Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
The day my Bobby told me he LOVED someone else
In this heart-rending extract from her memoirs, the real Tina Moore tells how her life as one half of Britain’s golden couple fell apart, as we’ll see in TV’s Tina & Bobby this week
There I was standing around at the Ilford Palais dance hall listening to the band play Blue Moon – ‘without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own’, in the words of the song. It was 1957 and I was 15 going on 16. Suddenly this blond boy was in front of me, asking for a dance. He said he was there with fellow apprentices from West Ham but I knew nothing about football and wasn’t impressed. In fact, I thought he was a bit square. I agreed to a date, but stood him up. Then one day I spotted him in the street when I was in a taxi with my mother. ‘He looks nice,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you invite him home for tea?’ That’s how it started.
Though I was a ‘nice’ kind of girl, with my grammar school education and elocution lessons, it was my sense of humour he fell for. I could make him laugh, and this intense, inhibited football prodigy needed that. I brought him out of his shell. The son of a cockney gas fitter, he’d led a very disciplined life compared to most boys.
His mother Doris was strongminded and fiercely protective. She and her husband, also called Bob, were upright, God-fearing people. The first time I stayed the night at their house I was put in the spare room with a warning from her that, ‘Any girl who gets “My Robert” into trouble will have me to deal with.’ But the truth was that I was a complete innocent. Bobby and I did our courting in the pre-pill era. He was a terrific dancer and at the Palais we used to kiss in time to the music. It was heady stuff, but that was it.
For all his macho credentials as a footballer, the toughest of the tough on the pitch, in private he was very soft and romantic. He would send me flowers, leave love notes in the pocket of my coat and call me ‘Princess’. After we were married he’d help me do my hair and I’d be thinking, ‘If the fans could see him now. The captain of England is bleaching my roots.’
With England’s World Cup victory in 1966, our lives could not have been better as we became part of the fabric of the 60s. A national newspaper listed me, a housewife from Essex, among ‘Ten of the Best-Looking Women in England’. Bond Street shops would loan me designer clothes. Taxi drivers wouldn’t charge me. I could ring up a restaurant and say, ‘Tina Moore here, can I have a table?’ and the answer was never ‘No’. We were the First Couple of Football. We had two children, a wonderful house, money. What could go wrong?
There was one blip in our otherwise perfect life – Bobby’s drinking. In many ways he was a paragon among husbands. He was not only immaculately dressed but obsessively neat. The jumpers in his wardrobe were hung in sequence from dark colours to light. But he loved a good Boys’ Night Out. Down would go lager, brandy, gin, crème de menthe, and he’d become mischievous, irresponsible Bobby. Even on our honeymoon in Spain some of his football mates turned up and they all got plastered.
Every Christmas Eve the turkey that West Ham gave each of its players as a present was late arriving home as he and the boys celebrated. It would be spotted sitting on the bar, with Bobby ordering a lager for himself ‘and a gin and tonic for the bird’.
His drunken exploits rarely made the newspapers. But one did. West Ham had be en in Blackpool for a match, which was postponed because of bad weather. The boys went for a drink and ended up in a nightclub. Bobby was adamant all they did was sip lager for an hour and they were back in their hotel by 1am. Unfortunately, the next day the match went ahead after all and West Ham lost 4- 0. A fan had witnessed the players out clubbing and blamed their night on the tiles for the team’s thrashing on the pitch. He took his story to the papers, who quoted the hotel porter as saying Bobby and the boys had returned at 3am with some girls and ordered champagne.
Bobby denied this and I believed him. There were never any stories of him womanising, though the opportunities for him to stray were endless. I knew how attractive he was to women, but I was completely confident in Bobby and in my marriage.
What changed everything was when Bobby retired as a player and, for reasons I’ve never understood, those at the top of the game abandoned him. It seemed a foregone conclusion he’d go into management but it didn’t happen. He shook hands with Elton John, the cha i rman of Watford, for the man ager’s job there but it didn’t materialise. He increasingly withdrew into himself as he received knockback after knockback. He’d wake with a scream from a recurring nightmare. ‘I’m running in sand,’ he would tell me. ‘I can’t get anywhere.’
