by Dan Davies
‘Peter was one of the many guys I said hello to,’ Savile said. ‘I spoke to him for several minutes each time … [He] was part of the very relaxed atmosphere in there … I told a few jokes and Peter and everyone else was in high good humour. They were all terribly friendly.’17
If psychopaths and serial killers remain a source of macabre fascination in the wider culture, for Jimmy Savile they represented something altogether different. One night at his flat in Leeds he told me how the only television programmes he watched were documentaries about dark, powerful men; figures such as Adolf Hitler or mafia bosses. He had already tried explaining to me why he felt so compelled to visit Fort Breendonk in Belgium, the site of a Nazi concentration camp, and had spoken at length of his long-held desire to understand those who had been committed to Broadmoor, and how they were treated.
Peter Sutcliffe became the most notorious of Broadmoor’s patients when he was transferred to the hospital in March 1984. Savile spoke of the killer being ‘ordinary’, on one occasion even describing him as being ‘as good as gold’. I wondered then, as I wonder now, whether Jimmy Savile studied psychopaths and killers because he wanted to understand more about himself. And by becoming part of the apparatus that treated such people, did he hope to learn how they were identified, diagnosed and treated by the system? Such knowledge would ensure he’d never end up in the same predicament.
50. LIKE A STRADIVARIUS
The first cracks began to appear in the spring of 1983, although few knew where to look for them. As Jimmy Savile, presenter of two of Britain’s most popular television programmes, the face of British Rail and a man with the ear of those in power, prepared himself for the crowning achievement of his life, the opening of a brand new National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, a project he had started, funded and managed himself, trouble was brewing. Serious trouble.
Savile believed he was untouchable, and yet on one occasion he did talk about the biggest mistake he ever made. During his time on Jim’ll Fix It and Top of the Pops he told Alison Bellamy, the journalist who wrote the family-endorsed biography, about being invited by a junior school in Leeds to give a talk to the children. A few days later, he said that two girls from the school, aged around 10 or 11, rang the doorbell of his flat in Leeds. He let them in and insisted they had a look around, and they then stayed for a chat and a cup of tea.
One of the girls told her father. ‘He flipped, calling me a pervert and all sorts, and rang up the News of the World,’ Savile explained to Bellamy.1 Savile said photographers were stationed outside his gates for the next six months.
In the report on Operation Newgreen, the West Yorkshire Police’s attempt to investigate itself over its relationship with Jimmy Savile, a former officer recalled that officers from the Police Women’s Unit regularly visited Savile to see if he had information about missing girls.
At our very first meeting, Savile had recounted with some relish how the tabloids had tried to put the squeeze on him. After seeing them off, he said he met one of the editors at a function many years later. ‘[The editor] said to me, “I’ve got to tell you something. We put you in the washing machine. Every conceivable angle we explored. We had people parked outside your house. We knew where you went. You didn’t even blink. Not once.”’ The spin Jimmy Savile put on it was that it earned him the ‘total respect of Fleet Street’.
More revealing, though, is the reaction of the father of one of the girls he invited into his flat. Although the dates of this incident appear to be lost, it must have taken place sometime after the mid 1970s when Jimmy Savile moved into his flat at Lake View Court. He would have been an idol for schoolchildren, thanks to his work on television and radio, so unless the schoolgirl had reported something untoward about her visit, or unless he had heard the rumours of Jimmy Savile’s proclivities on the Yorkshire grapevine, there would appear to have been little immediate cause for concern.
‘Paedophile’ was not a term that was commonly used or understood at the time, and while children were warned about talking to or accepting things from strangers, Jimmy Savile was familiar to just about every child in Britain. He was undeniably strange but a stranger to no one with a television set or radio. In 1985, he was even asked to put his name to Stranger Danger, a book warning children of the perils of talking to adults they didn’t know.
It is tempting to speculate whether the incident Savile spoke of to Alison Bellamy throws a potentially revealing new light on the series of interviews that ran in the Sun in April 1983. ‘Everyone knows he works long hours at Leeds Infirmary, Stoke Mandeville Hospital and Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane,’ ran the introduction to the series on day one. ‘But there is another side to the 55-year-old disc jockey. A dark side never revealed before.’
