In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (19 page)

24. THE ONLY PUNTER YOU CAN RECOGNISE FROM THE BACK

I
t was late and we had just finished dinner at one of Jimmy Savile’s favourite Scarborough eateries, a short walk up the Esplanade from his Wessex Court flat. He was on to his second large vodka of the evening and his tongue had loosened. All evening he had been joking with a young waitress who, he discovered, hailed from Fort William, near to Lochaber where he had been honorary chieftain of the Highland games for over 30 years.

Savile had a ‘team’ at Fort William, just as he did in Scarborough and Leeds, and at Stoke Mandeville and Broadmoor. They were people who were impressed by him and would attend to his needs when he was around. At that point, I hadn’t found out whether he had a similar team in London for those rare occasions when he stayed at his small attic apartment on Regent’s Park Crescent.

He always told me that when it came to the royal family he had taken the oath of
omertà
, which was apt given that he was prone to referring to himself as ‘the Godfather’. However, on this particular evening he’d already touched on his friendship with the Duke of Edinburgh and was just beginning to tell me a story about Earl Louis Mountbatten when a woman, whom I’d guessed at being in her sixties, leaned over from the neighbouring table and, in a posh voice, informed Savile how very unhappy she was about the quality of her meal.

‘Did you know a fella was following you?’ he barked back, prodding a fork in the direction of a man I presumed to be her husband. ‘I told him he’d get in trouble for that, what with you being underage.’

The woman did not seem to understand that this was intended as a joke or that Savile was clearly not interested in discussing the merits of the restaurant. ‘It was the most awful dinner,’ she blundered on regardless. ‘The duck was off.’

‘It was probably dead,’ deadpanned Savile, who informed her that he’d played safe by having the salmon.

The woman tried a different tack, announcing that the last time she had met him it was in this same restaurant about five years ago.

‘And I found your earring down the back of my sofa,’ he replied without a flicker of a smile.

This lopsided exchange continued for some minutes – her oblivious to his indifference, him responding with sour-faced innuendo – until the woman reiterated that her duck was off and Savile once again countered with a reference to it probably having something to do with it being dead for so long.

‘How long are you in Scarborough for?’ she asked.

‘About 5ft 10,’ he replied, ‘unless I get run over and I’ll be about 7ft 6.’

The woman finally admitted defeat, settled her dispute with the restaurant and left with her husband, who had said nothing throughout. ‘People are a pain in the arse,’ muttered Savile. ‘These sort of people will dine out on that story.’

Commotion over, we returned to our conversation and he told me about a television producer who marvelled at his ability to fit in anywhere. ‘I love people coming up to me,’ he added, contradicting what he had just said about the woman. ‘If you’re on TV you have to accept the responsibility, just like I had the responsibility for looking after my people in the dancehalls, even though they didn’t know I was really doing that. People can’t become second-class citizens once you come off TV. I belong to the people out there.’

Did people ever pick on him, or try it on, because he was odd? ‘No, there was nothing to pick on. They thought I was a bit freaky but they couldn’t tell me why. It was because I was odd. You can’t
really have a go at odd because there’s nothing to have a go at. It’s just odd. If you’re disabled or you’ve got an encephalitic head where it’s twice the size, people will have a go at you because it’s a recognisable thing. Odd is not a recognisable thing. Odd means you just don’t fit in. Odd is a description on its own which is indefinable. There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s a state that some people are in.’

When did he first realise that he was odd? ‘Very early on. It doesn’t mean handicapped, it just means odd.’

He called the Scottish waitress over, relayed the complaints from the next table, and ordered another large vodka. When she’d gone he talked a little about his older sister Marjory who had raised 14 children, and then about one of his nephews who had worked out that they had 420 traceable relatives alive in Britain. ‘The way I look at it is that I had two brothers who were in the war and they never knew whether they would ever see home again. I could have any number of nephews and nieces out there. Do me a fucking favour.’

The conversation was jumping around and the subject it alighted on next was children. ‘I hate kids,’ he trumpeted, not for the first time. It was a standard line he used but not one that I necessarily believed. Only that morning I had witnessed him talking sweetly to a little girl who was waiting for her grandparents at the front door to his block of flats.

