A Very Private Celebrity

by Hugh Purcell

  Yours ever, John7

  He must have been relieved to get it, for she did not dispense praise lightly. Indeed, a few weeks before, at the morning-after meeting of the Panorama team, she had reprimanded him: ‘Mr Freeman, I can’t tell you how bad you were last night.’

  Considering the popularity of Face to Face, it is remarkable how many of those ‘approached’ (not quite the same as ‘invited’) for interview between April and December 1959 turned the offer down. Of seventy-two ‘approaches’, only ten were successful. There was a ‘no’ from Danny Kaye, Laurence Olivier (‘not interested’), Eamon De Valera (‘constitutional reasons’), Igor Stravinsky (‘definitely no’), Pablo Casals, T. S. Eliot (‘not inclined to appear on TV’), Lord Beaverbrook (‘dislikes personal publicity’), Noël Coward (‘not coming to England’) and Charlie Chaplin (‘working on memoirs’). There were no replies from Groucho Marx, the Shah of Persia, Alec Guinness, Maria Callas, Ernest Hemingway, Ed Murrow and Frank Sinatra. There was a ‘perhaps’ from Evelyn Waugh (‘for a larger fee’ – the standard fee was 100 guineas) and Stanley Spencer (‘scarcely worth the while’), but a ‘yes’ from Cecil Beaton, Harry Belafonte, Augustus John, Gilbert Harding and Stirling Moss. Later Evelyn Waugh relented and gave Freeman a prickly interview.

  There was also a category of ‘not approved’, meaning that the choice of Burnett and Freeman was rejected by Grace Wyndham Goldie or Cecil McGivern (the controller of television programmes). This category included Oswald Mosley, the Dean of Canterbury, Jomo Kenyatta and Albert Schweitzer. The odd one out was Schweitzer, as his ‘English was no good’; the others, presumably, all had political black marks. Mosley was the former fascist leader; the ‘Red’ Dean of Canterbury was an unyielding supporter of the Soviet Union; and Jomo Kenyatta was allegedly the leader of the Mau Mau revolutionaries in Kenya, who had just been released from prison. However, this does not mean, necessarily, that the interviews were censored for political reasons. Grace Wyndham Goldie may well have thought that these three subjects would be so unpopular with a British audience that she would lose her precious viewing figures, plus there were more straightforward talks programmes, like Panorama, which could take them on.

  The Face to Face with Carl Jung, recorded at the professor’s home in Zurich in June 1959, was an historic coup. It was the only TV interview ever given by the world’s greatest living psychologist and founder of the concept of the collective unconscious. He was eighty-four and would be dead within two years. For this reason, the tape, script and then DVD of the interview were, and still are, in demand all over the world.

  Curiously, wrote Hugh Burnett, Jung was the only one of thirty-five guests to refuse to have his portrait sketched for the opening credits:

  Instead, we filmed paper captions floating on the lake by his house. He stood nearby, leaning on his stick and smiling as he watched us trying to drift the paper past the camera lens. I said to him, with a straight face, ‘Professor Jung, perhaps we could start this film with a shot of you coming out of the water from your morning swim?’

  ‘Ah yes,’ he replied, ‘emerging from the unconscious.’8

  At one stage during the interview, Freeman’s usual presence of mind seemed to desert him:

  FREEMAN: Do you now believe in God?

  JUNG: Now? Difficult to answer. I know. I don’t need to believe. I know.

  FREEMAN: Well, now what made you decide to become a doctor?

  Millions of viewers must have been beside themselves with frustration not knowing why the world’s greatest psychologist knew that God existed. Several of them wrote to Jung, who replied:

  Mr Freeman in his characteristic manner fired the question you allude to at me in a somewhat surprising way, so that I was perplexed and had to say the next thing that came into my mind. As soon as the answer had left ‘the edge of my teeth’ I knew I had said something controversial, puzzling, even ambiguous. I was therefore waiting for letters like yours.9

  Freeman himself wrote to Jung for the answer to the question he should have asked, and received this in return:

