In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  He told me The Beatles of that time reminded him of ‘four university students that had just graduated’. He then looked up at the picture on the wall of his living room which showed him sat between John, Paul, Ringo and George with all five of them pretending to be asleep. ‘They were quite special but also quite funny,’ he said. ‘When you are on top of the tree like that you become more defensive than funny.’

  ‘We knew Jimmy and we worked with him, he was a DJ, an MC on some of the shows,’ confirmed Paul McCartney.7 On one occasion in the group’s early days, they offered Savile a lift in their van across the Pennines after playing a gig in Yorkshire.

  ‘He told us all these stories about his wartime exploits, how he had been buying chewing gum and nylons and all that, and selling them,’ McCartney said. ‘He had all sorts of stuff going on. He was the older hustler guy, and we were very amused by these stories because he was a great entertainer, but we dropped him off at his place outside his house and we said, “Can we come in for a coffee?” and he said, “Oh, no, not tonight lads.”

  ‘When he’d gone we thought, “Why doesn’t he let us in? What is it, because most people would have let us in that we gave a lift to?” So we always thought there was something a little bit suspect.’

  McCartney added they were different times. ‘[In] that post-war boom, girls and guys, it was a much more open scene … free love and the Pill had just come in, so it was a completely different scene. The other aspect, of course, is that we – though not quite Jimmy – were of the age of the girls.’ In December 1963 Paul McCartney was 21; Jimmy Savile was 35.

  ‘We were all young,’ McCartney continued. ‘So if you’re now talking about a 17-, 18-year-old boy with a 15-year-old girl, we all knew that was illegal. We knew it and it was like, “No”. But the closer we were in age, of course, the less it seemed to matter. We knew with under-16s it was illegal, so we didn’t do it.’

  McCartney insisted they always tried to be certain when it came to girls. ‘We couldn’t always be sure but there was a definite no-no involved in underage kids,’ he said. ‘Hey, listen, we didn’t have to worry. There were plenty of over-16-year-olds.’

  Liverpool’s finest were still riding high at the top of the charts on New Year’s Day 1964 as Jimmy Savile introduced the very first episode of Top of the Pops. It was a new show for a new era in which beat groups, led by The Beatles, would dominate the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. The powers at the BBC were less convinced, commissioning an initial run of just six weeks.

  Savile spent the build-up to the first show working closely with Johnnie Stewart in trying to ‘guesstimate’ what the chart would look like on Wednesday 1 January. It was a crucial calculation; the charts were released at 8.30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, leaving little over 24 hours to have a line-up in place to film. Typically, Savile claimed to have correctly predicted eight positions out of the first Top 10.

  ‘Everyone’s nerves were sticking out like porcupine quills,’8 he recalled of the day of the first broadcast. All bar one person, that is, for in the very next breath Jimmy Savile claimed to be as relaxed and confident as ever. In fact, he had spent the previous evening in London at the Sunday People’s New Year’s Ball, before catching the 4.20 a.m. train to Manchester.

  The Rolling Stones, who Savile had promoted extensively on his Radio Luxembourg show, rolled up at the Dickenson Road studios in their pink VW tour van. They were at number 13 in the charts with ‘I Want to Be Your Man’. The Hollies, at number 17 with ‘Stay’, spent the hours before transmission moaning about the chaos masquerading as rehearsals. ‘It was ramshackle,’ confirmed Keith Richards, ‘like people were making it up as they went along. Jimmy Savile’s energy kept it all together. He kept popping in and out, going “All right boys, all right? He energized the whole thing before the show went out.”’9

  At 6.36 p.m., the red studio light switched to ‘live’ and the cameras zoomed in on Jimmy Savile. He was dressed in a sober black shirt and seated at a desk in front of a large illuminated board showing the week’s chart. Unlike the other presenters on the show, he did not have ‘disc maid’ Denise Sampey sitting beside him to put the pick-up arm on the record as the cue for the camera to fade up to the band miming on stage. As an experienced dancehall DJ, Savile argued this is what he did every night of the week.

