In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (21 page)

Top of the Pops
quickly confounded the sceptics within the BBC, although there were plenty of dissenting voices among the letters from viewers: ‘What an odd looking individual,’ remarked a solicitor of the first show’s host, while others described Jimmy
Savile variously as ‘a cross between a Beatle and an Aldwych farce curate’; ‘like a Presbyterian minister’; and ‘mutton dressed as lamb’. The most vitriolic comments came from a retired naval officer who wrote, ‘Really horrific. It ought to have an X certificate. And there was Mr Savile presiding over the orgy like a Puritan clergyman resurrected from his own churchyard.’
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Jimmy Savile presented the show once a month for the first three years of its long lifespan. He was the only one of the four presenters who wasn’t briefed in advance on his links by Johnnie Stewart, the only one not to require the services of the ‘disc maid’ and the only one not to wear a suit. ‘I wore what I used to wear in the dancehalls, which was teenage clothes,’ explained the man who had not been a teenager for 16 years when the first show went out.

27. A DEAD STRAIGHT PULL TIME

I
t was my first visit to see Jimmy Savile in the Scarborough flat he bought for his mother, and he had extended me the ‘honour’ of sleeping in the room he kept as a shrine to her.

In her room, the narrow single bed was adorned with a pink bedspread bearing his initials in a large gold shield. Above the bedhead was an amateurish pencil drawing of the only woman that he ever loved. I knew from Louis Theroux’s documentary that her laundered clothes were hanging in the slim wardrobe on the far side of the room, sheathed in polythene to keep them fresh. On a small dressing table with a mirror stood a white crucifix and a framed picture of Savile sitting at the feet of the Duchess. She was in an armchair, knitting happily. He was in a cut-off robe and white slippers leafing through what looked like fan mail.

After a night of deep slumber, interrupted only by a strange dream about someone lying on the floor next to the bed, I rose to find Savile in his armchair, looking out to sea. The room was heavy with the aroma of cigar smoke. On the low coffee table was an iced biscuit with a glazed cherry on top. It was, he explained, a ‘Scarborough breakfast’. Anything more substantial was unlikely for a man who refused to have cookers in his flats because they would give women the wrong idea. And the wrong idea, as he always insisted, would only lead to ‘brain damage’.

We talked about Elvis Presley, who he met on two visits to the United States. ‘His devastating quality was that he was shy,’ said Savile. ‘Of course, any bird will tell you that if you get a good looking kid who’s shy that brings out the 100 per cent predator in
all women. They are so used to people like me and you being wide-heads, full of SOS – Same Old Shit – they feel comfortable with the shy ones.’ It was the second time Savile had told me he thought we were alike. He was trying to reel me in.

I asked him whether there was ever a point when he thought he was falling in love. Rather than answer the question, he began telling me a familiar story about his process of deduction in the dancehalls, one that invariably meant he was left with at least 10 girls to choose from on any given night. Thankfully, before he could continue down the same well-trodden path, another thought occurred to him. ‘I didn’t think it was fair to tell one of them that they were the one,’ he said. ‘I knew I couldn’t stick with it. Girls weren’t the same in those days. They didn’t phone you up in tears. Brain damage didn’t come in for another 10 or 15 years.’

He was off and running now. ‘In the late Fifties, early Sixties, there was no booze, no drugs and you had a roomful of people where you could have a conversation with any one of them. Because you weren’t supposed to get your leg over that was the salient point why people wanted to do it. Girls weren’t supposed to get screwed so that’s why they wanted to get screwed. Lads did it because there was a big element of you’re not supposed to do it.’

He took a deep puff on his cigar. ‘The exciting time was when it wasn’t safe and you weren’t supposed to do it. There was no brain damage about it. There were no floods of tears next day.’

Jimmy Savile was 81 by this time. I asked him whether he was ‘still active’. ‘Yes, oh yes. I’m active in a sort of non-pushy way because there are enough people in the eight different places that I live. When I’m in town I’ll get a phone call and someone will come over and see me. I don’t need to be pushy. Never did.’