  I did not say in the programme, ‘There is a God.’ I said, ‘I do not need to believe in God: I know.’ Which does not mean, ‘I do know a certain God’ (Zeus, Jahwe, Allah, the Trinitarian God etc.), but rather ‘I do know that I am obviously confronted with a factor unknown in itself, which I call God.’ I remember him, I evoke him, whenever I use his name overcome by anger or fear, whenever I involuntarily say, ‘Oh God!’ It is an apt name given to all overpowering emotions in my own psychical system, subduing my conscious will and usurping control over myself. In accordance with tradition, I call the power of fate in this positive as well as negative aspect and, in as much as its origin is outside my control, ‘god’, a ‘personal god’; since my fate means very much itself, particularly when it approaches me in the form of conscience or vox dei, with which I can converse and argue.10

  In the cutting room back home, Burnett was finding Jung hard going:

  Dear John,

  I enclose a copy of the Jung script. Unless you press me very hard, I shall cut this programme on viewer appeal rather than psychiatrist’s significance. I realise I might be hacking a very significant statement. However, from page fourteen onwards, some of Jung’s statements are very difficult to follow. Up to thirteen, the material is excellent in terms of Face to Face technique, change of subject and vivid autobiography.11

  Freeman, on the other hand, was most intrigued and keen to know Jung further. The opportunity came in a scarcely believable way. The Face to Face interview had been watched by the publisher Wolfgang Foges. He thought Jung should write a book for educated readers who understood Freud’s basic theories of psychoanalysis, but were unfamiliar with Jung’s. Sensing Freeman’s interest, Foges asked him to persuade Jung.

  ‘I jumped at the idea,’ wrote Freeman, ‘and set off once more to Zurich. Jung listened to me in his garden for two hours almost without interruption – and then said no.’ That might have been the end of what would become Man and His Symbols had fate, or Jung’s subconscious, not intervened. Jung had a dream in which ‘a multitude of people were listening to him in rapt attention and appearing to understand what he said’ (Freeman’s italics). Crucial to Jungianism is the belief that man should be guided by his ‘unconscious’, as revealed in dreams. So Jung changed his mind – on two conditions: Freeman had to be a co-editor and he had to include essays from disciples chosen by Jung.

  Freeman accepted, but the second condition tried his patience beyond the limit. Urbane and charming he was, but Freeman was also used to getting his way, and neurotic European psychoanalysts were not his company of choice. He wrote in the margin of the essay by Jolande Jacobi, ‘I puke on this’ and – scarcely restraining himself from throwing it in the bin – handed over the entire manuscript to his friend Norman MacKenzie.12

  Man and His Symbols was completed in the month of Jung’s death, June 1961, and published with an introduction by Freeman.

  Freeman wrote that Jung had initially laid down the subject matter and outline of the book, but then ‘the last year of his life was devoted almost entirely to [finishing] it’. Jung had asked him to be co-editor (with his closest professional friend Dr Marie-Louise von Franz of Zurich) because he, Freeman, was the ‘average reader’ and therefore what he could understand ‘would be intelligible to all’.

  Freeman (and Norman MacKenzie) took their job seriously: ‘I have scrupulously insisted on having every paragraph written, and, if necessary, rewritten, to a degree of clarity and directness that enables me to say that in its entirety this book is designed for the general reader.’ Freeman prided himself in his writing more than in his interviewing, and later said he wished he had spent more time as a teacher. Here he introduces the subject of the book:

  Jung’s thinking has coloured the world of modern psychology more than many of those with casual knowledge realise. Such familiar terms, for instance, as ‘extravert’, ‘introvert’, and ‘archetype’ are all Jungi
an concepts – borrowed and sometimes misused by others. But his overwhelming contribution to psychological understanding is his concept of the unconscious – not (like the unconscious of Freud) merely a sort of glory-hole of repressed desires, but a world that is as much a vital and real part of the life of an individual as the conscious, ‘cogitating’ world of the ego, and infinitely wider and richer. The language and the ‘people’ of the unconscious are symbols, and the means of communication are dreams.

