In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  ‘If we went through life thinking if when we die, we rot and that’s it, well that’s alright. But it’s much nicer to go through life with a faith that when we do die we go on to an even better life. Therefore it follows logically that if you try to live life through a decent code, it’s a hope that when the time comes you go off, for want of a better word, to a life hereafter, a heaven. So from a gamble point of view, it’s a good thing.’

  In God’ll Fix It, in the chapter ‘What Happens When I Die?’, Savile used the death of his mother as the pretext for a further nugget of what he liked to call ‘JS wisdom’: ‘Be nervous about death with the nervousness of excitement … Death is a great adventure, a wonderful journey, the last great gimmick.’

  I was reminded again of what Professor Anthony Clare had pointed out 20 years previously, ‘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.’

  I also thought again of the time in Scarborough when he’d described the sense of calm he felt when faced with the prospect of imminent death during a publicity stunt with the Police Air Arm flight display team. ‘It’s all a bit of fun,’ he had concluded as we ambled past the amusement arcades and chip shops on Scarborough’s sea front. ‘All of a sudden you climb out of the aircraft and think, “Gonna die. Didn’t die. Very good” … It didn’t bother me because I’m a bit odd. One minute you’re here, the next minute you’re not.’

  It would not be the last time we discussed death – his own and other people’s – and yet looking back I am still struck by what he said in closing on that very first occasion we spoke: ‘How you die is quite important.’ And given what he wrote about his hopes for the final reckoning, that the debit column of his carnal sins would be weighed against the credit of his good works, it is surely telling he was found with his fingers crossed.

  *

  The first text arrived at 2.20 p.m. on 29 October, and within minutes my phone was bleeping with fresh messages. Jimmy Savile, just two days short of his 85th birthday, had been found dead in his flat in Leeds.

  In the days that followed, a sense of Jimmy Savile’s stature as a national icon began to emerge through stories in local papers up and down Britain. In Buckinghamshire, David Griffiths, general manager of the National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, spoke of the birthday party the staff had planned for their chief patron, while Paul Smith, executive director at the Spinal Injuries Association, told the local BBC News about the influence he wielded at the hospital and how ‘a great many spinal injury people really do owe him a debt’.1

  In Crowthorne, Councillor Jim Finnie remembered the times when he had sat with Savile on the board at Broadmoor. ‘He supported the wellbeing of its patients and its staff,’ offered a spokesperson for the trust that now runs the hospital. ‘He was instrumental in developing and opening the hospital’s first gym, which was well used and appreciated by our patients.’2

  In Peterborough, Nigel Hards, who worked for Thomas Cook when Savile was its highly paid consultant in the early 1990s, and had been involved in the fund-raising campaign to build a new children’s hospital in Peterborough, a plan that mysteriously fizzled out, talked of ‘a very complex character’ who established a charity road race, a children’s medical charity and brought his friend Princess Diana to the city. He also recounted how Savile liked working at the mortuary at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, ‘because he thought it would be easier for loved ones if he was there when they came in’.3

  Scarborough businessman James Corrigan, whose late father had owned an amusement arcade on the seafront and accompanied Savile on midnight runs along the seafront and to the Otley Civic Call, told his local paper how he’d grown up knowing Savile as a close family friend. ‘He came to every Christmas dinner at our house from before I was born until last year,’ he explained, ‘with the exception of three times when he got a better offer. One of those was when Margaret Thatcher invited him to go to Chequers.’4

  Corrigan added that Savile regularly brought guests to these family get-togethers, including on one occasion Mairead Corrigan who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976 for her efforts to end the violence in Northern Ireland. ‘Savile was the strangest thing anyone could inherit,’ he said, ‘and I inherited him from my father.’

