In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (38 page)

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The drive to rebuild the spinal unit at Stoke Mandeville was not the only multi-million pound campaign that Jimmy Savile lent his face to in the early part of 1980. He was also the man chosen to front the most lucrative account in British advertising.

After 30 years of steady decline, British Rail had become a national joke, and a bad one at that. Blighted by a series of industrial disputes and offering a service lampooned for late or cancelled trains, not to mention famously terrible sandwiches, BR was responsible for the sour taste familiar to the millions that used it. Under the leadership of Peter Parker, who was made chairman in 1976, a plan was hatched to revive Britain’s love affair with high-speed trains. The first step was the introduction of the Inter-City 125, with the first sets going into service in the autumn of that year.

The battle to win the BR account was fiercely fought, with six of the country’s leading advertising agencies in the running. Peter Marsh of Allen, Brady & Marsh understood that he needed to make an impact with his initial pitch. His answer was to keep a delegation of British Rail officials waiting in a deliberately filthy waiting room at his company’s offices. Only at the point when they were ready to walk out did Marsh, dressed in full BR uniform, put his head round the door and remind them that this was what their customers experienced on a daily basis.

If Marsh had grabbed their attention, he still needed to nail the final stage of the pitch to secure the account. Recognising that an experienced presenter would be required to effectively relay the mass of information he wanted to get across, he set his researchers to work on producing a statement that underlined the personality chosen believed in an integrated, publicly owned rail service that offered customer value and was committed to modernisation. A number of presenters were called in to do a filmed audition, including Terry Wogan and Jimmy Savile, who claimed to travel
in excess of 30,000 miles each year by train. The taped candidate statements were then played to members of the public who were asked for their reactions. ‘Everybody endorsed [the one] with Jimmy Savile,’
¹⁰
said Marsh.

But when the results were fed to Peter Parker, BR’s chairman was unconvinced. He said that he wanted more research done. ‘We’re a bit like a doctor, Peter,’ Marsh replied. ‘We don’t have to love our patients to give them the correct advice. Because of the robustness of the results we cannot other than recommend [Jimmy Savile] without any reservation.’

The decision was made. Marsh was hired and Britain’s national rail network was about to be rebranded via the exhortations of a man the public seemed to trust above all others.

‘I sort it all out myself,’ bragged Savile when asked how much he was earning from the TV and billboard adverts that became ubiquitous from March 1980. ‘British Rail come and say, “Will you do the job for £x?” “Ridiculous, I answer, make it £3x, and go away and think about it.” They go away, cogitate and usually we sort out a figure that is closer to my idea than theirs.’
¹¹

‘I didn’t like him very much,’ admitted Marsh, ‘but I didn’t have to. When he delivered his words he was brilliant. When you are a professional, you have to deal with people you wouldn’t choose to go to the opera with.’

The Jimmy Savile seen in the ads was a new and unfamiliar one; Allen, Brady & Marsh briefed him meticulously on his clothes and hair, two components of his image that had never previously been up for discussion. The result was a suited, freshly shorn figure that looked like he meant business. And that business, all £6 million of it, was proclaiming ‘This is the age of the train.’ It was a slogan, like the man who delivered it, which became a part of the fabric of British life.

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It seems inconceivable at a time when vast swathes of the public regarded Jimmy Savile as the one of the most trusted and admired men in Britain; a time when he had the ear of senior members of
the royal family and the nation’s most powerful political figures; a time when he was the mouthpiece of national concerns; when the
Jim’ll Fix It
Christmas special drew 22 million viewers, that he should also be the subject of serious allegations reported to police forces at opposite ends of England.

The first related to Detective Constable John Lindsay’s conversation with a more senior officer at Thames Valley Police. More shocking still is the revelation that in 1980, as Jimmy Savile was being feted by the prime minister and calling in favours from the Duke of Edinburgh, he was summoned by West Yorkshire Police to provide a cast of his teeth.

Bite marks had been found on the bodies of two victims of the Yorkshire Ripper, the serial killer then believed to be responsible for the murders of 11 women. The third victim, Irene Richardson, a prostitute from the Leeds suburb of Chapeltown, had been found near the Roundhay Park flat Jimmy Savile had only recently moved into.

Former detective John Stainthorpe spent 40 years with the West Yorkshire Police and was involved in the massive manhunt to bring the killer to justice. ‘When the Ripper was really active one of the suspects put forward by members of the public was Jimmy Savile,’
¹²
he confirmed. He remembers the tip-off being supplied anonymously.

Dr Mace Joffe, a Harley Street dentist, was contacted to take the mould. Dr Joffe is now dead, although a friend insisted he’d revealed that the police said Jimmy Savile was a suspect because he was known for using prostitutes in and around Leeds.