The headline above the opening double-page instalment read ‘MY VIOLENT WORLD, BY JIM THE GODFATHER’.2 And underneath: ‘How I fixed it the night I wanted someone beaten up.’ What followed lifted the lid on what the paper described as the ‘ruthless, calculating Jimmy Savile. A man who engineered his own rise to the top with cold precision. A man who is not scared of violence.’ It was a side to Savile that was totally at odds with the man that kids clamoured to be with, parents admired and the most powerful in society were happy to be associated with.
On the day the stories first appeared, Savile talked with evident pride about how in his dancehall days he instructed his bouncers to deal with a ‘geezer lying on the pavement looking up the girls’ skirts as they came in’. He said quite matter-of-factly that he instructed them to kick the man’s head in. He then went on to say how he dealt with one of his staff he discovered had been ripping him off. The man’s clothes were dumped on the pavement outside the flat Jimmy had arranged for him. ‘When you are the Godfather you can’t have your troops getting out of action,’ he added menacingly.
The revelations continued in the same vein with a story about a guy who had tried to steal his girl when his back was turned. Savile told the girl to accept the man’s dinner invitation, order the most expensive dish on the menu and then complain of a headache and leave. His Rolls-Royce would be waiting for her outside the restaurant. The next day, Savile confronted the man in front of the rest of the staff: ‘He thought he was going to have his legs broken – it wouldn’t be anything unusual. But what I did to him [by humiliating him in front of everyone else] was more damaging.’
The portrait of a cold, conniving figure was embellished still further when he admitted, with a certain chilling thrill, that he never lost his temper: ‘I don’t allow myself the luxury of personal feelings,’ he said. ‘It’s the same with my ladies.’ He said that making love was ‘non-emotional’ and that he was never less than ‘logical and mechanical in my dealings with women.’3
The story in the next day’s edition attempted to get to the bottom of how Savile had maintained his ‘Mr Clean’ reputation, despite the repeated boasting about how prolific his love life had been. ‘I like girls,’ he began. ‘Plenty of them. Before I go out, I write my telephone number half a dozen times on bits of paper and put them in my pocket.’4
These admissions hinted not only at his addiction to sex, but also the psychopathic level of detachment he felt towards those he inflicted himself on.
‘I have a busy sex life – as long as the circumstances are right and it’s not hurting anyone. It has got to be a natural progression – not just an animal rushing about, a farmyard rutting.’ The caveats had by now become conversational ticks – ‘as long as the circumstances are right and it’s not hurting anyone’. It was also not the first time he had likened himself to an animal when discussing sex. Previously he had described himself as a wolf.
Then, towards the end, came the most revealing passage of all, albeit wrapped in the now customary film of indignant denial. ‘I never ever take advantage of a fan,’ he maintained. ‘If a girl asks me for an autograph I don’t say, “You’re nice, come home with me for three days.”
‘Fans
can be very emotional,’ he explained. ‘If some girl travels a hundred miles and turns up on my doorstep, I never invite her in and make love to her. I don’t care about my good name or bad name, but it would confuse her brain if I made love to her, and it wouldn’t be fair.’ Was he thinking about the girls at Duncroft and on Top of the Pops, or even Claire McAlpine when he said this? Or was the memory of the schoolgirls from Leeds still so fresh that he felt compelled to serve up an unsolicited denial of precisely what he had been doing?
‘Parents can trust their 17-year-old daughters with me. They could come and spend the night at my flat if they were stuck for somewhere to stay, and I’d never take advantage. I’m careful who I make love to.’ And then, as a final coda to the piece: ‘I’m very careful to stick to the rules with my girls.’
Paul Gambaccini has his own very clear theory on these newspaper interviews and their odd timing, given the glow of public approval that Jimmy Savile basked in. Speaking on national television on the day before ITV’s Exposure documentary finally obliterated his former Radio 1 colleague’s reputation, Gambaccini recalled hearing that Jimmy Savile was about to be exposed by the press. He said Savile had quickly arranged an interview with a rival tabloid that effectively put a stop to the negative article.