  Cardinal Keith O’Brien, Britain’s most senior Catholic clergyman, thanked Savile for the 25 years he had been a patron of Across, a charity that takes seriously ill or disabled pilgrims to Lourdes, and explained their long friendship had developed through Jimmy’s mother.5

  Other stories were of a more personal nature. Two elderly women from Pocklington shared fond memories of him from their time as land workers in the early 1950s. In Manchester, he was recalled attending a bat mitzvah resplendent in a silver suit. In Stourbridge, gym owner Jim Charles cast his memory back to when Jimmy Savile was president of the National Amateur Body Building Association. The role required him to hand out medals to winners at the Mr Universe competition, including, on one occasion, to an unknown called Arnold Schwarzenegger. ‘He took us to Park Lane to a fashionable restaurant and then went to the loo and left us to pay the bill,’ said Charles.6

  Curiously, given that his fame was a uniquely British phenomenon, Jimmy Savile’s death made headlines in far-flung corners of the world. The New York Times reported how he served up ‘patter that in its manic opacity verged on Dada’ and described him as a ‘puckish man’ who was responsible for ‘a torrent of claims, some true, some false and others occupying the vast limbo of credibility between them’.7

  Towards the end the week I telephoned Howard Silverman, who I had met briefly when out with Savile in Leeds. Silverman, who was a regular at the Friday Morning Club meetings, told me he had visited his friend in the week before he died, as had Professor Alistair Hall, a cardio specialist at Leeds General Infirmary who Savile once invited me to dinner with at the Flying Pizza in Headingley. Silverman confirmed he was found in bed in a shell suit, which was how he would have wanted it.

  Five weeks before he died, Savile had gone on a cruise on the Queen Elizabeth for its maiden voyage around Britain. Luke Lucas, Savile’s long-time friend, colleague and a trustee of both the charities that bore his name, accompanied him. Savile had been taken ill and was forced to leave the ship in Liverpool. He was admitted to hospital where he was diagnosed with pneumonia. Alistair Hall later revealed that four of his major organs were failing.8

  In the week before he died, Jimmy Savile checked himself out of hospital and returned to his home, where he gave his final interview to Alison Bellamy of the Yorkshire Evening Post and had his portrait taken: a gaunt, hollow-eyed figure wreathed in cigar smoke and a dark green Lacoste tracksuit.

  Two quotes in particular jumped out from that last interview. First, Savile said he thought people were getting ‘a bit bored of his old stories’ and then, after Bellamy talked about her children, he allowed a rare crack of light to shine through: ‘That is something I have missed out on, kids and grandkids,’ he said. ‘I’ll never know what it’s like.’9

  Never once in all our meetings, or in any interviews I’d read, had Jimmy Savile ever expressed doubt about his own brilliance or admitted even a passing interest in commitment of any kind. It sounded like he knew his time had come.

  Mick Starkey took him for a drive on the Dales, and to buy some cigars from his tobacconist in Otley. ‘He was very tired but we had a long chat and he reminisced about his life,’ said Starkey. ‘I’m sure he knew the end was near.’10 Alan Franey, who had Savile to thank for his entrée to Broadmoor and claimed to know him ‘probably as well as anybody’, phoned and found his old running mate ‘very tired and short of breath’. He described Savile as being mentally alert but resigned to his fate. ‘I’m coming to the end of the tunnel,’ he’d said.11

  Even the Friday Morning Club meeting was cancelled, Savile informing his regulars that he was ‘
in bed and on strike’. Later that evening, Alistair Hall called round to the flat to make one last effort to get him to return to hospital.

  The next morning, Roddy Ferguson, the husband of the woman Savile had befriended as a 15-year-old and who had helped serve lunch to Prince Charles in Glencoe, tried calling. There was no answer. When his niece Amanda McKenna did the same, she contacted the caretaker of the flats and asked him to go in and check. Alan Hepworth, the caretaker, found Jimmy Savile’s lifeless body in his bed.12

  Alistair Hall was called out to take care of the formalities. The cause of death, it later emerged, was cardiac arrest, heart failure, ischaemic disease and renal failure.13

  Silverman sounded mildly exasperated at some of the coverage in the national press that painted his friend – the best man at his wedding, no less – as a loner. He was also frustrated by the fact that, as he described it, ‘the inner circle is becoming the outer circle’, a less than subtle reference to the manner in which Jimmy Savile’s grand finale was being organised.

