A Very Private Celebrity (24 page)
Read A Very Private Celebrity Online
Authors: Hugh Purcell
Five minutes to midnight on New Year’s Eve in the church belfry; with the new snow deep on the ground and the thermometer at 16 degrees. The bells bobbed their way through a cheerful peal, which splendidly proclaimed the New Year to a deserted countryside. Round the walls of the belfry sat the revellers, glowing with wine and love, momentarily hushed by wonder. Afterwards, whisky in the White Horse and a snow fight. The appeal of the year’s turn seems to be deep, archetypal magic.
John and Catherine were spending their Christmas holidays at Chilham with their baby son. He told her that 1961 had been an ‘annus mirabilis’ because of his editorship of the
New Statesman
and Matthew’s birth: ‘I never knew it was possible to be so happy.’
Freeman admitted that ‘he was not primarily a writing editor’. He said afterwards: ‘The greatest satisfaction I found was discovering new talent who would take over from me.’
12
Reading Flavus over the years of Freeman’s editorship, I am struck by the prominence of two themes. The first is the
New Statesman
’s traditional support of colonial revolution, from Indian independence onwards. He wrote many paragraphs about the iniquities of apartheid and the emerging nations of Africa. The second is more Freeman’s own: a fascination with crime, vice, law and order. Many weeks Flavus is in a magistrate’s court, a reception centre, a prison; exposing legal anomalies, the working of the Street Offences Act and the wrongness of capital punishment. He even notices the new fashion in soft porn magazines of displaying girls from the Iron Curtain countries: ‘Nothing I have read of the relaxation of communism is as totally convincing as the bare bosom of Manya Gaspararovna, “a jazz-digging dental technician from Leningrad”’: hardly the style of Kingsley Martin.
In October 1962 the world came as close as it ever has done to
nuclear war. Once again the
New Statesman
was an important forum for national debate; once again it showed the confused thinking of the late Kingsley Martin era. The occasion, of course, was the Cuban Missile Crisis.
13
American spy planes obtained photographs of Soviet nuclear missiles recently moved to Cuba in retaliation for similar American missiles placed in Turkey and Italy. The United States considered attacking Cuba by sea and air but decided instead to blockade the island, a military and legal ‘quarantine’, to prevent the delivery of more offensive weapons and as a way of demanding the removal of those already in place. When the
New Statesman
went to press on 25 October these facts were not clear and the Soviet response to the blockade was unknown. It was a fearful time. The day before Khrushchev had written a public letter to Kennedy accusing him of ‘an act of aggression propelling human kind into the abyss of a world nuclear-missile war’. Russian ships attempted to run the blockade and two days later a Soviet missile crew shot down an American spy plane.
That week, editor John and Catherine Freeman were in Paris and the leader was written by Paul Johnson. Contrary to expectations, particularly to those who remembered his anti-American leaders of the late ’50s, he placed the
New Statesman
dogmatically behind the United States:
The Russians stand accused of an act of provocation unprecedented since the outset of the Cold War, carried out in haste, in secrecy and behind a curtain of falsehood… Kennedy has chosen the least of three evils [the other two being diplomacy and invasion]. Russian response suggests that Khrushchev will not allow the operation to degenerate into conflict. He will accept humiliation over Cuba.
14
This prediction proved correct. On 28 October the Russians withdrew from Cuba taking their missiles with them. The
New Statesman
leader had been courageous. Even the
Daily Telegraph
had hedged its bets by calling for the United States to act through the United Nations.
Behind the scenes, however, there was dismay in Great Turnstile. Anti-American feelings on the nuclear issue could not be eradicated overnight. It so happened that Kingsley Martin had been booked to write the ‘London Diary’ for 25 October. He began, jauntily, ‘I presume Kennedy’s military blockade of Cuba has not yet triggered off a nuclear war?’ Even more contradictory was the introduction above a doomsday essay by Bertrand Russell ‘Can Nuclear War Be Prevented?’: ‘This article was written before the Cuban missile crisis became acute. Kennedy’s recent irresponsible warmongering illustrates the truth of all that follows.’ The early nickname of the
New Statesman
as ‘the naggers and staggers’ was proving all too accurate – as in, staggering from one view to another. Presumably it was Freeman’s absence in Paris that accounted for this lack of ‘editorial efficiency’ as Howard called it.
