In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (50 page)

Crucially, as we shall see, a West Yorkshire control room report was also unearthed that expressed concern for Savile’s welfare.
¹¹
A day later, a letter from the IPCC requested that the force record as a conduct matter the action of retired Inspector Mick Starkey.

By May 2014, some seven months later, a spokesman for the IPCC could not tell me when the findings of the independent investigation (the most serious of its type) would be published.

64. TWO 16-YEAR-OLD GIRLS FROM THE UKRAINE

L
ate on a dark, wet November night on the coast of north-east Yorkshire, the proprietor of Café Fish, one of Jimmy Savile’s favourite Scarborough restaurants, joined us in the bar area. Savile was wrapped up in a thick jacket, and a furry Arctic cap with earflaps was pulled down over his forehead. He’d told me earlier in the day that he was suffering from angina. He suddenly looked very old.

The proprietor was a large man who perspired gently beneath a white short-sleeved shirt. He seemed excited to see Savile and made a fuss about telling us all about which fish had been freshly caught that day. I suspected he was upping his game because the local celebrity was in.

Savile settled on the lobster. The memories from the
QE2
of the white crab flesh stuck to his jagged teeth, coupled with the volume of cigar smoke I’d inhaled over the course of the day, made me nauseous for a moment. Struggling to speak, I put myself in the proprietor’s hands. He deliberated theatrically before making his choice, and then brought the chef out from the kitchen to confirm the wisdom of his selection. Savile sat quietly, brooding beneath his layers. I sensed he was less than impressed with all the fuss that was being made.

We were offered a complimentary drink each; ‘Good old fashioned Scarborough hospitality,’ said the proprietor. Savile had a large scotch – his second of the evening. I went for a large glass of the house red, hoping it would settle my stomach. The proprietor went behind the small bar to fix himself a drink before rejoining
us to recount some of the times his famous guest had been in. Savile stared ahead, occasionally nodding. He said nothing.

Suddenly, the door flew open and a woman burst in looking wet and wind-lashed. The proprietor was called away. ‘Two weeks ago she was like an obedient dog,’ muttered Savile, jutting his chin at the woman. ‘Now she’s got him right at it.’ He settled back into the banquette and took another loud slurp at his whisky.

A few minutes later, we were joined in the small bar area by a group of couples, all talking loudly and laughing. They looked to be in their late thirties and early forties, so a chance encounter with Jimmy Savile represented a big deal. He seemed happy to chat, though it was standard fare to those who had heard it all before: ‘Indestructible,’ when asked how he was; ‘Ah, but you didn’t remember a stamped addressed envelope,’ when they asked him why he’d never replied to the letters they’d written to him on
Jim’ll Fix It
.

Our drinks were nearly done. A waiter approached to ask whether we needed anything. ‘Two 19-year-old girls from the Ukraine, please,’ said Savile without a flicker. Our table was ready. He signed an autograph on a napkin for one of the men in the party and shuffled through to where the tables were set.

The only other people in the dining area were two elderly women who were tucking into their main courses at a small table next to a window. The rain streaked the glass, blurring the red brake lights of traffic moving up the hill outside. We were shown to a table for four in a corner of the room. I sat down opposite Savile but he motioned for me to move because he wanted to put his feet up on the chair next to mine. We ended up sitting diagonally across from each other. Another round of drinks was ordered.

For some reason, the conversation began with global warming and as usual, Savile was uninterested in any opinion other than his own. Whatever argument I put forward or comment I offered, he seemed intent on contradicting it. Experience had taught me that this was how he could be at this time of day. He’d had a drink now
and I believed him when he said he rarely, if ever, touched a drop during his heyday. It clearly affected him now.

I had seen him in this sort of mood with Louis Theroux; it was as if he wanted to remind himself of his superior intelligence.

The conversation then switched onto ‘flag birds’, his system of ensuring that none of the disc jockeys he employed in his dancehalls ended up falling out over girls. They had women throwing themselves at them, he said, and the way his system worked was that every lad was allowed one ‘flag bird’, which meant that none of the other lads could make a move on her. As soon as he switched his flag bird, the previous one would be fair game. He said it worked a treat.

The starters arrived and Savile was now working up a head of steam, rattling on about how stupid the Romans were for inventing marriage. I was bored; I had heard his views on ‘brain damage’ and the fact he did not want to be responsible for a ‘living thing’ on for too many occasions.

The arrival of the main courses seemed like an appropriate junction at which to change the direction of the conversation, if such a one-sided discussion could be described as such. So I asked him whether he ever got angry. I had seen what I considered to be anger flush through him earlier in the day when he launched into his diatribe about Gary Glitter and the tabloids.

