Gotta Get Theroux This

by Louis Theroux

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Why do you think?’

  We bought Cokes and sandwiches. ‘It’s more than we ever got when filming,’ Alice said. ‘You might get a cup of tea in a transport cafe and a voucher for your train home if you were lucky.’

  I asked about the sex. ‘Very quick,’ one of them said. ‘I wondered if that was why he wore those elastic waistbands,’ said the other. ‘You knew when he’d had enough of you and wanted you to go away . . . He’d just say “Good morning!” ’

  The impression I had was that the sex was something they tolerated as the price of being part of his inner circle, and the complaints they had were less about – as they characterized it then – his sexual ineptitude and lack of consideration and centred more on his weird absence of manners: the fact that he didn’t see them out or buy them anything to eat or arrange transport back home. Alice said she had only once spent the night with him.

  As our conversation went on, I began to sense that Beth and Alice had slightly different attitudes to their experience: Beth still seemed loyal to Jimmy, slightly in awe of him and keen to highlight the fun they’d had; Alice was more ambivalent. ‘At the time it was great fun. A lot of laughs, but there were negatives as well,’ she said. ‘Looking back, I wonder if he gave a shit.’

  They’d brought old ticket stubs and photographs, including some that had been taken just a few years previously at a reunion of the group which Jimmy had hosted at his flat close to Regent’s Park. In the pictures they were laughing and clowning – there was one in which Jimmy was making an antic display of imposing himself on Alice, and another of Alice in the kitchen against the wall and Jimmy pressing up against her – you could only see his back and his white hair and her hand poking out from his shoulder. ‘He’s joking in that one,’ she said, pointing at the first. ‘But not in that one.’

  In hindsight, it’s tempting to pull out the most telling parts of what they said, those details that support what we later learned, though I worry it gives a misleading impression of an encounter that more took the form of a quizzical and bemused pooling of information – we were like a quartet of puzzlers standing over a ten-thousand piece jigsaw. Each of us gave our impression of the Savile mysteries in a freewheeling bull session. I shared the rumour about his being a necrophile, which they hadn’t heard. They talked about his mafia connections, which they took seriously, and which added to their sense of paranoia.

  I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I’d appeared more shocked by what they had to say about the callous and inconsiderate sex, but I still had in my head the tone of the letter and the references to reunions and fun and so I didn’t hear what was undoubtedly also there, especially in Alice’s recollections: a persistent sense of resentment and unease about how he had treated them. And there was also an explicit instruction that they would never tell friends about their relationship with Jimmy. They didn’t want their children to know.

  Towards the end of the lunch, Alice described approaching Jimmy about taking her child to Jim’ll Fix It – this was years later, in the late eighties. Jimmy had arranged tickets on the condition she came up to see him beforehand and she’d met him in his hotel room. He’d propositioned her. ‘But I was going out with someone at the time,’ she said. ‘I pushed him away. If I hadn’t been, I might have given in. He said, “You must love him very much.” Which was a sensitive thing to say. For him.’

  ‘He’s so clever,’ Beth said. ‘A genius really. But also mad.’

  On the pavement outside, we said our goodbyes. The session seemed to have relieved some of their animus, and my sense was that we all felt better having compared notes. ‘Sometimes I feel like confronting him,’ Alice said just before the two of them walked off down Regent Street. ‘But he’s so clever, I know he’d make mincemeat out of me. It’ll all come out after he dies.’

  In August 2001, when Neil and Christine Hamilton were arrested for rape while I was filming with them, Jimmy was fizzing with excitement at having, as he saw it, an inside line to the story through me.

  After the documentary went out, Jimmy called to congratulate me.

  ‘I have spoken to a whole lot of people from all walks of life and they all give it ten out of ten,’ he said.

  ‘What was your take on it?’

  ‘They’re a pair of swingers.’

  ‘How do you mean “swingers” exactly?’

  ‘They’re a pair of swingers. They’re quite given to having a bit of sexual philandering given half a chance.’

