In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (46 page)

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.’

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

I
t 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 Western 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

J
immy 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.

‘In the months leading up to that point I had been forced to think about my health problems more and more often,’ he explained. ‘My stamina was decreasing, and part way through runs or uphill climbs I’d be out of breath and often unable to
complete them. I knew something was wrong and my body was letting me know it was getting worse.’

He contacted Hall and arranged a visit to Killingbeck Hospital where he underwent a series of tests. Hall’s radical new treatment was not a suitable course of therapy in his case but a relationship nevertheless developed between the two men, and Savile decided to put himself in the young consultant’s hands.

He only told one friend, his old cycling pal Dave Dalmour, that he was going into hospital, and even then he didn’t say what it was for. They had stopped off en route at one of his favourite cafés for a bacon sandwich washed down with a cigar.

When the time came to be wheeled down to the operating theatre, Jimmy Savile maintained the façade of supreme confidence: cracking jokes with the porters as he went. But the truth was he was scared. He insisted on wearing his Royal Marines Green Beret before the surgery, and instructed Hall to place it back on his head before he woke up.

The operation took three hours, and was conducted by the surgeon Kevin Watterson who was assisted by Hall. After being put under, Savile was wired up to heart and lung machines and his chest was opened along the breastbone using a circular saw. Three incisions were made in his left leg, through which a vein was removed. This vein was then cut into four pieces and stitched onto the arteries at the point of the blockages.

Afterwards, he was taken back to the ward where he was attached to an ECG machine and ventilator. He was not taken to the high dependency unit because it was thought he might disturb the other patients. It proved to be a wise decision. ‘The first thing I remember when I came round,’ he said, ‘was a nurse leaning over me with her ear to my mouth and asking if I was alright,’
²
And Savile’s first reaction to discovering that he had made it and was still alive? He reached up and grabbed the nurse’s breast. The incident was duly hushed up.

Within five days he started exercising and after six was allowed to go home. He left the hospital in running shorts and cap, waving
to the battery of press photographers and film crews waiting outside. Dave Dalmour picked him up in the Rolls-Royce and they stopped off at the same café for a bacon sandwich on the way back to the flat overlooking Roundhay Park. When news broke of his operation, messages from well-wishers had flooded into the hospital. They included personal calls from Prince Charles and Princess Diana.

Being sawn in half, as he liked to describe it, was perhaps the most serious setback of his retirement, but it was by no means the only one. Indeed, Jimmy Savile’s twilight years were to be plagued by problems of his own making.

In 1994, three years earlier, two former pupils at Duncroft School had gone to the
Sunday Mirror
with their accounts of being sexually assaulted by the star in the 1970s. Paul Connew, the newspaper’s editor at the time, said he believed the women. But he decided not to publish because they both insisted on remaining anonymous and he feared losing a costly defamation case. ‘A star-struck jury would have been impressed by Savile’s protestations and the fact that we were actually not producing two frightened women in the witness box,’
³
he told a lecture audience in London in the summer of 2013.

‘In truth, at the time, post-Maxwell, the
Sunday Mirror
had limited resources [and] we were having to lose staff,’ Connew continued. ‘We just didn’t have the resources or the evidence to mount an investigation. You couldn’t [use] a child of the age that Savile was seen to prefer and you couldn’t find a journalist who would fit that bill.’

There is no question that Jimmy Savile would have sued. In his dotage, his lawyers were kept increasingly busy firing off letters to those their client saw as launching attacks on his reputation, challenging his control or conspiring to bring about his downfall.

The Christmas after the
Sunday Mirror
had thought better of exposing him, Biddle & Co. send a strongly worded letter to the BBC to explain that their client was seeking ‘substantial damages’ after Chris Morris announced Jimmy Savile’s death on his Radio 1
show. Six months earlier, the satirist had read out a similar spoof obituary for Michael Heseltine.

The publicity surrounding Savile’s heart operation stirred the deeply unpleasant memories carried by the woman, now in her early thirties, who he had raped in the television room at Stoke Mandeville when she was 12 years old.

‘As I matured I came to know that Savile was a national hero,’ she said, ‘someone who was held in high esteem by society. And this sickened me. During the summer of 1997, I was going through a low period following the death of my father and I began to dwell on what Savile had done to me. I therefore decided that I wanted to speak out,’ she says.

She wrote a letter to Savile’s secretary Janet Cope: ‘Dear Janet. In 1977 Jimmy Savile raped me.’ She included her telephone number, mobile number and address. ‘I took the letter by hand to Stoke Mandeville Hospital,’ she said, ‘and I asked where Savile’s office was. I was given the directions and I went to the office. No one was there so I put the letter in what I believed to be his secretary’s in-tray. I was very disappointed not to receive a response.’

After a week, the woman decided to try again, writing a second letter identical to the first. Once more, she took the letter by hand to the hospital and left it in an in-tray in Savile’s office. ‘Again I received no response to the letter,’ she reported.

Finally, she decided to send a letter to Savile himself. The letter started with the words, ‘You raped me in 1977’, and again she provided her name, telephone number and home address. This time, the woman chose a framed picture of a dog and a cat and pushed the letter into the back of the frame. She then wrapped it up to make it look like a present, and took it to the same office. ‘On this occasion,’ she recalled, ‘there was a lady sitting in the office when I arrived. I told her I had a present for Savile and she told me to put it on a filing cabinet that was situated next to a fax machine.’