‘Never.’

It was like he said, there was no room in his life for normal human emotions. There never had been. He did admit, though, that he occasionally got annoyed with himself for bumping into things. He was 83 years old but still living his life on his own terms; bowing to nobody, changing for nobody. I wondered whether he was beginning to fray mentally.

‘Do you know what I do when that happens?’ he asked me, smiling for the first time in the evening. I shook my head.

‘I say to myself, ‘Jimmy, you – stupid – fucking – CUNT.’

The last four words of the sentence were delivered in a growling crescendo, climaxing with the word ‘cunt’ being spat with such
force that I noticed the shoulders of the women at the other table rise involuntarily. There was an eerie silence in the room, not even the clink of cutlery.

Hearing the commotion, the waiter rushed over to check that everything was OK. He asked whether there was anything else we needed. ‘Two 16-year-old girls from the Ukraine,’ said Savile, shaving three years off his previous answer, before craning forward to shovel another hunk of lobster into his mouth. He looked up and his lips stretched into the same thin grimace that I had first witnessed in the lift going up to his penthouse flat in Leeds.

Little more was said that evening. On returning to his flat, I left him sitting in his front room, electric fire blazing, and went to bed. This time I wasn’t billeted in the Duchess’s room, but in a tatty box room opposite the bathroom. The next morning I woke early, packed and left. I never saw Jimmy Savile again.

Four months later, at a graduation ceremony in St Mary’s Church, Luton, he was given an honorary degree from the University of Bedfordshire in recognition of his work for the National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville Hospital.
¹

65. THE LAST GREAT GIMMICK

D
eath was one of Jimmy Savile’s favourite subjects. He talked to me about it on many occasions, beginning at our very first meeting in Leeds in 2004. He was 77 at the time and we were sitting in the flat where his body would be discovered some seven and a half years later.

I asked him whether death was something he feared. ‘No,’ he replied firmly, as a thick coil of cigar smoke unspooled around his head. ‘For 25 years as a voluntary hospital porter I had to put the lately deceased away in their boxes. I got quite used to death.’ He then explained he’d been comfortable with death ever since the nuns in the old people’s home opposite his childhood home had invited him to say goodbye to the recently departed.

Later during that first interview, he also told me about visiting the site of a former Nazi concentration camp near Brussels. ‘As a student of people I had to go on my own and wander about just to pick up the vibes,’ he said. ‘I thought it was an amazing experience. I came out with absolutely no answers but I didn’t go there looking for answers. I went there to pick up the vibes.’

In
The World of Jimmy Savile
, the 1972 film that offered him a platform for his bizarre views, he had tried to explain what his faith meant to him. ‘My own God, in that he’s moulded to my own image a bit – he suits me,’ he said while perched on a spindly exercise bike. ‘I believe in God, because if for nothing else it’s a good gamble.

‘If we went through life thinking if when we die, we rot and that’s it, well that’s alright. But it’s much nicer to go through life
with a faith that when we do die we go on to an even better life. Therefore it follows logically that if you try to live life through a decent code, it’s a hope that when the time comes you go off, for want of a better word, to a life hereafter, a heaven. So from a gamble point of view, it’s a good thing.’

In
God’ll Fix It
, in the chapter ‘What Happens When I Die?’, Savile used the death of his mother as the pretext for a further nugget of what he liked to call ‘JS wisdom’: ‘Be nervous about death with the nervousness of excitement … Death is a great adventure, a wonderful journey, the last great gimmick.’

I was reminded again of what Professor Anthony Clare had pointed out 20 years previously, ‘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.’

I also thought again of the time in Scarborough when he’d described the sense of calm he felt when faced with the prospect of imminent death during a publicity stunt with the Police Air Arm flight display team. ‘It’s all a bit of fun,’ he had concluded as we ambled past the amusement arcades and chip shops on Scarborough’s sea front. ‘All of a sudden you climb out of the aircraft and think, “Gonna die. Didn’t die. Very good” … It didn’t bother me because I’m a bit odd. One minute you’re here, the next minute you’re not.’

It would not be the last time we discussed death – his own and other people’s – and yet looking back I am still struck by what he said in closing on that very first occasion we spoke: ‘How you die is quite important.’ And given what he wrote about his hopes for the final reckoning, that the debit column of his carnal sins would be weighed against the credit of his good works, it is surely telling he was found with his fingers crossed.

*

The first text arrived at 2.20 p.m. on 29 October, and within minutes my phone was bleeping with fresh messages. Jimmy Savile, just two days short of his 85th birthday, had been found dead in his flat in Leeds.

