In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile Read online

  Commander Peter Spindler, head of Scotland Yard’s Specialist Crime investigations, described the man as a ‘predatory sex offender’ and said that his pattern of offending appeared to ‘be on a national scale’.6

  But the man was dead and could not defend himself. Spindler was asked whether he felt sure of his guilt. ‘I think the facts speak for themselves,’ he replied, ‘as does the number of women who have come forward and spoken of his behaviour and his predilection for teenage girls.’

  By the time Prime Minister David Cameron appeared on breakfast television to make his views known, the firestorm was blazing through the Roman Catholic Church, which had announced that it was to consider stripping the man of the papal knighthood it awarded him in 1981, and through parliament. The BBC, meanwhile, appeared in danger of being totally engulfed by the flames. After bearing the brunt of the media’s outrage, the national broadcaster finally declared that it would be launching an inquiry of its own.

  ‘These stories are deeply, deeply troubling,’ said Mr Cameron of the revelations and victims’ testimonies that now dominated the news. ‘I hope that every organisation that has responsibilities will have a proper investigation into what happened, and if these things did happen, how they were allowed to happen. And then of course everyone has to take their responsibilities.’7 He added that he was looking into whether the man could be posthumously stripped of the knighthood he’d received in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in 1990.

  And it was at this point that a bottle was thrown at the six-foot wide, four-foot high triple headstone in black, polished granite. Security was immediately stepped up at Woodlands Cemetery but relations of those buried in neighbouring plots expressed their concerns about possible damage to the final resting places of their loved ones.

  So, shortly after contacting Morphet to ask that he return to Woodlands Cemetery, the relations of a man who had been acclaimed as a ‘latter-day saint’ less than 12 months earlier, released a statement of their own. ‘[We] are deeply aware of the impact that the stone remaining there could have on the dignity and sanctity of the cemetery. Out of respect to public opinion, to those who are buried there, and to those who tend their graves and visit there, we have decided to remove it.’8

  Among the last people to see the headstone before it was removed was a woman who had worked at the same Leeds hospital where the man had famously volunteered as a porter. She said she had always thought he was odd. In 1969, she explained he had volunteered to drive a friend to her wedding in his Rolls-Royce. The man had turned up sitting in the back, with a chauffeur in the driver’s seat. The friend had told her he had tried to grope her all the way to the registry office and that she’d been forced to fight him off.9

  There was now only one person left who was unaffected by the tumultuous revelations; revelations that had seen a nation question itself and re-examine its past, and many of its biggest institutions turn on and against themselves. That one person was where he had always been: bricked in and beyond reach.

  2. FRISK HIM

  Friday, 12 March 2004. The taxi turned into West Avenue and continued a few hundred yards up a gentle incline before dropping me off outside Lake View Court, a modern block of apartments that would have been considered the height of chic in the Sixties. I pressed the intercom button marked ‘Penthouse’ and after a short pause, a voice: ‘Morning.’ The sound of the Yorkshire Dalek was unmistakable. The door buzzed, I pushed against it and took a seat in a small lobby that smelled of pot-pourri.

  Two or three minutes later, I heard voices coming from the lift shaft. Then the wooden doors of the lift slid open, releasing a cloud of smoke and two large, unsmiling men in their fifties. ‘Frisk him,’ barked Jimmy Savile, who had stepped out of the lift behind them and was wearing a blue shell suit with chevrons of red and white on the shoulders.

  I was pinned to the wall and searched before Savile finally called them off. He chuckled, extended his hand and introduced the two men as Mick Starkey, a West Yorkshire Police inspector, and Jim ‘The Pill’ Cardus, a retired pharmacist. ‘Meet the Friday Morning Club,’ he trumpeted before ushering the men out of the front door to the flats.

  He showed me into the lift, which was cramped and stank of cigars. The doors shut and to my surprise, I felt quite calm about being up this close to a man I had spent so many years wondering about, looking into, talking about and hating. He looked at me and raised his eyebrows. His lips stretched into a thin, toothless grin. Silver chest hair poked through the garish French tricolour string vest, a spider’s web of broken veins covered his nose.