  Jimmy was firing on all cylinders. Maybe it was excitement at the programme – that it was being chattered about, and the way his association with me put him vicariously at the centre of things. Jonathan King, the musical impresario and TV presenter, was then in the news, too, being accused of sex crimes against underage boys, and Jimmy began talking about that.

  ‘It’s six of one and two threes of another,’ he said. The accusers were all rent boys, he said, who were out for cash. ‘Part of the compensation culture.’

  ‘Ere, what about a thing on rent boys?’ he went on. ‘All you have to do is buy them a sandwich and they run off at the mouth. Half the time, it’s them that gets the punters at it.’

  That August I was invited to do a keynote presentation at the Edinburgh television festival, involving clips from old shows and work in progress. For some added value, someone – possibly David or Will – had the idea of making an all-access mini-documentary from the point of view of Jimmy interviewing me: When Jimmy Met Louis.

  By this time I’d moved out of my Shepherd’s Bush flat and had bought a house in Harlesden, a said-to-be up-and-coming area of west London. I think at some level, having recently been in a twelve-year relationship and on track to have children, I was carried by a kind of lifestyle momentum into a young-couple arrangement even though I was now single and living alone. My habits of thought hadn’t changed and I still saw myself as a budding family man. But the upshot was that I found myself with a large house and no real sense of what to do with it, other than live in it like a squatter.

  When the time came to film the documentary, I’d only been in the house a couple of months. It was big and empty – no sofas, no rugs, no pictures, no comfy chairs, no kitchen table. Just a futon and some clothes on a rack. This may also be one of the reasons I was comfortable having him over. I still didn’t like him knowing too much about me, didn’t quite trust him, and there wasn’t much in the house to give me away.

  Will directed. He contacted Jimmy, who agreed to the idea, asking only his usual ‘pourboire’ – his term for a collection of high-priced cigars – from a shop called Dunhill in Mayfair.

  Will met Jimmy at King’s Cross, and filmed him in the taxi to the BBC offices in White City. It was midsummer, warm, and Jimmy was wearing a string vest and running shorts. He was by this time seventy-five years old, still bedecked in gold rings and necklaces, his long white hair pulled back in a ponytail. He had with him a knapsack.

  He arrived at my offices at a moment when I’d stepped away, and he poked around my small closed-off section, playing the role of an intrusive investigator. ‘What a dreadful tip this is!’ He wrote ‘Louis’ Tip’ on a piece of paper, then took a Polaroid of himself holding it, leaving the photo on my desk. Then, when I turned up, we sat down and he interviewed me, which was a strange experience. He had no natural curiosity, nor did he like to admit to not knowing something, so his questions followed the rhythm of a cross-examination rather than a natural conversation.

  We had lunch at the BBC canteen – Jimmy discoursing on the nature of celebrity. ‘Success is a three-legged stool,’ he said. TV, radio, newspapers. ‘If you have all three you can do what you want. But if you only have TV and radio captured, you’ll be dependent on newspapers to print nice things about you. I wrote for the Sunday People for nearly twenty years and I found that when I was doing that none of the other papers were keen to have a go at me because it was like having a go at their own, right? So they
went and had a go at somebody else.’

  The subject of the Hamiltons came up. Jimmy viewed the story as an object lesson in how those in the public eye are vulnerable, and he impressed on me the need to be careful now that I was ‘at the top of the tree’ of broadcasting and prey to all sorts of prurient tabloid enquiries.

  ‘Does it perturb you at all that you are actually in that category where somebody can have a go at you?’ he asked. ‘They don’t care whether it’s right, wrong, true, false – so long as they’ve got names, baby, they’ll have a feast. Say, for instance, you were interviewing me on an allegation of something that was not nice, right? And you said to me, you’re alleged to have de-dum-de-dum-de-dum. My answer would be, “It would be a lot worse if it were true.” ’

  As ever, I found the idea of being held to ransom by the tabloids for alleged misdeeds a fanciful thing to worry about and I didn’t much like the idea of being clubbed together in his imagined category of embattled ageing celebrities. To wind him up, I said, ‘Well, they do say no smoke without a fire, don’t they?’

