In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  On 30 July 2012, that prospect moved a step closer with the sale of his belongings at Savile’s Hall. The first lot, his Highland suit complete with Lochaber tartan kilt, went under the hammer at 10.30 a.m. and sold for £280. The tone for the day, however, was set with the second item, an ash shepherd’s crook-type walking stick with a plaque engraved ‘James Savile OBE’. The stick sold for £500 against a guide price of £50–£80. From that point on, almost every item in the sale obliterated its estimate.

  The 2002 Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible with personalised ‘JS 247’ number plate went for £130,000, almost twice its guide price. The three-wheel bubble car fetched £22,000, bought by Angela Swift, the managing director of a care home company who said it would be parked inside a residential home in Barnsley. ‘Many of the residents have dementia so this will hopefully provide them with some nostalgic memories,’ said Swift, who also bought a gold Nike tracksuit for £500, four times its guide price.3

  Roger Bodley, another of Savile’s trustees and a former radiologist at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, bought a Highland sword and shield presented to the star in 1973 when he was named chieftain of Lochaber’s Highland games. Bodley said it would be returned to the Glencoe cottage that the trustees were now planning to turn into a Scottish retreat for the disabled.

  A former patient at Stoke Mandeville, George Ridgeon, spent £350 on some marathon medals. He had travelled from Gloucester in his wheelchair. ‘It wasn’t easy but I had to be here,’ he said. ‘I want something to remember my old friend by.’ He was even more pleased to be presented his items by a ‘pretty girl’ because, he explained, ‘just like Jim, I’ve got an eye for the ladies.’4

  Towards the end of the sale, an original Jim’ll Fix It badge went for a staggering £2,000. After following the sale all day, I bought a Stetson hat that Savile told me Elvis Presley had given him, and a bag of assorted medals and trinkets. I knew what was coming and this was the final farewell.

  After nearly 13 hours, the last item was sold: Jimmy Savile’s favourite ashtray and a Romeo y Julieta cigar that prompted one bidder to pay £140. The team of auctioneers had worked in relay, hundreds of people had attended and many thousands more followed the auction online. Every single one of the items went, apart from a certificate for an honorary doctorate awarded by Bedfordshire University that was withdrawn. The organisers had said they hoped to make around £200,000 for the Jimmy Savile Charitable Trust. The final total was over £320,000.

  His life had been celebrated again, and sold off for charity: the last positive publicity Jimmy Savile would ever generate. It was, indeed, good while it lasted.

  24. THE ONLY PUNTER YOU CAN RECOGNISE FROM THE BACK

  It was late and we had just finished dinner at one of Jimmy Savile’s favourite Scarborough eateries, a short walk up the Esplanade from his Wessex Court flat. He was on to his second large vodka of the evening and his tongue had loosened. All evening he had been joking with a young waitress who, he discovered, hailed from Fort William, near to Lochaber where he had been honorary chieftain of the Highland games for over 30 years.

  Savile had a ‘team’ at Fort William, just as he did in Scarborough and Leeds, and at Stoke Mandeville and Broadmoor. They were people who were impressed by him and would attend to his needs when he was around. At that point, I hadn’t found out whether he had a similar team in London for those rare occasions when he stayed at his small attic apartment on Regent’s Park Crescent.

  He always told me that when it came to the royal family he had taken the oath of omertà, which was apt given that he was prone to referring to himself as ‘the Godfather’. However, on this particular evening he’d already touched on his friendship with the Duke of Edinburgh and was just beginning to tell me a story about Earl Louis Mountbatten when a woman, whom I’d guessed at being in her sixties, leaned over from the neighbouring table and, in a posh voice, informed Savile how very unhappy she was about the quality of her meal.

  ‘Did you know a fella was following you?’ he barked back, prodding a fork in the direction of a man I presumed to be her husband. ‘I told him he’d get in trouble for that, what with you being underage.’

  The woman did not seem to understand that this was intended as a joke or that Savile was clearly not interested in discussing the merits of the restaurant. ‘It was the most awful dinner,’ she blundered on regardless. ‘The duck was off.’

