In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  *

  Jimmy Savile tried to do the same with some of the more infamous patients at Broadmoor Hospital. In 1991, Frank Bruno, the British heavyweight boxer, was at a crossroads in his life and career. He had lost successive world title fights when he first encountered the TV star and charity worker.

  ‘I had just finished my third pantomime season when Sir Jimmy took me to one side. He said: “Francis, young man,” – he always calls me Francis – “I want to ask you a very serious question and your answer could change your life. Do you want to be remembered as a pantomime fairy or as a champion boxer.” It was then I decided to give my all to becoming world champion.’8

  It was during the period Savile was mentoring Bruno – encouraging him to join him on charity runs and hospital visits – that he took the heavyweight boxer to Broadmoor for the opening of a new gymnasium. On a tour of the secure ward, he turned to his guest and said, ‘I want you to meet this gentleman.’ He introduced Bruno to a bearded man dressed in a garish shell suit who was leaning against a window ledge. The two chatted for a few minutes.

  Bruno asked the man whether he would be using the new fitness equipment and joked that he could do with losing a few pounds. The man replied that fitness wasn’t his thing and asked the fighter, who had recently lost to Mike Tyson, when he was going to be making a comeback. At this point, Jimmy Savile jumped in: ‘He’s fighting me next week,’ he said. The patient replied in that case Frank Bruno had ‘no chance’.9

  ‘I didn’t know he who was,’ says Bruno of the man. ‘Afterwards Savile asked, “Do you know who you met?”’

  Speaking after the exposure of a man he liked and respected enough to have appeared as a friend on This Is Your Life and attended his funeral, Bruno told one newspaper: ‘I was in Broadmoor to open a gym, not to meet a man who killed 13 women. Savile planned it. It was not a nice thing to do to me. If I had known it was the Ripper, I’d have tried to get out of it. It was a scary feeling.’

  A photographer was on hand to capture the moment Frank Bruno shook hands with Peter Sutcliffe. And there, standing a couple of paces back, was Jimmy Savile clutching a cigar. ‘I didn’t know a photographer was taking pictures,’ insisted Bruno. ‘When the photo came out I rang Savile and said, “What was that all about?” He apologised but by then it was too late. That picture has hounded me. I want to say sorry to every victim’s family and anyone that was upset.’10

  *

  Even now he had the trappings of a man who had been accepted into the establishment, Jimmy Savile could not escape the insidious whispers that continued to swarm around him. In truth, he did not help himself, as his radio interview with the consultant psychiatrist Anthony Clare demonstrated.

  The exchange, recorded for the Radio 4 series In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, was a heated one, and Clare emerged from it bloodied and bruised, reporting he found some of the things Savile had said to be ‘disturbing’.11

  Clare was surprised to find his subject had ‘a certain dislike for people’ and held some interesting opinions on the subjects of sharing and sacrifice. ‘He seemed to show no interest in them at all,’ he said. ‘Considering the work he has done and his public persona he appears to be at odds with himself.’

  The interview is enthralling, and appears to exemplify what Jimmy Savile had previously said about psychiatrists, namely ‘We should burn shrinks. Burn the bastards.’12 It was a startling comment given his long association with Broadmoor Hospital and his promotion of work done in the field of mental health. ‘If a psychiatrist would think that I was strange,’ Savile said, ‘it would take me absolutely no effort at all to completely unsettle him and maybe show that he himself needed some treatment.’

  Savile certainly tried to unsettle Anthony Clare, and as a result the interview was a study in defensiveness and obfuscation. It opened with Clare asking why he agreed to the interview given his opinion on psychiatrists. Savile said he found it hard to say no.

  Clare then asked him whether he ever got depressed before quizzing him on his childhood. It did not take long for the dominant and recurring themes to materialise: the supremacy of money in his list of priorities, his total absence of feelings, a complete unwillingness to open up.