The golden Bobby that everyone worshipped was slowly dying inside. One night he took me out to dinner, poured two glasses of champagne and said, ‘Tina, I love you. You deserve the finest things in life but I can’t do that any more. I can’t afford it.’ His spirit seemed crushed. It was then that our marriage hit the rocks.
To make money he was working the after-dinner speech circuit with the comedian Kenny Lynch, and would
‘I physically collapsed. I lost 20lb in as many days’
sometimes not come home at night, saying he was staying at Kenny’s. One day a close friend of mine said to me, ‘Tina, Bobby is having an affair.’ She and her husband had run into him at Tramp, the London nightclub, and he was with another woman. I was so stunned I could hardly speak. When I confronted him, he denied it and dismissed the friend who’d told me as ‘a vicious, vindictive bitch’. He convinced me. I decided my job was to lift his spirits in whatever way I could. He was spending more time away searching for work. He was in Australia one day when I rang him and the phone was answered by a sleepy female voice. I thought I’d dialled a wrong number but said, ‘Can I speak to Bobby Moore?’
‘One moment,’ she said, yawning, and seconds later, an even more sleepy Bobby came to the phone. I put the receiver down and felt sick. Bobby rang back in a panic, explaining that the woman was the sister of the man who owned the flat he was staying in. ‘I don’t believe you,’ I said, and hung up. I was beside myself with shock. When he got home there was something different about him. He couldn’t look me in the eye. He said his life was in a mess and he was worried about money, but he insisted there was no one else. ‘I love you more than anything,’ he told me. ‘You and the children are my world.’ But I persisted. ‘Have you met anyone?’ Finally came the admission, ‘Yes.’ I was devastated.
He refused to tell me anything about her, but I sensed he was vacillating between the two of us, and I was determined to win him back. He too was adamant he could work through his problem. But the atmos- phere between us grew so icy we could have chilled champagne in it.
Eventually he told me he was in love with this other woman. I physically collapsed. I couldn’t eat and lost 20lb in as many days. I begged, cajoled, lost all my dignity. I reached my lowest point sobbing my story to a stranger on a bus. I thought my world had ended.
Bobby was suffering too. He would pick arguments, walk out and not come back until the next day. He was leading a double life, which for a fundamentally decent man like him was a struggle. We’d been together for 25 years and neither of us could accept it was over. We struggled on. He was away a lot working but it was worse when he was at home. I struggled to control my temper. He cried a lot. At other times he said awful things about me and our marriage that I found very hard to bear.
We split up and I handled it badly. I drank and smoked and relied on sleeping pills, hoping against hope that I could manipulate him into coming back to me. We went on like this for more than a year before I realised I had to get my act together. In 1986 I braced myself for the final split and told him I wanted a divorce. ‘I’m going to start a new chapter,’ I said. And I did. I began the life of a single woman, travelling, going on holiday on my own, overcoming the loneliness I feared. Slowly I healed.
Bobby died from cancer in 1993. He was just 51. I had moved to Florida by then, and on the day of his funeral I went to a church in Miami and said a prayer for him. I’d written a last letter to him before he died, telling him he’d always have a special place in my heart. I might even have said, ‘I love you.’ I reassured him that whatever had happened didn’t matter. All the harsh words and lies and tears were of no consequence. I wanted him to be at peace and I wanted to be at peace with him. But I couldn’t stop crying. I wept for all the years that had gone. For that night at the Ilford Palais and the beautiful boy who had asked me to dance. ‘Blue Moon, I saw you standing alone...’ Bobby Moore: By The Person Who Knew Him Best by Tina Moore (Harper Sport, £9.99). To order a copy for £7.99 please call 0844 571 0640 or visit mail bookshop.co.uk. P&P free on orders over £15. Offer valid until 4 February. Tina & Bobby, Friday, 9pm, ITV.