Sheila could never escape the rumor that she was a man. The 80-year-old star made sad confessions to “Le Monde” about this lie which still costs him…
Sheila has unfortunately never been spared from the tabloid press. One rumor in particular has followed her from the start of her career until today: rumors in the corridors which claim that the singer is a man. The singer knows that she will suffer forever from this rumor of trans identity, as she has just declared in a recent interview with World…
Sheila, a man? “What matters is that we talk about you”
In February 1964, after an exhausting series of concerts, the star, only 17 years old at the time, collapsed on stage. The pace is so hellish that she is forced to rest for several weeks. “I am stressed, exhausted; I lost 15 kilos and I find myself anemic and suffering from hormonal imbalance. I passed out on stage. The doctor demands that I stop“, she told World.
Meanwhile, a rumor explodes: France Sunday title “Sheila transforms into a man“. A real descent into hell for Sheila, who falls prey to the tabloid press and must face the repercussions on those close to her. “The rumor takes hold, runs, grows. It becomes: ‘Sheila is a man.’ My parents are incredulous. Their friends ask them if it’s true“, she remembered.
“In tears“, the interpreter of Spacer confides in his impresario at the time, Claude Carrère, who responds with coldness and indifference: “What matters is that we talk about you“. But the singer, whose real name is Annie Chancel, ends up discovering the truth: it was her producer, in whom she nevertheless trusted, who was “the instigator of the lie” and had deliberately launched this false rumor to the press.
Sheila, faced with the “disaster” of the rumor: “I know that the day I die…”
The lie takes on increasingly delusional proportions. “When I was pregnant, a few years later, people claimed that it was staged and that my stomach was hiding a bag of sea water. So I hid. I feel a feeling of shame. And when I give birth, people insinuate that I bought my little boy in Switzerland. He himself will be harassed at school: ‘Your mother, in fact, is your father!’“, she lamented. More than 60 years later, this rumor still deeply hurts the 80-year-old artist. “I know that the day I die, there will still be people who claim to know the friend of the doctor who allegedly operated on me.“
And to conclude, resignedly: “I have no words to describe the disaster of such a rumor.” In his album Coming from elsewhere, released in 2021, Sheila evokes this painful episode in her life in the song The Rumorwhich she now performs every evening in concert, “with sadness“.
