Gotta Get Theroux This

by Louis Theroux

  Another colleague, a senior nurse at Stoke Mandeville called Sylvia Nichol, still had a trove of memorabilia, including an oversized last birthday card that was never given to him and a larger-than-life Jimmy Savile bust made out of Lego, which she kept in the shed. She’d spent the greater part of her working life raising money for Stoke Mandeville’s Spinal Injury Unit and described the moment she called Jimmy because the roofs on the cheap hospital buildings were leaking, and how that had let to him spearheading a charity effort that raised £10 million. All that work was now rendered suspect – seen as a smokescreen for his offending. ‘Sometimes I do say, please can you fix this?’ she said, standing in the shed with his Lego bust. ‘Because I reckoned he could fix anything.’

  And then there was Jimmy Savile’s personal assistant, Janet Cope. Janet had been fired unceremoniously by Jimmy after twenty years’ service – told simply, without explanation, ‘You’re out’ – around the time I’d done the first documentary. She had worked as Jimmy’s diary-keeper and factotum. By her own account, she organized events, cooked for him, and covered for him when necessary. When he’d felt lonely on an around-the-world cruise because it was full of Americans, none of whom recognized him, she’d spoken to him on the ship’s phone every day to keep his spirits up. Unlike Sylvia and Gill, Janet had read the reports. She viewed the incidents described as either trivial (‘a pat on the bum’) or simply made-up.

  Like the colleague at Stoke Mandeville, her life’s work had been tainted from its association with Jimmy Savile. Her way of dealing with it was simply to refuse to acknowledge the truth.

  Re-entering the world of Jimmy Savile was like travelling across a landscape ravaged by a hurricane. The survivors were making sense of what happened in different ways, but no one was untouched by what they had lived through.

  As filming progressed I was in touch via email with Beth, the woman who had written me a letter describing herself and her friend as ‘girlfriends’ of Jimmy’s. I’d been hoping to feature them in my follow-up programme. But both were publicity shy. They had family members who still didn’t know about their association with Jimmy and they were worried about their real identities becoming known. Still, negotiations proceeded. Methods of preserving their anonymity were discussed. Beth was also insistent that she should know the names of everyone involved with the production. Emails she sent were stamped with legalese about their confidentiality and her sense of anxiety ebbed and flowed depending on what was going on in the news. She described the toll the unmasking of Jimmy Savile had taken on her. She’d had a nervous collapse after giving testimony to the Janet Smith Inquiry and another after seeing the Jonathan Maitland play An Audience with Jimmy Savile.

  We met – first just Beth, myself and Will. Then later Alice came along as well – nearly fifteen years on from our lunch at the Langham, both of them a little nervous. Both had endured serious illnesses, Beth in particular looked grey and drawn and gave off an anxiety so intense that it was hard to differentiate from low-level passive aggression.

  What was odd was that they seemed to have reversed positions in the intervening years. Beth, who’d seemed more protective of him in 2001 and inclined to recollect the happy parts of their association, could now barely bring herself to think about him, so great was her hatred. Remembering some of their encounters brought her to tears. It made me wonder whether, in the scheme of things, the uncovering of Jimmy’s crimes had been worth it for her personally. Alice, on the other hand, seemed lightened by the revelations, still angry, but the anger didn’t seem to eat at her the way it did Beth.

  She talked about some feelings of guilt at having done interviews and been part of the posthumous process of unmasking Jimmy. She said she still had some residual fondness for him and talked about the first time he’d taken advantage of her – he’d been forceful but not violent.

  ‘It wasn’t the worst kind of “rape”,’ she said, doing air quotes.

  ‘Why did you do air quotes?’ I asked

  ‘Because the first time was so unexpected and quick. It was only later that I viewed it as rape. But the other times, I don’t view them as rape, because I went back. I knew what I was getting into.’

  She described a man who was awkward, who lacked finesse, and she said this in an almost indulgent, pitying way. She said she had dreams about him, since the revelations, in which he came to her crying and she’d feel sorry for him.

