I listened again, copying it into my notebook, wondering whether it might add something to the book-thing I was supposed to be working on and not thinking too much whether he was still a subject or something more like a friend.
The first contacts with Jimmy that were not strictly journalistic had begun around the time we were called upon to promote the original documentary. We’d done a couple of interviews at a hotel in King’s Cross. After that there was a trip up to Leeds for some more publicity for another project or to record some DVD extras – the exact sequence is hard to piece together now. In a box of material from that time I have some cuttings, dated April 2001, that resulted from our joint publicity efforts for a DVD release of the Best of Weird Weekends – two cover stories from colour supplements, the Glasgow Sunday Herald and the Yorkshire Post, featuring photos of me and Jimmy. One says: ‘Ows about that, then! It’s the Jimmy and Louis show’. The other: ‘The Odd Couple: How Jimmy and Louis got Fixed up’. And so, without quite realizing it, I entered into a strange, mutually parasitic quasi-friendship, quasi-deep-cover investigation into his dark side.
The exact nature of the quasi-whatever-it-was is hard to parse in hindsight. The view is too clouded by the revelations. Certainly he was using us for a sense of relevance, and possibly with the hope of doing further projects. But it’s also probably the case that he enjoyed my company – and Will’s, since we always saw him together. And on our side there was also a mixture of impulses: using him for publicity; later, for material for a possible book that might attempt to fathom the riddle of who he really was; for the strangeness and diversion of the experience – of having a story to tell.
In a way it was all an after-effect of his being on board with the film. From that moment, all sorts of other decisions flowed, to do with a feeling of having him in our corner, a deployable ageing celebrity, a satisfied profilee, who came packaged with his own unintended irony built in. ‘My friend, the weird and slightly creepy ageing DJ Jimmy Savile.’ It made good copy, whether or not it was strictly true.
Jimmy naturally enjoyed the interest in him stemming from the documentary, and when it led to me doing further celebrity profiles, he began taking on a kind of protective interest in my work. After the profile of Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee, he called to complain: ‘You are a Formula One car. You never got out of bleedin’ first gear.’ He was also troubled by a conversation I’d had with Debbie about her reproductive choices in which I’d mentioned that she’d never had children and that perhaps that was one of the reasons she had kept her svelte figure. ‘A gentleman does not fucking ask a lady why she has not had children,’ he told me with some heat, albeit erroneously, given that I hadn’t in fact asked that question.
Drumming up publicity with Jimmy Savile.
The success of When Louis Met Jimmy, followed by series three of Weird Weekends and then the Paul and Debbie film, meant my stock was rising and I don’t doubt that this also factored into Jimmy’s thinking. He viewed himself as a co-author of my success. Thanks to him I’d been catapulted from the niche confines of chronicler of weirdness into mainstream visibility.
At the beginning of 2001, I signed a contract for a book. It was to be a kind of celebrity diary detailing my star-studded encounters, the glamorous social carousel of a young TV presenter making the scene.
I had been ambivalent about the idea of writing a book, for various reasons, not the least of them being that I wanted to focus my time and energy on TV. But I had a romantic attachment to the notion of being an author, and the idea of a diary forestalled some of my fears about not having much time to write. I figured it meant I didn’t have to think of an actual idea, I just had to keep a journal.
The only trouble with this scenario was that I didn’t lead a glamorous existence, nor did I make the scene on any regular basis – my life was pretty boring. I had a new girlfriend by this time and of a night she and I would stay in and watch repeats of The Larry Sanders Show or sometimes go out for meals in restaurants close to her flat in west London. Other than that, I worked. And so my celebrity diary was thin on material. I attempted to remedy this by writing descriptions of the off-camera dimension of the production – the celebrities we were approaching and for the most part being rejected by, the little bits of shooting we were doing – but this had its limitations. How much detail does anybody want or need about the process of booking talent for a TV show? ‘People want to know what goes on behind the scenes,’ the editors said. But the whole notion of my documentaries had been, insofar as possible, to broaden the frame enough so that all the interesting stuff took place on camera. The in-office stuff largely took the form of: ‘We heard back from Noel Edmonds. It’s a no, I’m afraid.’