‘I’m very good with them because I hate them,’ he continued. ‘They know I’m not some yucky adult. I like to confuse them because they don’t know where they are then. Then they start to fall in love with you because they want to be with you. Nobody confuses kids like I do; they try to understand them and reason with them. I think all kids should be eaten at birth.’

A man came over to the table and was greeted with a joke: ‘How do you turn a cat into a dog? Pour petrol on it, set fire to it and watch it go “woof”.’ The man laughed and shook his head. ‘By God, you’ll never meet a character like him,’ he said, looking at me but motioning towards Savile. ‘He’s had a wonderful life.’

Savile wasn’t finished: ‘This copper says to this geezer, “When did you realise your wife was dead?” The geezer said, “I dunno. The sex was the same but the dishes kept piling up in the kitchen.”’ I tried vainly to summon a laugh but was saved by the waitress returning with the drink. Savile asked her for a doggie bag.

On the short walk back to the flat he talked about how he was a ‘complete phenomenon’. He was wearing one of his thick, quilted sports coats and a woolly hat, which was prudent as it was now freezing cold. ‘I’m still the only punter you can recognise from the back. If it all fell out tomorrow,’ he said, referring to his hair, ‘I wouldn’t give a shit. It’s never been dyed. I just bleach it and take all the natural colour out of it. This is natural hair.’

I asked him about the jewellery, and where the idea for the all the ‘jangle jangle’ had come from. The artist Harland Miller once wrote that Jimmy Savile had been the originator of the bling style adopted by American rappers.

‘Deals,’ hooted Savile. ‘I like to do deals. There’s eighteen hundred diamonds in the Rolex. They are all identically cut. The necklace is a gift from the president of South Africa. He came over and saw
Jim’ll Fix It
and said that I was the ‘wishbone of England’ so he got this golden wishbone made up for me. The other one is from the Goldsmiths’ Association of Britain.’ He pulled out a pendant from beneath his jacket and tried to show me a tiny cigar, training shoe,
Jim’ll Fix It
badge and record, although it was too dark to see properly.

‘The thumb ring is another one from the Goldsmiths’ Association when I got my knighthood. I told them that in the olden days knights used to get a thumb ring so they sent someone down to the British Library for a week to pore over books. The diamonds in that are another story.’ He then launched into a rather confusing anecdote about meeting a diamond dealer in a restaurant who told him one of the stones in his thumb ring was chipped.

‘Then he looked at the Rolex,’ explained Savile, ‘and nearly shot his load. It’s a very unique piece; there’s only two in the world. Mike Tyson had the other one but I reckon one of his birds has got
it now.’ The story finished with Savile getting a diamond in each corner of his thumb ring, for nothing. ‘What can you do?’ he said. ‘It’s not my fault.’

Back at the flat, he flicked through the TV channels before settling on a station playing classical music. He then told me that his cars were not for driving: ‘They’re for posing.’ He said that he liked talking to ‘young guys’ who knew he had a Ferrari and a Rolls-Royce and yet knew he still lounged around in a shell suit. ‘It’s part of the charismatic package,’ he offered. ‘I don’t have to do anything, I just have to be. I’m like a piece of soap in the bath; you can see it but when you try to get hold of it it’s gone.’

It was clear that something Savile had said in the restaurant was bothering him, because he suddenly veered back onto the subject of children. ‘I have no time for them but I don’t hate them,’ he explained. ‘A single man at my age with his hair this colour … ’ he laughed lugubriously. ‘If I told everyone how much I loved children, I would finish up like Michael fucking Jackson. It’s better to say I hate ’em and they should all be eaten at birth because it stops the stories dead, even for the tabloids. I don’t want the tabloids to think I am a lover of children.’

In the space of a few hours he had joked with a man about getting in trouble for being caught with underage girls, and told me how he liked to confuse children into falling in love with him. Now, he was effectively conceding that his appearance, work with children and the absence of normal adult relationships in his life made him look suspect. But he was not interested in such variables, the values of which only he truly knew. Jimmy Savile’s prime consideration was in controlling the outcome of the equation.

25. LET ’EM THINK

I
n May 1962, Jimmy Savile’s career as a Mecca dancehall manager came to an end. He was not sacked for being caught with his fingers in the till or for being found in a compromising position with an underage girl. In fact, he was promoted and given his own office in the company’s Southwark Street headquarters in London.