  ‘When we sent you that letter, I think I wanted you to do something, but we didn’t want to be involved . . . Who did you show it to?’

  ‘My executive producer. I can’t remember who else exactly. But it was an open-plan office. There was no sense of secrecy around it.’

  I had the sense Alice might be thinking there was someone who ‘suppressed’ the letter – who stopped me from doing more. I tried to explain that the letter said so much about ‘friendship’ and ‘fun’, there was nothing in it to make me concerned.

  ‘I took it as, OK, he had girlfriends. He’s not gay. He’s not asexual . . . But beyond that, it didn’t feel especially like news . . . There was nothing in it about sexual assault. And in fact, it talks about a thirty-year friendship.’

  ‘We put that stuff about being friends in so you knew we weren’t crackpots,’ Beth said. ‘To show we did know him.’

  Alice said that when Jonathan King had been convicted in 2005, she’d sent Jimmy a caravan-shaped postcard, saying, ‘Worried you might be next?’ But they had harboured fears about Jimmy’s underworld connections. His boasts of friends in the mafia, his joking references to himself as ‘il capo di tutti capi’, she’d taken at face value. ‘We all agreed nothing could be done while he was alive,’ Beth said. ‘He was too powerful.’

  I thought: I didn’t agree nothing could be done while he was alive. But I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Why didn’t you go to the police?’ I asked.

  ‘We wanted something much bigger and more public than that.’

  It occurred to me that a police investigation would have led to something big and public, but I didn’t point this out, and we all left a little later, having talked for two and a half hours.

  I saw Beth a few times afterwards. She’d asked us to keep her involved, and I sent her emails letting her know how the TV project was progressing. It was by now four years since the revelations, but the BBC1 documentary about victims and the appearance of the Janet Smith Inquiry meant there had been a spike in Savile coverage, which took a toll on her health. She’d been going through therapy and on one occasion she suggested I join her for a session – I think to help me understand what she’d been going through – but I declined.

  I never saw Alice again. Before our meet-up, I’d sent her a list of questions via Beth. In return, I got a two-page document with thoughtful answers to each of the questions. She described meeting him, when she was aged fifteen, through a friend, at his radio chat show Speakeasy. His first question to her had been, ‘How old are you?’ He’d sexually assaulted her up against the wall of a BBC corridor, and then, a few months after she turned sixteen, he’d raped her in a hotel room.

  ‘I hadn’t got a clue I was being taken advantage of at that time but I knew it was wrong somehow,’ she wrote. ‘It was only later that I saw it for what it was and became very angry and emotionally confused about it. Although it sounds sick, at the time I even felt flattered at the attention of someone so famous. I felt I was special to him and was fond of him.

  ‘I am glad it is out in the open as it has helped so many people come forward to report abuse . . . However, as for it being “therapeutic” I would say no. It has been immensely stressful . . . I now realize with vivid clarity I meant nothing to him but that I was taken advantage of, used and abused; I was one of hundreds. I know he was an absolute bastard but another part of me (weirdly) feels I have betrayed him. I am still looking for some understanding of my own experience and emotions. I know I am not to blame but I carry shame and guilt about what I feel I “allowed” to happen.
’

  Chapter 32

  Gotta Get Theroux This

  It started, like the hiss and whisper of train tracks announcing a coming train, with bits of noise on social media. On Twitter, there was a murmur of interest in my old programmes, some of which had turned up on Netflix. Young people tagged me in tweets expressing their appreciation for episodes of Weird Weekends – shows that were nearly twenty years old – and even, on occasion, avowed an unlikely amorous interest in that older version of me (if that two-sizes-too-big leather-jacketed gurning man-child was me, which at this distance I wasn’t sure it was).