  ‘It was probably dead,’ deadpanned Savile, who informed her that he’d played safe by having the salmon.

  The woman tried a different tack, announcing that the last time she had met him it was in this same restaurant about five years ago.

  ‘And I found your earring down the back of my sofa,’ he replied without a flicker of a smile.

  This lopsided exchange continued for some minutes – her oblivious to his indifference, him responding with sour-faced innuendo – until the woman reiterated that her duck was off and Savile once again countered with a reference to it probably having something to do with it being dead for so long.

  ‘How long are you in Scarborough for?’ she asked.

  ‘About 5ft 10,’ he replied, ‘unless I get run over and I’ll be about 7ft 6.’

  The woman finally admitted defeat, settled her dispute with the restaurant and left with her husband, who had said nothing throughout. ‘People are a pain in the arse,’ muttered Savile. ‘These sort of people will dine out on that story.’

  Commotion over, we returned to our conversation and he told me about a television producer who marvelled at his ability to fit in anywhere. ‘I love people coming up to me,’ he added, contradicting what he had just said about the woman. ‘If you’re on TV you have to accept the responsibility, just like I had the responsibility for looking after my people in the dancehalls, even though they didn’t know I was really doing that. People can’t become second-class citizens once you come off TV. I belong to the people out there.’

  Did people ever pick on him, or try it on, because he was odd? ‘No, there was nothing to pick on. They thought I was a bit freaky but they couldn’t tell me why. It was because I was odd. You can’t really have a go at odd because there’s nothing to have a go at. It’s just odd. If you’re disabled or you’ve got an encephalitic head where it’s twice the size, people will have a go at you because it’s a recognisable thing. Odd is not a recognisable thing. Odd means you just don’t fit in. Odd is a description on its own which is indefinable. There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s a state that some people are in.’

  When did he first realise that he was odd? ‘Very early on. It doesn’t mean handicapped, it just means odd.’

  He called the Scottish waitress over, relayed the complaints from the next table, and ordered another large vodka. When she’d gone he talked a little about his older sister Marjory who had raised 14 children, and then about one of his nephews who had worked out that they had 420 traceable relatives alive in Britain. ‘The way I look at it is that I had two brothers who were in the war and they never knew whether they would ever see home again. I could have any number of nephews and nieces out there. Do me a fucking favour.’

  The conversation was jumping around and the subject it alighted on next was children. ‘I hate kids,’ he trumpeted, not for the first time. It was a standard line he used but not one that I necessarily believed. Only that morning I had witnessed him talking sweetly to a little girl who was waiting for her grandparents at the front door to his block of flats.

  ‘I’m very good with them because I hate them,’ he continued. ‘They know I’m not some yucky adult. I like to confuse them because they don’t know where they are then. Then they start to fall in love with you because they want to be with you. Nobody confuses kids like I do; they try to understand them and reason with them. I think all kids should be eaten at birth.’

  A man came over to the table and was greeted with a joke: ‘How do you turn a cat into a dog? Pour petrol on it, set fire to it and watch it go “woof”.’ The man laughed and shook h
is head. ‘By God, you’ll never meet a character like him,’ he said, looking at me but motioning towards Savile. ‘He’s had a wonderful life.’

  Savile wasn’t finished: ‘This copper says to this geezer, “When did you realise your wife was dead?” The geezer said, “I dunno. The sex was the same but the dishes kept piling up in the kitchen.”’ I tried vainly to summon a laugh but was saved by the waitress returning with the drink. Savile asked her for a doggie bag.

  On the short walk back to the flat he talked about how he was a ‘complete phenomenon’. He was wearing one of his thick, quilted sports coats and a woolly hat, which was prudent as it was now freezing cold. ‘I’m still the only punter you can recognise from the back. If it all fell out tomorrow,’ he said, referring to his hair, ‘I wouldn’t give a shit. It’s never been dyed. I just bleach it and take all the natural colour out of it. This is natural hair.’