  In explaining why he had bought seventeen brand new Rolls-Royce motor cars over the course of his life, Savile said, ‘If a scandal comes up … or the people go off you, you’re finished.’ With a brand new Rolls-Royce in the garage, and everything in his life paid for, he could then ‘go and be very unhappy in the south of France, covered in shame and sunshine and mad birds with bikinis on for a long time because there was a new Rolls-Royce there and a new this and new that.’13

  Clare was clearly intrigued by Savile’s stated fear of being ruined by a scandal, and pressed him to explain more. ‘In actual fact today the concern has been taken away,’ he replied. ‘In the old days, we’ll say ten years ago, many people were ruined in my game by scandals that never existed … Today it’s not like that at all, because today we can actually sue people who tell lies.’14

  Savile explained the recent libel victories of Jeffrey Archer and Koo Stark had made his life a lot more comfortable.

  They discussed his mother before segueing into a prickly exchange on marriage, relationships and children. ‘A kid with me is on trial, like I’m on trial with the kid,’15 explained the host of one of the most iconic children’s shows in British television history. ‘We get on like a house on fire but there’s no yukky nonsense about it and I’ve got no paternal feelings.’

  On the subject of charity, Savile confessed that he was more interested in the process of making money than the people who would benefit from it. On matters of faith, he restated his need only to know that he was going in ‘the right direction’.

  After more thrust and parry, Clare tried changing tack: ‘The key feature of your lifestyle is your control of it … Nobody makes demands on your lifestyle. Such demands made are demands that you have in a sense accepted.’16

  ‘If anybody makes demands they don’t make them twice pal,’ Savile replied, ‘because they get the sack after the first time.’

  The conversation kept returning to Savile’s childhood and his refusal to acknowledge the place of emotion in his life. He described ‘ultimate freedom’, to which Clare responded by asking if he was conscious of things such freedom offered that needed to be resisted.

  ‘It would be easy to be corrupted by many things, when you’ve got ultimate freedom,’ answered Savile, ‘especially when you’ve got clout. I could be corrupted. I’d like to think that up to press I’ve managed to stay like I was.’17

  ‘It is only in the cracks and crevices of the conversation that doubts lurk,’ wrote Clare a year later, citing Savile’s relationship with his mother and his insistence on maintaining emotional independence from the rest of the human race as the marks of someone with ‘powerful reasons to shun intimacy’.

  Of his ‘morbid preoccupation with death’ – the desire to work in hospital mortuary departments, the days he spent in a room with his dead mother – Clare posited that people with ‘a distaste for emotions, who place great value on predictability and control, who see life as incorrigibly messy and death as a frozen model of perfection, are half in love with death. The dead don’t let you down, don’t make demands, don’t limit your freedom.’

  The psychiatrist concluded that Jimmy Savile was a ‘calculating materialist’ with no need for people. ‘He could cope with people needing him,’ Clare said, ‘as long as they are satisfied with the things he is prepared and able to give them – in most instances material things, and in no instance himself.’18

  Savile’s mortal fear of being embarrassed or exposed was something that Roger Ordish recognises. ‘His extraordinary attitude to the press was not, “Oh, how nice. Here’s someone who is going to give me some publicity and do a nice story about me.” It was, “You’re not going to catch me out.” He was so much on the defensive that it often ended up as meaningless gobbledygook.�
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  Not long after the interview with Anthony Clare, Jimmy Savile began spinning. ‘[Clare] only asked me about feelings about people, love, getting married and having children. He was slightly overawed by me because I employ consultant psychiatrists at Broadmoor. He should have broadened the issue.’19

  The interviewer on this occasion, Angela Levin, asked him whether he was a psychopath. ‘I know psychopaths. I’ve seen them at Broadmoor,’ Savile replied, contradicting what he had previously said about the patients at the hospital. ‘They have no emotion in relation to human life. But I love certain things. Nature moves me … I just don’t have those feelings with another human being.’ It sounded uncannily like the dictionary definition of a psychopath.

  Levin probed him about how he felt when journalists made insinuations about his private life. His answer, given the open nature of the question, was again revealing. ‘If anybody categorically said to me, “Do you associate with little girls?” I would say, “No, I don’t.” I never have done and I have no kinky desire to go that route. The people who know me know that the last type of people I gravitate to are children.’

