She had already missed her investiture at Buckingham Palace, a highly prestigious event in which the "Queen of Soul" would have met the other queen. But it's not as if the former Mary Isabel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien needed pomp and circumstance to remind her, or anyone, how much she had influenced pop history. Some of her hits from the '60s, such as "I Only Want to Be with You," "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me," and "Wishin' and Hopin'," are as familiar today as they were when London was mod and Springfield was stunning the pre-Madonna world with her encrusted mascara, bisexuality and an architectural beehive hairdo that could weather the greatest heartbreak.

Springfield's battle with breast cancer began in 1994, just as she was about to embark on a publicity tour for what would be her final album, A Very Fine Love. Details are sketchy - Springfield, despite her extroverted appearance, had always been a very private person - but apparently she noticed an indentation on one breast and had it checked out at the Royal Marsden, a well-known London cancer clinic. She got a second opinion in the United States, where she had lived for 15 years during a career lull.

"The shock was enormous," she told the Daily Mail after her diagnosis. But she quickly recovered with equanimity. "I shed about three tears in the hallway and then said, 'let's have lunch.'"

After a lumpectomy, six months of chemo and a course of radiation, she characterized her health with a thumbs-up. "Most of the time I felt really good," she said in spring 1995, right after treatment. "[Health care professionals] make you part of the cure, not part of the problem. I always knew that once they give you the all-clear that's the hard part, because you 've had so much help and the only demands are to find some courage, keep faith and show up. Then it's about returning to life and its demands. I do believe there's a mindset in dealing with breast cancer which helps. My family was from Ireland, and I believe the Irish fighter is better than the person who feels victimized. Why me? Why not?"

In summer 1996, the cancer was back. Springfield endured another three months of chemo in late 1998, and there were signs that the former folkie was getting her house in order. She sold off the rights to her catalog of 275 songs to the Prudential Insurance Company for approximately $4 million. She moved from the converted granary in Oxfordshire where she'd lived since her initial diagnosis into a heavily secured mansion 30 miles outside London, on the Thames. The new quarters were magnificently armed for battle - they had double gates and an electrified fence, neither of which would protect her from the ultimate intruder.

Like most careers, Springfield's had its ups and downs, including a long bout with substance abuse. Yet there was always a hand that reached out and pulled her back into the zeitgeist. In 1987, it was the Pet Shop Boys who sought her out for a duet on "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" In 1994, Quentin Tarantino put her "Son of a Preacher Man" on the rabidly successful soundtrack to the movie Pulp Fiction.

The story goes that Dusty's first band, the Springfields, broke up, demoralized, after seeing the Beatles at The Cavern in Liverpool. All these years later, Dusty Springfield wound up alongside Paul McCartney at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, equally important to music history and in a class by herself.

Jami Bernard
Published in the June 1999 issue of MAMM magazine, which is dedicated to "Women, Cancer and Community," (Volume 2, Issue 12).
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Thanks to David Torresen for posting this article on DUSTYMAIL.