‘On another occasion,’ Gambaccini said, ‘and this cuts to the chase of the whole matter, he was called and he said, “Well you could run that story, but if you do there goes the funds that come in to Stoke Mandeville. Do you want to be responsible for the drying up of the charity donations?” And they backed down.’
Kelvin Mackenzie, editor of the Sun at the time, categorically denies that the paper backed down from exposing Jimmy Savile as a sex predator and child abuser for fear he would pull the plug on his support for Stoke Mandeville. ‘If we had the story I can assure you we would have fucking printed it,’ he told me in no uncertain terms.7
Admitting that the truth about Jimmy Savile had been ‘a massive shock’, even for someone who had edited the Sun for 13 years, Mackenzie agreed the stories in his paper could have been a smokescreen. ‘He was a seriously devious bloke, that much is clear,’ he said. ‘Who’s to say that he knew a paper had the story of what he was up to, and it was in the background, and he put out these revelatory stories to deflect attention from them.’
This, after all, was a series of stories that ran firmly counter to the popular perception of the star as a do-gooding eccentric, popular figure of fun and lay saint. But why, when the Prince and Princess of Wales, who were still enjoying the flush of public approval, were set to cut the ribbon on a project the nation had participated in, did Jimmy Savile see fit to hammer huge dents in his own pristine public image?
Dave Eager said Savile told him that he put out the stories to divert unwanted attention from one of his high-profile colleagues at Radio 1. But this makes little sense given how remote Jimmy Savile kept himself from the colleagues he only ever saw as rivals.
Gambaccini’s recollections are much more plausible, especially when one considers that Jimmy Savile did, in fact, put out a concurrent series of stories with a rival tabloid to counteract the negative spin of the Sun’s revelations. On the day when the Sun led with ‘How I Pick up Girls on the Marathon’, Savile was also pictured in the Daily Star with an infant female, a patient from Stoke Mandeville, under the headline ‘THE REAL GIRLS IN MY LIFE’.
The rival story opened with the following passage: ‘“Hang on a minute,” says Jimmy Savile, “I promised this bird I would give her a ring.” In his tiny flat near London’s Regent’s Park he sits back, large cigar stuck rakishly in his mouth, and reaches for the phone. But despite the snappy language, this is no romantic call. The girl is in her teens, lives in Devon and has an inoperable brain tumour.’
The interviewer went on to say that although Savile did not deny that he was ‘a bit of a ladies’ man’ in his earlier days, ‘there is no doubt who the most important girls in his life are today.’
Savile even had the temerity to discuss the revelations being published in the Sun. ‘Listen, I’m not surprised I’m a target for the “nudge-nudge” brigade but I’ve got no skeletons in my cupboard and some people can’t stand that. They think, “Look at him, unmarried and with his money – there must be something. But there isn’t, no more than the average person.”’ It was a hugely risky strategy, whether he was shielding the truth about himself or someone that he might have leverage on in the future.
According to Gambaccini, Jimmy Savile played the tabloids ‘like a Stradivarius’ in order to keep his years of abusing behaviour secret. ‘He had an imperial personality in show business,’ he said. ‘I’m not talking about his personal life. You just didn’t mess with Jim. He was the governor.’
Certainly, his spinning of the Sun revelations represented an audacious piece of crisis management. He gave the Daily Star enough to make himself seem believable, and human, but then pulled it all back to what he wanted everybody to concentrate on in the first place: his tireless work for charity. He freely admitted that in his early days there were girls and groupies camped outside his home. He didn’t deny that he had enjoyed them. ‘But that’s all changed now,’ he insisted. ‘Ever since I started my hospital and charity work, it all stopped. People began to look at me differently.’
And then, in his time-honoured method of nipping potentially damaging revelations in the bud – in this case possibly the concerns being expressed by nurses at Stoke Mandeville – he shared an anecdote with the Star’s readers designed to demonstrate his big heart. In fact, all it revealed was the level of access and the total freedom afforded him by the hospital he had become synonymous with.
