At the end will she be a total bitch?
Apologies for linking to the Daily (Hate)Mail.
www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-444286/Surprise-Surprise--Cilla-nice-think.htmlI'll paste it here so they don't get any more hits.
Surprise, Surprise - Cilla is not as nice as we might think
Clutching a bottle of Champagne in a Fortnum & Mason shopping bag, I am sitting in a West London restaurant waiting for Cilla Black.
The champagne is for Cilla because I know she loves champagne. And she's so loveable that I wanted to buy it for her. She's the nation's Mum, the nicest person in the whole world ever - or, as Graham the announcer on Blind Date would call her 'our one and only Cillaaaaaaa Blaaaaaaaack'.
For years she was my faithful friend through a thousand lonely teenage Saturday nights. Even her teeth are a national treasure.
And now I am finally going to meet her. But she is half an hour late and I am anxious. Where is Cilla? Has she fallen down a light entertainment inter-galactic wormhole?
At last Cilla's Public Relations Person whispers 'she's here'. I peer out of the window and yes, a silver Mercedes (the Cillamobile I presume) is purring to a halt. I enter the private room, waiting for Cilla to bounce over and lovebomb me, to offer me a Blind Date, or a heartfelt hug.
Instead a slim woman stares at me and mutters 'hello'. But I wave the champagne and beam 'This is for you.'
She takes the bottle and looks as if she doesn't know what to do with it. So she hands it to her Public Relations Person. And sits down in the corner, while her PR, agent, photographer and random friend settle at the next table and stare. And I feel like I'm onstage without a wig.
I glue a smile to my face, sit down and twitter 'How are you?' She starts to speak, and she talks so quietly - well, she sounds bored, actually - that she reminds me of a Liverpudlian Satellite Navigation System in designer clothes.
Anyway last night, she says, she went 'to Dame Vera Lynn's 90th birthday party. It was fabulous,' she adds. 'All the greats were there. Roger Moore. Rolf Harris. Ronnie Corbett.'
What time did you go to bed? (I ask only because Cilla has a reputation for late nights, gay clubs and lashings of champagne).
'If you go to a party with Dame Vera Lynn, it's not going to be a late one, is it?' she says. And she cackles the famous laugh, which has been described as sounding like the entire River Mersey disappearing down a giant plughole. Poor Dame Vera Lynn, I mutter. That wasn't nice.
Priscilla White was born in 1943 and her fairytale reads like this. Her father was a docker and she grew up bouncing to the Mersey Beat and singing with The Beatles. Musically, she wasn't talented but she was in the right place at the right time (and in the right dress).
Brian Epstein, The Beatles' manager, signed her up and by 20 she was a star. Then came Blind Date, Surprise! Surprise!, and an OBE - National Treasure Status. When she hit 60 - she calls it 'sexty' - three years ago she announced her desire to buy a perfect pink diamond for a million pounds.
Have you found it, Cilla? No, she says. She changed her mind after her mansion in Buckinghamshire was burgled. Elton's John's manager - I cannot emphasise enough how like a speaking copy of Hello! Cilla is - found a £1million pink diamond for her. But 'it wasn't the right colour' she says. 'And it wasn't big enough.'
She sounds like the five-year-old self she describes being indulged by her father. Pampered little Cilla, wishing for a diamond.
'I always believed I would be a star,' she says, recalling how her dad would stand his only daughter on the kitchen table to sing songs. She was, she says, a star at the local talent contests. 'I was always the first on stage, and I always won.'
You always won? 'So much so that they changed the rules,' she says happily. 'You couldn't use your name and you had to stand in a room with a microphone so they couldn't see you.'
Cilla imitates her 11-year-old self: 'I'm Number Three and I'm going to sing ...' She lets it tremble in the air and then thwacks me with a punchline: 'And I still won!'
Was there any resentment from the other little stars? (Why didn't they beat you a pulp?) 'They knew a winner when they heard one!' she shouts and her friends at the next table laugh at her 'joke'.
Anyway, the question that's nagging me is why she was so enduringly successful. She was the highest-paid woman on television in the Eighties and Nineties.
Why did they pay you so much? It's the wrong question. Her smile freezes and she snaps in her stage voice, which is soaring with a little thump on the end, 'I think it's called talent, isn't it?' She looks over at her agent, her PR and the photographer - I have realised by now they are her audience - and they laugh in chorus (and at my expense).
When she is ready, she continues. 'I was a draw,' she says. 'And if you are a draw you are worth it. It's a business and I'm a product. Terrible, isn't it?'
But she doesn't look as if she thinks it's terrible. She looks as if she thinks it's wonderful. She adds: 'I never did the money side. My husband did that.'
Her husband was Bobby Willis, her childhood sweetheart, roadie, manager and father of her three sons. He died seven years ago from cancer, but when he was alive he 'haggled' over her, she says.
'He would come home and say "You don't know what I've been through. You're just like a packet of Persil". I would say "Me? They like me! Everybody likes me!" And Bobby would say, "I have to sell you". That is what he said. "I have to sell you".'