  The Rolling Stones opened the show, followed by studio ‘performances’ from Dusty Springfield (‘I Only Want to Be With You’), The Dave Clark Five (‘Glad All Over’), the Hollies (‘Stay’) and Swinging Blue Jeans (‘Hippy Hippy Shake’). In between were pre-recorded items with Cliff Richard with The Shadows and Freddie and The Dreamers. The finale arrived with the week’s number 1 single, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ by The Beatles. As the group were on tour in America the song was played over a montage of news clips.

  ‘Man I lost a lot of flesh … because a first ever show of a series can be murder,’ Savile reflected in the Sunday People the following week. Not that much it seems: on leaving the studios on Dickinson Road, he said he dropped into the Three Coins on Fountain Street before catching the 11.55 p.m. train back to London, arriving at 7.15 a.m. the next morning. From there, he went straight to Radio Luxembourg to ‘record five shows and four commercials’. In other words: business as usual.

  Top of the Pops quickly confounded the sceptics within the BBC, although there were plenty of dissenting voices among the letters from viewers: ‘What an odd looking individual,’ remarked a solicitor of the first show’s host, while others described Jimmy Savile variously as ‘a cross between a Beatle and an Aldwych farce curate’; ‘like a Presbyterian minister’; and ‘mutton dressed as lamb’. The most vitriolic comments came from a retired naval officer who wrote, ‘Really horrific. It ought to have an X certificate. And there was Mr Savile presiding over the orgy like a Puritan clergyman resurrected from his own churchyard.’10

  Jimmy Savile presented the show once a month for the first three years of its long lifespan. He was the only one of the four presenters who wasn’t briefed in advance on his links by Johnnie Stewart, the only one not to require the services of the ‘disc maid’ and the only one not to wear a suit. ‘I wore what I used to wear in the dancehalls, which was teenage clothes,’ explained the man who had not been a teenager for 16 years when the first show went out.

  27. A DEAD STRAIGHT PULL TIME

  It was my first visit to see Jimmy Savile in the Scarborough flat he bought for his mother, and he had extended me the ‘honour’ of sleeping in the room he kept as a shrine to her.

  In her room, the narrow single bed was adorned with a pink bedspread bearing his initials in a large gold shield. Above the bedhead was an amateurish pencil drawing of the only woman that he ever loved. I knew from Louis Theroux’s documentary that her laundered clothes were hanging in the slim wardrobe on the far side of the room, sheathed in polythene to keep them fresh. On a small dressing table with a mirror stood a white crucifix and a framed picture of Savile sitting at the feet of the Duchess. She was in an armchair, knitting happily. He was in a cut-off robe and white slippers leafing through what looked like fan mail.

  After a night of deep slumber, interrupted only by a strange dream about someone lying on the floor next to the bed, I rose to find Savile in his armchair, looking out to sea. The room was heavy with the aroma of cigar smoke. On the low coffee table was an iced biscuit with a glazed cherry on top. It was, he explained, a ‘Scarborough breakfast’. Anything more substantial was unlikely for a man who refused to have cookers in his flats because they would give women the wrong idea. And the wrong idea, as he always insisted, would only lead to ‘brain damage’.

  We talked about Elvis Presley, who he met on two visits to the United States. ‘His devastating quality was that he was shy,’ said Savile. ‘Of course, any bird will tell you that if you get a good looking kid who’s shy that brings out the 100 per cent predator in all women. They are so used to people like me and you being wide-heads, full of SOS – Same Old Shit – the
y feel comfortable with the shy ones.’ It was the second time Savile had told me he thought we were alike. He was trying to reel me in.

  I asked him whether there was ever a point when he thought he was falling in love. Rather than answer the question, he began telling me a familiar story about his process of deduction in the dancehalls, one that invariably meant he was left with at least 10 girls to choose from on any given night. Thankfully, before he could continue down the same well-trodden path, another thought occurred to him. ‘I didn’t think it was fair to tell one of them that they were the one,’ he said. ‘I knew I couldn’t stick with it. Girls weren’t the same in those days. They didn’t phone you up in tears. Brain damage didn’t come in for another 10 or 15 years.’