He was by now making more in his one day off than he was in the six doing his regular job as one of the company’s area managers. Offers were flooding in from companies looking to capitalise on his kudos, and as he was possessed of an inquiring mind and an unquenchable appetite for making money, Mecca correctly surmised that Jimmy Savile was not going to be able to resist such temptations for much longer.

Faced with losing his star, Carl Heimann made another canny business decision by appealing to Savile’s ego and bringing him further into the fold, even if it was on a part-time basis that would mean he’d be free to pursue his outside interests. But this was no token offering, because as an associate director he would be paid £50 a week and put in charge of music and DJ policy at Mecca’s 46 ballrooms nationwide.

Savile celebrated his promotion by ordering a brand new Rolls-Royce from Jack Barclay’s in London. He went to collect it in person wearing a pair of fur slippers. According to a newspaper report, the vehicle was fitted with a ‘record player, radio, fridge and a shillelagh, the reason for the latter being in the dance hall business, possession of a blunt instrument is nine tenths of mob law.’
¹

Along with the millions now listening to his shows on Radio Luxembourg, Savile’s elevated position within the Mecca organisation confirmed his new status as one of the most influential pop music tastemakers in the country.

Thick smog enveloped the capital that summer, but high above the gloom various stars were moving into alignment. A group of scowling young blues aficionados calling themselves The Rolling Stones took to the stage for their debut appearance at the Marquee Club in London. Shortly afterwards, at a Horticultural Society dance in the north-west, a drummer named Ringo Starr, formerly of Rory Storm and The Hurricanes, performed for the first time with his new group, a Liverpudlian beat combo named The Beatles.

British pop music was beginning to generate a momentum of its own, rather than relying on hits imported from the States, coinciding with seismic changes taking place in a society where young people felt increasingly empowered. Yet the country was still to shake off the last vestiges of the postwar era. Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government was one based on the same old school tie cliques that had ruled for decades, and was therefore naturally suspicious of a phenomenon that in time would become known as ‘youth culture’.

At the Decca studios in London, another, less noteworthy footnote was being written in the history of British pop music. In what the
New Musical Express
described as ‘a hush hush session’,
²
Jimmy Savile recorded ‘his debut disc’, a cover of the novelty record ‘Ahab the Arab’.

This session was not to remain a secret for long. ‘Disc Jockey in Sheik’s Clothing’ sang the headline above a story in the
Daily Mirror
.
³
According to the reporter, ‘Mr James Savile, the most extraordinary disc-jockey in this spinning business, peeled off a oncer from a roll of £200 to buy me half a bitter and said: “Do I need any more noughts on the bank balance?”’ The story went on to say that Savile had six bodyguards ‘to watch over him, his business affairs and his bank balance’. Royalties from the record were to be donated to the Little Sisters of the Poor.

Cutting a disc was just one of many moneymaking schemes on his mind as the new decade started to take shape. He set up Jimmy Savile Limited and decided that his various business interests would be best served by a move back to Manchester. A sparsely furnished studio flat on Great Cheetham Street in Salford was found and he moved in with the bare minimum of belongings.

In Manchester, his operations were initially focused on the Upper Broughton Assembly Rooms, a first-floor dancehall with a sprung dance floor, and a pair of coloured fountains that spouted in time with the music. The venue was a short distance from his new digs, and familiar to him from his days at the Plaza, being located in the same block as the Whisky a Go Go, one of his favourite after-hours haunts. Posters and newspaper ads for the Jimmy Savile Disc Club duly appeared around the city.

Savile moved into a one-bedroom flat in a crumbling building. Two floors in the Victorian mansion block were derelict and the rear of the premises lay in ruins, covered in weeds high enough to conceal snoozing tramps and, Savile recognised, his Roller and new Jaguar E-Type. He agreed to pay the £1.50 a week rent, and turned the living room into his bedroom. He decided to paint the whole place black. Savile’s reasoning was that with one red light bulb and one white there would be enough light to read by but not enough to see the grime and decay. Not altogether surprisingly, the residence was christened the ‘Black Pad’.

