My darling Cilla, by the tycoon who loved her
In a raw and emotional interview, tycoon Sir John Madejski talks for the first time about their very special 12-year relationship
Little more than a week ago, wealthy philanthropist Sir John Madejski spoke to Cilla Black on the telephone for what was, sadly, to be the final time. ‘i was going to see her on September 11,’ he says. ‘She was coming as my guest to the annual dinner of the Royal Berkshire Show. She said: “You will look after me, won’t you?” i said: “Of course i will. i always do.”’
Sir John, you see, cared deeply for Cilla for 12 years. She was, he says, his ‘soulmate’.
Understandably, he has been in pieces since her desperately sad death in Spain last Saturday, but today he’s holding himself together, determined to protect the memory of the woman he loved.
‘i’m fiercely protective of her. everybody is a human being at the end of the day. it doesn’t matter who they are. everybody is vulnerable.
‘Cilla was a very private person. She had a hell of a lot of dignity. She didn’t want to be in the spotlight all the time. She needed protecting in her life and she needs protecting now. it just upsets me . . .’ the sentence trails away as this warm, charitable man’s face clouds with anger.
Privately, Sir John, 74, co-chairman of Reading Football Club and chancellor of Reading University, is furious over Cilla’s so-called friends who are lining up to spew personal detail — most of it ill-informed — about her failing health.
indeed, some have gone as far as to suggest Cilla was so unhappy she wanted nothing more than to be done with life and join her beloved husband, Bobby, who died of lung cancer 16 years ago. ‘Cilla was not dying to die. Anyway, i t’s nobody’s damn business,’ Sir John says. ‘think of her family — don’t forget she’s got three sons [Bobby, 45, Ben, 41, and Jack, 35].
‘i spoke to Bobby today. Poor chap — he was there with her and he had to break her door down and discover her. He’s still raw, but he’s coping. My heart goes out to those kids.’
He shakes his head. ‘the repatriation and all the rest of it. it’s all such a nightmare, especially when you have to deal with authorities abroad.’
Sir John was on his way out for lunch on Sunday when a friend called to say they’d heard on the radio Cilla had died at her Spanish holiday home.
‘then my daughter called,’ says Sir John, who has never married, but has two daughters — Helen, 40, and Camilla, 38 — from an earlier relationship. Cilla was enormously fond of them, as Sir John is of her three grown-up sons.
‘At first, i didn’t believe it. i didn’t want to believe it. As time wore on, it became more and more evident that it was true and, oh . . .’ He pauses. Collects himself.
‘i was in a bit of a state. Devastated. Shocked. i just felt empty. You get all these flashbacks. Something like . . .’
Again, his voice trails off, then he regains his poise. ‘life will never be the same again without Cilla in it.’ the last time they saw each other was four weeks ago when he took her to the Henley Festival for a George Gershwin spectacular.
‘We were both looking forward to the dinner on the 11th,’ he says. ‘i’m the president of the Newbury Agricultural Society this year, but i didn’t invite her to the show. Cilla couldn’t have coped with it — it’s rammed with too many people. too crowded; i couldn’t have looked after her. the dinner was more select, more dignified.’ More Cilla? He nods. today, condolence cards crowd a counter top in his spectacular penthouse apartment next to Reading FC.
‘i’ve had a bunch of letters,’ he says. ‘All manner of people. i’m completely gobsmacked by the fact they would bother. it’s been very moving. Michael Howard — the former Home Secretary, nice guy — he phoned to commiserate. He was a huge fan of Cilla’s.
‘there was one time Cilla was here because liverpool were playing Reading. She arrived and she’s downstairs tarting herself up.
‘Michael Howard arrives. He doesn’t have a clue Cilla’s coming to the game. He’s standing there chatting and Cilla comes up the stairs. She goes “Surprise, Surprise!” He was gobsmacked. it was so funny, his expression.’
Memories of Cilla are everywhere here. there are two silver-framed photographs of the pair of them together among those of his family and closest friends.
Sir John, whose philanthropy includes eye-watering donations to the Royal Academy of Arts and the Victoria and Albert Museum, knows . . . well, let’s just say his Christmas Card list reads like an edition of Who’s Who.
But, apart from Prince Charles (‘Super guy, super guy. He’s had his ups and downs, too, of course,’ he says) and the Queen, Cilla’s is the only recognisable face. to him, her celebrity didn’t matter a jot.
‘You sit back, with everything that’s been said about her this week and go: “Crikey, that’s Cilla, isn’t it?” Because you know about Blind Date, you know about the fantastic pop star Cilla was but, when you get to know someone away from that, they’re just that person. they’re not all that other stuff.
‘there are so many images of Cilla in my mind. i picture her in the sitting room at the Grove — her house in Denham, Bucks — chewing the fat and having a good laugh about different things, which we did pretty often.
‘then, at the end of the night, i’d give her a kiss goodbye and all that stuff — but nothing sexual. there was no impropriety. if i slept over, she slept in her room and i slept in mine.’
Sir John is, make no mistake, a redblooded male. there have, over the years, been numerous girlfriends, or as he says: ‘i’ve had my moments’.
At 74, he continues to have a twinkle in his eye and is hugely charming. He is also deeply sensitive.
‘i had too much respect for Cilla to try it on with her. We got on terribly well, but Cilla was basically a one-guy woman. She never really got over Bobby. He was her rock. When i met her she was still poleaxed by the whole Bobby thing and wasn’t looking for someone else. i doubt she ever was. ‘And then . . .’ He pauses. then? ‘Well, when i met Cilla i was wealthy [he means stinking rich, to the tune of several £100 million], then, in 2007 the economy fell off the side of the cliff. Fortunately, i’m through it now, but the past ten years have been horrendous.