*

More than three years later, we were sitting in the same room. He had talked about the period after the war when ‘everybody was confused, nobody had a job and shops didn’t sell anything because nobody had any money to buy anything’. He had then segued straight into ‘Flower Power’, which confused me. I could not imagine
Jimmy Savile as a hippy – he was too driven, too opportunistic and too much of a capitalist. Free was a word he feared and loathed.

Once he’d finished his point I asked him when he thought sex became such a salacious topic in society. ‘It was only when the tabloids started going lower orders with tits and bums that it started,’ he muttered. ‘What are tits and bums for? Sex. So the whole thing drifted that way and then you’ve got shame and then you’ve got divorces and then you’ve got big divorce settlements and things like that. So the whole thing built into a structure. It wasn’t an overnight thing. But the sex thing was almost overnight because girls objected to being used as dustbins when they got the pill.’

But surely the pill gave women a greater sense of sexual liberation? ‘It changed things overnight,’ he argued. ‘It must have reduced the sex practice by a good eighty per cent.’ I tried not to smirk; ‘sex practice’ was just about the most functional description I had heard. He would not have noticed anyway because he was staring ahead, seemingly addressing the horizon. ‘Women all of a sudden became terribly independent,’ he continued, ‘and they weren’t going to be used as an ashtray, and quite rightly so.’

I told him I had recently seen
Nowhere Boy
, the feature film about John Lennon’s adolescence. In that there seemed to be plenty of casual sex around the time Lennon formed The Quarrymen and was playing skiffle at garden fetes.

‘I’ve had all that down the years,’ said Savile. ‘Girls wanted to be like that, not because they wanted the fella; they wanted to be like that because they wanted to be like that. The end product – the fella – was less important than the concept. They would wait outside the stage door of a theatre for hours and it was the waiting that they wanted. If a fella came out and said, “Right, I want three of you to come in for sex – you, you and you” they would have been terribly shocked. That wasn’t what they were there for. It was the doing of it that was the thing, not so much the end product. The important bit was being with the crowd and waiting outside.’

He explained that the first time a crowd had screamed at a ‘pop star’ was in the 1940s in the narrow cul-de-sac leading to the Savoy Hotel. ‘Johnny Ray was there and all these women were blocking the front of the hotel. This mobbing thing had never happened before. He went up onto a balcony and waved at the crowd and they all went away. Then it turned into mass hysteria with The Beatles.

‘I worked with The Beatles on their Christmas Show and the copper said, “Jimmy, if you’re not in the theatre by 1 p.m. we cannot guarantee you getting in at all.” They weren’t on until half past six at night – that’s where that picture was taken.’ He pointed to the same photograph of him with The Beatles as he had on his wall in Leeds. I realised it was not the only duplicate image on display. I wondered how many times such artefacts had been used as prompts, or props, for his stories.

‘They did two shows a night,’ he continued. ‘I had to do a sketch with them … but it didn’t work so we didn’t do it … It was the waiting outside that was the thing, you see. There was this peculiar club of waiting outside and it wasn’t the salivating at the thought of being taken in hand by one of The Beatles because that couldn’t happen. It was the being there and being in the crowd outside.’ It sounded like he was protesting too much – painting a convenient tableau of the times.

‘I knew girls who would fantasise over the Cliffs of this world but would be quite happy to go and get a bit of leg over with their boyfriend,’ he said. ‘I was sitting with Cliff once in his dressing room and this kid walked in, lamped him and walked back out again … There was a perfectly logical explanation: his girlfriend was besotted with Cliff and he had to sit with her while she was doing all this carrying on. So before he left the theatre he decided he was going to go back stage and give him a clump. She was quite happy with her boyfriend but she fantasised over Cliff.’

‘And what did you do?’ I asked.

‘Well, I restrained him and handed him over to the authorities.’ Jimmy Savile squeezed out another of his low, slow and malevolent
laughs. ‘It was all good fun. The whole thing was enormous, enormous fun. It wasn’t serious and it wasn’t vicious and it wasn’t wicked and it wasn’t bad or taking liberties with people you shouldn’t take liberties with. Nothing like that. It was a dead straight pull time.’

28. OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES AND SUCKLINGS

J
immy Savile returned to Leeds each week to call on his mother. On one such visit in the early 1960s he found her shivering in front of the electric fire, wrapped in shawls and with her feet up on the chair. ‘She looked dreadful,’ he told me. We were sitting in the flat that he bought her on the Esplanade at Scarborough, and in which he still kept her bedroom as a shrine more than 30 years after her death.

Savile explained how he paid for his mother to spend a few weeks convalescing with the Little Sisters of the Poor in the home on the opposite side of Consort Terrace. ‘The money it cost me per week to look after her was what I would have spent on a night out,’ he said, ‘and I suddenly realised, “Holy shit, that’s what money can do for you. It really can save your life.”’

From that moment on, he claimed money only represented what it could be used for to help his mother: ‘I made sure that she had whatever she needed,’ he said.

After her illness, he told me she complained about living alone in Leeds: ‘So I said to her, “Right, find yourself somewhere to live.”’ When she was still moaning a few months later, he said he put her in the car and drove to Scarborough. At this point, he got up and went to the window and pointed down at the pavement: ‘I parked out there where I used to fasten my cycle to the railings,’ he said.

Scarborough held fond memories from his outings as a child and, later, his cycling excursions from Leeds to the coast. ‘I got out, leaving her in the motor so I could have a look at the spectacular view,’ he went on. ‘And as I turned round to get in the car
I looked up and there was a block of flats. I rang the bell and asked whether any of them were for sale. [A woman] told me one was for rent on the ground floor for seven pound a week. I said, “I’ll have it.” That was the Monday and the Duchess moved in on the Thursday.’ Not long afterwards, he moved her upstairs after buying what he described as ‘the king flat because it has views all the way round and a balcony’.

Later that day, as we stood on that same balcony looking out to sea, he told me another story about his mother and Scarborough. ‘I had a caravan on the cliff tops,’ he said, pointing south over the headland towards Filey. ‘When the Duchess was alive it didn’t do – and I had too much respect – to take girls back. If there were any assignations or dates we would drive down to the caravan five miles away.

‘The kids and the young people on the caravan site would recognise whatever car I turned up in. One day they ran up, and I got out with a girl, and this kid asked, “Who’s she?” I told them she was my sister. When I came out half an hour later, this same kid said, “She’s not your sister.” I told her she was but he had seen me laid on top of her. He had peeped in through the curtains. Rumbled in the caravan,’ he hooted. ‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings.’

Scarborough’s seafront was to provide easy pickings for Jimmy Savile, something he alluded to in his autobiography. One stormy night in early 1965,
¹
he had driven his E-Type Jaguar down to the front because, as he described it, he wanted to look at the waves crashing over the front. Suddenly, out of the storm, a young girl banged on the window of the car. He said he opened the door, pulled her in and closed the door again before the next wave crashed over the bonnet.

‘The inside of an E-Type is not over capacious,’ he wrote, ‘and just now seemed to be full of wet body, long black hair, legs and bikini panties.’ He explained the girl had been sitting in a nearby car with her parents when she saw him go through the barrier. She had run along the sea road after him. ‘And here she was,’ he marvelled. ‘Such a start had to mean a good night.’
²

Savile reported that he reversed the car 500 yards whereupon the girl told her parents that she was going for a drive with her new friend. He then added, ‘Should the reader feel that her folks appear unconcerned, you would not believe the stories I might tell you about some parents.’ He wrote these words in 1974 when he was coming up to his 48th birthday.

His account described how they drove around for a while, talking and smoking until ‘steam started to come out’ of his ears. Realising that a two-seater sports car was not conducive to what he had in mind, ‘a diabolical plan formed within’. Taking her to the Scarborough flat, he wrote, ‘was out of the question because the Duchess was in residence’ so he headed instead to a garage where he kept his convertible Rolls-Royce. The car, he added with relish, had fold-back seats and, ‘seeing as I’d saved her from a watery grave she was duly appreciative’. The girl was dropped back at her parents’ house at 4 a.m.