Despite the fact he surrounded himself with teenage girls, partly because they gravitated towards him and provided an effective disguise for his own age, and partly because he could dominate them, Jimmy Savile still seemed to enjoy keeping people guessing about his sexual orientation. The crazy attire, the dyed hair and the conspicuous lack of a regular woman in his life gave rise to gossip. In his mind, though, any publicity was a good thing. His attitude was therefore, ‘If they’re talking about it, let ’em think.’

Penny-Ann Roles met Savile when she was a teenager working at the Three Coins coffee bar in Fountain Street. It was a long, dark and smoky cellar that was packed out with youngsters
dancing to local bands, and a venue that Savile went on to part own. She remembers the furious reaction from her father when Manchester’s most famous disc jockey dropped her home one evening in his Rolls-Royce.

‘On a Sunday night he used to take a few of us to a restaurant, an Indian place in the curry centre of Manchester,’ she says. ‘We used to go there for a curry and he would park his Rolls Royce up. Afterwards, he would take us home with the roof down on his car, and we’d all be singing our heads off.’ She remembers there were three or four girls that Savile took out regularly but insists he never tried it on with her. ‘I never saw him in a relationship with anyone,’ she maintains. ‘Between you and I, I don’t know whether he was gay.’

Other teenage girls in the area could confirm this was not the case. Pam Batty had first encountered Jimmy Savile at the Plaza. ‘He used to get a coffee and come and sit with us,’ she recalls. ‘He was a real ladies’ man. He was a charmer. A lot of people thought he was gay but nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t think he was in any way, shape or form that way inclined.’

She says Jimmy Savile paid her and a friend to listen to demo tapes he was sent: ‘We used to pick them up or he’d drop them off at the house or he’d pick us up and we’d go and listen to them.’ Pam was 18 and an apprentice hairdresser at the time, and she also insists Savile never tried anything with her.

Pam’s friend, who was younger, did get into a relationship with him, however. ‘They just seemed to click,’ Pam says. ‘She was quite an attractive girl and obviously he thought that.’

Pam Batty says they knew Jimmy Savile was a good deal older than them, but not how much older. She also confirms that the relationship with her friend was sexual and that she sometimes stayed with Savile at the Black Pad. ‘When it all fizzled out, she was quite upset,’ recalls Pam. ‘Obviously Jimmy wasn’t; he was just Jimmy. He just carried on.’

Jeff Dexter was another young person who discovered the truth about Jimmy Savile’s sex drive. Dexter had first entered Savile’s
orbit when he appeared as a teenage dancing prodigy at London’s Lyceum Ballroom. Despite looking young for his age, Dexter was street-wise and ambitious and went on to work alongside Tony Calder in promoting pop records and DJ’ing for Mecca. ‘He looked like someone off the ballroom circuit, like a ballroom manager,’ he says of Savile. ‘But he had three watches on, that was one thing I remember.’

Dexter was just 16 when he was hired to appear with Jimmy Savile, who was by then 36, at the
Daily Mail
Boys & Girls Exhibition at Olympia in December of 1962. The teenager was to give lessons on new dances such as the Twist and the Madison on a miniature dance floor, while the Radio Luxembourg star spun records. Other attractions at the two-week show included a sports arena, the world’s biggest model railway and a scale model of the recently launched Telstar satellite.

Many years later, and some time before Jimmy Savile’s death, Dexter described Jimmy Savile to me as a ‘pervert’ and commented that they would ‘lock him up and throw away the key’ if anyone found out what went on behind the scenes at Olympia. Shortly after the
Exposure
documentary on ITV, I asked Dexter about that comment and whether he witnessed anything that chimed with what was being reported about Jimmy Savile. His answer was brief: ‘Yep.’

But, he added, ‘All those girls, young and old, threw themselves on Jimmy. It was there for the taking … None of them complained, otherwise he would have been locked up years ago … I was 16 years old and [the girls] were my age. And the fact I’m with Jimmy Savile and I’m on stage in this ballroom set-up, to a lot of girls who come from out of town, you are fair game. So I was fair game and Jimmy was fair game at the time as well.’

Another source said: ‘He didn’t go looking for [girls]. They turned up. He was a pop star. When you’re in that business they’re always there in front of you. There were so many around. The Sixties were the sex years. All the girls wanted to try sex and all
the boys wanted to be into sex. Everyone was at it everywhere like rabbits.’

