Not long after we finished the dementia film, we started one on autistic children and their families. I’d heard a documentary on Radio 4 called ‘Letting Go of James’ about a family with several children, one of whom – the eponymous James – was autistic, non-verbal and prone to physical assaults on those closest to him. The documentary followed the ups and downs of the family as they came to the decision to put James into a full-time residential facility – the heartbreak of saying goodbye to one’s own child, the love mixed with more complicated emotions. I was aware that much of what people commonly understood about autism stemmed from films like Rain Man and books like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which tended to focus on protagonists less prone to physical outbursts, and whose challenges were compensated for by almost supernatural savant abilities. This struck me as not just a little distorted – taking the broad sweep of autism and its manifestations – but also unfair on those families involved with the more difficult types of behaviour, as if it was assumed they all had mini-Rain Men running around, memorizing phone books and helping them to win millions in gambling.
We ended up making the autism programme and putting it out alongside the dementia one as a two-parter. In an attempt to acknowledge the shows as being about families and relationships dealing with extraordinary sets of emotions caused by neurological conditions, we called it Extreme Love.
In the years afterwards, I toggled between stories that were more obviously about weirdness – a porn follow-up; another about sex offenders living surveilled lives in south Los Angeles – and human-interest subjects about ordinary people making difficult decisions in impossible situations: families tempted to keep piling on expensive, often painful, medical treatments for loved ones with life-threatening conditions; clinics for people with brain injuries or dealing with profound addictions or assailed by baffling mental health problems.
It is a privilege to be able to document some of the most intimate and harrowing moments of people’s lives. I’m aware that may sound a little glib, or just ghoulish. I tend to see it as the opposite: an opportunity to make connections in the most unlikely places, a chance to find the comfort of friendliness and laughter in the dark.
When we were filming with dementia patients, several times their families and loved ones told me that the change of routine and the excitement of having a crew around had given them a new zest for life, lifting them out of the doldrums of an unchanging routine and a slow decline. Clearly that’s not why I make programmes. I am a journalist, not a social worker. I am there to get the story. I am curious about life. I am fascinated by the awfulness that life throws at us and in awe of the resourcefulness ordinary people show in toughing it out. By bringing out the story, I hope to spread truth and understanding. But I also like to feel that where possible we do not make situations worse – and that, where vulnerable contributors are concerned, we are mindful of their need to be protected from further harm. And over the years I’ve been struck that people who are going through extraordinary, often awful experiences are grateful for the chance to share their travails with an outsider.
Sometimes I have the sense that I am trying the patience of the audience. No one has said to me, ‘Why can’t you go back to making funny programmes?’ but I sense it, on occasion, in the reactions of friends or on Twitter. ‘Why don’t you make some more Weird Weekends?’ people say. ‘I enjoyed your programme – if enjoyed is the right word.’ Very occasionally I get: ‘Oh, too dark for me. Too depressing. Gloomsville.’ It preys on my own mind, too, the idea that I may stray into terrain that is self-indulgent: ‘I don’t care if it’s boring, it’s important.’
My own feeling is that a subject should only earn its stripes by being engaging, watchable – and, yes, enjoyable. I never want or expect viewers to come to a subject out of a sense of duty. Is it a good watch or not? Is it shocking? Is it powerful? Is it wrenching? I enjoyed watching Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing. I enjoyed reading If This Is A Man by Primo Levi. I enjoyed Gitta Sereny’s biography of the death camp commandant Franz Stangl, Into That Darkness, and also her account of the child murderer Mary Bell in Cries Unheard. I enjoyed Nick Broomfield’s fly-on-the-wall film about a youth-offender institute Tattooed Tears and also Kurt Kuenne’s documentary about a child murder, Dear Zachary, and other films and books – too many to mention – that look with intelligence and sensitivity on subjects of profound sadness and darkness.
I read a phrase the other day: the heartlessness of optimism. To look on the bright side is counted as a virtue, but to do it in an unthinking way can be also unkind and uncaring, especially to someone who is experiencing pain, who is feeling lonely and unheard.