He told readers of his newspaper column that he’d agreed to speak to the girl on the phone the following week. But when he called her, she said it would not work out because, in her words, ‘You’ve got too much money, and I love you.’
³
In his autobiography, he embellished the story still further by stating that the girl left town that week ‘to work away’, although he received Christmas cards from her for some years to come.

Nothing about it rings true: the reasons the girl gave for not seeing him again despite what she felt for him, the convenient detail that she moved away soon afterwards, or the coda that he’d treated her so well that she remained in touch via cards at Christmas.

It is a story that shows how comfortable Jimmy Savile felt about putting his secrets out there for all to see. Perhaps he enjoyed the thrill: the allusion to the girl’s age in the reference to her being accompanied by her parents; the fact she was of an age where she needed their consent to go off with him; his caveat that it was the girl, not him, who suggested they go off in his car. But most importantly, by writing about it in a national newspaper the very
next week, Jimmy Savile’s version of events – his alibi – was safely recorded in print.

*

Just a couple of months later, in May 1965, he decided to treat his mother to a trip to London. He put her up at the Hilton while he preferred to stay in a shabby hotel on Hunter Street. It was owned by Bill Mills, the proprietor of his previous London base, the Aaland Hotel. He’d had to move out of the Aaland in March, along with the ‘young pop artists’ occupying the other 13 rooms because the building on Coram Street was due for demolition. As Mills explained, ‘We were told before Christmas that we would have to go, but I let the kids stay on for as long as I could.’
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‘My Jimmy is more comfortable here than being in the Dorchester,’
⁵
Agnes Savile told a reporter while sipping on a cup of tea at his new digs just off Russell Square. ‘He doesn’t like the big hard atmosphere of the big hotels,’ she added. Was this anything to do with his penchant for bringing young girls back at all hours of the morning?

It was the first time Jimmy Savile’s mother had been interviewed by a national newspaper, and what she said offers a rare insight into their unusual relationship. ‘My Jimmy is just an ordinary sort of chap,’ she insisted. ‘I know some people are outraged by him, but really he is playing to the public. It’s all an act. I know, I’m his mother.

‘He has always wanted me to have the very best’, she went on. ‘He’s given me a picture postcard flat at Scarborough overlooking the sea, put a taxi at my disposal so I needn’t walk anywhere, and an open credit account at any shop. Nothing is too much trouble for elderly people or youngsters, he helps them as much as he can.’

Agnes Savile spoke of how her youngest son had helped women and old people off the trams in Leeds as a child. ‘Now he opens church fetes and functions,’ she said. ‘Yes, he does it free …’ In fact, she said he did too much for charities: ‘He never seems to have any time to relax,’ she added. ‘Even if he gets into a train he is signing autographs.’

The lack of girlfriend or any apparent romance in her son’s life was clearly being noted by this time because the reporter’s final question to Agnes Savile was whether she would like him to marry. ‘Yes, but in the entertainment world it is a great hazard,’ she replied. ‘In Manchester, three or four thousand teenagers attend his record sessions; it must be a very understanding wife who would put up with all the adulation he gets. I have never heard him say he wanted to get married. But I hope he does one day when he retires for in the entertainment world there is no happiness at all.’

In the Duchess’s ‘king flat’ in Wessex Court on Scarborough’s Esplanade, I probed Jimmy Savile about his relationship with his mother. He was adamant there was ‘no tactile affection’
⁶
during his childhood, and that he had to learn how to enjoy her. It wasn’t love but friendship, he said.

I wanted to know how their relationship evolved in the years following his father’s death, and how it developed to the point where he once described it as ‘living through her proxy’. The first thing he told me was, ‘She was ruthless.’

It’s an assessment that Tony Calder, who met Agnes Savile when he went to stay with Savile in the Mecca house in Leeds, agrees with. He describes her as ‘domineering’, and Savile’s devotion was such that it got ‘to the point where it was embarrassing’.

‘He’d get up on a Sunday morning in that dirty fucking house – his shagging house in Leeds. His mum lived round the corner. He’d walk round and see her, and they’d go to church.’ Savile, Calder recalled, would be ‘kissing her hand coming out of the church. He had his arm around her like she was his girlfriend. It was a bit sad.

