A Very Private Celebrity

by Hugh Purcell

  John Freeman and Hugh Burnett did not always have an easy relationship, and it was going to get worse.

  In December 1960, the Face to Face guest was pop star Adam Faith. Lizi Freeman says he was her choice, after she dissuaded her stepfather from inviting Tommy Steele. She and some friends watched the live programme from the gallery. The interview was, said Adam Faith afterwards, ‘a pleasant talk with a pleasant man’, and that is how it seemed to viewers. Proof again that Freeman was not always the grand inquisitor. Perhaps the subject and style were chosen deliberately as a reaction to the notorious Face to Face with Gilbert Harding three months previously.

  Although a minor figure compared with most of the other guests, Harding was one of the best-known faces on BBC television and, in an age of deference and politeness, he was known for his irascibility. ‘The rudest man in Britain,’ the tabloids called him, partly for his performance as a panellist on the quiz show What’s My Line?, where he bullied or insulted the participants. Harding was a fellow TV professional and he had actually approached Face to Face for the interview himself, so Freeman and Burnett considered him fair game. Their plan was for Freeman to question Harding about his reputation for rudeness. Did it make him happy? Freeman intended to suggest that a professional life as a panellist and disc jockey after a Cambridge University education meant Harding was working ‘below his capacity’ and that this disappointment had made him the rude man the public saw.

  So the interview began. But then, in a more psychoanalytical approach, Freeman asked Harding if he had ‘obsessive thoughts about punishment and discipline?’ Then: ‘Are you good at enduring pain? Then: ‘Do you fear pain?’ Then: ‘Can you stay with other people who are suffering pain? Then: ‘Do you fantasise about punishment for your enemies?’ Then: ‘In your dreams are you a dominant figure?’ Then: ‘Have you ever been with a person dying?’ Then: ‘Is that the only time you have seen a person dead?’ Quite where the interview was leading no one could tell, because at this stage Harding was close to tears, with beads of sweat running down his temples under the studio lights. It turned out that Harding’s mother had died recently and he had been at her bedside. Freeman did not know this and he was distressed when he was told afterwards – more so by the suggestion (typical of the myth of Face to Face in the tabloid press) that he had consulted Harding’s psychiatrist before the show to discover his most vulnerable point. Mary Crozier, reviewing in The Guardian, was unimpressed: ‘Mr Freeman kept on in a really tedious way about pain, disappointment, punishment, discipline, dreams and childhood. I begin to think he attached far too much importance to this amateur psychoanalysis. I fancy Mr Harding’s answers showed considerable control.’18

  The interview revealed that under Harding’s grumpy persona was a sad and lonely man. Burnett wrote that letters of sympathy flooded in. During the interview, Harding said: ‘I’m afraid of dying. I should be very glad to be dead, but I don’t look forward to the process of dying.’ Eight weeks after the transmission, he suffered a fatal heart attack as he was leaving Broadcasting House. He was fifty-three.

  In January 1961, John Freeman took up his new post as editor of the New Statesman. He was shortly to turn his back on Face to Face, literally. That month, anticipating Freeman’s departure, Burnett wrote to Ed Murrow and asked if he would like to present a Face to Face series in America, featuring, it was hoped, Marilyn Monroe, Mae West, Professor Oppenheimer (of A-bomb fame) and Mort Sahl. Murrow was ‘very interested’, but the series came to nothing.

  In due course, Freeman resigned, but he told Burnett he might return after he had settled into the editor’s chair, provided he was billed as ‘John Freeman, editor of the New Statesman’ and paid more money than the 100 guineas a performance. In the meantime, Burnett piloted a programme with Panorama’s Robert Kee.

  In July 1961, Freeman wrote to Burnett denying that he was being ‘uncooperative or superior’ and agreed to present one more series in the autumn, if the money was right. Showing a cool nerve that Stirling Moss would have admired, Freeman did not sign a contract until within days of the series starting in October. He was polite but insistent: more money, and first-class air travel. Burnett complained about Freeman’s ‘militant attitude’. ‘Katie [Catherine Freeman] is doing her best to persuade him,’ said someone in the talks contracts department, and Leonard Miall dined Freeman at L’Escargot in Soho. In the end, the BBC caved in and the series went ahead, but it was doomed from the start.