Norman MacKenzie had retired from the
New Statesman
the previous week to return to academia. Now he wrote a long and anguished letter to John Freeman. He blamed Paul Johnson’s leaders for taking away ‘the conscience of the paper’:
Paul cannot bear those aspects of English radicalism for which the paper has traditionally stood – scepticism, uncertainty, the small battalions, even emotional responses if you like. The paper’s job is not to be bedevilled by taking sides, but to have the courage to stand alone, to rise above the sterilities of Cold War polemics and to offer a view that may not be ‘practicable’ but is desirable as an alternative to cynicism and stupidity.
15
What was the editor’s view? Freeman had delegated the editorial to Paul Johnson, as he often did, so he stood by him. It so happened, however, that he took part in a BBC Overseas Service discussion a day or so after the
New Statesman
’s publication. In it he argued (against Peregrine Worsthorne) that President Kennedy had over-reacted by blockading Cuba. If the Russians tolerated having American missiles so near their borders in Turkey, why should not the Americans tolerate having Russian missiles so near their borders in Cuba? Was this Freeman’s dispassionate view or did he simply want a robust argument? In either event, he was at variance with his own paper.
The fiftieth anniversary of the
New Statesman
was celebrated in the edition of 19 April 1963. It was the 2,605th edition in the magazine’s history, as Freeman pointed out in his leader, ‘The 50-Year Itch’. The magazine’s most established writers wrote on their favourite themes: J. B. Priestley on ‘Fifty Years of the English’; Kingsley Martin on ‘The Way of Dissent’; Richard Crossman on the ‘Newstatesmen’; and Malcolm Muggeridge on ‘Life with the Staggers’. Robert Graves contributed ‘Four Poems’ and Graham Greene a short story ‘Mortmain’. To this galaxy of home writers, every bit as distinguished as those in the 1930s and ’40s, were added eight once, present or future heads of state who sent greetings: President Kennedy; prime ministers Macmillan, Nehru and Nyerere; Earl Attlee; Harold Wilson and others. In his leader Freeman asserted the ‘fundamental purpose’ of the
New Statesman
:
It is to show our readers by scientific analysis and reason how they may apply to public affairs and great issues the standards of personal morality, good order and common sense, which civilised men take for granted in their private dealings. That individual men and women should take personal responsibility for asserting that principle at the
level of national and international affairs is the fundamental proposition on which democratic socialism must be based.
When Freeman was supposed to be at the
New Statesman
printers on a Thursday afternoon he was sometimes somewhere else, so he left phone numbers with the office where he could be contacted. One of these was for the home of the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien. In 1968 she published a collection of short stories called
The Love Object
– the title of the first story. It is about a young woman’s obsession with an older man and her breakdown, almost suicidal, when he leaves. It is sexually explicit:
‘Hey,’ he said, jocularly, just like that. ‘This can’t go on, you know.’ Then I raised my head from its sunken position between his legs and I looked at him through my hair, which had fallen over my face. I saw that he was serious. ‘It just occurred to me that possibly you love me,’ he said.
Edna O’Brien disguises the identity of ‘the love object’. He is a famous lawyer, not a broadcaster or journalist, but in many small and intimate ways, such as the descriptions of his face and body and his obsessive habits like folding his trousers along their creases before getting into bed, he is clearly John Freeman. There is a scene Catherine remembers when ‘Martha’ (Edna) identifies ‘Helen’ (Catherine) at a party:
I noticed a dress I quite admired, a mauve dress with very wide, crocheted sleeves. Looking up the length of the sleeves I saw its owner’s eyes directed at me. Perhaps she was admiring my outfit. People with the same tastes often do. I have no idea what her face looked like, but later when I asked a girlfriend which was his wife
she pointed to this woman with the crocheted sleeves. The second time I saw her in profile. Those eyes into which I looked did not speak to my memory with anything special, except, perhaps, slight covetousness.
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‘The Love Object’ ends with the man saying, ‘I adore you but I’m not in love with you. With my commitments I don’t think I could be in love with anyone.’ In real life, the commitments were that Freeman and his family were about to leave for India, news that he conveyed to Edna on a postcard. Gossip spread soon after publication among Washington high society that this very autobiographical story was about the British ambassador but no one ever said that to Catherine. As often, the wife was the last to know. Much later, she reproached him for not warning her about the book. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘I thought it was too trivial to mention.’