I diligently kept the diary all the same, sometimes with the feeling of writing something interesting, just as often with a sense of attempting to subsist on my own effluent like a one-man human centipede, my lips sewn tight around my own sphincter. The idea of the diary went in and out of focus. At times it felt like a dumping ground for my worst insecurities. Since some of these were to do with the idea of doing the diary, a lot of the writing was a kind of feedback loop of anger and anxiety directed at my editor and at the book itself – which is pretty weird when you think about it: a book full of abuse directed at the book. But the book was protean in its conception, and in one of its more stable forms it was a meditation on Jimmy Savile and an attempt to go further into unravelling his enigma.
And so, alongside the opportunistic outings up to Leeds for interviews to promote programmes and DVDs, was another motivation to keep up with Jimmy, the idea of generating copy for my diary-book-thing. I wrote entries about the trips to his penthouse and made notes every time he called on the phone with advice or just wanting to pass the time of day. All of which also shouldn’t cloud the inconvenient fact that Jimmy Savile’s company – when he dialled down the Savilisms and was on his home turf of his penthouse – could be quite pleasant. He’d recline on his sofas and play host with the minimum of fuss in his overgrown bachelor pad, offering chocolates and coffees or glasses of red wine, always with some anecdote of recent vintage to do with an advertising campaign he’d just done or an interview in a high-profile national glossy. ‘Ere, did you see FHM this month? Five pages, with a great big full-page photo. “Lock Up Your Daughters”.’
There was almost always some pretext for the visits – a bit of taping, some publicity, plus whatever bit of copy I thought I might extract for my book – but there was also a social dimension, and for my purposes the line between seeing him professionally and personally was somewhat blurred. There were maybe four of these visits – possibly three of them involved an overnight stay. Will would sleep on the sofa; I’d sleep in the spare room. Invariably there would be a trip to the Flying Pizza – usually we would come up on a Thursday, which was a busy night there, and then stay for a few hours on Friday morning to sit in on the Friday Morning Club, a talking shop of elderly male friends of Jimmy’s – unpretentious neighbours and local characters setting the world to rights.
Those trips to the Flying Pizza all blur together somewhat, but there tended to be a set routine. He’d always ask that Will bring a camera, so we could film him going into the restaurant celebrity-style. There was no film in the camera, since the point wasn’t to record the occasion but to create a sense of TV glamour and excitement. Jimmy would stand around trying to attract attention, meet and greet anyone who was interested, sing happy birthdays, and then when he’d exhausted the celebrity duties he’d settle down and eat and we’d catch up.
Mainly he talked – about whichever cruise he’d just been on, which TV commercial or celebrity profile he’d just done. This suited me since I never felt that comfortable telling him much about my own personal life. I’d be listening out for anything I thought might be revealing – references to girlfriends, which did occasionally crop up, this or that woman who would be coming to visit, a female photographer to whom he’d ‘given the Jethro – Jethro Tull �
� pull’ earlier in the day, or anecdotes about local friends of his, all of whom had nicknames, like Jim the Pill or his hairdresser The Yosh or Marvellous Marvin.
One anecdote he told involved a young female reporter who joined Jimmy on a cruise in the hopes of ensnaring him into a relationship for a putative kiss-and-tell story. In Jimmy’s recounting, the reporter confessed all and they ended up having an affair that remained their secret. I filed this story alongside many others of Jimmy Savile provenance under the heading Probably-Bollocks-Might-Not-Be. Jimmy’s attitude to the opposite sex always had a strange side – and in fact he generally seemed to enjoy affecting a slightly chilling detachment, bordering on callousness, from the normal emotional reactions, but which he would have characterized as a clear-sighted and logical attitude.
Referring to a mentally ill young man who’d written him a fan letter, he breezily said, ‘He’s never getting better.’
‘Seems a bit bleak,’ I countered.
‘Excuse me. I’ll say it again, he’s never getting better.’
There was an occasion – apropos of God knows what but possibly his volunteer work at Leeds General Infirmary and his interactions with sex workers when they’d come in to get patched up on the weekends – when he said, ‘A psychologist will tell you that there is something in all women that wants to be a prostitute.’ And another when I pointed out an attractive woman who may have been in her thirties or forties, and his response was: ‘Grandma.’