  He was off and running now. ‘In the late Fifties, early Sixties, there was no booze, no drugs and you had a roomful of people where you could have a conversation with any one of them. Because you weren’t supposed to get your leg over that was the salient point why people wanted to do it. Girls weren’t supposed to get screwed so that’s why they wanted to get screwed. Lads did it because there was a big element of you’re not supposed to do it.’

  He took a deep puff on his cigar. ‘The exciting time was when it wasn’t safe and you weren’t supposed to do it. There was no brain damage about it. There were no floods of tears next day.’

  Jimmy Savile was 81 by this time. I asked him whether he was ‘still active’. ‘Yes, oh yes. I’m active in a sort of non-pushy way because there are enough people in the eight different places that I live. When I’m in town I’ll get a phone call and someone will come over and see me. I don’t need to be pushy. Never did.’

  *

  More than three years later, we were sitting in the same room. He had talked about the period after the war when ‘everybody was confused, nobody had a job and shops didn’t sell anything because nobody had any money to buy anything’. He had then segued straight into ‘Flower Power’, which confused me. I could not imagine Jimmy Savile as a hippy – he was too driven, too opportunistic and too much of a capitalist. Free was a word he feared and loathed.

  Once he’d finished his point I asked him when he thought sex became such a salacious topic in society. ‘It was only when the tabloids started going lower orders with tits and bums that it started,’ he muttered. ‘What are tits and bums for? Sex. So the whole thing drifted that way and then you’ve got shame and then you’ve got divorces and then you’ve got big divorce settlements and things like that. So the whole thing built into a structure. It wasn’t an overnight thing. But the sex thing was almost overnight because girls objected to being used as dustbins when they got the pill.’

  But surely the pill gave women a greater sense of sexual liberation? ‘It changed things overnight,’ he argued. ‘It must have reduced the sex practice by a good eighty per cent.’ I tried not to smirk; ‘sex practice’ was just about the most functional description I had heard. He would not have noticed anyway because he was staring ahead, seemingly addressing the horizon. ‘Women all of a sudden became terribly independent,’ he continued, ‘and they weren’t going to be used as an ashtray, and quite rightly so.’

  I told him I had recently seen Nowhere Boy, the feature film about John Lennon’s adolescence. In that there seemed to be plenty of casual sex around the time Lennon formed The Quarrymen and was playing skiffle at garden fetes.

  ‘I’ve had all that down the years,’ said Savile. ‘Girls wanted to be like that, not because they wanted the fella; they wanted to be like that because they wanted to be like that. The end product – the fella – was less important than the concept. They would wait outside the stage door of a theatre for hours and it was the waiting that they wanted. If a fella came out and said, “Right, I want three of you to come in for sex – you, you and you” they would have been terribly shocked. That wasn’t what they were there for. It was the doing of it that was the thing, not so much the end product. The important bit was being with the crowd and waiting outside.’

  He explained that the first time a crowd had screamed at a ‘pop star’ was in the 1940s in the narrow cul-de-sac leading to the Savoy Hotel. ‘Johnny Ray was there and all these women were blocking the front of the hotel. This mobbing thing had never happened before. He went up onto a balcony and waved at the crowd and they all went away. Then it turned into mass hysteria with The Beatles.

  ‘I worked with The Beatles on their Christmas Show and the copper said, “Jimmy, if you’re not in the theatre by 1 p.m. we cannot guarantee you getting in at all.” They weren’t on until half past six at night – that’s where that picture was taken.’ He pointed to the same photograph of him with The Beatles as he had on his wall in Leeds. I realised it was not the only duplicate image on display. I wondered how many times such artefacts had been used as prompts, or props, for his stories.

  ‘They did two shows a night,’ he continued. ‘I had to do a sketch with them … but it didn’t work so we didn’t do it … It was the waiting outside that was the thing, you see. There was this peculiar club of waiting outside and it wasn’t the salivating at the thought of being taken in hand by one of The Beatles because that couldn’t happen. It was the being there and being in the crowd outside.’ It sounded like he was protesting too much – painting a convenient tableau of the times.