In her memoir,
Country Girl
, Edna O’Brien adds a small postscript. She remembers an unexpected ring of her doorbell one Monday evening. Standing on the doorstep was the actor Richard Burton. He had read ‘The Love Object’, which she describes as a story ‘in which the spiritual and carnal ramifications of a love affair were laid bare’, and ‘maybe because of this, he took me to be more libertine than I was’. I invited Edna O’Brien to contribute to Freeman’s biography. She replied: ‘I know it would be more generous, were I to say yes, but I am not the person I was then and therefore I am declining your invitation to contribute.’
In April 1963, Freeman was profiled in the
News of the World
by the popular columnist Nancy Spain in her article ‘Dish of the Week’:
Physically John Freeman is dishy. He has aggressively red hair, a fair skin burned brick red by the wild tropical suns of Hampstead Heath,
his voice has the caressing, undeviating power of all male stars, whether of the theatre or screen, and his hands are beautiful – well-kept, and somehow ruthless.
Voice and hands, as all the girls will tell you, are very important in a Dish. The public knows very little about his private life. This is not a bad thing either. Women like a bit of mystery.
He is also gentle, very big both mentally and physically, and his probing kindliness, applied with such strength and power, is the quality that most of the public remember him for in
Face to Face
.
‘I believe in trying to find out the truth,’ he said, ‘and then in handing it on to the public analysed in such a way that it is easily understood by them.’
Charm, charm, charm … this is the thing that counts in a Dish. And when you get allied with it a passion for the truth that almost amounts to obsession, then, indeed, you have a Dish of the Day.
Freeman wrote the page ten column in the
News of the World
at this time, alternating with Randolph Churchill, so Nancy Spain’s gushing piece may partly be excused as a plug for the paper. He made two comments in the interview that are worth remembering: ‘I don’t see myself as a political figure; I am a journalist, pure and simple’ and ‘I would rather like to forget my time as a TV journalist. I found out everything I could about that medium, and now I’m much more interested in the old-fashioned, written word.’ Freeman, as always, had moved on, ‘closing each door firmly behind him’.
Explaining why he wrote for the mass-circulation, scandal-sheet
News of the World
, Freeman said, ‘it enabled my role at the
New Statesman
to be rather more episcopal than it might otherwise have been’. The delicious use of the word ‘episcopal’ shows his precision with words, his pomposity, but also a self-mockery. As usual, he added
that he wrote for the money. He was paid a guaranteed minimum of £2,500 per year by the
News of the World
. Added to his
New Statesman
salary and his continuing broadcasting work as a freelance, he would have been earning £12,000–15,000 a year in the mid-’60s, a good income. His page ten column consisted of 1,000 words or so of comment on the week’s news. At best it was an opinion piece, popularly expressed. ‘Damaging Questions the Premier Must Answer’ referred to the Profumo scandal. In the article Freeman wrote that he had known, and liked, Jack Profumo since their first days at Oxford. ‘Empty Seats? Don’t Blame Your MP’ was an argument for more pay for MPs. ‘Why the Premier Won’t Hand Over’ referred to a failed putsch by the Tories to remove Macmillan. ‘This We Risk To Guard Freedom: the press must sometimes be ready to cause offence – and damn the consequences’ was an argument for press freedom in the light of the Vassall Report.
17
Freeman’s reporting of the Vassall case landed him in trouble.
John Vassall was an admiralty clerk caught spying for the Russians and sentenced to eighteen years in prison in 1962. He was a known homosexual rumoured to be having an affair with his boss, Tam Galbraith, Civil Lord of the Admiralty. This gave rise to rumours that despite going through the normal security procedures, Vassall had been protected by someone in the admiralty with the result that he had got away with his treachery for many years. In November 1962 Freeman wrote an unsigned article for the
News of the World
to this effect: ‘Is it possible, MPs are asking, that somewhere among senior officials lurks a Mr Big who is able to protect homosexuals from the stringent enquiry to which others are subject when they take over secret jobs?’ The Radcliffe Tribunal, conducted by three judges, was set up to investigate the supposed lapses in security. Freeman was summoned to appear. Anthony Howard remembers him slipping out
of the
New Statesman
office ‘looking a bit sheepish’. Freeman agreed that a ‘legitimate inference’ of his article was that there was a person in the admiralty or security services protecting homosexuals, but his language had been, perhaps, ‘over-colourful’. In any event, he said, he was only expressing the concern of MPs. The tribunal concluded that Vassall had not been helped, shielded or favoured by anybody in government. Freeman had got it wrong.