‘What?’ I said.
‘Grandma,’ he said again.
Jimmy was also given to the usual sorts of racist speech typical of many of the older generation; possibly he delighted in offending my delicate sensibilities with his occasional references to ‘schvartzers’ and ‘poofs’ and ‘cripples’, though it’s worth saying that he just as often was likely to make statements in favour of fellow feeling and tolerance. On one occasion during filming in Scarborough, before going out for dinner with a gay friend of Jimmy’s, he said, ‘Ere, Eric’s a shirtlifter, right, so no jokes about poofters.’ I’m not sure this qualifies as sensitivity but it seems to me marginally on the right side. He had – by his own profession, at least – a natural affinity with the Leeds Jewish community. He called Jewish people ‘Wejs’ – which is ‘Jews’ spelled backwards – though I’m not sure if this was his coinage. ‘I’m looking forward to some good Wej verbals,’ he’d say en route to a meeting with some Jewish friends.
Another time he called up to chat and share a couple of jokes: ‘Ere, why does Michael Barrymore not need ashtrays? He puts his fags out in the pool! Heh heh.’ Also: ‘What do you call a shampoo for gypsies? Go and wash.’
I didn’t laugh, but I also didn’t judge too harshly, seeing the jokes as the private expressions of an old-school sensibility and part of Jimmy’s natural inclination to shock. He enjoyed dark humour generally. When the police were looking for clues to the identity of the Yorkshire Ripper, for several days they had a large team searching Roundhay Park for clues, or possibly remains, complete with a catering van, close to Jimmy’s flat. ‘When I saw Peter in Broadmoor, I told him thanks for burying that brass in Roundhay Park,’ Jimmy said. ‘I ate free for a week!’ Nietzsche wrote, ‘A joke is an epitaph on the death of feeling,’ and with Jimmy’s dislike of emotionality, his jokes were a statement he was making about his detachment from normal human affect.
The trip up to record the ‘Jimmy links’ for the DVD collection Best of Weird Weekends was another time Jimmy gave hints of dark interests. We’d gone up the night before and made our ritual visit to the Flying Pizza. Then the next morning we sat watching the four episodes of the shows as Will filmed us in a locked-off shot. For nourishment, Jimmy had laid on a packet of Frazzles and some chocolate biscuits.
In typical style, Jimmy showed a yeoman-like commitment to the task at hand. It would have been easy to fast-forward and drop in some comments at salient points but he was set on watching all the shows all the way through – he also said he’d watched them all the day before as preparation. One of the Weird Weekends episodes, about gangsta rap in the Deep South, featured a Mississippi-based rapper called Mello-T, who styled himself a pimp. Mello was a troubling figure, charismatic but macabre and given to pronouncements like: ‘Somehow when a woman has a gun pointed to her head, seems to make her think better.’ Jimmy was quite taken with him. On camera, for the links, he expressed a weird concern that girls who saw the programme might be induced to take up careers in prostitution. Off camera, he commented about Mello: ‘A man after my own heart.’ Again, I noticed this then rationalized it as a bit of Jimmy Savile provocation disguising a deeper truth to do with his view of women as irrational.
After the four episodes of Weird Weekends, as a pièce de résistance, we watched When Louis Met Jimmy. It was almost eerie how easily we slipped back into our respective roles.
‘Petulant!’ Jimmy said, in a sing-song voice, of my attitude in an early encounter. I teased him for his weird inconsistencies and evasions, and the commentary devolved into the same childish repartee as the original programme. ‘You’re tricky,’ he said, ‘but I’m tricky too.’
When he learned that I was working on an entire series of celebrity profiles, Jimmy made semi-regular calls to offer suggestions or advice. Some part of him was probably keen that we should keep it to celebrities of similar calibre to him. He enjoyed Chris Eubank and tried to take credit for it. ‘Ere that were a good idea of mine, the boxer kid.’ When we briefly toyed with a profile of the presenter Esther Rantzen he was dismissive: ‘With Esther it’s just all about Childline. Total snooze.’