  Thus an examination of Man and His Symbols is, in effect, an examination of man’s relations with his unconscious. And since in Jung’s view the unconscious is the great friend, guide and advisor to the conscious, the book is related in the most direct terms to the study of human beings and their spiritual problems.13

  The comedian Tony Hancock was Freeman’s twelfth guest, the interview pre-recorded in January 1960. For Hancock, it was a huge honour to be invited. He was the first popular entertainer on a roll call of world-famous philosophers, lawyers and writers. He was an autodidact whose shelves at home in Sussex contained the works of Russell and Jung – and now he was going to occupy the same chair as them! Hancock did not want to be regarded as a professional buffoon, but rather as an introspective thinker who spent much of his leisure time working on self-improvement, and he therefore took the interview very seriously. According to his brother, this was literally fatal, as it set him on a course of unhealthy introspection and self-destruction: ‘It was the biggest mistake he ever made. I think it all started from that really. He should never have done it. Tony was an intelligent man, but he was not an intellectual. He was carried away by John’s intellect. Self-analysis – that was his killer.’14

  Before the interview, he compiled and answered his own questions, despite the advice of his foil in Hancock’s Half Hour, Sid James: ‘For God’s sake, don’t answer everything truthfully – you’ll be right in it!’ But Hancock ignored the well-known warning among comedians to not take themselves too seriously. He was determined to tell the truth.

  Freeman’s aim was to push this to the limit, although he did not quite put it that way. He said he set out to explore ‘the old Pagliacci theme, the sorrow behind the mask of laughter, of which he was a prime example. I thought the public would be interested in seeing a little of the torment that goes into the making of a great comic.’15

  On Face to Face, Hancock was obviously nervous – pursing his lips, puffing on a cigarette butt and grimacing. He answered questions about his childhood, about why he was childless, about his ill health, about whether he was happy and about why he was anxious, but it was only in the last few minutes that Freeman became persistent and intrusive.

  FREEMAN: There appears to be something that is troubling you and I would like to know what it is?

  HANCOCK: I would not expect happiness. I don’t think that’s possible. I’m very fortunate with my work.

  FREEMAN: You would not change your life at all? I wonder if you really get very much out of your triumphs. You’ve got cars you don’t drive; you’ve got health you tell me is ropey. You find it difficult to learn your lines; you’ve got money you don’t spend; you are worried about your weight.

  HANCOCK: I spend the money. I do. I enjoy it.

  FREEMAN: I want to put to you one last question. You could stop all this tomorrow if you wanted to. Tell me, why do you go on?

  HANCOCK: Because it [my work] absolutely fascinates me, because I love it and because it is my entire life.

  The audience research report on Face to Face with Tony Hancock was mixed. The reaction index was well below average, at 64 per cent, and some found the interview ‘painful’.

  ‘John Freeman hit below the belt and at times was impertinent,’ reported one of the panel. ‘His questions seemed barbed with antagonism,’ said another. There was even some sympathy for Hancock: ‘He was like a fish out of water.’

  Others, however, thought the interview was ‘painfully effective’ and ‘most accomplished’.

  Freeman wrote to the Daily Telegraph in self-defence: ‘I judged that more of Hancock’s complex and fascinating personality would appear on the screen if he was kept at full stretch. I hope viewers did not equate that with hostility. I am sure Hancock didn’t.’

  Hancock certainly did not. He went round to Heath Mansions to watch the programme being broadcast and afterwards he stressed that he had felt no embarrassment: ‘After all, we know that if you go on a programme like that, some of the questions are going to be tough. They were tough, but good, and I’m sorry that Freeman got the worst of the criticism.’

  The two became friends, and the self-improvement continued. Catherine remembers spending the weekend with the Hancocks at Lingfield in Sussex and falling asleep (she was heavily pregnant), much to John’s displeasure, while he and Hancock discussed a chart on the wall linking quotations from Kant, Hegel and Descartes. ‘This man has a fine mind,’ Hancock said of Freeman, ‘and he was very good for me because he used to listen and then he would say, “Some of your points are very good, but you are talking like a student.” I’m very fond of him.’16

  After the Hancocks’ marriage fell apart, Tony took refuge in Freeman’s flat at Heath Mansions. When the Freemans were in India, Tony stayed with them in New Delhi on his way to Australia to do a new show. Soon after arriving in Sydney he committed suicide.