‘You could see that he’d never have a serious relationship with another woman while his mother was alive because she wouldn’t approve of it,’ he says. ‘That was his whole take on it: “I’m shagging like crazy because she doesn’t know about it and I see her on Sunday to go to church and I see her in the week when I’ve bought things for her.”’

When Calder chided Savile for the fact he’d never be famous beyond the shores of Britain, he replied that he didn’t care because
it would be too far away from his mother. ‘“Mother”: she was always “Mother”,’ Calder recalls. ‘Or “the Duchess”. She wasn’t very pleasant to many of the people with him and she treated me like one of the ponces around her son.’

Another source has warmer memories of Agnes. He too confirms her youngest son was in thrall to her. ‘He loved her to death. But the Duchess was the boss … [when he visited her] he had to behave himself. He couldn’t be smart. He became a different Jim. “Now Jimmy, I want you to sort this out, go down to the shop for me and this window needs fixing.” It was all that.’

A young Mancunian DJ named Dave Eager became Jimmy’s unofficial assistant at the top Ten Club. ‘All [Jimmy] ever said about his childhood to me,’ says Eager, ‘was that his mother and him always had a relationship where it was constantly on test.’

Eager recounted how such conversations played out: ‘“What are you buying me for my birthday, Jim?” “What do you think I’m buying you? A set of Pyrex dishes.” “What?” “Somebody like you at your age should be in the kitchen cooking food. So Pyrex dishes is what you’re having.” “No, I’m not.” “Yes, you are.” His mother, because of her nature, would never, ever ask Jim for money. So there was always this little game.’ Eager states Agnes treated her son ‘like a little boy. He never grew up in her eyes.’

Another constant in their relationship, it seems, was Agnes’s sense of disapproval. According to another of Agnes’s visitors: ‘She’d go, “I don’t know how he dares go out dressed like that.” … She’d tell me stories about when he was little, like he used to wear a big hat when [they] went to the shops. The stories were from when she had control of him and now he was out of her control.’

Agnes would regularly moan about him, often when he was within earshot: ‘“He doesn’t come anymore. He used to come and see me every night but now I don’t hear from him for a week sometimes.”’ Eager describes such exchanges as a test of how much control Agnes still exerted.

The more he provided, the tighter her grip on him. ‘She had a lurking suspicion that I would come unstuck sooner or later,’ Savile wrote in his autobiography.
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He also said she never watched him on television or congratulated him on his achievements, and lived in constant fear of the police knocking at the door: ‘She thought I was stealing all the money,’ he said.
⁸

And yet, Jimmy Savile’s mother became his most regular and conspicuous companion. ‘Bit by bit she turned into a terrific sort of pal,’ he told me. ‘I found that me teaming round with her – I used to take her to functions and awards dinners; she was only five foot tall and had this golden hair – well, people loved it.’ They went on holidays together to the Imperial Hotel in Torquay, where Agnes enjoyed playing the one-armed bandits in amusement arcades, and Rome to visit the Vatican. Bizarrely, Savile maintained she had ‘the energy of a teenager and could pleasure all night as often as the opportunity arose’.
⁹

In 1991, Jimmy Savile told Anthony Clare that he realised he could have a better time ‘teaming’ about with his mother because a conventional girlfriend would give him ‘brain damage’.
¹⁰
With the Duchess he could have a meal or take off somewhere with no strings attached. They had a great time together; a time, Savile insisted, ‘you couldn’t have … with a girl’. When Clare asked him why, he replied, ‘Well, because a girl would be a different kettle of fish, because a girl is more of a partnership. As against the Duchess – she brought me up for the first part of her life and I brought her up for the second part of her life.’

Over the course of his life, Jimmy Savile offered many reasons for why he never married. He claimed that his peripatetic lifestyle legislated against it. He argued there were just too many girls. He said it was because he had never been in love. They are very possibly true, although his preference for girls under the legal age of consent was surely a more conspicuous obstacle. It is also tempting to speculate that the certain knowledge he had to provide for his mother, to ensure above all else that she would never want for anything again, left an emotional void in his life.