  There had been a limit to what I had been able to find out about Savile’s family up to that point. The last of his siblings had died in 1997 and he became irritable when asked to talk about them. I had listened to him taking calls from their numerous offspring, and heard him say that he didn’t view his nephews and nieces any differently from anyone else who crossed his path.

  It was therefore fascinating to now see his relatives emerge. Roger Foster, his 66-year-old nephew, had taken on the role as Savile family spokesman. He told the press that his uncle had hoped to be buried alongside his mother and father at Killingbeck Cemetery in Leeds, but had discovered some years before that the plot was full. Instead, he would be laid to rest on a hilltop overlooking the sea at Scarborough.

  ‘We have found a beautiful spot in Woodlands Cemetery where you can see North Bay, South Bay, Scarborough Castle and even the seaside flat that he bought for his mum,’14 added his niece Amanda McKenna. For the time being, she said, his flat would be left exactly as her ‘Uncle Jimmy’ had left it, even down to the last cigar he smoked, half finished in the ashtray.

  In the Rhondda Valley, Vivian Savile, another nephew, told the story of his famous uncle’s visit in 1964: ‘I remember we were at home and there were hundreds of children climbing over the wall to get a glimpse of him … Nothing like it had ever been seen in Porth before.’15Accompanying the article was a black and white photo of Savile standing with his eldest brother Vince and his sister-in-law Sadie. The teenage Vivian, clad in full Teddy boy regalia, lurked at the shoulder of his peroxide-haired uncle, a look of sly pride playing across his features.

  Towards the end of the week, Foster revealed that his uncle Jimmy would be buried in a gold coffin that, in accordance with his final wishes, would be lowered into the ground at a 45-degree angle ‘so he could see the sea.’ The last great gimmick indeed.

  *

  My attempts to track the course of Jimmy Savile’s existence had become all consuming, providing reliable dinner party entertainment for those who liked to remind me of my failure to make significant progress towards any meaningful discovery.

  I told myself that he was like the central character in the Woody Allen film Zelig, possessed of an uncanny knack of popping up at key and unlikely points in time. I naively believed that Jimmy Savile’s story might work as an alternative history of popular culture in postwar Britain, with his progress across its landscape illuminating some dark and forgotten corners. It was also, I said to anyone who was still prepared listen, a story about our childhoods – and how darkly prophetic that turned out to be.

  I hoped too that the journey might also end in some kind of understanding of how he’d come to assume such a central place in my life.

  I had always planned to confront him in a final climactic encounter with what I hoped would be the truth. But like Conrad’s Kurtz, he was supremely controlling, which meant there was no prospect of speaking to anyone on the inside without it getting back to him and the line of enquiry being shut down. I also knew that anyone he would allow me to speak to would only spin the lines he’d been feeding so relentlessly and for so long.

  If he had succeeded in drawing me in and knocking some of the sharp edges off my suspicions, I can confidently say he never did quite manage to turn me.

  Even after the days and nights I’d spent with him, the kindness he’d seemed to show me and his consistent denials about there being a secret beyond what you saw, there was never any doubt in my mind that arriving at the real Jimmy Savile would entail a journey into the heart of darkness. Hence the title I’d planned for my book, and now its opening chapter: ‘Apocalypse Now Then’.

  I just hadn’t figured on him dying when he did, at a point when I had advanced only a short distance upstream. He had always threatened to live forever and his immortality – secured, I suspected, via some Faustian pact – was something I had taken for granted. So when the news broke, I felt not only sad but angry. Angry he had robbed me.

  *

  Jimmy Savile’s three-day funeral was marked with a combination of the solemnity usually reserved for departed statesmen and the tawdry showmanship that had been his hallmark. I arrived in Leeds on the afternoon of Tuesday, 8 November to find the city cowering under dank, grey skies. Three satellite TV trucks were parked on the short ramp leading from the station and camera crews lined the pavement in front of the Queens Hotel.