It concerned a young female patient who was paralysed after jumping off a building. She had become depressed so Savile went over and talked to her. He said, ‘Listen, I’ve got to tell you that I fancy you and I’m here for the weekend. If I can spring you off the ward, will you come and watch TV with me in my motor caravan? But I’ve got to warn you – the caravan only has a bed in it.’8
He explained that the girl was so ‘slaughtered by the effrontery of this’ that she agreed. She got herself dressed up, he bought her flowers and chocolates and they spent four hours watching television in his vehicle. ‘Now can you imagine what the muckrakers would have made of that story if it had got out?’ said Savile, a look of incredulity on his face.
It was out in the open now, and whether or not anything happened in the motor caravan, he had done what he always did in times of possible trouble: he got his story into print first. And who would dare to believe anything otherwise when a man as important, as famous and as powerful as Jimmy Savile had been prepared to talk about it in the first place?
The day afterwards, Jimmy gave a less colourful version of the same story to the Sun. He’d survived. He’d stared down a potentially ruinous exposé, spun the negative press to his advantage and then ultimately spiked the Sun with a better story for a tabloid rival. It was a high-risk strategy, but not one that was undertaken without checks and balances being in place. Jimmy Savile knew full well that his standing within the establishment, coupled with the vast fund of goodwill he had built up over the three years it had taken him to build a new Spinal Injuries Centre, were persuasive countermeasures for whatever the tabloids now knew about him, or indeed had known for a very long time. A cartoon published in the Sun soon afterwards9 seemed to confirm as much. In it, Jimmy Savile is dressed as a gangster, wearing a black shirt, pinstripe jacket and Fedora. A machine gun is slung over the back of his chair. Margaret Thatcher is standing before him, showing him pictures of Labour Party leader Michael Foot, NUM leader Arthur Scargill, and opposition politicians Denis Healey, Tony Benn and David Steel. The caption underneath reads: ‘Bump off this lot and I’ll see you get a knighthood.’
British Rail underlined his standing in society when it decided to extend his £80,000 a year advertising contract. ‘We carried out market research surveys among a cross-section of the public to see if their
view of Jimmy Savile had altered,’ said BR spokesman David Ewart in the aftermath of the Sun’s week of salacious stories. ‘There had been no drop in his credibility.’10
As for his own reflections on the episode, Jimmy Savile appeared to be interested in nothing but reasserting his vice-like grip on proceedings. ‘Nothing appears without me helping to organise it,’ he said of the less than flattering newspaper coverage.
But if the public still loved him, doubts were beginning to surface within Whitehall. Margaret Thatcher had been lobbying senior civil servant Robert Armstrong, chairman of the Honours Committee, stating her firm belief that Jimmy Savile should be awarded a knighthood for his services to Stoke Mandeville. Indeed, she had put his name forward for the first time in November 1981, well before the National Spinal Injuries Centre had even been completed. It was decided then, and a year later when Thatcher tried again, that it would be better to wait.
Soon after the revelations in the Sun, Prime Minister Thatcher went in to bat for Jimmy Savile for a third time. However, in a climate in which the threat of AIDS was causing widespread consternation, the claims about his promiscuous sex life, allied with the thuggish aspects of his dancehall career, meant it was again decided that it would be wise to consider him for a future list.
There were no such reservations within the royal family, though. In late July, the 120-bed National Spinal Injuries Centre welcomed its first new patient. A few days later, on 3 August, Jimmy Savile stood on the front steps with Prince Charles and Princess Diana alongside for the official opening.
His stock was similarly high with the Catholic Church; in December, Cardinal Basil Hume, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, proposed Jimmy Savile for membership at the prestigious Athenaeum Club. The club, founded in 1824 as a ‘meeting place of men who enjoy the life of the mind’, is situated in a grand Georgian house on Pall Mall with pillars at its entrance, a sweeping staircase and superb library. At lunchtime, its dining room resembles a Who’s Who of the British establishment, with former prime ministers rubbing shoulders with bishops, artists and professors. A spokesman for Cardinal Hume said, ‘He is a great admirer of what Jimmy has done for young people and Stoke Mandeville and is delighted to help in this matter.’11