In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  ‘The audience were always young teenagers, from 13 up to 16 or 17,’ confirms Stanley Dorfman, who directed Top of the Pops once a fortnight from the show’s inception in January 1964. ‘Kids were dying to be on it … If they were dancers and were attractive, obviously they got on.’

  Dorfman remembers Jimmy Savile for being ‘absolutely brilliant’ as a presenter. ‘He was totally outgoing, he had the kids right away. They adored him because he talked like them and he knew about the music and he was always funny.’

  Part of the attraction, Dorfman believes, was they knew Savile was on friendly terms with many of their idols. He shared a table with The Beatles and Brian Epstein at Mecca’s prestigious Carl-Alan Awards at the Empire Ballroom, Leicester Square, and as compère of the first NME Poll Winners Party, he introduced the Fab Four to Wembley’s packed Empire Pool. Bounding onto the stage in a light suit, dark glasses and a variety of hats, the zany, platinum-haired DJ told screaming fans, ‘Nowhere in the whole wide world has such a concert been assembled.’ It was a claim supported by the line-up: The Beatles, Manfred Mann, The Tremeloes, Cliff Richard, Billy J. Kramer, Freddy and The Dreamers, Kathy Kirby, Gerry and The Pacemakers and The Rolling Stones.

  The Stones were riding high in the charts at the time with ‘Not Fade Away’, their first big hit. After championing the group to the doubting bosses at Decca, Savile had set about applying a positive spin to five young men being portrayed as the antithesis of the clean-cut ‘Mop Tops’.

  He told me that he had witnessed the ‘mini riots’ at some of the Stones’ early gigs and reckoned they played on their reputation for trouble. ‘They were the sort of group that almost promoted it,’ Savile said. ‘It went with the territory but at the height of the rioting, if you parked outside Mick Jagger’s house you would see him at 11 o’clock in the morning going down the road to the Queen’s Club with a tennis bag and tennis gear. It was all part of the game.’

  That summer, shortly after Savile’s newspaper column prediction had come to pass that ‘It’s All Over Now’ would give the Stones their first number 1 record, the group were booked to play at the Top Ten Club at Belle Vue.

  The band flew in from a short tour of northern Europe and their reputation seemed to follow them. According to those who were there, the atmosphere that night in the New Elizabethan Ballroom was febrile, and not even Savile’s team of infamous doormen could stop fights breaking out across the venue. At one point, the police were called in to restore order. Jimmy Savile stood at the front of the revolving stage playing records to try to relieve the tension.

  It was then, he said, that one of his disc jockeys informed him The Stones were refusing to go on. Instructing the DJ to take over, Savile went to the back of the revolving stage to find out what the problem was. It transpired that The Stones’ instruments had got lost in transit and they were refusing to use those belonging to the support group.

  Savile’s response was characteristically blunt: he pointed to where three of his largest minders were standing and growled, ‘You’ve got the time it takes this stage to revolve to make your mind up … If you’re not going to play you’re going to be unconscious because my minders are going to chin all of you.’ All except drummer Charlie Watts, that is. Savile claimed that Watts looked him up and down before speaking. ‘You would, wouldn’t you?’ he said. ‘No danger,’ replied Savile. ‘And I’ll throw you to the fucking audience. I guarantee you that.’

  Left with no choice, The Rolling Stones grabbed the instruments on offer and climbed onto the revolving stage. Meanwhile, Jimmy Savile took up a position on the top tier from where he could keep an eye on the group, his dancehall and, most importantly, savour his victory. ‘I would have had the bastards chinned and slung to the crowd,’ he told me. ‘If they’d lived or died, it wouldn’t have mattered to me.’

  Bill Wyman confirms the story is true: ‘Eventually, after prolonged arguments, we agreed (or were forced!) to go on stage by Jimmy Savile, the compere, and the management’, he wrote in his memoirs.1

  Jimmy Savile was quite prepared to use violence, whether real or threatened. Todd Slaughter was a teenage Elvis Presley fanatic who had met Savile in Great Yarmouth in the summer of 1963. They had stayed in touch, and the following spring Slaughter visited London to appear on The Teen and Twenty Disc Club to promote his ‘Elvis via Telstar’ campaign which, it was hoped, would culminate in a live concert being beamed to Europe using the new satellite.