  After lunch we drove up to my house. With Will filming, Jimmy did a faux-investigative tour of the almost-empty premises. In the middle of one of the bedrooms, as a provocation, I’d left the little wooden box in which I used to keep my hash and rolling paper – I was still then in the habit of smoking a joint at night to help me sleep. I was curious to see Jimmy, whose trademark was his glibness and unflappability, faced with illegal narcotics up close. I had to point it out to him, though I’d left it in the middle of the floor. ‘I’m an Indian tracker,’ he said when he spotted the box. He opened it up, then finding what looked like a small fragrant clod of dried mud, exclaimed, ‘Bleedin’ ’ell fire!’

  In the other rooms, Jimmy made a show of attempting to discern evidence of lady companionship.

  In a top-floor bedroom, I’d hung some old photos showing Jimmy as a young man. ‘This is your bedroom, if you ever want to come and stay,’ I said, not quite meaning it, knowing he would never take me up on the offer, but also, if I’m honest, not completely not meaning it either.

  My main recollection was the sense that he was mentally counting the minutes until he could head back up to Leeds. Downstairs, as I showed him out, I said: ‘Thanks for coming by.’

  ‘OK, good morning!’ he replied.

  ‘And if you ever do need a place to crash in London, you’ve seen you’ve got a room upstairs.’

  ‘Thank you very much. I appreciated that. I’m just going to check that it’s safe out there.’

  Making a show of looking up and down the road, he ventured out, then hopped into the taxi that had been ordered for him. As he drove off, three children who had spotted him – though they would have been too small to remember Jim’ll Fix It, so how they recognized him is an open question – chased his car down the road shouting, ‘Jimmy! Jimmy!’

  And in fact around this time, the tabloids and the gossips did start taking an interest in my private life. It came to the attention of the press that I had been married, and a reporter from one of the redtops rang Sarah’s doorbell at her new home. They got a photo of her looking bewildered in a long shot with her finger in a copy of a book I recognized as About the Author by John Colapinto.

  Among my reasons for being precious about my own privacy was an awareness of what a private person Sarah was, and that grainy apparition of her in a newspaper, clutching a book, came to symbolize some sense of collateral damage wrought by my willingness to embrace fame too readily, to crave success, to be an emotional cretin – I wasn’t quite sure exactly what, I just knew I felt guilty and implicated.

  Of all the themes least likely to appeal to a general audience, I realize ‘I’m too famous! Wah! Wah!’ is high on the list. So be it. There are many worse things in a person’s working life, like losing your arm in a threshing machine or getting black lung or sustaining a brain injury in a body slam in a wrestling bout with Rowdy Roddy Piper. Let’s just say that, as I look back at the protracted climacteric of that time and the sequence of trivial incidents that were for me small landmarks of unhappiness, the one that was most surreal was the day Jimmy called and said I wasn’t to worry but a paper had been asking him about ‘Louis Theroux’s secret wife’. ‘They had no chance,’ he said. ‘Because against me the punter isn’t born that has a chance.’

  I felt relieved, and then in quick succession came a feeling of disbelief that my life had come to such a pass: having Jimmy Cigar-smoking Tracksuit-wearing Now-then-now-then Savile as a kind of ally and gatekeeper to my private life.

  Chapter 19

  You Can All Fuck Off

  It was towards the end of 2001. There had been a series of false starts and abortive projects – one involved embedding with a troupe of eighties pop bands for the ‘Here and Now’ tour, another on John Noakes, the ex-Blue Peter presenter. Uri Geller briefly came back into the frame, yet again, and the boy band 5ive.

  For a while we were having serious conversations about dedicating an hour of network television to a profile of Linsey Dawn McKenzie, a glamour model whose fame was based on the enormous size of her breasts. She was going on a ‘boob cruise’ with a paying clientele of breast appreciators. An AP went out to Essex to recce her. I can’t remember the specifics. But since we didn’t make the programme, I conclude that her breasts just weren’t big enough to generate a full hour-long programme.

