I spoke to her by phone about my experience of filming and our friendship, such as it was. During the interview, I went off the record and asked if she’d heard the rumours that he had an unpleasant secret sexual side. The book, How’s About That Then?, came out early in 2012, a benign appreciation of the man and his good works. She included a couple of pages on the rumours. It was, she later told me, ‘the worst-timed book in history’.
In the months after he died I noticed one or two small news stories about Jimmy, referring to a Newsnight segment and allegations to do with an ‘approved school’ – a government-funded boarding school for wayward girls of high intelligence, Duncroft in Surrey. The Newsnight segment had been shelved, for reasons unknown.
In October, ITV aired Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile. Presented by Mark Williams-Thomas, it featured a series of women who spoke about his assaults on them as teenagers – tongue pushed into the mouth, unwanted groping, much of it taking place on BBC premises, a lot in NHS hospitals, and all of it dependent on a sense of celebrity and glamour conferred on him by his BBC TV shows. The women’s defences were down; they trusted Jimmy Savile, and he assaulted them. Several of the contributors had attended Duncroft, where it was said teachers and staff turned a blind eye to reports of Jimmy’s sexual misconduct.
Reaction to the programme was immediate and overwhelming. A dam had burst and a torrent of further allegations from other women – and some men – crashed over anyone who’d ever had any dealings with Jimmy. The BBC was immediately in the firing line – not just for its failure to stop Jimmy in all the years he was assaulting women on its premises but also for the decision to pull the Newsnight investigation. Inquiries were set up, and within a few weeks I was on the phone to one of them, telling what I knew: principally about Beth and Alice, and the fact of their having had relations with him in the late sixties when one of them was fifteen, but also about comments made by Johnnie Walker and Phill Jupitus.
In those early days I imagined it might all be over quite quickly. In a kind of stubborn adherence to the facts as I understood them – and maybe in a spirit that was unconsciously having trouble facing the reality of having been friendly with a sexual predator – I tried to tell myself it couldn’t be quite as bad as it seemed and I found myself parsing the data to find ways in which it might be questionable or speculative. But what I couldn’t explain away or extenuate was the testimony of the girls from Duncroft – how plausible it seemed that he might take advantage of vulnerable girls – girls already so ill-used by life as to make them easy pickings for one so-minded, plied with cigarettes and sweets and the promise of tickets to the TV show Clunk-Click – girls who I could all too easily imagine him viewing as ‘damaged goods’ and grateful, in his transactional understanding of the world, for the attention of an ageing DJ and therefore, in his mind, fair game for his predatory attentions.
A BBC colleague told me that all the rushes from When Louis Met Jimmy were being viewed by an in-house investigator or maybe by the police. Requests to speak to various inquiries trickled in – a police investigation in Scarborough, another in Leeds. I spoke to these, confirming that I’d seen nothing during filming in the way of depraved or criminal behaviour. For several weeks after the Exposure piece, more of Jimmy’s victims and survivors came forward, on an almost daily basis, in tabloid articles and in TV appearances: on morning chat shows, on a follow-up ITV documentary and a BBC Panorama entitled ‘Jimmy Savile: What The BBC Knew’. This last one featured Kat Ward, whose interview for Newsnight had been spiked. The calm and measured detail of her testimony, its description of a quid pro quo of TV tickets for oral sex in the back of a Rolls-Royce, was utterly persuasive.
With each new revelation, the image of a free-ranging predator whose charity work gave him access to restricted areas with vulnerable people came into sharper focus. In many of the accounts I struggled to recognize the man I’d imagined I knew, but occasionally there were details that reminded me of him. One – an anonymous letter from 1998, sent to the Scotland Yard vice squad – alleged, ‘His fundraising activities are not out of altruistic motives; but purely for selfish advancement and an easy living. He has slimed his way in wherever possible. He has tried to hide his homosexuality, which in any event is an open secret with those who know; but did you know that he is also a deeply committed paedophile.’