  *

  Jimmy Savile was 67 and his powers were waning. Despite the fanfare in the media, including his appearance at an Anglia TV telethon and the backing of the local evening paper, his plans to build a 55-bed children’s hospital in Peterborough disguised as a fantasy castle with turrets and flagpoles came to nothing.

  Detailed plans were submitted to Peterborough City Council, and in May 1991, Peter Lee, director of Planning and Environmental Health at the Town Hall wrote back, stating, ‘The City Council is not opposed to the proposed development but does have reservations about the design philosophy employed. Whilst it is recognised the unconventional design is intended to ease the concerns of children who attend the hospital, it is considered the proposed scheme will lie uncomfortably with the existing Edith Cavell Hospital.’

  Savile was not the sort of person to give up easily, or to take no for an answer, so why did a campaign announced on national television fizzle out so quietly? The official reason given was the downturn in the economy and expenditure cuts forced on Thomas Cook by its owner Midland Bank. But could it have been that rather than easing the concerns of children, somebody in a position of authority found out that giving Jimmy Savile his own children’s hospital, one that he vowed to be at constantly, would have achieved the exact opposite? With the appeal fund standing at just short of £500,000, the decision was made to redirect the funds to a children’s medical charity in the city. Janet Cope, a staunch defender of Jimmy Savile’s reputation, has no doubts about why the appeal foundered. ‘It’s simple,’ she said. ‘People had got appeal fatigue.’

  It wasn’t the only high-profile aspect of his life that was under threat. After 19 years, so too was Jim’ll Fix It. Recently appointed BBC1 controller, Alan Yentob, had arrived wielding a new broom.

  ‘He wants to quit at the top,’ said a BBC spokesman when it was announced that the series filmed in 1993 would be the programme’s last. It echoed the manner of the stage-managed exit from Radio 1. Will Wyatt, managing director of BBC Television, was quick to pay tribute: ‘Jimmy Savile has been one of the stalwarts of our entertainments programming for more than a quarter of a century … We owe a great debt to Jimmy for all his BBC work and wish him well for the future.’20

  Savile admitted he had no immediate plans for the future, other than buying a new motor home and travelling round the country. A couple of weeks later, however, he served up the truth about why he had quit the show that had turned him into one of Britain’s biggest stars. ‘Along comes Jack the Lad,’ he said, referring to Yentob, ‘and if he sacks a small show, he’s only a small manager. But if he sacks a big one like mine, he’s a big manager. Instinct tells me to quit while I’m at the top. It shows supreme survival confidence.’21

  He’d always said he wanted to be ‘loaded with nothing to do’. Now it was Jimmy Savile’s turn to have his wish come true.

  58. A VOID

  It was 7.45 p.m. and we were in Jimmy Savile’s cabin. The QE2 was a short distance off Land’s End. He told me to take a seat as there was something he wanted to do. Reaching over to the shelf below his cabin porthole, he located a bottle of champagne from among the cigar boxes and bottles of scotch, and presented it to me. He wanted to know whether I thought it had ‘been worth the trouble’. It had. He’d been both generous and kind but when I tried to articulate my gratitude he would hear none of it.

  ‘On a cruise there’s nothing to complain about,’ he said, ‘and complaining is part of the fabric of our lives. Not being able to complain leaves a void. But, you see, I don’t need to switch off. I come on a cruise because it’s a ceaseless round of pleasure and fun. When you get off you go cold turkey for about three months.’

  Satisfied he’d made his point, he began again with the life coaching, suggesting I should think outside the box more and try ‘to make a few quid’. He wanted to see me do well. Maybe an American magazine would be interested in the story of a cruise on the QE2 with Jimmy Savile. The truth was, his fame was contained within the borders of the small group of islands that would soon be in view.

