Troubling truth about the fame hungry girl whose suicide ended Tony Blackburn’s career
A broken home, modelling from the age of THREE, a gang of teen friends who targeted DJs . . .
but that she had not made any sexual advances.’
All this is quoted in Dame Janet’s report, along with a handwritten note — of unclear provenance — suggesting that Blackburn (29 at the time) helped Claire acquire a ticket on one occasion to attend Top Of The Pops.
The DJ, meanwhile, has argued that flimsy evidence is being used to make him a fall guy for wider failings at the BBC, and has promised to pursue a defamation suit against the Corporation.
In the meantime, this messy affair increasingly appears to revolve around a single unanswered question: what exactly drove Claire McAlpine to take her own life?
Was she an innocent and vulnerable 15-year- old girl exploited by immoral ‘pop people’? Or was she a troubled fantasist unable to cope with the humdrum reality of her everyday suburban existence?
Certainly, Claire McAlpine’s short life was far, far more complex than it looked at first glance.
Born in May 1955, she was adopted at six weeks by Vera and her first husband Jack Ufland, a workingclass furniture salesman.
Vera and Jack had met during the war when they worked for ENSA, which staged entertainment for the Armed Forces.
They married in 1945 and endured nine childless years before adopting Claire and an older boy, Simon.
Encouraged by Vera, Claire began modelling clothes at the age of three and would also appear on TV as a child actor. Then, after junior school in St Albans where the family lived, she decided she wanted to become a singer. On the home front, meanwhile, life was far from idyllic. Vera and Jack’s marriage ended in 1967 when Claire was 12, and she was taken to Watford by her mother, who swiftly remarried David McAlpine.
The move upset Claire, who lost touch with her father. (He died in 1994 after he had also remarried.)
‘It was a very, very acrimonious divorce,’ recalled her father’s second wife, Judith Ufland, this week.
‘Vera was a feisty woman and she decided not to allow Jack to see Claire. It was all very upsetting, as they had been close.’
School reports spoke of Claire’s growing lack of concentration and her disruptiveness, and said she was always ‘looking for something new to do’.
In 1970, at 15, Claire decided to leave school and pursue a career in showbusiness. She t ook f ul l advantage of the freedoms her new life afforded, regularly travelling to London to appear on Top Of The Pops and other TV shows.
And there was no shortage of older men willing to take advantage of her. ‘I know she went out with one disc jockey,’ Janine Hartwell, a contemporary on Top Of The Pops, told a newspaper shortly after Claire’s death.
‘I know a group of 15-year-old girls who slept with him after his shows.’
Another close friend, Donna Scarff, observed: ‘ Samantha [ Claire McAlpine] went around telling everybody she was 23 and she certainly looked a lot older than 15.
‘Lots of girls go there just to get on television, and if this involves sleeping with the disc jockeys, some of them will do.’ In a 1971 interview, Scarff added: ‘I rem remember Samantha went to [a famousfamo DJ’s] dressing room one night aftera Top Of The Pops had been rec recorded, and the next night she went out with him.
‘I think she went out with him once or twice. Then, a week later, we met after a broadcast of The [ DJ Emperor] Rosko Show and another disc jockey, ****, picked her up.’
Asked whether the DJ had slept with Claire, Scarff replied: ‘She said the bed was made when they arrived at the flat, but it wasn’t when she left.
‘I think she was rather proud of the fact that she had slept with him. She said two other girls, both aged 15, went to his flat from the show.
‘They had this joke about how cold his feet were in bed and when they talked about it later among other girls they used a kind of code referring to “made” and “unmade” beds to indicate whether they had
made love.’ The contents of Claire’s diary were apparently more explicit, and after her mother stumbled across it in January 1971, she banned her daughter from travelling unaccompanied to London.
Claire was furious, claiming one of the DJs had offered her a recording contract ‘that would make her famous’, and that if she was banned from Top Of The Pops, her career would suffer.
‘I told her I wanted her safe home at nights and that if the man wanted to offer her a contract I wanted to meet him and know what was going on and see the contract,’ Vera later said.
It was following this that Vera filed her complaint with the BBC.
And, according to Claire’s friend Donna, the unnamed DJ she had claimed to have slept with then began to ‘ignore her’.
No recording contract was forthcoming and, in the following weeks, Claire failed to secure paid work and became unsettled.
On the eve of her death, her mother later told the inquest that she refused to run an errand.
A family row developed. Claire went upstairs to the bedroom, where she liked to play the tape recorder and watch TV, at around 8pm. It was the last time she was seen alive.
Mrs McAlpine would have normally looked in on her daughter on her way to bed, but that night it wasn’t to be.
‘I was cross,’ she told the inquest. ‘I hesitated at her door, still feeling a little . . . I didn’t go into the room. The light was off.’
The next morning, Claire McAlpine was dead.
‘Don’t laugh at me for being dramatic, but I really just can’t take any more,’ read the last page of her diary.
‘All anyone has ever done is to tell me what a problem I am. People always get the impression that I am wellbred and overflowing with confidence and everything.
‘But I’m not. It’s all so false. I sit and dream for hours about me as a fairy godmother, or me as a star, or me as Sinatra’s wife.
‘But it’s all a dream. I can’t bear reality, ordinary everyday life.’
Those words were made public at the inquest. As for the rest of the diary’s contents, they remain a mystery.
One friend, Kelly Gold, suggested last week that the diary would lift the lid on Claire’s romantic liaisons not just with BBC DJs, but also with a world-famous American singer who is still touring.
However, according to other reports, the diary also makes a series of selfevidently false claims, including that Claire had slept with the American actor Rock Hudson, who was homosexual but always kept this secret.
A copy of the text of Claire’s diary is said to be in the hands of the police, but it was not made available to Dame Janet Smith at the request of Claire’s immediate family, whose only surviving member, her brother Simon Ufland, declined to comment when I approached him. Her mother died in 2012. Claire’s friend, Donna Scarff, did not wish to elaborate further. Detective Inspector Richard Booker, who led the inquiry into Claire’s death, is believed to be dead, along with Marcus Godman, the Watford coroner who carried out the inquest.
As for Claire’s father’s second wife, Judith Ufland, now 80, she was visited not long ago by detectives working on Operation Yewtree, the investigation into sex crimes involving prominent media personalities.
They asked her and her son Mark what they knew about the contents of the red leatherette diary.
‘I dare say there was some truth i n what that poor girl wrote, but some of it plainly didn’t make sense,’ Judith tells me. ‘It was all such a long time ago.’
Maybe so. But after 45 years, the tragic tale of Claire McAlpine may yet have a few chapters left to run.
Her diary makes claims that are evidently false