It went on to describe Jimmy getting involved with a rent boy who had blackmailed him and threatened to expose him for paedophilia, even alleging that it was Jimmy’s practice to seek out rent boys after doing charity runs. ‘Now I’ve had a run, I feel like some bum,’ he would allegedly say.
I thought back to his conversation with me about rent boys. All you have to do is buy them a bun. They run off at the mouth like they’ve got verbal diarrhoea. Even – ridiculously – the rhyming motto had the ring of truth. If it ain’t a game it’s a shame, I’d heard him say many times. Was it possible in his strange, almost medieval, Catholic view of things – like a Medici buying indulgences before committing a crime – he viewed his vice as having been paid for by the good work of the charity run?
As it became clear how the BBC had missed the chance to expose Jimmy – alleged at the time to be because of a reluctance to disrupt the Christmas TV schedule, which included a Jim’ll Fix It tribute, though this was subsequently disproved – the organization went into meltdown. The Director General was forced to resign and the Chairman of the BBC Trust came in for heavy criticism. News managers involved in the decision to pull the Newsnight piece were suspended. Suddenly, anyone who had ever heard a rumour about Jimmy Savile was under suspicion – which was weird given that, as far as I knew, everyone had heard rumours about Jimmy Savile, from the DG of the BBC to my mates in the school playground in 1983.
For having made an exposing documentary about him while he was alive that at the same time failed to out him as a paedophile and a predator, I now occupied an ambiguous place in the whole affair. From some, I got credit for having shown him as the weird creature of narcissism and detachment that he was. It was also pointed out that I’d been one of the very few people who’d raised the issue of rumours of paedophilia to his face. But in some quarters – principally those reposing in the area of my brain known as the ‘self-doubt cortex’ – I was also the person who hadn’t managed to take him down despite two weeks of access and the resources of a TV production behind me. In general, I couldn’t shake the feeling of disappointment that I’d failed to see him clearly for what he was when he was alive or that I’d missed an opportunity to unmask him.
The Panorama documentary played the clip from When Louis Met Jimmy in which I talked to him about the rumours of paedophilia. I was, of course, pleased to be able to appear prescient. But I was also aware how far from a j’accuse that moment actually was.
In amongst the victims that were coming forward were the two women I’d spoken to and had tea with in 2001, and what played most on my mind was the thought that, if I’d handled the conversation differently, they might have been able to say more. Looking over notes I’d taken at the time, I was struck by how many clues there were. How quick and unexpected the sex was. ‘It would be up against the wall. In the dressing room or in his caravan at King’s Cross.’ ‘Very persuasive.’ ‘One thing would lead to another so you didn’t really know what was happening.’ And the sense of secrecy and social pressure. ‘Draws you in and draws you in.’ ‘Like a cult.’
At the time it had been wrapped in the tone of the original letter and the warmth of their conversation, which was about friendship and fun. It seemed so different in hindsight. Had they needed more of a nudge? But it was also true that I’d never had the sense I was supposed to do anything with what they were saying. They had just wanted to be heard. And I kept telling myself, if they’d wanted to out him as a predator, why didn’t they just say so, and what was to stop them going to the police?
I was also conscious how much there was about Jimmy that wasn’t being said – or that people w
eren’t getting quite right. The number of victims kept going up and up, along with the luridness of the details. There were allegations of satanic masses and dismemberings of small children. The sense of outrage at his having got away with his crimes and his supposed closeness to the establishment had created a slingshot effect: the truth had been suppressed for so long, with victims’ voices kept silent and complicit elements in the saddle, and now it was twanging violently back into a world of outlandish allegations in which everything was believed.
The person being depicted bore no relation not only to the man I’d known, but to anyone who ever lived. Someone with ‘no emotions’ whose entire life had been constructed with the exclusive purpose of committing crimes. The ancillary of this was that anyone who had dealings with Jimmy was under suspicion. How could they have not known when he was committing sexual assault on a daily basis? The leading investigator on a Metropolitan Police report said, ‘He spent every minute of every waking day thinking about it.’ One part of me took this as understandable hyperbole, given the sense of betrayal and anger that was flooding over the country. It was possible the nation needed to live through a moment of convulsive outrage. But at the same time, wasn’t it also important to tell the truth – in a forensic way like, you know, a police detective?