  By now all my anxieties and doubts about making celebrity profiles had coalesced into a kind of disgust. Having started out as a journalist, a humble trapper and skinner of stories with a certain knowledge of his hunting grounds and how to bag his quarry, I found myself in the position of wandering around the woods with a silver platter, waiting for a roast chicken to fall onto it. Day after day we were joylessly pushing the button on a slot machine, its wheels marked with celebrity names, hoping for a payday.

  Not to mention that the whole diary-book-thing, which had seemed such a good idea, had now by its very formlessness taken over my life. In my work I’d always tried to expand the frame of enquiry, capturing more reality and greater authenticity by including those moments at the edges of an encounter that are in some ways the most real. But with the diary it felt as though I’d expanded the frame so wide that it was no longer clear where the edges were. My waking hours resembled a life-support system for a project that required me to have conversations with my celebrity ex-subjects and take notes. Of all the conversations, as ever, the weirdest and most interesting were with Jimmy Savile. But, even with him, I found myself in a place of diminishing returns, never getting closer to making his parts add up.

  Then, in amongst these failures and missteps, there came an expression of interest from Max.

  When he died in his cell at HMP Littlehey, Cambridgeshire, Max Clifford, the star publicist, was three years into an eight-year sentence for multiple counts of indecent assault. His death was an ignominious end for a man who had once been one of the most powerful people on Fleet Street. His stock in trade had been kiss-and-tell stories. Max would sell the tabloids scoops about nights of passion with celebrities. Rebecca Loos, a personal assistant to the footballer David Beckham, had used his services when she’d alleged that the two of them had been having an affair. The actress Antonia de Sancha had gone to him with her account of being the mistress of the conservative politician David Mellor. Max also worked for celebrity clients who wished to keep their names out of the papers. He would use his influence among editors to spike articles, usually by supplying alternative stories about stage-managed relationships.

  Clifford’s scoops sometimes involved colourful headlines of his creation. The most famous, ‘Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster’, was a mostly fictional Sun cover story about an unpredictable comedian eating a rodent sandwich while staying with a friend.

  Though he would have disliked the comparison, Max Clifford resembled Jimmy Savile in some ways. Like Jimmy, he had a leathery toughness and lied without compunction – for advantage or to amuse himself. Also like J
immy, he was a dedicated and high-profile charity fundraiser. And he was an undiscovered serial predator who – in 2001 – agreed to spend ten days with me for a documentary profile.

  Max’s interest in doing a programme came with a condition: he insisted we meet off camera before filming. Going back to TV Nation and Weird Weekends days, it was my policy not to do this, to preserve some authenticity to the encounter. But by now, with production in the doldrums, I was relaxing some of my old rules.

  His offices were on the fifth floor of a building in New Bond Street: open-plan, overlooking the rooftops of the West End. A half-dozen or so mostly female workers sat at desks – ‘Max’s Angels’. On the walls were framed front pages of his greatest hits and photos of Max with some of his celebrity clients.

  I arrived with my director – Alicia, from the Eubank film – and an AP, Helen Sage, to find Max in his glassed-off corner office, gabbing on the phone. ‘Have you seen today’s Tatler?’ he was saying. ‘It’s going to be huge.’

  He was silver-haired, in his sixties, in a blue short-sleeved shirt that showed his ex-boxer’s arms and chest.

  Once off the phone, he explained why the documentary wouldn’t work.

  ‘You want a big scandal, I know what you want. But these people who come to me with stories, they don’t want their faces shown. They don’t come to me because they want to be on TV. They come for two reasons: because they want to make big money, or they want revenge.’

  This led into an inventory of his life and a cascade of unverifiable gossip, all of it off-the-record: an anecdote about a Westlife stag party and something else about Prince Edward. He kept mentioning names and then giving a little smile as if to say, ‘Oh, I could tell you things,’ and turning his lips as though secrets were wriggling to get out.