‘Girls chatted to us,’ the source maintained. ‘We were harmless because we weren’t chasing anybody. We were safer than the others and by that I mean the men who were trying to trap them and marry them. We were great at consoling girls when they’d fallen out with other boys. We liked to console them.’

*

If Jimmy Savile was addicted to sex, as Tony Calder suggests, it was quick, emotionally detached liaisons that he sought. And in pliable teenagers, he found partners that he could control and manipulate without the prospect of having to confront the emotional void at his core. Money, his other great obsession, provided a further layer of protection.

At the start of the New Year, he set off on a tour billed as ‘Johnny & The Hurricanes and The Juke Box Doubles’. It was a curious concept, combining a popular singing act with what can only be described as an early incarnation of
Stars in Their Eyes
with lookalikes performing songs in the style of Elvis Presley, Adam Faith, Gene Vincent and The Shadows. The 18-date schedule began at the Gaumont State in Kilburn and finished at the Nelson Imperial, just in time for the release of Jimmy Savile’s follow-up single ‘The Bossa Nova’.

While he was off touring the country, The Beatles arrived in Manchester to play two dates, at the El Rio and The Three Coins, venues owned by local promoter Danny Betesh. A month later, the group released their debut LP,
Please Please Me
, and by May were top of the singles charts with ‘From Me To You’.

The album followed an identical trajectory, and on the day it reached number 1, a newspaper advertisement appeared for Jimmy Savile’s next big engagement: a new weekly pop music column. ‘Great news for the “with it” brigade,’ trumpeted the copy. ‘The
People
has signed up disc-jockey, super showman Jimmy “Luxembourg” Savile to write brutally and bluntly about records.’

Jimmy Savile was now moving smoothly through the gears. He regaled the paper with how he had built up a £20,000-a-year income ‘by outrageous showmanship and brilliant tycoonery’. He was travelling almost constantly between Leeds, Manchester and London and working ‘at a furious pace from 10.30 a.m. to 3 a.m., on six days a week’. On the seventh, he said, he took his beloved mum out.

In a summer that witnessed Secretary of State for War John Profumo resign over his affair with Christine Keeler, £2.3 million stolen in the Great Train Robbery in Buckinghamshire and Pauline Reade’s disappearance on her way to a dance in Manchester, the first victim of what would later be known as the Moors Murders, Jimmy Savile’s moneymaking bandwagon rolled into Great Yarmouth where he was compère for a seasonal showcase at the Royal Aquarium. The main attraction was teenage singing sensation Helen Shapiro, who had first topped the charts as a 14-year-old. Among those lower down on the bill were Roy Castle and an upcoming comedian by the name of Ronnie Corbett.

Savile was driven to those weekend gigs on the coast in his E-Type Jaguar, insisting on travelling in slippers and sleeping most of the way. He didn’t want to spend his wages on a hotel so stayed in a caravan that belonged to a friend.

After the shows, he did not have to go looking for female company because local girls queued up to speak to him or get his autograph. The result was a steady stream of visitors to his temporary digs.

When he wasn’t working, sleeping or having sex, Savile was consumed by a desire to stay fit. He would regularly round up various acolytes and run for miles, often late at night. On other occasions, he would get on his bike and cycle over the Pennines to Leeds to see the Duchess.

This was a period of pandemonium and change, driven largely by the meteoric rise of The Beatles and the slew of home-grown beat groups that trailed in their wake. Teenage girls screamed through live performances, fainting and wetting themselves with
excitement, and chased the Fab Four and anyone associated with them, in and out of venues up and down the country.

The phenomenon was described as ‘Beatlemania’ for the first time in a story published in the
Daily Mirror
on 15 October 1963. Three days later, Savile received the news that Bill Benny had been found dead in a flat in Rusholme. Benny had taken part in a wrestling bout at the Free Trade Hall after which his business partner Vic Lewis visited him in the dressing rooms. They had headed to the Cabaret Club for dinner before Lewis retired to his hotel and ‘Bill took a girl back to his flat to continue his partying’.
⁴
Lewis received the news at seven o’clock next morning. ‘I was stunned,’ he wrote in his memoirs.