  The series opened with the trade union leader Frank Cousins. It was a straw in the wind when Burnett wrote to Leonard Miall: ‘I would like to place on record that to put the first of a new series of Face to Face between an appeal for the National Old People’s Welfare Council and the Venerable F. W. Cox doing an Epilogue is death and destruction to this programme.’19 The series continued with a very popular interview in London with the American civil rights leader Martin Luther King.

  Shortly after, in November, Freeman agreed to squeeze in a few American recordings of Face to Face when he was over in New York for the New Statesman. It says something about the self-importance of the BBC that it expected its New York office to book, at short notice, Marilyn Monroe, Tennessee Williams, Ella Fitzgerald and General Douglas MacArthur. All said no and the American venture was abandoned.

  In January 1962, the series continued in Britain. There were two weak interviews, with the actor Albert Finney and the playwright John Osborne. Freeman seemed unprepared and, for the first time, lacked drive and persistence: as a result the interviews fell flat. The Osborne Face to Face scored the lowest reaction index of all: 54 per cent. On 6 February, Leonard Miall wrote a terse memo to Burnett:

  Freeman is not interviewing as well as he used to.

  He and you are not pulling in harness.

  The look of Face to Face is nearly stale. The opening is slow and laboured.

  The real trouble is two [that Freeman and Burnett were no longer working as a team]. Sort that out and all will be well.20

  This was the sort of memo Burnett could not ignore. He had a frank talk with his interviewer and reported back to the head of talks:

  John has come clean. He thinks that as editor of the New Statesman he can no longer afford to be regarded as a star of gladiatorial combat, which is what the viewer expects from Face to Face. He says he has deliberately abandoned the tough form of questioning because his TV personality has threatened to overshadow his NS personality. He regrets embarking on the present series and says he is too busy to do more. He will not undertake any more series of Face to Face. You will remember that when I suggested to you my position was like a man with a rope around his neck with you pulling one end and Freeman the other, you said that is what a producer is for (!!!). Further, I have watched John repeatedly turn down names of subjects approved by the BBC. It is the harness that is at fault, not the relations between the horses.21

  The director-general had also noticed Freeman’s weak interviewing. He said he did not rule out a future Face to Face with Oswald Mosley, but not for the present, given Freeman’s interviewing had lost its ‘toughness’.

  Burnett suggested to Freeman one last Face to Face – this one with the artist whose sketches had introduced nearly all the programmes, Feliks Topolski. ‘He turned it down flat,’ Burnett told Miall.

  Burnett then invited Robert Kee to take over from Freeman as interviewer and the schedulers placed another series (the seventh) for the summer 1962, with Lady Astor as the first guest. Nothing came of it.

  This was the unhappy ending to the BBC’s most famous series of interviews. It had made John Freeman a household name and TV Personality of the Year in 1960. He said genuinely that he disliked the celebrity status, and gave this as his reason for turning his back on Face to Face. But the truth was more complicated.

  The fame of Face to Face invited parody. The Stanley Baxter Show produced a sketch called ‘Nose to Nose’. More significantly, on 7 December 1962, BBC drama broadcast a play specially written for television by Te
rrence Rattigan called Heart to Heart (the Daily Mirror billed it as ‘the largest theatre in the world’, as the two-hour play was expected to reach an audience of eighty million having been produced for television in thirteen versions in thirteen countries over one week). The lead was the inquisitor (played by Kenneth More), a cynical, womanising journalist with a drink problem, who had rocketed to fame ‘taking people apart’ on television. Not surprisingly, Freeman had a case for a libel action, although the scenario was unrealistic. The Daily Sketch said: ‘As a serious attack on the Face to Face type show, it probably made John Freeman giggle into his mug of BBC canteen tea.’ Nevertheless, Freeman protested in the New Statesman office, ‘The allegation of alcoholism I just about accept; that of amorousness I reject absolutely’, to which Catherine would later comment, ‘That should have been the other way round.’ Freeman consulted a lawyer and settled with the BBC after ‘an amicable exchange of letters’.