And yet the public face remained as inscrutable and as blemish-free as ever. His policy on what made it into
Jim’ll Fix It
bordered on the puritanical: ‘I was very firm in telling the BBC what I didn’t want,’ he explained. ‘Violence, lavatory jokes, sex and such like can go in all the other shows that want them.’
¹³

48. ALL SORTS OF TROUBLE

‘A
h ha, is that the fearless reporter, he who wields the sword of truth? The famous journalist scourge of all wrong-doers?’ It was how Jimmy Savile liked to open our telephone conversations. He had called to tell me there were reporters wanting to speak to him about the feature I had written in the June 2008 edition of
Esquire
magazine. It was a long and detailed piece, based on three lengthy interviews, two in London and one overnighter hosted at his flat in Leeds.

‘Jim the Fixer’, as the feature was headlined, was my third big Jimmy Savile story to be published in five years. In that time, he’d accommodated me, pricked my curiosity and seemingly accepted that I was one of the only journalists who wanted to know more. I was also a source of publicity, the oxygen of which he had found to be in short supply in his old age.

On my previous visits to Leeds and Scarborough, Savile had told me all about his six-decade reign of brilliance. He was not kidding when he referred to himself as ‘the Godfather’ and his observance of the code of
omertà
was anything but a joke. He had spent a lifetime drawing attention to himself without ever really revealing who, or what he really was. At our first meeting he told me, ‘I am the man what knows everything but says nothing. I get things done but I work deep cover.’ On that occasion, he was referring to his peculiar relationship with the royal family.

For the
Esquire
story, he again enjoyed the challenge of saying a lot but revealing little. What he gave me, though, was revelatory enough for the
Sunday Times
and the
Mail on Sunday
to devote
column inches to exploring the veracity of his claims. Could Sir Jimmy Savile, octogenarian celebrity relic, really be one of the best-connected men in Britain? Neither paper could find anyone to disprove my findings, although Paul Merton and Ian Hislop still had fun at his expense on the following week’s
Have I Got News For You?

‘Now then, you’ve got me in all sorts of trouble,’ announced Savile flatly from the other end of the line. He hadn’t seen a copy of the magazine yet and I wasn’t sure whether he had caught the previous Friday’s episode of the show. For a split second I was wrong-footed. A low, tobacco-coated cackle confirmed he was as laid back about life as he always claimed to be. For the time being, Jimmy Savile was news again and that was just fine by him.

He asked me how I’d been and I told him I had split up with a girlfriend. I was knee deep in boxes and self-pity, and about to temporarily move out of the flat we had bought together and into a concrete shed at the bottom of a friend’s garden. ‘It could be worse,’ snapped Savile. ‘You could be with me at Stoke Mandeville, looking at a knockout teenage girl who’s just been told she’s never going to walk again.’

This was typical, I thought: no-nonsense Yorkshire logic deployed to obliterate all emotional obstacles in its path. He was obviously at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire, doing his rounds at the National Spinal Injuries Centre, a facility part funded and still owned by his charitable trust. I knew he spent a couple of nights at the hospital most weeks and tried to imagine what he’d been doing that day. I wanted to see him in his Stoke Mandeville environment.

‘Or you could have the
Sun
knocking on your door because you’ve been carrying on with underage girls.’

This conversational sucker punch caught me unawares, and by the time I had properly absorbed what he’d just said, Savile had performed another of his deft sidesteps. He announced he was about to embark on a 16-day cruise of the Mediterranean on board the
QE2
, a liner he’d boasted about travelling on more than
30 times. I heard a rustling of paper before he reeled off a list of dates and scheduled shore visits. And then, in his staccato for emphasis way, he added, ‘So, why-don’t-you-phone-my-man-at-Cunard-and-say … you-are-coming-to-interview-me?’

And with that, he fixed it.

*

I woke with a dry mouth and a pulsing headache from too much to drink the night before. I had spent the evening alone in a beachfront bar in Cadiz, wondering what the hell I was doing there and why I was about to embark on a short cruise with a man I’d spent so much of my life obsessing over.

A feeling of dread had settled in the pit of my stomach. There was no magazine commission this time, only his promise of a ‘nice break’ and ‘a bit of fun’. A bit of fun, in this case, that would involve four days at sea with an aged bachelor in a shell suit. After all this time carrying him around in my head, all the time wondering about him and trying to find out who he was, this, I felt sure, was the beginning of the end.

Light poured through the window of my budget hotel room. I showered, got dressed and headed downstairs where the duty manager called me a taxi. As we reached the port nestling beneath the ramparts of the historic old town, Cunard’s iconic flagship reflected the morning sunlight. Viewed from a distance, the ship seemed to dwarf the cranes and the brightly coloured containers stacked in the depot alongside. Up close, the long shadow cast by her vast hull offered shade to the column of OAPs waddling back along the quayside.

Cadiz was the last overseas stop on the ship’s farewell cruise of the Mediterranean. Six months from now the
QE2
’s 39-year, globe-crossing story would end in Dubai, where £200 million of Saudi money was waiting to be spent on transforming her into a luxury, floating hotel.

I paid the taxi driver and pulled my travel bag to the bottom of the gangplank where a white uniformed ship’s officer ticked my name off a list. On stepping aboard, I was led through a series of
red-carpeted corridors to cabin 1077 on 1 Deck. ‘So you’re the famous journalist,’ said the woman officer as she opened the door and handed me the keys. ‘We’ve been expecting you.’ The words had come straight from the lips of Jimmy Savile.

Inside, the decor reminded me of his flats in Leeds and Scarborough: familiar deep reds and purples in the carpet, bedspread and curtains, offset by dark wood in the cabinets and wardrobes. It even had a similar aroma, the cabins of the
QE2
being among the last indoor areas in the English-speaking world where it was permissible to smoke. Savile, I’d been told, was in cabin 2044 so I picked up the phone and called. There was no answer.

Lying on the bed was a printed programme of the day. Afternoon activities included ‘low impact aerobics on 7 Deck, C stairway’, ‘darts competition with Cruise Staff in The Golden Lion Pub’, ‘Afternoon Tea with Pianist Frankie in the Queens Room’ and, at 5 p.m., a ‘Sailaway Party!’ where passengers could enjoy the ‘live sounds of our Caribbean Band ChangeZ’ at the Funnel Bar on the sun deck. Tonight’s dress code was ‘semi formal – jacket and tie for gentlemen, cocktail dress or trouser suit for ladies’. I unpacked my bag and went for a wander.

By lunchtime, I had still not found him. On the pool deck, the early afternoon sun had begun baking the bald heads and bingo wings resident in the deckchairs. Up a flight of metal stairs, a metal balcony afforded a view onto a gently perspiring congregation of mahogany-tanned torsos and food-filled bellies below. Inside, snaking lines of silver-haired passengers pushed trays between food stations offering cold meats, salads, and a whole rotunda of desserts at the Lido Restaurant’s all-day buffet. I kept on searching, climbing another set of stairs to the boat deck and heading back inside, past the Royal Promenade shopping area with its Harrods concession.

Further on and down another flight of stairs, a large rectangular display case dominated the wall at one end of an expansive landing. Inside it were scores of photographs, suspended at different distances from the glass. Black and white and colour
pictures captured the great, the good and the glamorous enjoying what looked like glitzy nights and lazy days at sea. I stopped for a while and looked at them until my eyes relaxed and the faces dissolved into a gently vibrating blur: Nelson Mandela, David Niven, Princess Margaret, Paul Newman, Bing Crosby, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Princess Margaret, a platinum-wigged Mr Punch. My vision snapped back into focus and inevitably, he was there: Jimmy Savile, gurning at me from bottom right of the cabinet. And there again, middle left, just along from Les Dawson. And again, top right. And there, through a doorway to my left, he was again, only this time it really was him.

He was sitting at a table in the corner of the Golden Lion pub, talking to a couple who I estimated to be in their thirties, which made them comfortably the youngest passengers I had seen in my hours on board. He was in familiar pose, leaning back in his chair; foot up on a barstool, right elbow cocked and a cigar smouldering between gilded fingers. Wisps of bleached white hair escaped from underneath a backwards-facing baseball cap and he was wearing his pink, John Lennon-style glasses. A black tracksuit top unzipped to the waist revealed his bare chest and stomach. Beneath his matching tracksuit trousers, unlaced white running shoes, no socks. Like the decor of the
QE2
, his look was largely unchanged by the decades.

‘Well now,’ he said on spotting me. He rose slightly and shook my hand with just enough vigour to rattle the thick, S-shaped links on the chunkiest of his gold bracelets. ‘Let me introduce my friend, the famous, fearless reporter and frequenter of some of London’s finest massage parlours.’ It was typical Savile. In the past, he had answered my mobile phone and explained I was in the capable hands of a busty masseuse. The couple were from Birmingham, and after nearly two weeks on board they appeared to be on familiar enough terms with Savile to realise that this is what he was like.

I asked him how the cruise had been so far. ‘An endless round of ceaseless pleasure,’ he said before getting to his feet and suggesting we go for a tour.

Progress was painfully slow because Savile liked, in his words to ‘spread pleasure’. It was how he described his ‘duties’ on board. First he clasped the hand of a lady with a backcombed mist of blue-tinted hair before kissing it theatrically, clutching his heart and emitting his catchphrase yodel of pleasure. Then he interrupted a game of Scrabble to tell an American couple that he played in Chinese because that way nobody knew if he was cheating. They did not seem to know who he was but played along with him anyway. A few metres later he told three giggling women from Scotland that I was from the
Sun
and on the lookout for new topless models for Page Three.

We walked down a corridor and he told me how he’d been teasing the girl who worked in the gift shop. He’d told her he was shoplifting lighters and took me there to prove it. ‘I’m a thief, always have been,’ he said to the girl at the till. She was not British and could only summon a wan smile.

On the way out, he stopped an English couple who appeared to be in their late sixties. Motioning to the wife, he warned the husband he was being stalked by an underage girl. ‘I wanted you to know,’ he said conspiratorially, ‘because you could get into trouble for that.’ They told him he was ‘incorrigible’ and hurried past. Jimmy Savile chuckled to himself and shuffled on.

It was like Tourette’s of the soul.