A Very Private Celebrity (18 page)

Freeman's questions on this occasion were gentle, almost flirtatious. He tried to coax her into frank answers, though not always successfully:

The interview was another success. The
Daily Herald
declared: ‘Here was a living legend captured on the popular screen.'

Grace Wyndham Goldie was delighted:

8 May 1959, from assistant head of talks television

 

My dear John,

 

I have already told Hugh Burnett how superb I thought the Sitwell programme was, and how beautifully he had handled it visually. I thought I must write to say that it seemed to me also the best thing I have ever seen you do on television.

I don't know how you made her so obviously at ease and happy that she could reveal herself, in ways that were fascinating and resounded to her credit as a person, in front of the television cameras. Thank you very much. I enjoyed it enormously.

 

Yours ever, Grace

12 May, 8 Heath Mansions

 

Dear Grace,

 

Thank you so much for writing. I value your praise more than anybody else's – without exception.

 

Yours ever, John
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He must have been relieved to get it, for she did not dispense praise lightly. Indeed, a few weeks before, at the morning-after meeting of the
Panorama
team, she had reprimanded him: ‘Mr Freeman, I can't tell you how bad you were last night.'

Considering the popularity of
Face to Face
, it is remarkable how many of those ‘approached' (not quite the same as ‘invited') for interview between April and December 1959 turned the offer down. Of seventy-two ‘approaches', only ten were successful. There was a ‘no' from Danny Kaye, Laurence Olivier (‘not interested'), Eamon De
Valera (‘constitutional reasons'), Igor Stravinsky (‘definitely no'), Pablo Casals, T. S. Eliot (‘not inclined to appear on TV'), Lord Beaverbrook (‘dislikes personal publicity'), Noël Coward (‘not coming to England') and Charlie Chaplin (‘working on memoirs'). There were no replies from Groucho Marx, the Shah of Persia, Alec Guinness, Maria Callas, Ernest Hemingway, Ed Murrow and Frank Sinatra. There was a ‘perhaps' from Evelyn Waugh (‘for a larger fee' – the standard fee was 100 guineas) and Stanley Spencer (‘scarcely worth the while'), but a ‘yes' from Cecil Beaton, Harry Belafonte, Augustus John, Gilbert Harding and Stirling Moss. Later Evelyn Waugh relented and gave Freeman a prickly interview.

There was also a category of ‘not approved', meaning that the choice of Burnett and Freeman was rejected by Grace Wyndham Goldie or Cecil McGivern (the controller of television programmes). This category included Oswald Mosley, the Dean of Canterbury, Jomo Kenyatta and Albert Schweitzer. The odd one out was Schweitzer, as his ‘English was no good'; the others, presumably, all had political black marks. Mosley was the former fascist leader; the ‘Red' Dean of Canterbury was an unyielding supporter of the Soviet Union; and Jomo Kenyatta was allegedly the leader of the Mau Mau revolutionaries in Kenya, who had just been released from prison. However, this does not mean, necessarily, that the interviews were censored for political reasons. Grace Wyndham Goldie may well have thought that these three subjects would be so unpopular with a British audience that she would lose her precious viewing figures, plus there were more straightforward talks programmes, like
Panorama
, which could take them on.

The
Face to Face
with Carl Jung, recorded at the professor's home in Zurich in June 1959, was an historic coup. It was the only TV interview ever given by the world's greatest living psychologist and founder of the concept of the collective unconscious. He was eighty-four and
would be dead within two years. For this reason, the tape, script and then DVD of the interview were, and still are, in demand all over the world.

Curiously, wrote Hugh Burnett, Jung was the only one of thirty-five guests to refuse to have his portrait sketched for the opening credits:

At one stage during the interview, Freeman's usual presence of mind seemed to desert him:

Millions of viewers must have been beside themselves with frustration not knowing why the world's greatest psychologist
knew
that God existed. Several of them wrote to Jung, who replied:

Freeman himself wrote to Jung for the answer to the question he should have asked, and received this in return:

In the cutting room back home, Burnett was finding Jung hard going:

Freeman, on the other hand, was most intrigued and keen to know Jung further. The opportunity came in a scarcely believable way. The
Face
to
Face
interview had been watched by the publisher Wolfgang Foges. He thought Jung should write a book for educated readers who understood Freud's basic theories of psychoanalysis, but were unfamiliar with Jung's. Sensing Freeman's interest, Foges asked him to persuade Jung.

‘I jumped at the idea,' wrote Freeman, ‘and set off once more to Zurich. Jung listened to me in his garden for two hours almost without interruption – and then said no.' That might have been the end of what would become
Man and His Symbols
had fate, or Jung's subconscious, not intervened. Jung had a dream in which ‘a multitude of people were listening to him in rapt attention and
appearing to understand what he said
' (Freeman's italics). Crucial to Jungianism is the belief that man should be guided by his ‘unconscious', as revealed in dreams. So Jung changed his mind – on two conditions: Freeman had to be a co-editor and he had to include essays from disciples chosen by Jung.

Freeman accepted, but the second condition tried his patience beyond the limit. Urbane and charming he was, but Freeman was also used to getting his way, and neurotic European psychoanalysts were not his company of choice. He wrote in the margin of the essay by Jolande Jacobi, ‘I puke on this' and – scarcely restraining himself from throwing it in the bin – handed over the entire manuscript to his friend Norman MacKenzie.
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Man and His Symbols
was completed in the month of Jung's death, June 1961, and published with an introduction by Freeman.

Freeman wrote that Jung had initially laid down the subject matter and outline of the book, but then ‘the last year of his life was devoted almost entirely to [finishing] it'. Jung had asked him to be co-editor (with his closest professional friend Dr Marie-Louise von Franz of Zurich) because he, Freeman, was the ‘average reader' and therefore what he could understand ‘would be intelligible to all'.

Freeman (and Norman MacKenzie) took their job seriously: ‘I have scrupulously insisted on having every paragraph written, and, if necessary, rewritten, to a degree of clarity and directness that enables me to say that in its entirety this book is designed for the general reader.' Freeman prided himself in his writing more than in his interviewing, and later said he wished he had spent more time as a teacher. Here he introduces the subject of the book:

The comedian Tony Hancock was Freeman's twelfth guest, the interview pre-recorded in January 1960. For Hancock, it was a huge honour to be invited. He was the first popular entertainer on a roll call of world-famous philosophers, lawyers and writers. He was an autodidact whose shelves at home in Sussex contained the works of
Russell and Jung – and now he was going to occupy the same chair as them! Hancock did not want to be regarded as a professional buffoon, but rather as an introspective thinker who spent much of his leisure time working on self-improvement, and he therefore took the interview very seriously. According to his brother, this was literally fatal, as it set him on a course of unhealthy introspection and self-destruction: ‘It was the biggest mistake he ever made. I think it all started from that really. He should never have done it. Tony was an intelligent man, but he was not an intellectual. He was carried away by John's intellect. Self-analysis – that was his killer.'
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