There was no response. ‘I feel very let down by Janet Rowe [who had remarried by this time and become Janet Cope],’ said the
woman. ‘I felt sure she, as his secretary, would have read my letters.’ (In 2012, the woman maintains she Googled the name Janet Rowe and saw a photograph of Savile’s secretary: ‘This was indeed the woman I spoke to on the third occasion that I visited his office at Stoke Mandeville Hospital.’)

Janet Cope confirmed to me that she answered all mail addressed to Jimmy Savile at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. She said there were ‘a lot of crank letters but we just chucked them in the bin’. Most were begging letters, she insisted, and she maintained that she never saw anything sinister or that gave her cause for concern.

When I repeated the allegation made by the woman who says she was raped as a 12-year-old, and asked whether Cope had any recollection of such a letter, she replied, ‘No, none whatsoever.’ I then asked her whether if she had, she would have dismissed it as a crank letter. ‘I can’t even imagine what I would do … in that position,’ Cope replied. ‘Instinct would be to tear it up and chuck it away because it was a crank. But I never received anything like that, ever.’

Cope refuses to believe that Jimmy Savile was guilty of the hundreds of allegations made against him, even though she was forced to write a letter of her own, this one containing a grovelling apology to the man she had idolised and served so loyally. In 1999, Jimmy Savile had instructed Biddle & Co., his firm of solicitors, to seek damages from his former secretary following an interview she had given to a national newspaper in which she’d expressed her dismay and deep sadness at being unceremoniously sacked after 28 years of loyal service.
⁴

Since first meeting Savile at Stoke Mandeville in 1971, Cope had come to regard herself as a cross between surrogate mother and wife. As well as dealing with all his correspondence, which increased dramatically during the campaign to build the National Spinal Injuries Centre, she made herself available on the phone to him every day. She’d cleaned his quarters at the hospital, done his laundry and regularly invited him to her home for his favourite meal of minced beef and mashed potatoes. He rarely thanked her for these acts of quiet generosity, but she put
up with his thoughtlessness all the same. She liked to joke that with them, it was a case of ‘till death do us part’.

Speaking to the newspaper reporter in her fastidiously neat bungalow, Cope recalled how Jimmy Savile had become ‘the man in her life’ after her first husband died of cancer. When she married for a second time in 1990, Savile had given her away and even paid for the reception. But then quite suddenly, in early 1999, he terminated the relationship in the most callous manner.

Cope had retired from the NHS two years earlier and been made a member of staff on the Jimmy Savile Stoke Mandeville Hospital Trust. ‘He was having a lunch meeting with consultants and a new trustee,’ she said of the day she found out her services were no longer required. ‘The connecting door to his room was open. I’d taken in some sandwiches and sat on the sofa. Jimmy put his feet up on the desk and declared, ‘I’m going to take it easy now. I’m letting these new people take over.’ Then, motioning at Cope, Savile had said, ‘And she’s out.’

Other than for taking the uncharacteristic step of standing up to him over his decision to sack two maintenance men, Cope claimed to have no understanding of why he had suddenly cut her adrift. She said that she never saw him again. She heard from his solicitors though, who called seeking a full retraction and apology for what their client considered to be ‘false and damaging allegations’.

Mavis Price from Leeds General Infirmary, the wife of the consultant cardiologist who first diagnosed Jimmy Savile’s heart problems, subsequently took over the day-to-day administration of his life.

*

Just over two weeks after Jimmy Savile emerged from his heart operation, Princess Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris. He was invited to the funeral service at Westminster Abbey but was too weak to attend.

In our final interview, I asked Savile again about his relationships with the royals. ‘What you’ve got to realise is how many
books have been written about them by people who don’t really know them,’ he said. ‘Paul Burrell and people like that.’ I put it to him that having worked as Diana’s butler for ten years, Burrell must have surely known her better than most.

‘Yes, he did,’ said Savile, suddenly changing his tune. ‘I helped him get out of his court case.’ In 2002, Burrell was charged with the theft of items belonging to the Princess of Wales but the trial collapsed when it emerged the Queen had spoken to him and a public interest immunity certificate was presented to the court. ‘That was something else,’ smiled Savile, leaning back in his chair, eyes tightly closed as if mentally picturing the next brick being laid on the wall.

‘Nobody could get him off the hook. The entire world had him on the hook. He fell out with [Diana’s] trustees … Paul was very upset about this and because he was so upset, he was a danger, you see. So they invented this thing that he’d half-inched some of her gear, which he hadn’t.’ (In April 2014, Janet Cope showed me a 1998 letter from Paul Burrell in which Diana’s former butler said how much he was looking forward to ‘spending some quality time with Jimmy. I need some sound and wise advice from him as he always knows the right answer.’)

Savile pointed to my tape recorder and told me to turn it off. It was the only time in all our meetings that he requested me to do this. He then proceeded to explain how he’d collected all the soft toys that had been left by mourners at the gates of Kensington Palace. He’d taken them away and had them laundered. He said they were now in bags at his lock-up at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. It’s a story that Janet Cope insists was exaggerated.

He then went on to tell me a little about the time in 1999 when Prince Charles came for lunch at the three-bedroomed cottage he’d recently bought near Glencoe. Savile said he first clapped eyes on the building when he’d cycled through the Highland glen during World War II. More than half a century later, he bought it, paying the previous owner, the celebrated mountaineer Hamish MacInnes, £125,000 for the privilege.

When Savile learned the Prince of Wales was to visit the area and present a minibus to a mountain rescue team, he issued his invitation. His friend, Julie Ferguson, was asked to source local salmon, lamb and a bottle of Laphroaig whisky, which he knew the prince liked.