  Then a more unexpected development: unlicensed merchandise. T-shirts, Christmas jumpers, pillows, birthday cards, mugs – some of it frankly baffling in conception: one of the mugs showed me, for some reason, with large breasts – and often with the legend ‘Gotta Get Theroux This’ or ‘Sleep Tight Theroux The Night’. I had spent years, nay decades, hearing people say ‘Theroux the keyhole’, ‘Theroux the looking glass,’ even in the primary school playground – literally when I was about five years old – ‘Louis Theroux the ball! Ha ha!’ So I was by now anaesthetized to the comic effect of that particular jeu de mots but I was, nevertheless, grateful for what I took to be an appreciative sentiment.

  Every now and then I’d hear of someone who’d got a tattoo of me on a leg or arm, which I found flattering but also stressful. Being emblazoned permanently on someone’s body seemed to carry with it certain responsibilities, and it was far from clear what those might be. Another darker part of me, the part that liked it, seemed to think that perhaps more people should be getting tattoos of me, and the notion even flitted through my head of incentivizing them with free signed DVDs.

  A mug of me with tits? Sure! Why not?

  A waitress on the West Coast of Ireland birthed a Twitter account, @NoContextLouis, with screen grabs from shows and the relevant piece of dialogue: one showed me apparently saying: ‘She said there was no dick too big’, another ‘Can I work the swan tonight?’ One of my pleasures in my years of making TV had always been getting into situations where I was forced by circumstances to say something ludicrous or asinine with a straight face. ‘He called you a bald-faced fucker.’ ‘Do you want some Lucozade?’ I enjoyed @NoContextLouis as a celebration of those moments.

  There was also a Twitter account – @louistherouxbot – that used a computer algorithm to generate random bits of ‘Louis Theroux commentary’ of a wholly nonsensical sort. Sensing a PR opportunity, I announced on Twitter that I would record one of the lines if I got enough retweets, and ended up using my best ‘serious VO’ voice to announce, ‘I’m in Amsterdam to meet Hannah, a former IT expert turned cybergoth who believes that Hull is a portal to Hell.’

  Peak ironic-Louis-appreciation – I still haven’t found a catchy way to describe the phenomenon – may have been a series of Louis Theroux-themed club nights around Britain. I didn’t delve too deep into the details – it has always felt unseemly to be over-interested in whatever cult status I may or may not enjoy – but I did stumble across a short video clip of ten or fifteen people on a dance floor, grooving around while wearing masks with my face on. I can only compare my feeling to the scene in Being John Malkovich when the eponymous main character enters a portal in his own head and arrives in a world in which everyone looks like him.

  It was hard to judge the exact tone of some of the appreciation. It definitely wasn’t nasty. At the same time, it was clearly partly tongue-in-cheek and playful – naturally so, since it revolved around a kind of fiction, a constructed TV identity and not the real me, whoever that may be. Nancy researched the company that was making some of the merchandise. I’d wondered who else they featured on their iPhone cases and pyjamas, hoping it might be philosophers and revolutionaries like Jean Genet and Hakim Bey. I was a little disappointed to find their other honourees were David Hasselhoff and a Sky Sports commentator I’d never heard of. Nonetheless, it was basically flattering, and it was only strange to achieve some kind of ambiguous elder-statesman status when I felt my grip on success was still so tentative, my sense of security so fragile.

  And the serendipitous part was that the slow percolation of interest among younger viewers coincided with us finishing up My Scientology Movie.

  The film had been edited through the end of 2015 and beginning of 2016 – spending more than six months in the cutting room, four months longer than any of my TV projects. It had been a beast to get under control – for a while John and Simon had kept me out of the edit altogether. ‘I like to give my directors a little space to play with the material,’ Simon said when I called to ask what was going on. I felt like Colonel Sanders after he’d signed his name and image rights away to KFC and wasn’t allowed to open another restaurant, pressing my face against an imaginary screen door and saying, Hey, guys, remember me? Can I help fry the chicken tonight?