  He asked whether I’d thought about working in TV – he reckoned I’d be good. ‘They’ – there was disdain in his tone – ‘only want to talk about celebrities.’ He said it had always been thus and to prove his point he told a story about getting slung off Michael Parkinson’s chat show with Michael Palin. He was ‘a giggler’, recalled Savile of the Monty Python star. ‘Once he starts he can’t bleedin’ stop.’

  Palin and Savile had done their one-on-ones with the host when the third guest, Donald Sinden, came on. ‘An awful twat, he was so boring. They all lie,’ he said, referring to actors. ‘That’s what they do.’

  Savile recalled pretending to doze off. The audience started laughing, which then set Michael Palin off. ‘Parkinson lost it,’ he chortled. ‘He asked us to leave the set. So we did. We went and sat in the front row with these two birds. Well that was it, the place was in uproar.’

  Eventually, Savile and Michael Palin were called back onto the sofa. ‘We took these two birds with us.’ He remembered Parkinson was seething by this stage. He said the chat show host told them both they would never be invited on his show again.

  ‘You’ve got to go through the turbulent times,’ announced Savile, slamming shut his filing cabinet of celebrity anecdotes and reverting back to the tutorial. ‘It’s like the flu, you get over it and then one day you’ll wake up happy, and then you’ll be knacked. Why? You’ll be confused.’

  I asked him whether he was speaking from experience. Had he ever been confused? ‘No, because I was different – always have been.’

  I left with the bottle of champagne. ‘If you cop for the Lido I’ll come in a bit later and do my state visit,’ he said. ‘It always generates a bit of heat.’ He was now repeating himself word for word. I couldn’t help but wonder whether he was going senile.

  We dined in separate restaurants that evening. I sat on my own in the Caronia restaurant while Savile ate alone in the more upmarket Britannia Grill.

  Later, as the sun waned and bathed the English Channel in a glorious mauve, I looked across the room at the elderly couples engaged in conversation and wondered what Jimmy Savile thought about when he glanced up from his food and saw couples that had been married for 50 years and more.

  I felt a twinge of sadness about leaving him. There had been chinks of insight, as well as moments of genuine warmth. But I’d also had my fill. I’d already told myself that I would be among the first off this floating waiting room when it docked at Southampton.

  After trailing in Savile’s wake, listening to him bid passers-by ‘Good morning’, no matter what time of day it was; wrestling with my discomfort as he continually warned old men about the dangers of being caught with underage girls, in this case their elderly wives; and pontificating about everything from marriage to the death toll in the Wes
tern Straits during World War II, I was ready for the firmer footing of normal life.

  For Jimmy Savile, normal life meant being collected on the quayside by his driver from Broadmoor Hospital, before being whisked off to the high-security hospital in Berkshire to begin the round of constant touring all over again. Broadmoor, Stoke Mandeville and Leeds General Infirmary were about the only places where he still felt wanted; needed, even. After the weeks at sea it was back to the hospital beds, locked wards and wheelchairs: the captive audiences.

  PART SIX

  59. THE WRONG IDEA FOREVER

  Jimmy Savile opened his eyes to find himself in an unfamiliar room festooned in flowers. There was a long and angry gash in his chest. ‘I thought I was lying in a coffin in a chapel of rest,’1 he said. It was a bed at Killingbeck Hospital in Leeds, 36 hours after he had undergone quadruple heart bypass surgery. Having put if off for 37 years, he’d finally had to take out another insurance policy, one that would turn out to buy him fourteen more.

  He was first informed the arteries pumping blood to his heart were closing in 1970, but for nearly four decades refused to do anything about the congenital defect that went on to kill his mother and two of his sisters. He said the experience of working in hospital operating theatres and witnessing the side effects of anaesthetics was the reson he was so reticent. In 1993, when a different cardiologist had informed him that he only had days to live, he’d still not felt moved to act: ‘Something inside me told me it wasn’t the right time.’

  Two things changed his mind. The first was a television programme about a Leeds-based cardiologist, Dr Alistair Hall, who had devised a drug from snake venom that was being used successfully in the treatment of heart conditions. The second was the sudden death of his sister Christina in Malta.