  *

  I had not seen Jimmy Savile in the flesh for 24 years, not since an early evening in the autumn of 1980 when, as a treat, my mother took me, my best friend and my younger brother to watch an episode of Jim’ll Fix It being recorded at a television theatre in Shepherd’s Bush, west London. I was nine years old at the time and Jim’ll Fix It was one of Britain’s biggest family shows.

  Since 1975 its winning formula had cast Jimmy Savile, madcap disc jockey, Top of the Pops presenter, confirmed bachelor and charity fund-raiser extraordinaire, as a real-life Santa Claus, only one with the power to make Christmas Day come round every Saturday evening. Children wrote letters in the hundreds of thousands, and for the lucky few, Jimmy Savile made their dreams come true. Those who were picked got to fly with the Red Arrows, blow up water towers or sing with The Osmonds. One boy even got to visit the place where baby Jesus was born. Millions tuned in to watch and the bizarre-looking man with the big cigars, odd catchphrases and helmet of white hair became a national institution.

  I can still remember sitting in the red velvet seats of the auditorium, and the excitement when the lights finally went down and the floor manager waved his clipboard as the signal for us to clap and cheer. Savile emerged from the wings in a grey three-piece suit with flared trousers, which was relatively subdued attire for him. With Jimmy Savile, you never knew what to expect. One week he might appear in a tracksuit, the next he could be dressed as a pharaoh or in the tiniest of running shorts or as an adult cub scout. The only constant was his refusal to ever make reference to what he wore.

  To children, he was a mysterious, Wizard of Oz-like figure. He possessed the power to dispense happiness and silver ‘Jim Fixed It for Me’ medallions from a chair with drawers and compartments that emerged robotically from the arms. Jimmy Savile was quite simply the man who could do anything.

  The Jim’ll Fix It theme tune played out of speakers above our heads: ‘Jim’ll Fix It for you and you and you.’

  Like every other child in the audience that evening, I had gone expecting to witness magic. What we were presented with instead was the unvarnished reality of pre-recorded television: packages played back to us on monitors, cameras blocking the view, a messy tangle of leads and numerous stressed-looking adults corralling a procession of insanely grinning ‘Fix Its’ to go for their chat with Jimmy Savile who finished by rewarding them with those magical red-ribboned badges.

  My overriding memory of that evening, however, was not of the boy in the wheelchair doing a dance routine in the studio with Legs & Co., the troupe of saucy dancers from Top of the Pops. It was of leaving the theatre feeling ambivalent about Jimmy Savile. In his gruff manner there seemed to be a suggestion of menace. For someone we all felt that we knew so well, there was something remote and cold and untouchable beyond the façade. I spent the car journey home in silence.

  The troubling experience of those couple of hours in the BBC Television theatre in Shepherd’s Bush might have remained nothing more than a flicker in the recesses of a child’s subconscious, had it not been for the accidental discovery some years later of a copy of As It Happens, Jimmy Savile’s autobiography. The cover photograph alone was enough to reopen the box: Savile in a pinstripe suit and adorned with jewellery, his snow-coloured hair hanging like that of a medieval peasant. He was leaning forward in his chair, his right hand raised to his mouth as though about to call out. The eyes w
ere blank and unsmiling. On the back cover was a picture of his elderly mother proudly cradling a framed portrait of her famous son.

  I was in my mid-teens at the time, by then too old to be interested in writing to Jim’ll Fix It but very possibly looking for something or someone to rail against. The book, published in 1974, was read in one sitting. But rather than guffawing at Savile’s capers as a child drummer in a wartime band, Bevin Boy miner, racing cyclist, dancehall manager, pioneering deejay and pop personality, I was struck by his evangelical zeal, his fascination with death, his all-consuming obsession with money and his frequent references to teenage girls, inevitably followed by cheerful accounts of how he had made narrow escapes from suspicious parents.

  Furthermore, there was his evident pride in lacking normal human emotions, the recurring subtext of violence and the highly unusual relationship with his mother, a woman he described as his ‘only true love’. Looking back, As It Happens was my Rosetta stone, a text that reawakened and then put flesh onto the skeleton of a dormant bogeyman.