  As a postscript, a few months before Face to Face ended, the BBC audience research panel reported its poll on possible future guests. Over 400 names were suggested, of whom the most popular was the conductor Sir Malcom Sargent (fifty-two votes), followed by two TV personalities – Richard Dimbleby (twenty-nine) and Eamonn Andrews (twenty-four). Radio quizmaster Wilfred Pickles and pop singer Cliff Richard were also popular choices.

  Sir Winston Churchill polled fourteen votes. As Leonard Miall wrote on the bottom of the list: ‘Sic transit, gloria mundi.’22

  Notes

  1 Notes by Hugh Burnett with release of BBC DVD set of Face to Face in 2009

  2 Extracts from interviews with Lord Birkett, Carl Jung, Bertrand Russell and Edith Sitwell all from Face to Face with John Freeman, BBC Books, 1989

  3 Michael Parkinson written tribute to publisher, 2015

  4 The Guardian, 6 May 1961

  5 Woman’s Day, 12 August 1961

  6 ‘The Grillers Grilled’, Tatler, 1961

  7 WAC Face to Face file

  8 Burnett, op. cit.

  9 Jung letter, cited in Wounded Healer of the Soul by Claire Dung, Continuum, London, 2000, p. 200

  10 Letter from Jung in possession of Freeman family

  11 WAC Face to Face file

  12 Jung: A Biography by Deirdre Bair, Little, Brown, Boston, 2003, p. 620n

  13 This and above references from John Freeman’s ‘Introduction’ to Man and His Symbols conceived and edited by Carl G. Jung, Doubleday Books, New York, 1964

  14 Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography by John Fisher, HarperCollins, London, 2008, p. 272

  15 Anthony Clare’s interview with John Freeman at Davis, California, in 1988 (full transcript in Face to Face with John Freeman)

  16 Fisher, op. cit., pp. 279–80

  17 WAC Face to Face file

  18 The Guardian, 19 September 1960

  19 WAC Face to Face file

  20 Ibid.

  21 Ibid.

  22 Ibid.

  Chapter 7

  Political journalist – Freeman and the Cold War

  FOR FOURTEEN YEARS, John Freeman wrote for the New Statesman (1951–65). For the last ten of those years, he was either deputy editor or editor, thereby exercising editorial control at the height of the Cold War over a socialist magazine that had a reputation for pro-communist beliefs. As such he seemed to invite rumours. He was a public figure on the left who guarded his privacy, and that in itself was suspicious. He was also well known for his dubious friendships, as with Tom Driberg, who was suspected of being a spy. One rumour at the time was that Freeman worked for the intelligence services; another, preposterous now, was that he was the ‘fourth’ or ‘fifth’ man in the spy scandals surrounding the defection of the three spies Burgess, Maclean and Philby.

  These rumours were not true but undoubtedly two of his co-writers and close friends on the magazine were ‘spies’ for one side or the other, or both. Less emotively and more accurately, they worked part-time as informants, couriers and photographers, answerable to the secret services of the state. There was, after all, a Cold War on at the time and those who travelled to the other side of the Iron Curtain considered it their patriotic duty to prevent it becoming ‘hot’. Freeman, as we know, was a socialist on the left of the Labour Party. Was he a Soviet sympathiser? How far did his political views shape his editorial policy? And in what direction? First, I need to place Freeman in the New Statesman offices and account for his promotion to editor.

  When John Freeman took over from Kingsley Martin as editor of the New Statesman and Nation in January 1961, the circulation was 75,000 – but falling – and the advertising revenue was almost £100,000 per year. When Martin had become editor in 1931, the circulation had been 12,000, the advertising revenue £7,000 per year, and the magazine losing money. In other words, Freeman succeeded a thirty-year editorship that had turned the New Statesman into the most successful political weekly magazine in Britain, although arguably it was past its best.