  On 11 April, some months after the Hancock Face to Face, John Freeman was Roy Plomley’s guest on Desert Island Discs. His choice of music was eclectic but familiar. In fact, Kathleen Ferrier singing ‘What Is Life?’ (‘the voice that has moved me most in my lifetime’), Dylan Thomas (‘whom I have met’) reading his own ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’, Billie Holiday singing ‘Strange Fruit’, and Toscanini conducting Verdi’s ‘Agnus Dei’ are among the most popular records chosen in the long history of the programme. However, Freeman must be one of the few guests to have welcomed the desert island – ‘I have often thought that an enforced spell in prison or hospital would be a good way of collecting my senses’ – but did he really mean that, or was it an example of an interesting but untruthful answer? He admitted, surprisingly, that before Face to Face he was ‘absolutely shaking with nerves’.

  Roy Plomley was most interested in Freeman’s interviewing technique:

  PLOMLEY: Some rather rough words have been used about your interviewing technique in Face to Face. Brutal is one; aggressive is another; third degree is a third. Fair comment?

  FREEMAN: Not really. I think occasionally I have been aggressive when I thought it necessary, but I hope never brutal and never third degree.

  PLOMLEY: I watched your programme with Tony Hancock. One of the questions you asked concerned his degree of affection for his mother. Now, surely that is more suited to psychoanalysis than a TV interview?

  FREEMAN: It depends entirely what you’re trying to get out of a person and whether he’s willing to answer. After all, no one has to appear with me on TV unless they want to. I was anxious to find out some of the things that worked on Hancock in his childhood, and this appeared to be relevant. He answered, as far as I remember, quite happily.

  PLOMLEY: Well, the camera was showing, to put it mildly, that your questions were disconcerting Tony Hancock. In fact, once or twice he was squirming, but you still pressed home the attack.

  FREEMAN: It wasn’t an attack at all. It was an attempt to keep him at full stretch, because I thought in this way people would understand more about him. He’s a very shy man – inarticulate when separated from his script-writers – and there was a danger that if I let him relax too much he would just talk in comfortable platitudes, as showbiz people sometimes do.

  From Freeman’s perspective, the high point and low point of Face to Face occurred, respectively, with the racing driver Stirling Moss and the painter Augustus John.

  He told Anthony Clare that his interview with Moss (with Albert Finney, the only Face to Face subject alive in 2015), broadcast in June 1960, ‘was almost the only one I can ever recall doing
on Face to Face, or anywhere else, for that matter, from which I came away reasonably satisfied’. He had expected a playboy with a talent for driving fast cars, but he instead found an ‘intensely serious professional’. Moss dismissed the concept of fear and replaced it with a matter of calculation: if you got the calculation right, there was nothing to be afraid of. Freeman observed: ‘This was a man of cold, precise, clinical engineering judgement, and that surprised me very much indeed.’

  Freeman revealed that the notion of a man who could live so closely to the edge of death and danger, but trust entirely his own judgement to keep on the right side of the line, appealed to him very much. The analogy could be applied to Freeman’s live broadcasting of Face to Face. In front of an audience of several million and with no escape, Freeman had to trust his own judgement to keep on the right side of the line and deliver a winning interview. John Freeman and Stirling Moss had much in common, and perhaps this was why he found the interview so satisfying.

  The Face to Face with Augustus John, pre-recorded but eventually broadcast after retakes in May 1960, was a near disaster. The old painter appeared semi-drunk and slightly senile. For once, Freeman appeared to have no empathy and little courtesy; in fact, he could barely contain his irritation. Afterwards he let rip to Burnett:

  It was a fiasco. I feel sure that nothing can be salvaged that could be worthily used in Face to Face. You may be able to sling something together but I shall take the strongest exception to this being put out as one of a series that has very high standards. Throughout a long afternoon he said little that was coherent and absolutely nothing that was interesting.

  The important lesson is that we should never undertake a Face to Face without thoroughly reconnoitring the subject. On the whole, we should fight shy of octogenarians for all sorts of reasons, but please let us never try this one again.17