She never saw one of her pay cheques, or booked herself on to an aeroplane, before he died.
Cilla won't answer my question about why she's been so successful. But I think I know what happened. Fame called Cilla because she's ordinary, lucky, just worked hard at it, a sort of you've-done-it-so-we-all-can mascot for the working classes; a we'll give you The Beatles but you have to take Cilla too, two-for-one offer from Liverpool.
But she won't acknowledge it. 'It is when I am on stage that I feel most comfortable,' she says instead. 'It is my home. It is the only thing I have known since I was a kid. When I was performing with Frankie Howerd I got a standing ovation every night. I defied them not to stand up to get out of their seats. And I did it just to test myself.'
I tune out. This is vintage Cilla-ese from the woman who has been in Mexican stand-offs with journalists for nearly 45 years and I know I can't win.
So, defeated, I ask her what Barry Manilow is like, because Cilla lives on Planet Light Entertainment and she knows them all. 'Barry is fabulous,' she says. 'I love his voice. I think everyone does.'
And out comes the laugh again, a bit more of the Mersey sliding down the plughole.
She offers more anecdotes. She tells me about her VIP visit to the Rolling Stones concert at the Hollywood Bowl last year. 'We had a police escort all the way,' she says. 'I thought that was terrific, getting all the treatment over there.'
When I asked her why she refused to go on This Is Your Life in the Eighties (she told Bobby she would divorce him if it happened) she says she didn't want to see how much her classmates had aged. But then she changes her mind and says: 'I couldn't bear the idea of people coming on and saying wonderful things about me.
'I was in a restaurant today and a woman came up to me and said "Excuse me, are you Cilla Black's daughter?" She was sending me up and added "Can you believe you and I are same age?" And she was grey-haired and a bit overweight and I said "No".'
Cilla laughs and adds, a little too late: 'It was very nice of her to come over and pay me a compliment.' And what a shame you couldn't pay it back, I think: I bet you wouldn't do that on TV.
Cilla has just signed a deal to promote the sugar substitute Splenda, which I think she's perfect for, being so synthetically sweet herself, but otherwise she's unemployed, having very publicly walked out on Blind Date four years ago.
Now, she says, she wants to enjoy her grandchildren: 'I've no intention of not seeing them grow up.' But will she ever be able to resist the lure of Saturday night TV? They were a perfect match, after all - reassuringly naff meeting reassuringly naff. Will she return?
'I'm a never say never girl,' she says. 'Frank Sinatra retired four times. He kept coming back. But there are people in our business who want to die on stage. Literally. I don't want to do that.'
I don't know - Panto Star Dies On Stage at Wimbledon Theatre is a good headline. But the offers of work just pour in, she insists: 'People are on the phone all the time. Gordon Ramsay phoned me up to do The F Word but I thought I'd be embarrassed if he swore. A lot of projects are not right for me. And I'm having too much fun.'
She toys with one of her huge diamonds, tosses out one of her fabulous legs and says facetiously: 'It would just interfere with my social life.'
Ah yes, social life. She is very friendly both with the Reading FC Chairman John Madejski and the advertising king Sir Frank Lowe. Will there be Cilla-shaped wedding bells? 'I don't want to get married again,' she says. 'But I never say never.'
Are you going out with anyone? Cilla doesn't want to tell me and casts around, rather desperately, for a gag. 'No, well, it depends, well, have you got time ...' and finally settles on: 'I'll make a list!'
Her agent cackles and she responds to his ovation. 'I'll make a list!' Then she tells me that her friend Joan Collins wouldn't let her marry anyone who had 'grey chest hair'. And that Joan 'can still do the splits'. (But can she get up again? And can you do the splits, Cilla? She ignores me).
'I don't get bothered by other men when I'm with my men friends,' she frets. 'Otherwise I do get bothered. I've even had a guy in a restaurant send me his telephone number on a napkin.' She looks appalled. 'How dare he? What am I supposed to do with that?' Throw it away and smile, perhaps?
We're done and I stand up to thank her, wishing I could have my Champagne back. Because Cilla reminds me of a drag queen, a parody swallowed by the product that is herself.
She doesn't seem to know what she thinks or wants - except that she must always be the winner - and seems to have no passions other than herself and her crazy lifestyle of diamonds, Barbados (where she has a holiday home) and Champagne.
She is far more beautiful in the flesh than she is on television (apart from her weird teeth, which I don't dare ask about) but so much colder. The whole Cilla phenomenon is based on her being loveable - or, rather, loving - and having met her, I feel like we've all been the victims of a Cilla-sized fraud.
Because she isn't what I'd call nice; actually, she seems to me rather spoilt, still that five-year-old girl singing on her dad's kitchen table, needing to be told she's wonderful.
My final question is, if you hadn't been Cilla, what would you have been? 'A hairdresser,' she replies. Oh - what should I do with my hair, Cilla? ' Whatever you want,' she says, again in the stage voice which makes me her straight woman; the gang laugh like fools.
She couldn't give a toss about my hair, of course. But, fame aside, she always wanted to be a hairdresser. And, having met her, I have to say, I rather wish she had.