  From that point on he was fixed in my mind. I began collecting Jimmy Savile’s increasingly odd pronouncements on all facets of life. These were initially unearthed in newspapers, magazines and in old Top of the Pops and Jim’ll Fix It annuals found in car boot sales and charity shops. From this limited source material I learned that he didn’t much like children, boasted about being known as ‘the Godfather’ in his younger days and, inexplicably, enjoyed the ear of prime ministers, princes and popes.

  God’ll Fix It, a thin volume first published in 1978, was the next major milestone on my journey to the real Jimmy Savile. Intended as an accessible overview of his views on religion and presented as a series of wide-ranging discussions, to me it provided a window onto his disturbing opinions on sex and ‘sins of the flesh’. He talked of trussing up troublemakers at his dancehalls and also of walking alone in the wilderness in the Holy Land before admitting that he viewed his good works as credits to offset the debit column of his many transgressions.

  As a child of the Seventies and Eighties, I had heard the playground rumours about Britain’s favourite uncle; we all had. Jimmy Savile was a weirdo and possibly worse; a poofter, a necrophiliac or a child molester.

  Friends thought I was kidding when I spoke of my ‘Jimmy Savile Dossier’ and how I was going to use it to one day to bring him down. My parents’ generation dismissed such talk, reminding me that Jimmy Savile was a clever, wealthy, self-made man who had done an awful lot of good in his life. He was, after all, nationally celebrated for raising many millions of pounds for charity and rebuilding an entire hospital unit.

  As the years passed and the internet afforded greater access to information, my Jimmy Savile Dossier grew, and its contents became reliable dinner party fodder. It seemed I wasn’t the only one with misgivings. In 1990, the respected broadsheet interviewer Lynn Barber probed Savile about the uncommonly close relationship he had with his late mother, sex, and the rumours that he had a ‘thing’ for young girls.

  A year later, the well-known psychiatrist Anthony Clare tried to get to the bottom of why Jimmy Savile had become so fixated with death, so fearful of attachment and so determined not to show or share his feelings. ‘There is something chilling about this twentieth-century “saint” which still intrigues me to this day,’ concluded Clare.

  In 1999, five years after the final episode of Jim’ll Fix It, Savile appeared on Have I Got News for You. He insisted on smoking a cigar and cut a somewhat tragic figure, a relic of a bygone age who was unable to tap into the vibe and whose humour felt dated and out of step.

  Not long afterwards, a transcript of an off-air exchange that was alleged to have taken place between Savile and Paul Merton, the opposing team captain, appeared on various internet sites. In it, Merton goaded Savile about an underage girl he’d threatened with violence when she said she’d go public about their relationship. Savile’s lawyers intervened, and websites carrying the transcript, which was later proved to have been a hoax, were forced to remove the offending material.

  Jimmy Savile suddenly seemed at odds with the modern world, a decline that was most famously captured by the documentary maker Louis Theroux. When Louis Met Jimmy went out on national television in September 2000 and trained a beam of light on what a strange old man Jimmy Savile really was. After 40 years at the forefront of popular culture, he was seen leading a sad, lonely and peripatetic existence; a tracksuited, cigar-chomping dinosaur. And in keeping with the tenor of interviews conducted since Savile’s celebrity status had waned, Theroux quizzed him about the dark rumours. The film became an instant talking point. It was entertaining, bleak and surreal in equal measure, but I refused to accept it had got to the bottom of who Jimmy Savile was.

  By 2004, the editor of Jack, the magazine I was working for, decided he’d heard enough of my conspiracy theories about the powerful cliques Jimmy Savile moved between and influenced. The editor was from Scarborough, the holiday town on the North Yorkshire coast that Jimmy Savile had visited all his life – more regularly after moving the Duchess into a flat on the Esplanade in the Sixties. He decided it was time that I went and put my years of Jimmy Savile study to the test.

