Step inside love! Secrets of cilla’s £4m sanctuary
A ghost. A budgie house. Frankie Howerd snoozing on the sofa. As Cilla’s £4m home goes on sale, MICHAEL HELLICAR relives the day he went ...
The solid red-brick walls of Cilla Black’s eight-bedroom Victorian mansion — up for sale at £4.35million following her death ten months ago — have a fascinating story to tell. There is nothing scandalous about the secrets they hold; just insights into the obsessively private family life of a very public personality.
For the 45 years that Cilla lived there, the house rocked with laughter, resonated with song, resounded with deep love and fierce pride and soaked up more than its fair share of sadness and tragedy.
Very few outsiders were allowed through its imposing front door because Cilla and her late husband, Bobby Willis, were determined to raise their three sons, Robert, Ben and Jack, in non-showbizzy surroundings.
‘Indoors, I’m Mrs Willis, wife and mother, and with the boys it’s feet-on-the-ground time,’ Cilla told me the first time she invited me to visit. I was editing Cilla’s column for a national newspaper and at her insistence we would usually do it over long, champagne-fuelled lunches in smart restaurants.
But after a time Cilla and Bobby said they wanted me to see how they really lived. It was, as Bobby kept reminding me, ‘a rare privilege and you’re a lucky b ****** ’. he was only half-joking.
‘It’s not that we’ve got a secret life,’ explained Cilla. ‘We’ve got nothing to hide and there’s nothing we’re ashamed of. You will get a shock, though, when you see how boring we are indoors.’
Cilla at this time was Britain’s biggest female star. She’d had a string of hit records in the 1960s and, after giving birth to her three boys, had worked her way back to the top.
Now she was presenter of two top-rated TV shows — Blind Date and Surprise, Surprise — on a contract worth £600,000 a year (the equivalent of £1.8 million today). A third show, Moment of Truth, produced by Bobby’s own company, paid her £10,000 an episode (£30,000 today).
‘I’m not one for glamour,’ she would insist to me. ‘I just want to get home, perhaps stop for fish and chips or a curry on the way, and when I’m indoors I kick my high heels off and watch Coronation Street. I’ve got tapes of every episode ever made, and sometimes I spend the whole weekend bingeing on them.
‘I’m not a star 24 hours of the day like Shirley Bassey, who probably never has to do anything for herself. I hate waste, re-use teabags, keep butter wrappers to grease my baking tins, and I won’t let anyone throw a toothpaste tube away until I’ve made sure there’s none left to squeeze out. I might live in a dream house, but that’s no excuse for extravagance.’
on the appointed day, I negotiated my way past the forbidding security gates and headed down the long tree-lined drive to their splendid house, set in 17 manicured acres in Denham, Buckinghamshire.
They had bought it for £40,000 from the conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent and had almost immediately begun refurbishing and extending it. Their new conservatory would become known as Bobby’s budgie house, because he kept his 48 budgerigars and cockatiels there. At Christmas, their four reception rooms would each have a magnificently decorated tree.
Cilla flung open the door to greet me. ‘Step inside, love,’ she sang, ushering me into her light and airy, green-painted sitting room dominated by expensive paintings and a futuristic globe-shaped TV.
I noticed that the number disc had been removed from the telephone, so nobody — visitors, workmen — would see it. Cilla herself had told me that only a dozen friends had been given her phone number. Not even I was allowed to have it — any contact outside our weekly lunches had to be via a specially installed fax line which Cilla had insisted my newspaper pay for. We even had to supply her with the paper and ink!
AS she poured champagne (‘It gives me the kick-start I need before I get the hoover out’), the sound of snoring drifted across from a sofa, where comedian Frankie howerd — ‘the only showbusiness friend I ever let in, although mostly he invites himself’ — was asleep.
‘he’s mislaid the keys to his house in London,’ Cilla laughed, ‘so we’re putting him up until he remembers where they are.’
howerd woke up and looked around. ‘oooh, missus, where’s my adopted sons?’ he yelled.
‘You fuss around and spoil them even more than Bobby and I do,’ she told him.
Robert, then 20, Ben, 16, and tenyear-old Jack were all out. ‘Cilla’s so lucky to have a family,’ howerd told me sadly. ‘I do envy her. I would’ve loved to have married, had kids and been a real father, but it was not to be.’ (his sexuality, though, was hardly a secret.)
In the kitchen, Cilla rustled up a snack — hot Mars bars wrapped in smoked salmon. ‘I love them because they’re so gross and I’m so common,’ she said — and whispered about her friendship with howerd, whom she first met in the 1960s when they were in a West end show together.
‘Frankie loves it best when the boys come in to say goodnight to him. Sometimes, he’ll turn up on a Sunday for me to cook him a roast lunch, then he won’t go until it’s time to catch the last train home.
‘Sometimes, he’ll leave it too late and have to stay the night, and I’m convinced he does that on purpose because he’s so lonely.
