Cilla Black remembered by John Madejski
I first met Cilla in Barbados, at a party given by my friend, the entrepreneur Eddie Healey. I was chatting to her with a glass of red wine in my hand when I noticed that the music system was smoking away, about to catch fire. I shouted over to Eddie, who charged across the room, bumped into me and I tipped my wine all over Cilla, which was incredibly embarrassing. I apologised profusely, as you do, and gave her my card, saying let me know what the damage is, fearing the worst because it was a designer dress, no doubt. I never heard from her, of course: she was far too much of a lady to get in touch with a dry cleaning bill.
About a year later, I was having lunch in Le Caprice, around the corner from the Ritz, when I saw Cilla with a gaggle of girlfriends. I went over to say hello and asked her if she remembered me. “You bet I remember you,” she said. And that’s how our friendship started.
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She was such a lovely person and she was such good company you couldn’t help but love her. We became very good friends – but that is all we wererather than anything more. Her husband, Bobby, had passed away a few years before we met. Obviously, he was the love of her life. She was a good Catholic girl; she’d been brought up properly as people were in those days and she was very loyal to his memory. She was still grieving.
We thought it was rather funny that the newspapers were convinced we were romantically involved. I remember going with her to a birthday party for Joan Collins’s husband, Percy. We came out afterwards laughing our heads off, holding hands, and we were snapped by the paparazzi. The following Sunday the headline in all the newspapers was “New love...”. We didn’t know each other very well at the time and it could have made our friendship tricky but luckily, because Cilla had such a great sense of humour, we were able to laugh about it. We knew what was true and what wasn’t and in the end the media settled down.
We had some terrific times together: Hogmanay in Scotland, holidays at her house in Barbados. I remember going with a gang of friends to see her playing the “Furry Godmother” in Cinderella at the Adelphi theatre. She came to Reading to watch football with me many times. On one occasion, she had come to my penthouse at the ground to watch Reading play Liverpool and while she was downstairs powdering her nose, Michael Howard arrived. He was a big Liverpool fan and the leader of the Conservative party at the time. I didn’t tell him Cilla was there. As we were chatting, Cilla slowly walked up my spiral staircase and called out, “Surprise, surprise!” His face was a picture. It was wonderful.
There were people wanting to touch her and talk to her wherever she went and I made it my business to look after her
If you asked me to define what it was about her that made her able to command audiences of millions on Saturday night television for so many years, I would say it came down to one thing: personality. She was everybody’s friend. I was not surprised to learn that she was the most Googled person of 2015 in Britain. It is a mark of just how popular and well loved she was. She used to love engaging with her audience and with people she met. One of the reasons I used to hold her hand when we went out together was that it kept the fans at bay a bit. Otherwise, she could easily have been knocked over. There were people wanting to touch her and talk to her wherever she went and I made it my business to look after her. It was not that she didn’t want to meet the fans: she did – and she was very good with them. She had time for everyone.
She loved playing up to her image as the ordinary girl from Liverpool but she also loved the trappings of stardom. She enjoyed every bit of it. She had always wanted to be a star and she had a great life.
I miss her very much. When she died it was a bolt from the blue, very unexpected, and I was sent reeling by the shock.