‘look, i was still better off than quite a lot of people, but cash is king and assets are assets. When you can’t shift the assets . . . it wasn’t just small things it was huge things. Not tens of millions, but hundreds of millions.
‘i would talk to Cilla and she was very supportive. She was there for me. But i had to spend so much time with my shoulder against the wheel, trying to keep all the balls in the air.
‘that might have had an impact on my friendship with Cilla. Who knows? i don’t know. Who can say?’ He stops to mull this over.
‘ Remember, too, she was a Catholic or, as she said ‘Car-tholic’. He mimics Cilla’s liverpudlian accent and chuckles.
‘throughout her courtship with Bobby, she was a good girl — dragged up properly.’ He laughs. ‘i don’t know,
‘I’d kiss her goodnight, but that was it’ ‘Laughing with her is what I’ll remember most’
‘I’ve never trusted women, but I did trust Cilla’
I think she just enjoyed us and felt: “If it ain’t broke, why fix it?” We had a great relationship. I respected her and she respected me. You don’t get many relationships like that with the opposite sex. We were, in some ways, like an old couple.’
Indeed, as Sir John, who is by nature a hugely private man, speaks openly for the first time about a friendship about which many have speculated for more than a decade, he reveals a bond much deeper than many romantic attachments.
‘Laughter, that’s what I remember the most, sharing so much laughter with Cilla,’ he says.
Sir John had met Cilla i n 2003 at a party i n Barbados that was thrown by their mutual friend, the phenomenally wealthy entrepreneur Eddie Healey.
‘I happened to be there with someone else,’ Sir John says. ‘ I was chatting to Cilla and the music system started smoking, so I said: “Eddie, the music system’s on fire.”
‘Eddie barges across the room. I was holding a glass of red wine in and, of course, he barges into me. Straight over Cilla’s designer outfit. I was mortified. I said: “Oh, my God!”
‘To be fair, she didn’t go off the deep end and make a huge fuss. I said: “Let me know what I can do to put things gs right right, blah blah, blah blah blah.” ” ‘Anyway, wind the clock on a year and I was in Le Caprice having lunch.The restaurant is L-shaped, and when we’d finished, I got up and looked round the L and there was Cilla with a bunch of ladies having lunch.
‘I went over and said: “Hi, do you r emember me?” She s ai d: “I remember you all right.” We got chatting and then we started seeing each other.
‘One of our first dates was Joan Collins’s husband Percy’s birthday party and, of course, we came out of there laughing our heads off. We didn’t know at the time, but there was a van outside and we were being papped papped. Then Then, of course course, it was all over the papers, “Cilla’s new love ”, which was very unhelpful. We hardly knew each other. It was absurd.’
Sir John has always been uneasy about living his private life in the public eye. He has, he says, never been truly comfortable in his skin because of what he calls ‘my derivation’.
Born illegitimately in Stoke- on-Trent in 1941, he was placed as a baby into foster care. When he failed to settle, his mother moved him to a children’s home near her Reading home, only retrieving him when she married his stepfather, World War II pilot Zygmunt Madejski. He never knew his real father, until during his friendship with Cilla Cilla. ‘That ‘ That was everything for me,’ he says now.
‘If you don’t know your birthright, the world’s a very lonely place. I loved my mother, of course, but she wasn’t overly emotional. I was born at a time when illegitimacy was really frowned upon and I think it ruined her life to a large extent. There was a strange atmosphere in the house .. . secrets. I definitely had an enormous chip on my shoulder.’ Thanks to ‘copious amounts of research’ by a close female friend, Sir John tracked down his halfbrother shortly after becoming friends with Cilla.
‘It was quite an epiphany,’ he says. ‘I didn’t know he existed and he didn’t know I existed. It was only when we had the results of the DNA I knew he was my brother.
‘That was the biggest thrill of my life. I’d found out who my father was: William Adshead.’
He says this with the sort of pride many of us would have if we discovered royalty in our family tree. Should I know him?
‘No,’ he says. ‘ When he met my mother, he was driving for a local factory churning out Spitfires for the war effort. There he was, a 19year- old Jack-the-Lad and . . .’ He raises his eyes and laughs.
‘The funny thing was, from the moment Cilla became a friend we had this close association.
‘Yes, I was flattered someone like that could be interested in being my friend. She was effervescent. She was fun. She was very rock ’n’ roll. But there was more than that: she was a real soulmate, and I never knew what to put it down to. Then I discovered my father came from Liverpool. Cilla and I both thought it very amusing.’
Sir John and Cilla continued to spend time together, more often than not away from the camera. ‘We’ve been to Barbados together. We’ve been t o Glasgow and Edinburgh. We’ve been to Wimbledon, to the races and parties.
‘It was a very honest friendship. I never trusted women, but I trusted Cilla. And I think she used to use me as a sounding board. I know jolly well some of the advice I gave her she listened to. She’s very, very sensitive,’ he explains, falling into the present tense.
‘Particularly about the feelings of people. Sometimes she felt she’d upset someone, not because she wanted to, but because it happened, as it does, and I’d tell her a way of overcoming it . . .’
He pauses. ‘She was a very different person offstage. She could be very dogmatic — very stubborn.’
Sir John lapses into silence. ‘Poor Cilla,’ he says. ‘You know that threepart television series with Sheridan Smith about her life that was on recently? It was a wonderful thing. She enjoyed that.’
‘She felt it showed you what those days were like. It was a different time when things weren’t 100 miles an hour as they are today. They were about respect and dignity.’
He pauses. ‘She was my soulmate. I’ve a great love for Cilla — I always have had, and I always will.’