‘So many times he’s told me how much he hates being gay, and he gets really unhappy. he says if there was a pill to make him fancy women, he’d take it. But most of the time he’s outrageously funny and indiscreet, and the boys love him. he’s always telling me how I’m bringing them up well, considering, he says, I’m “just an old slapper from Liverpool!”’
[When howerd died two years later, Cilla’s eldest son Robert asked if he could have the comedian’s tattered tweed coat ‘because it smells of him and will keep him alive for me’.]
Leaving howerd to resume his nap on the sofa, Cilla showed me around the magnificently furnished house: ‘I like to keep every room up to what my mother called “Ideal home exhibition standard”.
‘It’s a constant battle with three untidy boys, but our Jack is the worst one. Last week we were having TV aerial cables threaded through the house, and they had to take up floorboards in every room downstairs.
‘I got home on Friday night to find they’d finished the ground floor, which meant they’d be upstairs on Monday. And I’d be too ashamed to let them see Jack’s room — it was a total tip. So I spent the weekend cleaning it up until I was exhausted.
‘When they came in on Monday, I told them I’d cleared out our Jack’s room to make their job easier, and they looked at me as if I was mad.
‘ “But Mrs Willis,” they said, “we laid the cable there before we clocked off on Friday — and we put everything back just as it was!”’
There was a grand piano in the sitting room which, although covered with family pictures, wasn’t just for show. on rare occasions she would rehearse songs for her TV appearances. ‘I hate bringing work home, and I hate even more doing it when the boys are around,’ she said.
Sometimes, as happened when I was there, these rehearsals would turn into raucous sing-a-longs, with Cilla giving spot-on impersonations of her fellow Lancastrians Gracie Fields and George Formby.
The only shadow of sadness that hung over the house at that time
dated back to 1975, when Cilla gave birth at 27 weeks to a daughter, Ellen, who lived for only two hours.
‘There isn’t a day when I don’t remember her,’ Cilla would tell me, her eyes filling with tears.
‘One minute she was alive and I was holding her in my arms. The next, she had died through lung complications.
‘I couldn’t work for a long time after that. I blamed myself for her dying. I still feel guilty, because I’d been working far too hard and I must have overdone it.
‘With Robert, I’d worked until I was five months pregnant. When I was expecting Ben, it was seven months. But I’d had plenty of time off, so there was never a problem.’
Jack’s birth, in 1980, was to go smoothly, though Cilla confided that she had taken the precaution of turning down all work while she was expecting him.
‘For a long time I wallowed in my guilt and misery over losing Ellen. Then one day Bobby took hold of me and showed some tough love.
‘He got fed up with me always saying “Why did it happen to me?” and he said: “Well, why not you? Thousands of women lose their babies. What makes you so different?” He was right, as he always is. I still grieve but it’s for her, and other lost babies, not for me.’
When her beloved Bobby died of cancer in 1999, she told me: ‘It’s times like this when you realise how fragile and fleeting life is.’
Bobby handled every aspect of her life. Despite being the 27th richest woman in Britain at that time, Cilla never carried cash or wrote a cheque. That was Bobby’s job.
I once asked her if it was true that she had never even used the remote control on her TV. ‘Bobby does everything for me,’ she laughed.
She scattered Bobby’s ashes at their four homes — beneath a willow tree in their garden at Denham, on the roof terrace of their Westminster flat and at their holiday houses in Barbados and Estepona, Spain. The newly widowed Cilla would spend hours sitting under the Denham willow, talking to Bobby and silently praying for a sign from him. One day, a white feather floated through the air and landed at her feet.
This convinced Cilla that Bobby was in touch from the afterlife. ‘I know he is waiting for me,’ she told her sons. ‘When the time comes, we will be together again.’
Cilla’s belief in the psychic world had begun after we had both seen a ghost at her home — a pallidfaced girl in a long white dress with a ruffled collar.
Cilla and Bobby had seen her in their bedroom; I’d seen her on the stairs. We researched the house’s history and found that 14-year-old Lilian Redley, the daughter of the gardener, was recorded as having died there in 1912.
A clairvoyant told Cilla that the girl had died in childbirth and was earthbound: ‘She’s still looking for her baby. Tell her gently that the baby is now in the spirit world and she will go.’
Cilla did this and the ghost was never seen again.
Now Cilla herself has gone — she died last August aged 72, following a fall at her house in Estepona, and her sons have decided to sell the Denham mansion where they grew up.
Would their mother have approved? ‘I’ll never leave here,’ she once told me.
‘It’s a world away from the flat above a barber’s shop where I was brought up in Liverpool. We didn’t even get a bath put in until I was 13, but it was home and the only thing we didn’t have was our own front door.
‘Now I wake up every day and think “how on earth did I deserve this?” It’s like being in a dream. But now I’ve got it, they’ll have to carry me out before I let it go.’