In the days that followed, a sense of Jimmy Savile’s stature as a national icon began to emerge through stories in local papers up and down Britain. In Buckinghamshire, David Griffiths, general manager of the National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, spoke of the birthday party the staff had planned for their chief patron, while Paul Smith, executive director at the Spinal Injuries Association, told the local BBC News about the influence he wielded at the hospital and how ‘a great many spinal injury people really do owe him a debt’.
¹

In Crowthorne, Councillor Jim Finnie remembered the times when he had sat with Savile on the board at Broadmoor. ‘He supported the wellbeing of its patients and its staff,’ offered a spokesperson for the trust that now runs the hospital. ‘He was instrumental in developing and opening the hospital’s first gym, which was well used and appreciated by our patients.’
²

In Peterborough, Nigel Hards, who worked for Thomas Cook when Savile was its highly paid consultant in the early 1990s, and had been involved in the fund-raising campaign to build a new children’s hospital in Peterborough, a plan that mysteriously fizzled out, talked of ‘a very complex character’ who established a charity road race, a children’s medical charity and brought his friend Princess Diana to the city. He also recounted how Savile liked working at the mortuary at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, ‘because he thought it would be easier for loved ones if he was there when they came in’.
³

Scarborough businessman James Corrigan, whose late father had owned an amusement arcade on the seafront and accompanied Savile on midnight runs along the seafront and to the Otley Civic Call, told his local paper how he’d grown up knowing Savile as a close family friend. ‘He came to every Christmas dinner at our house from before I was born until last year,’ he explained, ‘with the exception of three times when he got a better offer. One of those was when Margaret Thatcher invited him to go to Chequers.’
⁴

Corrigan added that Savile regularly brought guests to these family get-togethers, including on one occasion Mairead Corrigan
who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976 for her efforts to end the violence in Northern Ireland. ‘Savile was the strangest thing anyone could inherit,’ he said, ‘and I inherited him from my father.’

Cardinal Keith O’Brien, Britain’s most senior Catholic clergyman, thanked Savile for the 25 years he had been a patron of Across, a charity that takes seriously ill or disabled pilgrims to Lourdes, and explained their long friendship had developed through Jimmy’s mother.
⁵

Other stories were of a more personal nature. Two elderly women from Pocklington shared fond memories of him from their time as land workers in the early 1950s. In Manchester, he was recalled attending a bat mitzvah resplendent in a silver suit. In Stourbridge, gym owner Jim Charles cast his memory back to when Jimmy Savile was president of the National Amateur Body Building Association. The role required him to hand out medals to winners at the Mr Universe competition, including, on one occasion, to an unknown called Arnold Schwarzenegger. ‘He took us to Park Lane to a fashionable restaurant and then went to the loo and left us to pay the bill,’ said Charles.
⁶

Curiously, given that his fame was a uniquely British phenomenon, Jimmy Savile’s death made headlines in far-flung corners of the world. The
New York Times
reported how he served up ‘patter that in its manic opacity verged on Dada’ and described him as a ‘puckish man’ who was responsible for ‘a torrent of claims, some true, some false and others occupying the vast limbo of credibility between them’.
⁷

Towards the end the week I telephoned Howard Silverman, who I had met briefly when out with Savile in Leeds. Silverman, who was a regular at the Friday Morning Club meetings, told me he had visited his friend in the week before he died, as had Professor Alistair Hall, a cardio specialist at Leeds General Infirmary who Savile once invited me to dinner with at the Flying Pizza in Headingley. Silverman confirmed he was found in bed in a shell suit, which was how he would have wanted it.

Five weeks before he died, Savile had gone on a cruise on the
Queen Elizabeth
for its maiden voyage around Britain. Luke Lucas, Savile’s long-time friend, colleague and a trustee of both the charities that bore his name, accompanied him. Savile had been taken ill and was forced to leave the ship in Liverpool. He was admitted to hospital where he was diagnosed with pneumonia. Alistair Hall later revealed that four of his major organs were failing.
⁸

In the week before he died, Jimmy Savile checked himself out of hospital and returned to his home, where he gave his final interview to Alison Bellamy of the
Yorkshire Evening Post
and had his portrait taken: a gaunt, hollow-eyed figure wreathed in cigar smoke and a dark green Lacoste tracksuit.

Two quotes in particular jumped out from that last interview. First, Savile said he thought people were getting ‘a bit bored of his old stories’ and then, after Bellamy talked about her children, he allowed a rare crack of light to shine through: ‘That is something I have missed out on, kids and grandkids,’ he said. ‘I’ll never know what it’s like.’
⁹

Never once in all our meetings, or in any interviews I’d read, had Jimmy Savile ever expressed doubt about his own brilliance or admitted even a passing interest in commitment of any kind. It sounded like he knew his time had come.