Accept that life is unbearable and awful for many people at least some of the time. Laugh about it if you can. Look on the dark side and make the best of it all.
Chapter 26
Savile-Geddon
Nancy and I married at Marylebone Registry Office on Friday 13 July 2013 – the inauspicious date was the only one available at short notice. With nine years and two children already on the clock, the idea of a wedding was a little after the fact. The delay – which resulted from a combination of my inborn misanthropic qualities and a lamentable failure on my part to recognize how much I owed Nancy, how much I loved her and also how important a public declaration of love might be to her – in a way demands less explanation than my miraculously managing, against the odds, to see clearly what a plonker I was being.
I was – and continue to be – a confused person in many important respects. I told myself I believed the best way to honour our relationship was for us to love one another and make it last, and that I viewed the idea of a public statement of intent, like a wedding, as attention-seeking and phoney. But undoubtedly amidst those inclinations was an inability to commit – certainly that was what Nancy felt – and it was only when I came face to face with the real risk of losing her that I realized what a calamity that would be.
The rapprochement that followed took months and involved relationship counselling in West Hampstead with a woman whose clear impression was that Nancy was right about almost everything – afterwards we would eat lunch at a Middle Eastern café on West End Lane in almost post-coital fashion. A few months after the counselling ended we were in a posh restaurant at the top of a skyscraper in Los Angeles when I finally did something I’d never quite been able to imagine myself doing.
I didn’t have a ring. I’ve never been good at picking jewellery and with the knowledge that, worst case scenario, the ring would be on her finger for at least a few months – or, all being well, for life – the pressure was on. So, instead, I had the brainwave of presenting her with the business card of a Hatton Garden jewellers.
The idea was the card would speak for itself – I slipped it into a menu, and after we’d finished our main courses, I waved the menu at her in nonchalant fashion.
‘Have you got room for something else?’ I asked.
When she saw the jewellers’ card, she looked confused. It didn’t quite say ‘big romantic gesture’ in the way I’d hoped, so to remove any ambiguity I got down on one knee and said, ‘Nancy, will you marry me?’
She smiled in a way that seemed to say it was both too late and welcome all the same.
The official part of the ceremony took place at Marylebone Registry Office. My dad had flown over from Hawaii with his wife, Sheila; my mum and her partner Michael were also there – there was something unifying about having all the parents and step-parents together in one place. Naturally we had included our two boys, then four and six, dressed in little linen outfits. The older one, Albert, was supposed to do a reading, a quotation about friendship from Winnie-the-Pooh, but he panicked and went dry. My brother Marcel, who was acting as best man, stepped in, hoisted him up and filled in, reading the text while holding Albert in his other arm.
After the signing of the paperwork we retired for a lunch at a grand Victorian pub in Kensal Green. Marcel gave a speech that too
k its cue from a Twitter handle I once used, ‘Loubot2000’. Its conceit was that I was a temperamental bit of high-tech kit that needed a troubleshooting guide:
With Nancy at our wedding, dancing to ‘In Dreams’.
Congratulations on purchasing your new Loubot 2000! The Loubot 2000 is precision engineered to work straight out of the box and give you a lifetime’s trouble-free use. If you feel that your Loubot 2000 is malfunctioning or faulty, please take time to read the following list of FAQs before contacting the helpdesk. ‘My Loubot 2000 is unresponsive.’ The Loubot 2000 is highly introspective and may sometimes go into power-save mode. To restore normal functionality, try asking one of the following questions: Was Jimmy Savile really a paedophile? What do Scientologists actually believe? Are chimpanzees dangerous? This should reboot the system. ‘My Loubot 2000 seems tense and anxious.’ Try oiling your Loubot 2000 with red wine.
I then gave my own speech, expressing my love for my new wife, my awe at her intelligence, her kindness and humour. ‘Nancy continues to sprinkle stardust on my life,’ I said. ‘One of life’s mysteries is how I’ve hung on to her.’ My cousin Justin was then in a relationship with the actress Jennifer Aniston and I recalled a conversation we’d all had one night at a restaurant in LA when Jen had compared Nancy to Cate Blanchett. ‘Personally I think Cate Blanchett should feel flattered by the comparison,’ I said. ‘Jen didn’t mention which film star I looked like,’ I added. ‘Probably because it might have been awkward mentioning Brad Pitt.’