In a weird way, it did Jimmy too much credit to imagine he was capable of doing that much evil – that he was, as some seemed to feel, on a par with Adolf Hitler and Ian Brady. Further, in reducing him to a monomaniac and a caricature, it did a disservice to those who worked and helped him in his programmes and his charitable works in good faith but failed to see his dark side. I worried that it short-changed his victims, some of whom had a more complicated attitude; and perhaps most serious of all that it made further abuse in the future by other predators more likely by removing them from the real world and putting them in the realm of Grand Guignol.
At the same time as I was feeling all these things, at a deeper level, I was also doubting them. What if my emphasis on the need for ‘nuance’, and ‘truthfulness’, and a ‘forensic attitude’ came down to an attempt to minimize his crimes in some way? Was I trying to protect myself because I had been one of those groomed – the journalist who spent two weeks with him and then stayed in touch with him and yet still somehow failed to see him for what he was? I began second-guessing my impulses – the most basic principles that had guided twenty years of work: the importance of seeing complexity and ambiguity, and understanding most of what we term evil as a by-product of a kind of self-deception and confused good faith or simple selfishness. What if my journalistic radar had failed me in my hour of greatest need and all my clever notions of showing empathy for people who least seemed deserving of it was dangerous sophistry – ‘clever twat shit’, to use a phrase of Jimmy’s – and tortured apologetics for abuse and oppression? What if I had ‘contextualized’ and ‘nuanced’ myself into the profound failure of not recognizing sexual predation when it was blowing cigar smoke in my face? In my darkest moments of self-doubt I imagined myself as one of those ageing Nazis in Germany who spent decades post-Second World War quacking about ‘the real Führer’ and how much he did about crime and the economy.
In this spirit of over-sensitivity, soon after the first batch of revelations, I attended a charity function at the Globe Theatre on the South Bank with a smattering of random celebrities. In huddles in the bar, like an unofficial show-business conclave, we compared notes on the Savile latest. Part of my MO at that time was to air my own understanding of the situation, trying to make sense of it. In an attempt to explain their vulnerability, I made mention that some of Jimmy’s victims had been ‘star-struck’, and that this had led to their defences being down. The look of incredulity on the face of a female actor I was talking to was chilling. What she seemed to have heard me say was, ‘Those girls were throwing themselves at him.’
One part of me wondered if she’d lost the plot. But the greater part wondered if I’d lost the plot – the ability to navigate cocktail-party showbiz chat in a way that didn’t sound like I was OK with paedophilia.
One April morning, in 2013, I was summoned to give evidence to the Janet Smith Inquiry, the BBC’s all-encompassing review of its role in the Savile affair – assaults committed on BBC premises, against BBC staff, people under its care.
I was living in LA by this time, and the interview had to be done via some high-tech video-conferencing system on the umpteenth floor of the gleaming downtown offices of the international legal firm Reed Smith.
Dame Janet – snowy-haired and distinguished-looking, like the commander of a space ship on a progressive Star Trek spin-off – beamed in from her conference room in England somewhere flanked by young-pup legal aides, to ask about the circumstances of the documentary, how it had come to be made, how I’d found Jimmy, the rumours I’d heard before doing the show. The conversation proceeded in a friendly fashion for an hour or two and – bizarrely, given it was the question that preoccupied me – appeared to be over without me having been asked about Beth and Alice, the two girlfriends turned whistle-blowers, despite my having spoken about their letter and meeting them to at least two people months earlier who were working on the inquiry. Naturally my instinct was not to bring it up, since it was, I felt, my weak spot in the whole affair, but good sense prevailed and I tippled them to the meeting – ‘tippling’ being the sort of word Jimmy Savile liked to use.
