New book unveils how Diana Dors saved Cilla in her darkest hour

Cilla, left, and Diana Dors comforted each other over their lost babies

WE KNOW the magic of Cilla Black and there's no denying she packed an awful lot into her 72 years.

 

WE KNOW the magic of Cilla Black and there's no denying she packed an awful lot into her 72 years. But behind the public smile there was a private pain which stayed with her for 40 years. The death of her baby daughter Ellen haunted Cilla and she thought about her every day.

Ellen was the baby girl she and Bobby always wanted but, born in the early hours of an autumn night in 1975, she did not live until breakfast-time.

A month earlier another extraordinary British talent, Diana Dors, had suffered her own tragedy. She was 43 at the time and after a complicated seventh pregnancy lost her baby, a son, who was stillborn on August 30, 1975.

 

 

When Cilla lost Ellen just five weeks later the two stars bonded. Diana, older if not wiser in life, became the comfort for Cilla. She understood only too well what the Anyone Who Had A Heart singer was going through and they were united, mother to mother in their grief.

Heartbroken Bobby, childhood sweetheart, husband, manager and all-round minder, helped Cilla cope as she helped him. But as she railed at the world for the loss of her baby, Bobby, Cilla's scaffolding in so many things, was helpless. What could he say? Extraordinary as it seems, tea and sympathy presented by the nation's "blonde bombshell" were the perfect prescription. They talked of their dreams of the babies they'd never hold and, as with all grief, there was some joy in memory as well as plenty of tears.

They needed that cathartic dialogue; it got the pain out and Cilla remained forever grateful. "Di was marvellous," she recalled. "I'd never met anyone who was in the same position and it was nice to talk. She was a tremendous help to me.

There was a time after losing our Ellen when I thought I'd never be able to sing Lullaby again

Cilla Black

"I think she coped much better than me. It was just a very black period. Bobby knew me inside out and he knew what was right for me but I wouldn't listen. We were too close.

"I'm very private in my grief. I don't want to share the downsides. But Diana was there for me, knowing and caring.

"The sadness never goes and in the beginning you get quite selfish about it. You look at everybody, and all you see are babies everywhere. You say, 'Why me?' Then Bobby said one day, 'Well, why not you? What makes you so special? Why not you?' And all of a sudden it hit home. I thought: 'Yes, why not me?'" Yet, the tragedy tortured Cilla who, at 72, lost her life last weekend at her villa in Estepona on the Costa del Sol, Spain.

Until then she'd thought every day of Ellen and of her beloved Bobby, who died on October 23, 1999, when he was only 57. His loss from lung and liver cancer overwhelmed Cilla but never diminished the place in her heart for baby Ellen.

"She was and remained part of the family for all of us."

It had all begun with such excitement and hope. Her sons Robert (born in 1970) and Benjamin (1974) were under the age of five when Cilla became pregnant again, and this time she hoped for a girl. That summer of 1975 a season in Eastbourne and several UK concert dates were scheduled. She was seven months pregnant when on a cold Friday evening in October she was taken ill after the second show in Coventry.

She'd walked offstage in a gown specially designed by the BBC's costume wizard Linda Martin to slim her down but, with the audience still applauding, by the time she reached her dressing room she was in labour.

 

Cilla was delivered of the baby girl she longed for but her joy was shortlived. Doctors had to tell her that Ellen, whose lungs had not formed properly, had died after just two hours. Cilla always said that part of her died too that day.

For a woman who lived in a "cando" world it was devastating. For once Cilla was powerless: "Anyone who hasn't lost a child can't try to understand how you feel. If your baby lives, if only for two hours, you can never, ever forget it. Not a day goes by and my other children are a constant reminder and you thank God you have them."

" In the days, months and years that followed Cilla said that she dreamt about Ellen and the person she would have become.

"I kept asking questions. Though I'd always felt marvellous during pregnancy, and had worked until five months with Robert and seven months with Ben, had I gone on too long with Ellen? Had I been too sure of myself? That was the guilt thing.

"After that depression got me. I shut myself in our bedroom and wanted never to come out. I'd be there still if it hadn't been for Jimmy Tarbuck and his wife.

"Jimmy was wonderful. Someone had to fill in at the theatre that Saturday. Bobby phoned him in Scarborough and he left the golf course, drove straight to Coventry and went on stage in his golfing gear, with a hole in his sweater. A week later he asked Bobby what he and his wife Pauline could do to help and Bobby told him that somehow they had to get me out, perhaps to dinner, try to make me laugh."

A DATE was fixed up and, because it was the Tarbucks, Cilla went out. She smiled. It was a breakthrough of sorts although nothing would ever be the same again. "After that I knew if I didn't plunge back into work quickly I'd never sing again. Val Doonican (Cilla's Buckinghamshire neighbour who died last month) had taken over in Coventry but he wasn't free for long and the show had to go on.

 

Cilla with Bobby (back centre), Robert (left). Benjamin (centre), and baby James

"I went back after two weeks. It was Val who'd first sung Liverpool Lullaby and, generous as always, he urged me to do it, saying it would be ideal for me. It's a traditional melody with marvellous words and I'd been singing them that autumn season. In the dressing room I ran through the lines in my head for 20 minutes while I was in make-up. When I got to Lullaby I managed the mental run-through from 'Oh, you are a mucky kid' right until the last two lines: 'But there's no one can take your place. Go fast asleep for Mammy.'"

The show would go on but as Cilla left her dressing room she asked Bobby to take Liverpool Lullaby out of the programme.

It remained one of her most popular hits but she admitted: "There was a time after losing our Ellen when I thought I'd never be able to sing Lullaby again. For the first 18 months after I lost her I saw her in every pram other mothers pushed and I had to turn away.

"I scarcely read a paper in case there was a story of a baby being left on a step, in a dustbin, for that made me feel really violent.

"But through it all Di Dors kept in touch. We'd meet and talk and that was the best medicine, being with someone who understood."

Five years after losing Ellen, Cilla gave birth to her fourth child, another son they named Jack. The machine which monitored his heart at Queen Charlotte's Hospital had been bought with the help of money raised by Birthright, the charity Cilla supported after she lost Ellen, and his birth brought all the memories flooding back.

"I just had a feeling that this baby was going to be all right. I think that is the way you have got to think. I had lots of check-ups but not because of what happened before - it was my age. I was 37 when I had Jack. They were just very careful with me. But being pregnant again brought back what happened so vividly. There was no warning last time that anything was wrong. It was terrible to go through a pregnancy with all the expectation and excitement and then not to have anything at the end of it.

"Gradually you learn to live with the pain and go on. I only managed it because at that point in the last pregnancy I'd come to accept that I'd already been blessed with two sons and a daughter, though I lost her, and should be grateful for the happiness I had."