  *

  The lift opened directly into a wood-panelled vestibule adorned with plaques from Royal Navy ships and army regiments. A cascade of woolly hats and thick, quilted coats of the type more commonly worn by football managers clung to a row of hooks; beneath them, a row of running shoes. This cramped entrance hall opened right into a long, rectangular living room with electric blue shagpile carpet and floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides.

  The clutter of the room’s time-warp interior was in stark contrast to the panoramic views of Roundhay Park and the hills beyond. An ancient-looking exercise bike, a low sideboard with two This is Your Life books lying open on the top and a free-standing glass-fronted cabinet stuffed with what looked like cups, medals, plaques and various awards from his career in entertainment dominated the first half of the room. A low wooden shelving unit against the far wall accommodated a stack of videotapes and a pair of extravagant lamps with white bases fashioned as cherubs holding the bough of a tree. At the far end was a black swivel reclining chair, an L-shaped white leatherette sofa and a coffee table cluttered with ashtrays, pens, brochures and assorted pieces of paper. Perched on the top of a modest black stack hi-fi system was a framed photograph of Jimmy Savile in a field. He was wearing a kilt and struggling under the weight of a 15-foot caber. Above it was another framed shot: Jimmy Savile standing with Prince Charles and Princess Diana. In the corner, a set of sliding doors led out onto a small outdoor terrace covered in green Astroturf.

  Savile showed me through to his kitchen, decorated in tiles of pink and brown, or ‘The colour of sex’ as he put it. He asked me what was missing but I already knew the answer: it didn’t contain a cooker. He liked to boast that none of his many homes had one. ‘It would give women the wrong idea – and that would only lead to brain damage,’ he said. The ‘brain damage’ caused by conventional relationships was something he had discussed with Theroux. He opened the fridge to reveal a spartan range of assorted chocolate wafers, a half-finished box of After Eights and pallet of long-life milk cartons held together with gaffer tape. He filled the kettle, flicked the switch and encouraged me to snoop around.

  On the walls of the long living room in his penthouse apartment there were framed gold and silver discs and a black and white photograph of Savile squashed together on a sofa with The Beatles. He told me it was taken during the five weeks he spent compèring The Beatles’ Christmas Show at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1964, a time when Beatlemania was erupting across the world.

  Coffee made, he shuffled into the front room and sank into his black recliner which allowed him to lean back at a 45-degree angle. Lighting one of the three giant Bolivar cigars I had bought him – one of his conditions for granting the interview – he took a couple of puffs and announced that we could now begin.

  Sir
James Wilson Vincent Savile, OBE; Knight of Malta, Knight of the Vatican, ‘Special’ Friend of Israel; Honorary Royal Marines Green Beret, Honorary Doctor of Law and Honorary Assistant Entertainment Officer at Broadmoor maximum security psychiatric hospital; miner, scrap metal merchant, inventor of the disco; racing cyclist, wrestler and marathon runner; pop Svengali, radio DJ and Top of the Pops presenter; charity fund-raiser, highly paid business consultant, hospital administrator; confidant of prime ministers and princes. Most famously, though, Jimmy Savile – fixer of things.

  There was so much I wanted to ask him even though I was already familiar with many of his stories thanks to the steady growth of my Savile Dossier. What I really wanted to find out, though – over and beyond whether he genuinely hated children, why he never married and if his relentless charity work was a bid for atonement for some awful sin in his past – was where the border existed between the public persona and the private man. The latter appeared to be someone few, if anyone, really knew.

  In other words, what or who lay beneath the shell suit, the jewellery and the cigar smoke? And where better to start than at the beginning.

  3. NOT AGAIN CHILD

  Jimmy Savile was always old, it seems; even as a child. ‘I was the youngest of seven, which with hindsight was phenomenal, because you are never a kid. I didn’t have a childhood.’ This was the very first thing he told me about himself. He leant back in his chair and cackled, blowing a self-satisfied plume of cigar smoke into the cloud hovering at head height in his living room in Leeds.

  ‘You can’t be left at home if you are the youngest of seven,’ he continued. ‘You have to be taken everywhere. I grew up with adults, which meant I didn’t have anything to say. So I finished up with big ears, listening to everything, and big eyes, watching everything, and a brain that wondered why grown-ups did what they did.’