A Very Private Celebrity (20 page)

Shortly after, in November, Freeman agreed to squeeze in a few American recordings of
Face to Face
when he was over in New York for the
New Statesman
. It says something about the self-importance of the BBC that it expected its New York office to book, at short
notice, Marilyn Monroe, Tennessee Williams, Ella Fitzgerald and General Douglas MacArthur. All said no and the American venture was abandoned.

In January 1962, the series continued in Britain. There were two weak interviews, with the actor Albert Finney and the playwright John Osborne. Freeman seemed unprepared and, for the first time, lacked drive and persistence: as a result the interviews fell flat. The Osborne
Face to Face
scored the lowest reaction index of all: 54 per cent. On 6 February, Leonard Miall wrote a terse memo to Burnett:

This was the sort of memo Burnett could not ignore. He had a frank talk with his interviewer and reported back to the head of talks:

The director-general had also noticed Freeman's weak interviewing. He said he did not rule out a future
Face to Face
with Oswald Mosley, but not for the present, given Freeman's interviewing had lost its ‘toughness'.

Burnett suggested to Freeman one last
Face to Face
– this one with the artist whose sketches had introduced nearly all the programmes, Feliks Topolski. ‘He turned it down flat,' Burnett told Miall.

Burnett then invited Robert Kee to take over from Freeman as interviewer and the schedulers placed another series (the seventh) for the summer 1962, with Lady Astor as the first guest. Nothing came of it.

This was the unhappy ending to the BBC's most famous series of interviews. It had made John Freeman a household name and TV Personality of the Year in 1960. He said genuinely that he disliked the celebrity status, and gave this as his reason for turning his back on
Face to Face
. But the truth was more complicated.

The fame of
Face to Face
invited parody.
The Stanley Baxter Show
produced a sketch called ‘Nose to Nose'. More significantly, on 7 December 1962, BBC drama broadcast a play specially written for television by Terrence Rattigan called
Heart to Heart
(the
Daily Mirror
billed it as ‘the largest theatre in the world', as the two-hour play was expected to reach an audience of eighty million having been produced for television in thirteen versions in thirteen countries over one week). The lead was the inquisitor (played by Kenneth More), a cynical, womanising journalist with a drink problem, who had rocketed to fame ‘taking people apart' on television. Not surprisingly, Freeman had a case for a libel action, although the scenario was unrealistic. The
Daily Sketch
said: ‘As
a serious attack on the
Face to Face
type show, it probably made John Freeman giggle into his mug of BBC canteen tea.' Nevertheless, Freeman protested in the
New Statesman
office, ‘The allegation of alcoholism I just about accept; that of amorousness I reject absolutely', to which Catherine would later comment, ‘That should have been the other way round.' Freeman consulted a lawyer and settled with the BBC after ‘an amicable exchange of letters'.

As a postscript, a few months before
Face to Face
ended, the BBC audience research panel reported its poll on possible future guests. Over 400 names were suggested, of whom the most popular was the conductor Sir Malcom Sargent (fifty-two votes), followed by two TV personalities – Richard Dimbleby (twenty-nine) and Eamonn Andrews (twenty-four). Radio quizmaster Wilfred Pickles and pop singer Cliff Richard were also popular choices.

Sir Winston Churchill polled fourteen votes. As Leonard Miall wrote on the bottom of the list: ‘
Sic transit, gloria mundi
.'
22

Chapter 7

Political journalist – Freeman and the Cold War

F
OR FOURTEEN YEARS,
John Freeman wrote for the
New Statesman
(1951–65). For the last ten of those years, he was either deputy editor or editor, thereby exercising editorial control at the height of the Cold War over a socialist magazine that had a reputation for pro-communist beliefs. As such he seemed to invite rumours. He was a public figure on the left who guarded his privacy, and that in itself was suspicious. He was also well known for his dubious friendships, as with Tom Driberg, who was suspected of being a spy. One rumour at the time was that Freeman worked for the intelligence services; another, preposterous now, was that he was
the ‘fourth' or ‘fifth' man in the spy scandals surrounding the defection of the three spies Burgess, Maclean and Philby.

These rumours were not true but undoubtedly two of his co-writers and close friends on the magazine were ‘spies' for one side or the other, or both. Less emotively and more accurately, they worked part-time as informants, couriers and photographers, answerable to the secret services of the state. There was, after all, a Cold War on at the time and those who travelled to the other side of the Iron Curtain considered it their patriotic duty to prevent it becoming ‘hot'. Freeman, as we know, was a socialist on the left of the Labour Party. Was he a Soviet sympathiser? How far did his political views shape his editorial policy? And in what direction? First, I need to place Freeman in the
New Statesman
offices and account for his promotion to editor.

When John Freeman took over from Kingsley Martin as editor of the
New Statesman and Nation
in January 1961, the circulation was 75,000 – but falling – and the advertising revenue was almost £100,000 per year. When Martin had become editor in 1931, the circulation had been 12,000, the advertising revenue £7,000 per year, and the magazine losing money. In other words, Freeman succeeded a thirty-year editorship that had turned the
New Statesman
into the most successful political weekly magazine in Britain, although arguably it was past its best.