Mid-afternoon we adjourned to a second pub, where we hosted a wider ring of friends and guests. My dad gave an idiosyncratic oration, involving one of his favourite themes: his mystification – pride mixed with pain – that there were places where I was better known than him, and his confusion that people sometimes approached me when we were together to express enthusiasm for my programmes and yet, being told he was my father, did not shower him with attention as progenitor of whatever talent I possessed.
He then recited a poem from memory by Robert Frost, called ‘Provide, Provide’, which describes an ugly old witch called Abishag, who works as a washerwoman, but who was at one time a beautiful Hollywood star. This is the normal course of human affairs, the poem suggests, and goes on to recommend dying early. It was, all in all, a weird message for a wedding and afterwards I asked my mum what she thought he meant by it.
‘Oh, don’t read anything into that,’ she said. ‘He only said it because it’s the one poem he knows by heart.’
And it was here, at the second pub, with the music blaring as guests danced and ordered drinks from the bar and queued for a hog roast, that Will Yapp, the director of When Louis Met Jimmy, approached me, leaned in and confided, ‘So, Beth’s been in touch. ITV are doing a job on Jimmy. Big exposé for a new strand.’ I was happy but not drunk and I had to strain to catch his words as he described what he knew about the exposé. It was to be a scalding tell-all: women were coming forward with stories. Even his charity work would be revealed as a cloak for self-enrichment.
I nodded and took it in, not thinking too much about it – it all seemed so vague and speculative – and then we were swept up in the music and occasion: my new wife and I dancing to our opening song of Roy Orbison’s ‘In Dreams’.
The last time I’d seen Jimmy had been in the autumn of 2005, after I’d come back from writing my book in America. Even before that there had been a distancing. After I threw over the diary-book-thing, the relationship with Jimmy had tapered down quite naturally. By the time I’d gone back to doing stories in America – the brothel, the neo-Nazis – there was no contact between us, neither friendliness nor ill will, just a sense that a strange passage of life had come and gone and – not to put it too cold-bloodedly – we had no further reason to see each other.
For that last 2005 visit, the invitation to travel up had come from Will. It was late in the year and, though I was back in the UK, I was not yet back making television – the only professional pretext for the trip to see Jimmy was to promote my book. A TV reporter filmed parts of the evening for a segment on the local news – our conversation at the house and an outing to the Flying Pizza. But I didn’t take any notes. I have no recollection of what we discussed.
Friends of his, after he died, told me he’d continued to view me in a friendly way after we lost touch. But I also tend to think he felt a little bit abandoned. Our last conversation, when I’d called after a gap of several years, had been in 2009. I was booked on Chris Evans’ Radio 2 breakfast show to promote a new documentary about prisons or mental health – I’m not sure – and I’d thought it might add a moment of surprise and intrigue if I could say I’d just spoken to Jimmy.
Jimmy had answered the phone himself, as he always did, with a noise that sounded like: ‘Nyes?’ But as we spoke, he’d sounded distant, a little cold.
‘I’m going on Chris Evans,’ I said.
‘Ah, the height of fame,’ he replied with a sarcasm that was a touch unfriendly.
As the years passed, from time to time, I’d hear little bits of information. I continued, whenever I gave interviews, to be asked about him and also to pump my interlocutors for anything they might know that shed more light on his hidden side. Once, when I was interviewed by the Radio 2 DJ Johnnie Walker, he made a veiled and vague reference to a young woman, or girl, who, he’d heard, or said he’d heard, had had a relationship with Jimmy, or a something, which for unclear reasons, had ended badly, with her feeling ill-used. It was that vague and, though it sounded a little ominous on the face of it, it was impossible to chase up or know how much to make of it.