Later I emailed Will Yapp to vent and express mixed-up feelings of confusion, shame and fear. We agreed to open a file to share documents – reports and newspaper cuttings relating to l’affaire Savile. It was like a scab I couldn’t stop picking. Nearly a year after speaking to Dame Janet, I heard via Will that Beth was upset with me for mentioning her letter and possibly compromising her identity. Had I told the Inquiry her and Alice’s real names? There was an awkward transatlantic phone call in which I told her I didn’t think I had mentioned real names but I’d shared the text of the letter. Afterwards I thought about the strangeness of worrying about not having done more earlier with what I knew and now being told I’d said too much. I wondered why I had a low-level feeling of guilt when I hadn’t, as far as I was aware, done anything wrong, and why was I racking my brains for something I might have done wrong. I thought about a remark of Nietzsche’s, that witches killed in witch hunts were often, by the end, persuaded of their own guilt. ‘So it is with all guilt,’ he writes.
And at the same time, in spite of all of it, with an almost vertiginous sense of anxiety, I couldn’t help thinking about a follow-up.
Chapter 27
Coffee with Larry
Vast and unsustainable, and teetering always on the edge of environmental disaster – mudslides, wildfires, earthquakes – Los Angeles is a strange city, though I sometimes wonder if other people take against the place for the same reasons I like it. It is in some ways idiotic and certainly self-obsessed– but also vigorous and unpretentious: the equivalent in conurbation form of the kind of deluded monomaniac that for a long time I made the subject of my interviews.
We had moved there because we wanted an adventure. It was late 2012. Nancy and I were not long married and had decided to consecrate our renewed commitment to each other with a major life change. Nancy, raised abroad in less rain-lashed countries, craved a break from another British winter. The children were open to the idea of a big move – or too young to understand what they were signing on for; while I, a professional observer of American culture, reasoned it could only be a good thing for my work if I lived in the midst of the people I was studying, in classical anthropological style.
The invisibility of being in LA, the fact that I wasn’t often recognized, was also part of its appeal.
Any ambivalence I had about being famous – the fact that you sometimes got asked for selfies when your child was having a five-alarm meltdown on the Tube, or found yourself outside a pub where a large party went into a FOMO panic and every person had to have a photo – was reversed. In LA I could wande
r around lost and not worry that someone had spotted me and thought, ‘There’s Louis Theroux. Why is he walking up and down and looking at his phone?’ And those moments of recognition, someone asking for a picture or offering a compliment, being rare, were more welcome. In LA, I was in my twenties again, noticing that actors at parties didn’t seem that interested in what I had to say. ‘What do you do? Documentaries? Uh-huh. Cool.’ Scans room for escape. It was like being back on Krypton – a planet where I no longer had my superpowers.
At home in LA, busy coming up with ideas.
The 2008 crash was then still recent enough that property prices were depressed and we could just about afford to buy a house on the east side of the city, in a pleasant tree-lined area on the southern edge of Griffith Park called Los Feliz. Our children enrolled in a local school. The BBC arranged for a series producer to be based with me. A couple of APs were brought on and we rented a small office on a Hollywood lot, called The Lot, built aeons ago (in LA years) for Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford.
The first subject we looked into was California’s network of mental hospitals. Based on a previous film we’d made about a maximum-security facility for paedophiles and sex offenders, the California Department of Mental Health had been receptive, and access had already been signed off at the top level.
My new series producer and an AP went on a recce, and the reports that came back made it sound fascinating: a unit full of stalkers of stars; another that housed patients with psychogenic polydipsia, a pathological compulsion to drink water. It was like hearing travellers’ tales from explorers on a far frontier, describing lands where diamonds were strewn on the ground and men whose heads grew below their shoulders. Then the reports became less frequent and more laconic – the access was in doubt, for mysterious reasons – possibly one of our team had asked ‘Where do you keep the psychopaths?’ and the question had ruffled some feathers or more probably it was just a general sense of apprehension on the part of rank-and-file clinicians at the hospitals at the idea of featuring a vulnerable population of the mentally ill on a television programme. The project ebbed away.
Gotta Get Theroux This Page 29