  I asked him about the jewellery, and where the idea for the all the ‘jangle jangle’ had come from. The artist Harland Miller once wrote that Jimmy Savile had been the originator of the bling style adopted by American rappers.

  ‘Deals,’ hooted Savile. ‘I like to do deals. There’s eighteen hundred diamonds in the Rolex. They are all identically cut. The necklace is a gift from the president of South Africa. He came over and saw Jim’ll Fix It and said that I was the ‘wishbone of England’ so he got this golden wishbone made up for me. The other one is from the Goldsmiths’ Association of Britain.’ He pulled out a pendant from beneath his jacket and tried to show me a tiny cigar, training shoe, Jim’ll Fix It badge and record, although it was too dark to see properly.

  ‘The thumb ring is another one from the Goldsmiths’ Association when I got my knighthood. I told them that in the olden days knights used to get a thumb ring so they sent someone down to the British Library for a week to pore over books. The diamonds in that are another story.’ He then launched into a rather confusing anecdote about meeting a diamond dealer in a restaurant who told him one of the stones in his thumb ring was chipped.

  ‘Then he looked at the Rolex,’ explained Savile, ‘and nearly shot his load. It’s a very unique piece; there’s only two in the world. Mike Tyson had the other one but I reckon one of his birds has got it now.’ The story finished with Savile getting a diamond in each corner of his thumb ring, for nothing. ‘What can you do?’ he said. ‘It’s not my fault.’

  Back at the flat, he flicked through the TV channels before settling on a station playing classical music. He then told me that his cars were not for driving: ‘They’re for posing.’ He said that he liked talking to ‘young guys’ who knew he had a Ferrari and a Rolls-Royce and yet knew he still lounged around in a shell suit. ‘It’s part of the charismatic package,’ he offered. ‘I don’t have to do anything, I just have to be. I’m like a piece of soap in the bath; you can see it but when you try to get hold of it it’s gone.’

  It was clear that something Savile had said in the restaurant was bothering him, because he suddenly veered back onto the subject of children. ‘I have no time for them but I don’t hate them,’ he explained. ‘A single man at my age with his hair this colour … ’ he laughed lugubriously. ‘If I told everyone how much I loved children, I would finish up like Michael fucking Jackson. It’s better to say I hate ’em and they should all be eaten at birth because it stops the stories dead, even for the tabloids. I don’t want the tabloids to think I am a lover of children.’

  In the space of a few hours he had joked with a man about getting in trouble for being caught with underage girls, and told me how he liked to confuse children into falling in love with him. Now, he was effectively conceding that his appearance, work with children and the absence of normal adult relationships in his life made him look suspect. But he was not interested in such variables, the values of which only he truly knew. Jimmy Savile’s prime consideration was in controlling the outcome of the equation.

  25. LET ’EM THINK

  In May 1962, Jimmy Savile’s career as a Mecca dancehall manager came to an end. He was not sacked for being caught with his fingers in the till or for being found in a compromising position with an underage girl. In fact, he was promoted and given his own office in the company’s Southwark Street headquarters in London.

  He was by now making more in his one day off than he was in the six doing his regular job as one of the company’s area managers. Offers were flooding in from companies looking to capitalise on his kudos, and as he was possessed of an inquiring mind and an unquenchable appetite for making money, Mecca correctly surmised that Jimmy Savile was not going to be able to resist such temptations for much longer.

  Faced with losing his star, Carl Heimann made another canny business decision by appealing to Savile’s ego and bringing him further into the fold, even if it was on a part-time basis that would mean he’d be free to pursue his outside interests. But this was no token offering, because as an associate director he would be paid £50 a week and put in charge of music and DJ policy at Mecca’s 46 ballrooms nationwide.