  Then, having ‘played’ their way to a standstill, they invited me in to collaborate, and I threw myself into helping, which seemed only to make matters worse, at least for a while, until gradually the four of us – me, John, Simon, and Paul the editor – found a way through the material: an opening that set up the idea of Scientology as something beguiling and mysterious, the introduction of the device of the re-enactments, the story of my relationship with Marty balanced against a mounting sense of intimidation from the Church, and the final-act moment of confrontation with Marty on the street outside the studio where we’d filmed the recreation of the Hole.

  In the last few weeks of the edit, we sent the Scientologists a list of all the allegations the film made. There was then a process of reflecting the Church’s denials and ‘clarifications’ using on-screen text. I had slightly dreaded this, worrying it would emasculate the story – clutter it up and weaken it with qualification. In fact, in the end, the inclusion of the Church’s counter-statements strengthened the drama by giving the viewer more access to the Scientologists’ mindset, shedding light on how they explain their actions to themselves.

  Among the claims in the letters from the Church was the delightful explanation that they had filmed us at various locations only because they were working on their own documentary about me. I couldn’t help finding this idea flattering and intriguing, though at the time of press there is still no sign of My Louis Theroux Movie by the Church of Scientology.

  The BBC legal and compliance teams for the most part let us say what we wanted. The only significant point of contention for them was that the scene of Tom Cruise playing backgammon was too close to the re-enactment of the Hole and that it might be construed as suggesting the star of Risky Business and the Mission Impossible franchise knew about David Miscavige’s alleged abuse and that he was around when it was allegedly happening. (Scientology denies any abuse in the Hole, or the existence of a Hole. Or the existence of a film called Holes starring Shia LaBeouf. Have I mentioned that?) To placate our lawyers, we tweaked some commentary and moved the backgammon scene a little further down the film. This still wasn’t enough. In the end the decision was referred all the way up to Danny Cohen, the BBC’s then Director of Television. From his Olympian roost, he ruled that yes, it was OK to show Tom Cruise and David Miscavige playing backgammon.

  Along with its letters and rebuttals, the Church also sent a thick ring-binder full of printed papers in individual plastic sheaves. It was entitled ‘Letters from Executives and Staff who have been at the Gold Base since the 1990s’. It contained a hundred or so written testimonials from Sea Org personnel, in a variety of fonts, many with jazzy photos of the correspondents grinning and looking as though they were trying a little too hard to telegraph freedom and self-expression and definitely-not-in-a-cult-ness. What was eerie was the way the letters all hit the same talking points. Every one described the luxurious conditions staff live in and featured a vignette depicting Miscavige’s wonderful personality. ‘He is the most selfless person I have ever met.’ ‘He is the most compassionate man I have ever seen.’ ‘I will never forget the first time
I met him . . . He came and personally spoke to me and asked me my name.’ ‘He is the most caring person I have ever seen.’

  I imagined the orders coming in. Here is what your letter should look like. Here is a template but make it your own! The accumulation of over-the-top praise was so formulaic it had the effect of sounding utterly false.

  In late 2015 the film was accepted into the London Film Festival, and it was around the same time that we sent a link for Marty to watch. We’d maintained a cordial long-distance relationship in the months of editing. There had been some talk of possibly flying him out for the premiere, and though that idea was dropped, we were still hopeful he would support the film and view it as a fair-minded albeit warts-and-all portrait. He wrote back to say, in somewhat muted terms, he had found it ‘clever’ and to congratulate us for being true to our word about showing the conditions in the Hole. A few days later he wrote again. This time he wasn’t so complimentary. He said he hated the film and he blamed Simon for – as he saw it – conning him into participating in a project that was wholly different than the one that was promised. On the plus side, he seemed to regard me as too trivial and unserious to deserve the same level of vitriol – though he did call me an ‘assclown’. He labelled John a ‘rimless zero’. In subsequent months, he made other false allegations – claiming that I had egged him on to be more lurid in his scripting of the alleged abuse in the Hole.