  It was a political magazine based firmly on Martin’s socialist principles – and everything that Freeman did was bound to be in his shadow. Freeman described his predecessor as ‘an angular, argumentative, exuberant Nonconformist, who never acquired the good taste and discretion to keep quiet in the face of injustice and folly. In his magazine he weekly wrestled with doubts and proclaimed the conviction of a whole generation.’1

  Despite his patriarchal appearance and pedagogic manner, Kingsley Martin was notoriously indecisive; ‘wrestling with doubts’ was a good description. The nickname of the New Statesman and Nation – ‘Staggers and Naggers’ – referred to Martin’s fickle conscience and nagging morality. When he retired from the editorship, A. J. P. Taylor sent a message: ‘The end of an era! It is most distressing to think that the New Statesman may now follow a consistent line two weeks running.’2

  Kingsley Martin could not make his mind up between pacifism and preparations for war. In the late ’30s he was one of the first appeasers of Hitler and then one of the first to turn against Chamberlain for appeasement. In the late ’50s he could not decide whether to support the campaign for nuclear disarmament or not, alternating between enthusiasm and ambivalence. Freeman accused him of having ‘a halfbaked love affair’ with unilateralism.

  Kingsley’s agonising over the right path was shared by his readership. When Norman MacKenzie, who was an assistant editor from 1943 to 1962, spoke at his memorial service in 1969 he said that Kingsley Martin ‘was not so much the conscience of the left as the unconscious of the middle class, and that’s why he had so much power. He had a very deep sense of his readership, their anxieties and hopes, and of himself in behaving justly.’3

  Transparently honest, often angry at the state of the world but funny about the idiosyncrasies of the British character, Kingsley’s journalism ‘played a crucial role in shaping the thought of a generation’. That was Freeman’s view writing in the 1960s.

  The critics of the NS labelled it indecisive, irresponsible and pessimistic, but:

  It is difficult to deny that had Martin’s New Statesman not existed, public opinion on such varied and momentous issues as anti-fascism in the ’30s, war aims, the welfare state, and – perhaps above all – the anti-imperial revolution of India and the British colonies, for the three decades of his editorship would have been very different from what it was.4

  Such was the seminal influence of the magazine that Freeman inherited.

  Norman MacKenzie lived just long enough to write in the April 2013 centenary edition about the literary and social traditions of the magazine, which was often referred to by the name of its location – an alley in a Dickensian corner of London leading off Lincoln’s Inn Fields called Great Turnstile:

  If I have to fit Great Turnstile into the English tradition of radical writing, I would say it goes back directly to Richard Steele’s early coffeehouse congeries of mid-eighteenth-century London that gave rise to the Tatler magazine. That’s certainly how Kingsley saw it. The New Statesman interlocked the old Whig radicalism, centred ro
und Whitehall, with the Fabian parliamentary radicals of the LSE and the art, crafts, music and theatre crowd from Bloomsbury. Great Turnstile Street was right in the middle, literally.

  When Kingsley Martin had become editor his first deal was to acquire The Nation with its Lib–Lab viewpoint. In the 1920s, The Nation had bought up that great Victorian literary weekly, The Athenaeum. When Martin added The Week-end Review the following year (1934), he found himself master of a vehicle he had largely designed himself, a literary omnibus carrying star writers from the left spectrum – H. G. Wells, J. B. Priestley, Malcolm Muggeridge, C. E. M. Joad, Harold Laski and a coach load of glitterati from political and artistic circles. It was all grist to Kingsley’s mill. He was a very inclusive editor. That remained the strength of the NS for forty years. We were a sort of club of intellectual gentlemen like the Savile or Garrick: not so high class but similarly collegiate.5

  John Freeman first wrote for the New Statesman in 1951. Kingsley, then in his mid-fifties, was looking for a successor and already had Freeman in mind, partly for his chief of staff capabilities. As Freeman said: ‘Kingsley hated work, all other forms of work except writing, which he loved.’ Freeman was in the process of resigning from the government, and his resignation principle of welfare before re-armament was in tune with the Labour left on the staff, from the editor downwards. So Martin took Freeman out to lunch and, on 23 May 1951, Freeman accepted by letter the offer of a part-time staff job:

  I would ask you to have two things in mind. First, that you will really try – having regard to your judgement of my capacity – to find me a proper, reasonably secure and remunerative job in the NS and N; secondly that you will exercise some care and patience in teaching me the rudiments of the job, which is new to me, and not lose patience if I show initial clumsiness and ignorance. I’m sure I shan’t regret taking the decision even though, on the face of it, it’s financial lunacy.6