, she won't sneak up on anybody or ride through on any wave of elation.

The bar will be far higher, and the pressure she felt only from herself last time will now be coming from millions of people who want this fairy tale to have a happy ending. As if that weren't enough, the British papers are also reporting that her brothers, among others, are pressing her to quit "Britain's Got Talent" right now and cut a CD. The iron will never be hotter, they argue, and since contestants can't make commercial recordings until the show ends, precious months will be forever lost.

Some recent anonymous reports say Boyle has thought about that possibility herself, though she's also been quoted as saying she's committed to the show. That would seem wise. Should she leave the show, she'd turn off her international spotlight, but it makes her look calculating and eager to cash in, notions very much at odds with every romantic notion the "I Dreamed a Dream" performance conveyed.

In some ways, what's happening with Boyle now is a classic case of being careful what you wish for. Much as Susan Boyle wanted people to love her singing, she probably didn't think the media manifestation of that admiration could prevent her from attending Mass. Much as she must appreciate friendly, admiring words after years of bullying and thoughtless teasing, she may not need regular calls from sudden good friends, or brothers, asking her what she's going to do, or telling her what they think she should do.

It would be interesting to know how many of those friends and relatives called regularly in the weeks after her mother died. Still, for all that, there are many ways things could break well from here for Susan Boyle. She could win the competition.

She could make records people will love. She could spend the rest of her life respected and honored as a person who does a valuable thing very well. No matter what else happens, she will always have that moment when she made time stand still for millions of strangers.

Too bad we can't all freeze-frame it.