  Inside, amid the brown marble, patterned carpet and twinkling chandeliers of the hotel’s public bar, his American-style coffin, finished in a brushed gold satin, had been put on display. On a small table nearby were arranged a single white candle, a crucifix, a framed black and white photograph of Savile with his thumbs up, his two This is Your Life books and a glass ashtray containing two cigars. One, half-smoked, was the last he ever enjoyed.

  Pockets of people, many elderly or in wheelchairs, took photos of the coffin on their mobile phones and traded stories of when they met Jimmy Savile and how he had touched their lives. Single flowers and small bouquets had been left on tables to either side, many bearing cards. One thanked him for all the good times and was signed by a member of The Teen and Twenty Disc Club. Another card was made out to ‘The Boss’ and signed from ‘Tich – Manchester Team 1962–66’.

  As people came and went, I heard about how he helped one man get into the army; met others on jogging circuits of Roundhay Park; wheeled a child into Leeds General Infirmary; joked with cyclists on club runs across the Yorkshire Dales; wished diners happy birthday in local restaurants; chatted with fellow marathon runners and sat at the bedsides of the recently paralysed. I was also told how he lusted after younger sisters and invited lads up to the manager’s office at his dancehall to dish out packets of cigarettes.

  One elderly woman came in alone and tenderly stroked the portrait printed on card and displayed on an easel. She explained quietly that she had her photo taken with him when he came to wrestle in Lincolnshire in the late 1960s. She insisted he’d been ‘an absolute gentleman’.

  A short walk up the hill from the Queens Hotel brought me to the city’s Victorian Quarter with its trio of sparkling arcades. Restored in recent years and now home to some of the most fashionable shops and boutiques in Leeds, it was the site of the old Mecca Locarno. Now, some half a century on, the Mecca’s elaborate trio of marble and faience arches, and its miniature balcony above, provided the façade for a branch of Reiss.

  West of the city centre, set amid a dull hinterland between the university campus and a swathe of uninspiring business hotels, office buildings and council housing, was the street Jimmy Savile grew up on. Opposite number 22 Consort Terrace, an unremarkable four-storey terraced house near the top of an incline, a modern, dark-bricked housing development occupied the space where once he’d skulked through the corridors of the St Joseph’s Home for the Aged.

  The next morning, Professor Alistair Hall stopped in City Square to look across to the Queens Hotel where crowds watched at a respectful dista
nce as the gold coffin was loaded into the hearse for its final tour of the city. I had met Alistair and his colleague Professor Mohan Sivananthan, a consultant cardiologist, over dinner a few years earlier.

  Hall told me how his relationship with Savile had blossomed and about the financial support he had given to research projects he and Sivananthan had undertaken in the field of heart disease. We walked up the hill together and he explained that having done well for the decade following his operation, the last four years had witnessed a steady decline in Savile’s health. He also spoke of how Princess Diana had called when he was in hospital for his heart operation.

  On the approach to the cathedral, thousands of people waited behind temporary barriers, while a scrum of photographers and camera crews jostled near the steps. Grey-haired men who appeared to be wearing the regalia of Freemasonry showed mourners to their seats.

  I sat down next to a man with medals on his blazer. He introduced himself as John Bailey, or Bill, as Savile used to call him. I’d seen him in black and white photographs at Savile’s flat, accompanying the platinum-haired disc jockey under nets and over walls and through ponds during his bid to become the first civilian to receive an honorary Green Beret from the Royal Marines. Savile was to be buried with his Green Beret in one hand. Bailey smiled at the memories: ‘People forget he was 39 when he started the commando training course and 42 when he finished it,’ he said.

  The sound of applause from outside signalled the arrival of the hearse, followed by a lone chant of ‘Jimmy, Jimmy’. The congregation rose.

  As I listened to the eulogies, I experienced a range of emotions: sadness; a conflict over my persistent doubts, fuelled by what I had started to hear from people who worked with or knew him from his dancehall days, people who vouched for the fact he liked girls young but argued that it was a different time, different place; uncertainty about what the future held. I was torn between the eccentric old man whose life was being celebrated here and all around the country, and the shapes now beginning to emerge from the shadows.