  ‘I knew girls who would fantasise over the Cliffs of this world but would be quite happy to go and get a bit of leg over with their boyfriend,’ he said. ‘I was sitting with Cliff once in his dressing room and this kid walked in, lamped him and walked back out again … There was a perfectly logical explanation: his girlfriend was besotted with Cliff and he had to sit with her while she was doing all this carrying on. So before he left the theatre he decided he was going to go back stage and give him a clump. She was quite happy with her boyfriend but she fantasised over Cliff.’

  ‘And what did you do?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, I restrained him and handed him over to the authorities.’ Jimmy Savile squeezed out another of his low, slow and malevolent laughs. ‘It was all good fun. The whole thing was enormous, enormous fun. It wasn’t serious and it wasn’t vicious and it wasn’t wicked and it wasn’t bad or taking liberties with people you shouldn’t take liberties with. Nothing like that. It was a dead straight pull time.’

  28. OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES AND SUCKLINGS

  Jimmy Savile returned to Leeds each week to call on his mother. On one such visit in the early 1960s he found her shivering in front of the electric fire, wrapped in shawls and with her feet up on the chair. ‘She looked dreadful,’ he told me. We were sitting in the flat that he bought her on the Esplanade at Scarborough, and in which he still kept her bedroom as a shrine more than 30 years after her death.

  Savile explained how he paid for his mother to spend a few weeks convalescing with the Little Sisters of the Poor in the home on the opposite side of Consort Terrace. ‘The money it cost me per week to look after her was what I would have spent on a night out,’ he said, ‘and I suddenly realised, “Holy shit, that’s what money can do for you. It really can save your life.”’

  From that moment on, he claimed money only represented what it could be used for to help his mother: ‘I made sure that she had whatever she needed,’ he said.

  After her illness, he told me she complained about living alone in Leeds: ‘So I said to her, “Right, find yourself somewhere to live.”’ When she was still moaning a few months later, he said he put her in the car and drove to Scarborough. At this point, he got up and went to the window and pointed down at the pavement: ‘I parked out there where I used to fasten my cycle to the railings,’ he said.

  Scarborough held fond memories from his outings as a child and, later, his cycling excursions from Leeds to the coast. ‘I got out, leaving her in the motor so I could have a look at the spectacular view,’ he went on. ‘And as I turned round to get in the car I looked up and there was a block of flats. I rang the bell and asked whether any of them were for sale. [A woman] tol
d me one was for rent on the ground floor for seven pound a week. I said, “I’ll have it.” That was the Monday and the Duchess moved in on the Thursday.’ Not long afterwards, he moved her upstairs after buying what he described as ‘the king flat because it has views all the way round and a balcony’.

  Later that day, as we stood on that same balcony looking out to sea, he told me another story about his mother and Scarborough. ‘I had a caravan on the cliff tops,’ he said, pointing south over the headland towards Filey. ‘When the Duchess was alive it didn’t do – and I had too much respect – to take girls back. If there were any assignations or dates we would drive down to the caravan five miles away.

  ‘The kids and the young people on the caravan site would recognise whatever car I turned up in. One day they ran up, and I got out with a girl, and this kid asked, “Who’s she?” I told them she was my sister. When I came out half an hour later, this same kid said, “She’s not your sister.” I told her she was but he had seen me laid on top of her. He had peeped in through the curtains. Rumbled in the caravan,’ he hooted. ‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings.’

  Scarborough’s seafront was to provide easy pickings for Jimmy Savile, something he alluded to in his autobiography. One stormy night in early 1965,1 he had driven his E-Type Jaguar down to the front because, as he described it, he wanted to look at the waves crashing over the front. Suddenly, out of the storm, a young girl banged on the window of the car. He said he opened the door, pulled her in and closed the door again before the next wave crashed over the bonnet.

  ‘The inside of an E-Type is not over capacious,’ he wrote, ‘and just now seemed to be full of wet body, long black hair, legs and bikini panties.’ He explained the girl had been sitting in a nearby car with her parents when she saw him go through the barrier. She had run along the sea road after him. ‘And here she was,’ he marvelled. ‘Such a start had to mean a good night.’2