  Savile celebrated his promotion by ordering a brand new Rolls-Royce from Jack Barclay’s in London. He went to collect it in person wearing a pair of fur slippers. According to a newspaper report, the vehicle was fitted with a ‘record player, radio, fridge and a shillelagh, the reason for the latter being in the dance hall business, possession of a blunt instrument is nine tenths of mob law.’1

  Along with the millions now listening to his shows on Radio Luxembourg, Savile’s elevated position within the Mecca organisation confirmed his new status as one of the most influential pop music tastemakers in the country.

  Thick smog enveloped the capital that summer, but high above the gloom various stars were moving into alignment. A group of scowling young blues aficionados calling themselves The Rolling Stones took to the stage for their debut appearance at the Marquee Club in London. Shortly afterwards, at a Horticultural Society dance in the north-west, a drummer named Ringo Starr, formerly of Rory Storm and The Hurricanes, performed for the first time with his new group, a Liverpudlian beat combo named The Beatles.

  British pop music was beginning to generate a momentum of its own, rather than relying on hits imported from the States, coinciding with seismic changes taking place in a society where young people felt increasingly empowered. Yet the country was still to shake off the last vestiges of the postwar era. Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government was one based on the same old school tie cliques that had ruled for decades, and was therefore naturally suspicious of a phenomenon that in time would become known as ‘youth culture’.

  At the Decca studios in London, another, less noteworthy footnote was being written in the history of British pop music. In what the New Musical Express described as ‘a hush hush session’,2 Jimmy Savile recorded ‘his debut disc’, a cover of the novelty record ‘Ahab the Arab’.

  This session was not to remain a secret for long. ‘Disc Jockey in Sheik’s Clothing’ sang the headline above a story in the Daily Mirror.3 According to the reporter, ‘Mr James Savile, the most extraordinary disc-jockey in this spinning business, peeled off a oncer from a roll of £200 to buy me half a bitter and said: “Do I need any more noughts on the bank balance?”’ The story went on to say that Savile had six bodyguards ‘to watch over him, his business affairs and his bank balance’. Royalties from the record were to be donated to the Little Sisters of the Poor.

  Cutting a disc was just one of many moneymaking schemes on his mind as the new decade started to take shape. He set up Jimmy Savile Limited and decided that his various business interests would be best served by a move back to Manchester. A sparsely furnished studio flat on Great Cheetham Street in Salford was found and he moved in with the bare minimum of belongings.

  In Manchester, his operations were initially focused on the Upper Broughton Assembly Rooms, a first-floor dancehall with a sprung dance floor, and a pair of coloured fountains that spouted in time with the music. The venue was a short distance from his new digs, and
familiar to him from his days at the Plaza, being located in the same block as the Whisky a Go Go, one of his favourite after-hours haunts. Posters and newspaper ads for the Jimmy Savile Disc Club duly appeared around the city.

  Savile moved into a one-bedroom flat in a crumbling building. Two floors in the Victorian mansion block were derelict and the rear of the premises lay in ruins, covered in weeds high enough to conceal snoozing tramps and, Savile recognised, his Roller and new Jaguar E-Type. He agreed to pay the £1.50 a week rent, and turned the living room into his bedroom. He decided to paint the whole place black. Savile’s reasoning was that with one red light bulb and one white there would be enough light to read by but not enough to see the grime and decay. Not altogether surprisingly, the residence was christened the ‘Black Pad’.

  Despite the fact he surrounded himself with teenage girls, partly because they gravitated towards him and provided an effective disguise for his own age, and partly because he could dominate them, Jimmy Savile still seemed to enjoy keeping people guessing about his sexual orientation. The crazy attire, the dyed hair and the conspicuous lack of a regular woman in his life gave rise to gossip. In his mind, though, any publicity was a good thing. His attitude was therefore, ‘If they’re talking about it, let ’em think.’

  Penny-Ann Roles met Savile when she was a teenager working at the Three Coins coffee bar in Fountain Street. It was a long, dark and smoky cellar that was packed out with youngsters dancing to local bands, and a venue that Savile went on to part own. She remembers the furious reaction from her father when Manchester’s most famous disc jockey dropped her home one evening in his Rolls-Royce.