Vicki Wickham hit it off with Dusty Springfield the moment they met in 1962. "We were both around the same age, we had a lot in common," she remembers. "We would have dinner most days, go to each other's friends' houses to play Monopoly and Scrabble. And we would play stupid games like Truth or Dare. I remember once we made her go downstairs to the local launderette and kiss the first man she saw. We were very juvenile and silly."

For a while they shared a flat in London's Westbourne Grove. It was a friendship that was to last almost 40 years, until Dusty's death from cancer in March 1999.

Vicki Wickham is best known as the woman behind Dusty Springfield. She has gone on to manage many of the music world's big names--Morrissey, Holly Johnson, Patti Labelle, Marc Almond. A legend in the music industry, Wickham was one of the founders of the Sixties cult show Ready, Steady, Go!, where Dusty worked as a guest-presenter in 1963, before debuting her first solo hit, "I Only Want To Be With You", on the programme.

An early shared admission made the two women close from the beginning. "We both knew we were gay right from the start and I think that helped enormously. We were totally platonic, though, which I think is why it lasted. We really were just mates and because of that she could tell me about her affairs and I could tell her about mine." Didn't she ever wish she had been Dusty's lover too? "Not remotely! She really wasn't my type and I'm sure I wasn't hers," Wickham laughs.

New York-based Wickham still looks like rock royalty with her hippy, louche glamour: shaggy, silver hair; eyes hidden behind dark glasses; a black "roadie" outfit. Her voice complements the look--with rough but rounded vowels, she sounds just like a likeable version of Joanna Lumley's Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous, peppering her anecdotes with "yeah", "great" and "brilliant" as snorted asides.

Now approaching 60, she has a hell of a lot of great names to drop for "somebody who doesn't remember things very well". Her partner is Nona Hendryx, singer with the group Labelle, who had the ultimate Seventies disco hit, "Lady Marmalade": "I've lived with Nona for about 30 years--for ever!" she smiles.

As well as continuing to work with Marc Almond and managing Dusty's ongoing business, Wickham also manages Hendryx's career from their Upper West Side home. "Nona's still making records, she's writing music for a play on Broadway, she's producing people, writing. It's brilliant."

This is the first time Wickham has spoken on the record about her relationship with Nona and she herself didn't "come out" in print until last year. It's something she and her friend "Dust", as she calls her, both felt quite strongly about--that it shouldn't need saying.

"Dusty knew people realised she was gay. What good would it have done to make a big public announcement?" says Wickham, "When I was her manager I agreed with her: I always felt it was nobody's business. And anyway there is still a double standard. If a big female star suddenly said 'I'm gay', I think it would kill her career dead in its tracks, I really do."

Nonetheless, she says, one of the highlights of both of their careers was Dusty's comeback with the Pet Shop Boys--"What Have I Done To Deserve This"--in 1987, Dusty's first top 10 hit in more than 20 years. It confirmed her increasingly obvious status as a gay icon, and showed Springfield that her sexuality had been accepted by her public.

Going back to their early days together, it's a bit of a joke asking Vicki Wickham who she hung out with in the Sixties--she knew everyone. "Marc Bolan. Jimi Hendrix. The Who, of course: Keith and Peter were absolutely heaven. The Stones--mmm, always liked Brian, Mick. The Animals--loved Eric. Otis Redding--I thought he was the best. Ike and Tina."

She was truly in the thick of it: she co-wrote "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me," one of Dusty's biggest hits (which was later a number one for Elvis) and produced the first black music show for British television (with The Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas and Stevie Wonder: Dusty presented). The only person who could equal (if not beat) Vicki's famous-people-I-have-known list is Penny Valentine, the acclaimed music journalist who is her co-author on "Dancing With Demons, The Authorised Biography Of Dusty Springfield," which is out this month.

Wickham says she started out as "not remotely a music fan" ("In the Fifties I listened to the most dreadful Alma Cogan songs--embarrassing!") and fell into the business completely by accident. She came from a sedate Berkshire background: "My dad was a farmer and my mum had been a nurse. I have to say, I was the squarest, most boring person in the world. I hadn't a clue fashion or anything."

Straight out of secretarial college, she worked as an assistant on a couple of radio programmes then got a job as secretary to television's head of entertainment, who had just come up with the idea of Ready, Steady, Go! Aged 20, and with "absolutely no idea who The Beatles were", Wickham worked on the pilot in 1962. By the time the show launched a year later she was producing, writing scripts and booking the guests. Wickham told presenter Cathy McGowan about Biba ("I'm no good with fashion for me but I can do other people") and shopped at Mary Quant for Dusty.

"It was an incredible time because everybody was starting out," she remembers, "It wasn't at all sophisticated: everybody just knew everybody, we all went to the same clubs and parties. We didn't realise how fantastic it was because we were just with our mates. And now I look back and think: 'Oh my God.' I really was at several parties with Jimi Hendrix. We sat and chatted. How brilliant. Yeah!"

According to Wickham, there was very rarely any bitchiness or rivalry around the programme. "I can't remember ever having a run-in with anybody," she says, "Nobody was mean and everybody was just happy to be there. There were very few people I didn't like. Van Morrison was probably the only difficult person," she says in a low voice, tapping her fingers on the table excitedly, "and Nina Simone terrified me: she had a real presence. On the show they made me tell her she was only going to do one number, not two. She wasn't pleased."

Didn't things ever get nasty with all the drugs that must have been flying around? "Oh no! Of course, they were taking loads of drugs, but they were sharing their drugs! It was like a big party. They were all just thrilled to be in a pop group, most of them, and to be on television. A lot of them came from the same backgrounds, working- class families, and suddenly to have some money was brilliant. Although I think they only went home with about GBP 15 each."

Wickham left Ready, Steady, Go! in 1967 for New York, where she thought she was going to be "a big-shot in TV--but that didn't happen". Instead she ended up running the New York office that had just signed Jimi Hendrix and Marsha Hunt. There she met Patti Labelle and the Bluebelles, and agreed to manage them--although she had no experience. She was behind their worldwide hit "Lady Marmalade (Voulez-Vous Couchez Avec Moi Ce Soir)" in 1975. "Patti Labelle is actually very prudish and when she heard it meant 'Will you sleep with me tonight?', she was going, 'Oh my God, what will people think?' But Nona Hendryx egged her on, and the hit was born.

Dusty Springfield spent a lot of the Seventies in America too. It was the worst decade of Springfield's life. She began drinking heavily, became addicted first to pills and then to cocaine. She was in and out of rehab and psychiatric wards.

"You could so clearly see what was happening and obviously like any friend you would try and say, look, this is not a good idea," says Wickham."You would think, I've heard this before, I cannot keep doing it. There were many times I would say to her: if you don't get yourself together, don't call me."

Thank God, says Wickham, she did not share Dusty's addictions: "I was really lucky. I mean, if it had been the two of us we would have been disastrous. I drank happily through the Sixties, became a very bad drunk, but I did stop. We started drinking together really, and I dropped out, which I'm sure was a huge disappointment to her."

Their friendship held strong, however, partly, says Wickham, because although Dusty could be a right mess, she was always there when you needed her--even when she was fighting cancer at the end: "At various dramatic times in my life she picked me up and looked after me. I've always had a lot of problems with migraines and no matter how sick she was herself, Dusty would always be asking me 'How's your headache?' She really was a great friend."

Sunday Express
August 13, 2000