Mick Starkey took him for a drive on the Dales, and to buy some cigars from his tobacconist in Otley. ‘He was very tired but we had a long chat and he reminisced about his life,’ said Starkey. ‘I’m sure he knew the end was near.’
¹⁰
Alan Franey, who had Savile to thank for his entrée to Broadmoor and claimed to know him ‘probably as well as anybody’, phoned and found his old running mate ‘very tired and short of breath’. He described Savile as being mentally alert but resigned to his fate. ‘I’m coming to the end of the tunnel,’ he’d said.
¹¹

Even the Friday Morning Club meeting was cancelled, Savile informing his regulars that he was ‘in bed and on strike’. Later that evening, Alistair Hall called round to the flat to make one last effort to get him to return to hospital.

The next morning, Roddy Ferguson, the husband of the woman Savile had befriended as a 15-year-old and who had helped serve lunch to Prince Charles in Glencoe, tried calling. There was no answer. When his niece Amanda McKenna did the same, she contacted the caretaker of the flats and asked him to go in and check. Alan Hepworth, the caretaker, found Jimmy Savile’s lifeless body in his bed.
¹²

Alistair Hall was called out to take care of the formalities. The cause of death, it later emerged, was cardiac arrest, heart failure, ischaemic disease and renal failure.
¹³

Silverman sounded mildly exasperated at some of the coverage in the national press that painted his friend – the best man at his wedding, no less – as a loner. He was also frustrated by the fact that, as he described it, ‘the inner circle is becoming the outer circle’, a less than subtle reference to the manner in which Jimmy Savile’s grand finale was being organised.

There had been a limit to what I had been able to find out about Savile’s family up to that point. The last of his siblings had died in 1997 and he became irritable when asked to talk about them. I had listened to him taking calls from their numerous offspring, and heard him say that he didn’t view his nephews and nieces any differently from anyone else who crossed his path.

It was therefore fascinating to now see his relatives emerge. Roger Foster, his 66-year-old nephew, had taken on the role as Savile family spokesman. He told the press that his uncle had hoped to be buried alongside his mother and father at Killingbeck Cemetery in Leeds, but had discovered some years before that the plot was full. Instead, he would be laid to rest on a hilltop overlooking the sea at Scarborough.

‘We have found a beautiful spot in Woodlands Cemetery where you can see North Bay, South Bay, Scarborough Castle and even the seaside flat that he bought for his mum,’
¹⁴
added his niece Amanda McKenna. For the time being, she said, his flat would be left exactly as her ‘Uncle Jimmy’ had left it, even down to the last cigar he smoked, half finished in the ashtray.

In the Rhondda Valley, Vivian Savile, another nephew, told the story of his famous uncle’s visit in 1964: ‘I remember we were at home and there were hundreds of children climbing over the wall to get a glimpse of him … Nothing like it had ever been seen in Porth before.’
¹⁵
Accompanying the article was a black and white photo of Savile standing with his eldest brother Vince and his sister-in-law Sadie. The teenage Vivian, clad in full Teddy boy regalia, lurked at the shoulder of his peroxide-haired uncle, a look of sly pride playing across his features.

Towards the end of the week, Foster revealed that his uncle Jimmy would be buried in a gold coffin that, in accordance with his final wishes, would be lowered into the ground at a 45-degree angle ‘so he could see the sea.’ The last great gimmick indeed.

*

My attempts to track the course of Jimmy Savile’s existence had become all consuming, providing reliable dinner party entertainment for those who liked to remind me of my failure to make significant progress towards any meaningful discovery.

I told myself that he was like the central character in the Woody Allen film
Zelig
, possessed of an uncanny knack of popping up at key and unlikely points in time. I naively believed that Jimmy Savile’s story might work as an alternative history of popular culture in postwar Britain, with his progress across its landscape illuminating some dark and forgotten corners. It was also, I said to anyone who was still prepared listen, a story about our childhoods – and how darkly prophetic that turned out to be.

I hoped too that the journey might also end in some kind of understanding of how he’d come to assume such a central place in my life.

I had always planned to confront him in a final climactic encounter with what I hoped would be the truth. But like Conrad’s Kurtz, he was supremely controlling, which meant there was no prospect of speaking to anyone on the inside without it getting back to him and the line of enquiry being shut down. I also knew that anyone he would allow me to speak to would only spin the lines he’d been feeding so relentlessly and for so long.