He regularly suggested profiling the strip-club manager Peter Stringfellow, who he said was a friend. Stringfellow never showed much interest in our overtures and, as proved the case more than once, Jimmy’s vaunted connections led to no material advantage whatsoever for the production. Based on my experience, if the ability to deliver subjects for a series of puckish first-person TV profiles of intriguing public figures is any guide, Jimmy Savile had as much clout as you’d expect for a deranged-looking man in a tracksuit and a string vest. Among the other people he bruited as candidates for profiles were: then-manager of Leeds United football club, David O’Leary; the singer Lulu; the Romany impressionist Joe Longthorne; and the Kray brothers’ enforcer Mad Frankie Fraser (‘Don’t call him mad’), who had once been resident at Broadmoor and whom Jimmy professed to be tight with.
Jimmy’s suggestions were neither helpful nor unhelpful but revealing in what they said about his interests and the image he had of himself as a kind of behind-the-scenes fixer.
For a long time I imagined that some of the questions I had about Jimmy might be answered if I could just induce him to take an off-camera excursion with me to Broadmoor. I knew he had an interest in criminal mental health but it wasn’t a subject he talked about much.
In the complement of his showbiz interests and charity work, his involvement with the killers and psychopaths at the hospital was the closest thing to something solid. ‘Not criminals, patients,’ he would say. He claimed to be ‘the entertainments officer’ but was hard-pressed to describe what entertainments he’d actually organized. It was said he used to have tea with Peter Sutcliffe but he was cagey on the subject.
I also had the impression he had made visits to Ashworth, the forensic mental hospital where Moors murderer Ian Brady was detained, and another time, when it was in the news, I asked what he made of ‘the Myra Hindley story’. ‘I am the Myra Hindley story,’ he replied gnomically and without elaborating.
I wondered if an outing to Broadmoor would at least be a chance to see Jimmy in a different context, in which some of his contradictions might make more sense. But, despite me asking him several times, no invitation was ever forthcoming and it began to be a bit embarrassing so I stopped bringing it up.
One of the few revealing pieces of information about Jimmy and the truth about his private life came in May 2001, in the middle of the period when I was in sporadic friendly
contact with him.
A pair of middle-aged women who said they had been his girlfriends in the late sixties had got in touch by letter shortly after When Louis Met Jimmy originally aired. The letter was from both of them – let’s call them Beth and Alice – and described how they had been part of a group of girls who sometimes helped out with jobs, all of whom were involved with Jimmy. Some left, moved on; others remained in his circle for years. ‘There was never any jealousies,’ they wrote.
It seemed, mainly, a bid for recognition. In the film Jimmy had claimed he’d never had any girlfriends. I assumed this rankled them and that they wanted someone to know that Jimmy had had relationships – which they characterized as casual and ‘fun’. The letter, which I showed to others on the production, appeared to put to bed at least two hypotheses regarding his sexuality: that he might be gay or simply asexual. Other than that, however, it didn’t seem to promise much in the way of revelation and, with other work to do, almost a year passed before I called Beth on the phone and set up a rendezvous.
By this time I was working on my celebrity diary-book-thing, so my main impulse may have been to generate some material for that, though there was also a personal sense of curiosity about what light Jimmy’s girlfriends might shed on his character. Will, my director, came along too. We met at the Langham Hotel, on Regent Street, close to Broadcasting House. They walked in, a few minutes late, two smartly dressed women in their mid-forties, both slightly nervous. It soon emerged they were worried that Jimmy might find out we were meeting.
‘Are we being filmed or taped?’ was the first question from Beth. And then, ‘Why did it take you so long to get in touch?’
Beth led the conversation and was the more voluble of the pair: she’d known Jimmy longer and had occupied a sort of leadership position in their little group, as organizer and diary-keeper. They painted a picture of a coterie of teenage fans who would meet in studio dressing rooms and caravans to socialize and catch up. Trying to get my dates straight, I asked one how old she had been. ‘You sound like Jimmy,’ she replied. ‘That’s the first question he would ask. “How old are you?” ’
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