In another interview, the DJ Phill Jupitus commended me on air for my work exposing people whom ‘we know to be despicable’. I bridled at this a little, saying it wasn’t quite how I saw what I did. ‘Do we know Jimmy Savile to be despicable?’ I asked. Off air he told me he didn’t have the goods on Jimmy himself but that if I wanted to know more I should get in touch with the frontman of the rock group Slade, Noddy Holder. Noddy had told Phill personally that he kept a file on Jimmy ‘this thick’ – he made the appropriate gesture with finger and thumb – conjuring the unlikely image of the glam-metal icon sleuthing Jimmy’s crimes between Slade gigs and adverts for Nobby’s Nuts.
I did some half-hearted follow-up on the Noddy lead, but it went nowhere.
In early 2006, Jimmy made a cameo appearance on Celebrity Big Brother series four. The house that year included the politician George Galloway, the glamour model Jodie Marsh, and a rapper from Wales called Maggot. Jimmy, looking stooped and ancient, held court in a red tracksuit, discoursing about show business (‘Whatever The Beatles did, they wanted to have me not too far away. They reckoned I brought luck to them’) and making insinuating jokes. ‘Don’t forget, ladies, I am available most weekends for home visits.’ It was striking how much the housemates deferred to him. The retired basketball player Dennis Rodman took an unlikely interest in Jimmy – or maybe, given his incongruous friendship with Kim Jong Un, Rodman had a penchant for mercurial men with strange hair.
Later, a couple of victims were to say that it was this appearance that prompted them to go to the Surrey police. This in turn led to the one recorded police interview with Jimmy in 2009. The interview, published after his death, took place at Jimmy’s office at Stoke Mandeville and was, on Jimmy’s side, a masterclass in evasion, consisting of flannel, legal threats, bluster, and lies. The police investigation was dropped soon afterwards.
In my own mind, I had by the end settled on a view of Jimmy as simultaneously creepy and mysterious but also someone to whom I felt a degree of affection; a manipulator, with a troublingly detached and transactional attitude to human relations, but also, weirdly, as someone somehow dependable.
How strange it is to write that now.
When he died in 2011 Jimmy was still riding high as the nation’s most famous charity fundraiser and icon of eccentricity. Celebrities and dignitaries queued up to salute him. His funeral was a jamboree in Leeds invo
lving the usual Savile flare and showmanship: thousands of attendees, a gold coffin, a massive marble headstone. I had passed up an invitation to go to the commemoration. I’d like to think it was because I was too wary of being part of a tribute to a man whom I knew to be, at the very least, flawed and possibly far worse. But it may be that I simply didn’t have the appetite to be a bit player in an over-the-top media spectacle.
I wrote a blog post of thoughts on his passing, mentioning my sadness and a mild sense of guilt that I hadn’t seen more of him before he died. I talked about the dark rumours and how they had been my motivation for making the original film. I recounted the irritations of dealing with him, his evasions and pranks, his dark references to physical intimidation in the nightclubs but also the toughness I’d come to respect – the way he was ‘unfazed by negative attention’.
I ended: ‘He was a complete one-off. Wrestler, charity fundraiser, DJ, fixer, prankster, and professional enigma. He was also a plainspoken Yorkshire philosopher and psychologist. There won’t be another one like him.’
But I was also careful about what I didn’t say. I turned down various offers to write a piece for a national paper or comment on the radio or take part in a Christmas TV tribute. My feelings were too complicated for me to know how to do them justice, and even then I was aware that, as much as we’d played the role of friends in newspaper profiles and even on occasion with each other, our relationship was chillier and warier than that, and at its base, on both sides, somewhat transactional.
Six months later a journalist for the Yorkshire Evening Post emailed a colleague, trying to reach me. She was preparing an official biography of Jimmy. ‘I was a dear friend of his,’ she said. ‘He often spoke of Louis but did say he hadn’t kept in touch recently . . . I read bidding prayers at his funeral and am really sad he has passed away as we had lots of fun together.’ The working subtitle of the book was The Life and Times of a National Treasure.
Gotta Get Theroux This Page 28
