Petula Clark was an uncool 60s pop star on the rise when, 50 years ago today, she held on to Harry Belafonte’s arm on US television, and sparked a race relations furore

Had you asked anyone in 1968 to pick the British female singer most likely to become embroiled in a race-related TV scandal, no one would have said Petula Clark. Not “Pet”. Not pop’s prim Miss Jean Brodie to the St Trinian’s brass of Sandie, Cilla and Lulu. Not the “Singing Sweetheart” of the wireless era.

Clark’s elocutionary voice was first immortalised on shellac in 1949 and filed under “easy listening” ever since, whether it was her first UK No 1, Sailor, in 1961, or her signature anthem Downtown. The latter swam with the tide of the Beatles-led British Invasion to top the US charts in early 1965, helping her become the first British female singer to win a Grammy. That it was also written by the man later responsible for the theme to Neighbours, Tony Hatch, says much about Clark’s immunity to the Vidal Sassoon cool of her younger, earthier pop peers: she was an anomalous supper club chanteuse for whom the 60s often shone but never swung.

And yet it was Clark who, in the decade’s “year of revolt”, found herself at the centre of a media controversy involving race, censorship and endemic bigotry in a newly desegregated yet depressingly divided US. All because she had dared to place her white, English fingers upon the black Caribbean-American arm of her friend and fellow singer, Harry Belafonte.

“It sounds stupid now,” says Steve Binder, the TV director responsible for encouraging their contentious intimacy. “But back then it became an international story in Newsweek and Time magazine. It wouldn’t even have been an incident if the show’s sponsor hadn’t said anything. Petula touched Harry’s arm and the next thing they went bonkers.”

Binder was a 35-year-old pop TV veteran when he was hired by NBC to direct Clark’s first one-hour US TV special. The sponsor was Plymouth motors, a division of Chrysler, and the catalyst for all the ensuing hullabaloo was its head of advertising: a 49-year-old decorated US Air Force pilot and former second world war PoW named Doyle Lott.

Her eyes are tearing up, Harry’s eyes are tearing up and Petula becomes so emotional that she holds Harry’s forearm Steve Binder

Lott’s military record almost certainly had something to do with his evident opposition to Clark’s choice of guest star. Once the “King of Calypso”, by 1968 Belafonte was using his celebrity to become a prominent civil rights activist. That February, he’d stood in for Johnny Carson as host of the Tonight Show, discussing Vietnam, poverty and racial inequality with political ally Bobby Kennedy, and his close friend, Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Belafonte’s liberal, anti-Vietnam stance wouldn’t have sat well with Lott’s Silver Star medal for valour in combat, nor his waiting plot in Arlington cemetery. Whatever his motives – political or racial – from the moment Binder first brought Belafonte’s name into discussion, Lott attempted to veto him.

“As soon as Belafonte said yes to the show, I rang up the ad agency to tell them the good news,” says Binder. “They said: ‘You’ve got Belafonte! Wow!’ Because at that time Harry had more or less stopped doing variety TV. So this was a real coup, to have Belafonte back singing on screen. But then two minutes later, I get another call from a different guy at the agency who tells me: ‘We have to get rid of Belafonte.’ I was confused. And the guy said: ‘Off the record, the reason is Lott’s a bigot. He doesn’t want a black person on the show.’ I was speechless.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Harry Belafonte, centre, with Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King. Photograph: Ivan Massar/AP

The head of Chrysler overruled Lott and allowed the network to keep Belafonte on the show. Lott, however, wasn’t to be outdone. For the show’s filming, he took residence in a green room near the soundstage, following along on a monitor.

The Belafonte sequence was a 10-minute solo spot with minimal staging, climaxing with Clark’s reappearance on screen for a duet of her own song On the Path of Glory, a sober lament on the horrors of war. “NBC were nervous,” notes Binder. “We had to convince them that it wasn’t about Vietnam but about war in general.”

Apologies in these situations mean nothing. Inside, he feels the same way because of how I look on the outside Harry Belafonte

The script said nothing about Clark and Belafonte touching. “It was improvised,” Binder says. “The first few takes, Petula walked up and stopped a few steps behind Harry, but I felt it wasn’t working. So I said to Petula: ‘Just go right up alongside him and stand shoulder to shoulder.’ So we do this take and all of a sudden it starts happening. Her eyes are tearing up, Harry’s eyes are tearing up and Petula becomes so emotional that she reaches over and physically holds Harry’s forearm. And I’m tearing up too, thinking: ‘This is great! This is the take!’ And then it all blew up.”

No sooner had Binder cried “cut” than Lott stormed crimson-faced out of the green room and on to the set. “Screaming,” says Binder. “Because a white woman had touched a black man on screen. Seriously! It sounds comical but he was yelling ‘This will never get on TV!’ and ‘We’ll all lose our jobs!’ and demanding that I reshoot it, which I point blank refused to do. He was literally shouting ‘You’ll never work in this town again’ and threatening to fire me.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Forget my best interests’ ... Petula Clark. Photograph: Photoshot/Getty Images

In his 2011 autobiography, My Song, Belafonte admits he was prepared to acquiesce to Lott’s demands, if only for the sake of damage limitation to Clark’s stateside reputation. “Perhaps, I told her, we should pick another fight, another day – at least while her best interests were at stake. ‘Forget my best interests,’ she said. ‘What would you do?’ I grinned. ‘I’d nail the bastard.’ ‘So we will,’ she replied.”

Petula Clark, singer – portrait of the artist Read more

Binder and Clark’s husband, Claude Wolff, grabbed the tapes while Lott was on the phone, and had a technician erase all the earlier edits. “The only one NBC had, the only one they could broadcast, was the last one where they touched. When Lott came off the phone and found out, he went even more nuts.”

The irony to Lott’s pitiful wrath was that its ultimate victim was himself. A whole month before Petula was scheduled to be broadcast, it was Belafonte who took the story to the papers and generated a media storm, publicly disgracing Lott for what he described as “the most outrageous case of racism I have ever seen in this business”. A mortified Lott pleaded he’d merely been “tired” and had “overreacted to the staging, not to any feeling of discrimination”. He also telephoned Belafonte, offering an apology. It wasn’t accepted.

“Apologies in these situations mean nothing,” Belafonte later explained. “They change neither that man’s heart nor my skin. Inside, he feels the same way because of how I look on the outside. He can apologise for the balance of his life but it won’t alter the attitude he has today. And a man with such an attitude has to be exposed.”

An embarrassed Chrysler further distanced itself from Lott, insisting the matter “resulted solely from the reaction of a single individual and by no means represents the Plymouth division’s attitude or policy on such matters”. When Petula was finally broadcast on Tuesday 2 April 1968, “the touch” intact, Lott had been relieved of his post and moved in the company.

Clark’s acceptance into the US entertainment mainstream continued with a Golden Globe nomination for her first Hollywood musical, Finian’s Rainbow, and the following year’s summer season at Caesar’s Palace. Binder similarly prospered, earning himself a place in rock’n’roll history as the director of NBC’s next big TV special, rescuing Elvis Presley from the brink of obsolescence.

Most viewers who saw Clark’s hand caress Belafonte’s arm that evening in April 1968 probably wondered what all the fuss had been about. Yet within 48 hours, America’s racial tensions were violently cast into far sharper relief by a single gunshot in Memphis: King’s assassination. One week to the day that Belafonte appeared on prime-time TV screens with Clark hanging on his arm, he was stood at an Atlanta graveside with another female hand clinging to his elbow: that of Martin Luther King’s widow, Coretta.