It was a political magazine based firmly on Martin's socialist principles – and everything that Freeman did was bound to be in his shadow. Freeman described his predecessor as ‘an angular, argumentative, exuberant Nonconformist, who never acquired the good taste and discretion to keep quiet in the face of injustice and folly. In his magazine he weekly wrestled with doubts and proclaimed the conviction of a whole generation.'
1

Despite his patriarchal appearance and pedagogic manner, Kingsley
Martin was notoriously indecisive; ‘wrestling with doubts' was a good description. The nickname of the
New Statesman and Nation
– ‘Staggers and Naggers' – referred to Martin's fickle conscience and nagging morality. When he retired from the editorship, A. J. P. Taylor sent a message: ‘The end of an era! It is most distressing to think that the
New Statesman
may now follow a consistent line two weeks running.'
2

Kingsley Martin could not make his mind up between pacifism and preparations for war. In the late '30s he was one of the first appeasers of Hitler and then one of the first to turn against Chamberlain for appeasement. In the late '50s he could not decide whether to support the campaign for nuclear disarmament or not, alternating between enthusiasm and ambivalence. Freeman accused him of having ‘a halfbaked love affair' with unilateralism.

Kingsley's agonising over the right path was shared by his readership. When Norman MacKenzie, who was an assistant editor from 1943 to 1962, spoke at his memorial service in 1969 he said that Kingsley Martin ‘was not so much the conscience of the left as the unconscious of the middle class, and that's why he had so much power. He had a very deep sense of his readership, their anxieties and hopes, and of himself in behaving justly.'
3

Transparently honest, often angry at the state of the world but funny about the idiosyncrasies of the British character, Kingsley's journalism ‘played a crucial role in shaping the thought of a generation'. That was Freeman's view writing in the 1960s.

The critics of the
NS
labelled it indecisive, irresponsible and pessimistic, but:

Such was the seminal influence of the magazine that Freeman inherited.

Norman MacKenzie lived just long enough to write in the April 2013 centenary edition about the literary and social traditions of the magazine, which was often referred to by the name of its location – an alley in a Dickensian corner of London leading off Lincoln's Inn Fields called Great Turnstile:

John Freeman first wrote for the
New Statesman
in 1951. Kingsley, then in his mid-fifties, was looking for a successor and already had Freeman in mind, partly for his chief of staff capabilities. As Freeman said: ‘Kingsley hated work, all other forms of work except writing, which he loved.' Freeman was in the process of resigning from the government, and his resignation principle of welfare before re-armament was in tune with the Labour left on the staff, from the editor downwards. So Martin took Freeman out to lunch and, on 23 May 1951, Freeman accepted by letter the offer of a part-time staff job:

Within months, Freeman was de facto editing the paper when Kingsley Martin was abroad. He was learning journalism too, although as a former editor of
Cherwell
and a writer of political reports, it was hardly from a standing start. What united all Freeman's careers was his talent as a communicator. He told C. H. Rolf, another regular
New Statesman
writer and the editor of Kingsley Martin's
Letters and Diaries
:

For the next four years, Freeman combined being a backbencher in Parliament with writing for the
New Statesman
. His promotion to deputy editor became assured in 1955, in circumstances that would have embarrassed anyone with a less ‘ice-cold temperament' than Freeman. Richard Crossman MP – considered one of the most brilliant political journalists in Britain, and chief leader-writer for the
NS
on foreign affairs since the war – had made clear to Kingsley Martin that his spiritual home was the
New Statesman
, not Parliament, and he wished to succeed Martin as editor. If he knew he was the heir apparent, he told Martin, he would resign his parliamentary seat. Martin had not responded. Then, in July, Crossman was offered a tempting job on the
Daily Mirror
. He tried to use this offer, clumsily ‘holding a pistol to Martin's head', with the threat that, unless Martin named him formally as deputy editor, he would defect to the
Mirror
, which was offering him four times as much money.

Freeman's reaction to this was clever, and possibly duplicitous. Crossman claimed in his diary that Freeman wrote him a note to the effect of ‘rather than lose me he would like to see Kingsley resign and me take his place, in which case he would serve under me'.
8
This is quite possible, bearing in mind that they had been Bevanite colleagues in Parliament until Freeman's resignation. The opinion in the
NS
office, however, was that Freeman outwitted Crossman by a lateral move. Realising that Kingsley Martin would find it easier to lose Crossman if there was another fluent, polemical leader-writer waiting behind his typewriter, he travelled to Paris and persuaded Paul Johnson, the
very young
NS
correspondent in France, that there might be a job on the London staff. Johnson was delighted.

Kingsley Martin sacked Richard Crossman, by phone, at 8.30 a.m.: ‘I've thought it over and it's quite definite that there is no room for the three of us [meaning himself, Freeman and Crossman] on the paper.' Later, C. H. Rolf discovered among Martin's papers this note about Crossman: ‘I have never worked on the paper with anyone so brilliant but so impurely motivated. I think he lacks the qualities that will bind a staff in loyalty to him and the integrity, disinterestedness and judgement that will make him a good editor.'
9
The implication of this damning note must be that Crossman's attempted putsch was doomed before it even started. John Freeman wrote Crossman a chivalrous letter:

The trouble with writing about John Freeman – so private; so ‘hard of access', in Paul Johnson's own terms – is that it is sometimes impossible to find out what his motives really were. At my suggestion, Norman
MacKenzie asked Freeman why Kingsley Martin had preferred him to Richard Crossman. Freeman replied: ‘You know, he was like a Tudor monarch with court favourites of the moment. I was preferred at that time.' Possibly true, but not a revealing answer.

That was not quite the end of the story. Two days after the breakfast phone call, Martin met Crossman face to face. He was less candid than he might have been, but forthright nevertheless: