Olivia by Tim Ewbank Page B

clear was that they were finished. Olivia was adamant it was over, a fait accompli.
    Faced with an unyielding Olivia, the following morning Bruce felt he had no option but to move out of the house at Hadley Common that had been such a happy home for them both. He never went back. With a heavy heart and still shell-shocked by such an abrupt, unforeseen ending to his relationship with Olivia, he moved into a flat he had bought some years before in the middle of Soho, just a stone’s throw from the London Palladium.
    Bruce was still very much in love with Olivia and he couldn’t get her out of his mind. At home in his flat he played her records just so he could hear her voice, and at night he found he couldn’t stop his feet from taking him to the Prince of Wales Theatre where Olivia was appearing in concert. There he would forlornly watch her on stage and mourn the love he had lost. He was in complete torment. ‘I went haywire,’ he said. ‘I had nothing to live for.’
    Having never had a drink until he was twenty-one, Bruce now started hitting the bottle in a big way to drown his sorrows. ‘My world just fell apart,’ he recalled. ‘It took me two full years to get over it. After a while I would sit at home and drink a bottle of brandy a day on my own - not just once, but day after day, so I put on weight.’
    And when the house at Hadley Common was sold, he increasingly felt desperately alone and that he had nobody to turn to - no parents, no grandparents, no relations; his ex-wife Anne had moved away to Majorca with their son Dwayne after the divorce.
    ‘Having no family hits hardest when things are really bad, like when Olivia and I broke up,’ he said. ‘The sense of isolation and loneliness can be overwhelming. Sometimes I sat and talked to myself because there was simply no one else.’
    Bruce’s misery was complete when he discovered towards the end of May that Olivia had been having an affair with a famous singer, believed to be Sacha Distel, and he was unfortunate to find them together at the flat Olivia had moved into in St John’s Wood, round the corner from her sister Rona.
    The break-up for Bruce was painful enough, but on a professional level it could hardly have come at a more inopportune time either. He was in the middle of producing an album for Olivia and was also scheduled to go on a Marvin, Welch and Farrar tour. He felt that in the circumstances he could hardly continue to work on Olivia’s album and handed over production duties to John Farrar. And given the amount he was drinking, Bruce felt he wouldn’t be in any fit state to undertake any sort of a tour with John and Hank. He says that at his lowest point he was downing two bottles of brandy a day as well as wine.
    In July, heartbroken and at the end of his tether, Bruce decided life no longer held anything for him, and he was ready to end it all. With typical precision, he informed friends that he was going away for the weekend and cancelled his milk and newspaper orders before swallowing some barbiturates and drinking copious amounts of brandy. The last thing he remembers, he says, was the view from the window of his flat, high up above Soho, of a vivid red evening sky stretching across London’s rooftops. The next thing he knew, he was waking up in the Middlesex hospital after coming out of a coma.
    For all Bruce’s meticulous planning, he had forgotten one small thing - to cancel the window cleaner. The caretaker of Bruce’s block had let the cleaner into his flat with a master key and, after finding Bruce comatose on the floor, he had called an ambulance in the nick of time.
    Bruce remained in hospital for several weeks, during which time Olivia visited him twice. She had career commitments she could not break, including the filming for the BBC of a Cliff Richard comedy thriller called The Case , and a tour with Cliff of the Far East in which Hank Marvin and John Farrar would also feature, but augmented by former Shadows bassist