  On his way to see Savile at the Aaland Hotel, Slaughter says he was pounced on by ‘a bunch of ne’er-do-wells’. Help was at hand. ‘Jimmy appeared,’ he says, ‘and went up to one and put his hand at the side of his face and plunged his thumb into the guy’s eye socket. What spurted out was horrific.’

  *

  Jimmy Savile was named Melody Maker’s Disc Jockey of the Year in September 1964, and took his mother along to the gala lunch at the Savoy Hotel as his special guest. In deposing the suave, well-spoken and smartly dressed David Jacobs, this strangely-attired, working-class son of Yorkshire had struck an early blow for ‘the classless society’ that Labour leader Harold Wilson would outline on becoming prime minister less than a month later.

  Not everyone was pleased, it seemed: ‘Although disc jockey Jimmy Savile may be “with it” I think it is ridiculous of him to keep his age secret,’ wrote Miss B.F. Tilehurst in a letter published in the Daily Mirror. ‘It is obvious he hasn’t been a teenager for at least fifteen years. As for that silly hair … get it cut!’

  The truth was that Jimmy Savile was now closing in on his 38th birthday, making him much older than almost everyone in the pop world he now ruled. John Lennon was 24, Paul McCartney was 22, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were 21. When she made her Top of the Pops debut in February 1964, Cilla Black was just 20. ‘To me,’ said Black, ‘Jimmy Savile seemed like an old man even then.’2

  Perhaps it was his age that explained why Savile viewed the pop business differently to those caught up in its maelstrom. His newspaper columns were ripe with allusions to what he clearly considered to be the most important aspect of this new industry.

  After returning from his second trip to California to see Elvis Presley in April 1964, he pondered on Colonel Tom Parker, ‘the cash brain behind Elvis’3 and marvelled at how together they were making £40,000 a week. On other occasions, he talked about sitting in the leather chairs at Isow’s restaurant in the West End and watching the ‘the big brains’ at work while ruminating on how a ‘star can make £1,000 a week, but if a theatre is a sellout, a promoter can make £1,000 a night’. When quantifying the growing popularity of The Rolling Stones, he referred not to record sales but the fact they were ‘grossing five or six hundred pounds a week’. To Jimmy Savile, pop music was nothing but business.

  His own wealth remained his most reliable source of copy, though, whether in writing about taking delivery of a new Rolls-Royce, insuring himself for a £1 million before taking a helicopter flight to open a night club in Rhyl or spending £250 on a pair of ‘black jewelled mink shoes’. In December 1964, a profile in the Daily Sketch described him as crouching by the gas fire ‘like a beatnik hitch-hiker who had just borrowed enough money to pay for a night’s kip in [an] obscure hotel’.4 And yet, as the article reported, Jimmy Savile was now making £40,000 a year for himself and another £46,000 for charity.

  His moneymaking enterprises now included appearing in films (Ferry Across the Mersey) and fronting TV specials for foreign markets (Pop Gear). After the success of his debut bout in Manchester, he was snapped up on a lucrative five-year contract by wrestling promoter George Rel.

  In the dilapidated flat in Manchester where Savile carried on living, however, there was little more than a kettle and a single ring for heating baked beans. If anyone drove him south to London, they were made to sleep on the floor of his 18-shilling-a-night room at the Aaland Hotel.

  Savile’s star continued to rise and his banner year was capped when he was hired as compère of The Beatles’ 1964 Chris
tmas Show at Hammersmith Odeon. He told me the building was under permanent siege from screaming fans, and that he passed the hours before the curtain went up by helping young girls to spend some priceless seconds with their heroes. ‘I finished up all week running up and down stairs like a flippin’ yo-yo with deserving causes until the Fab Four started to call me Dr Dogood,’ he said.

  It was a label he liked, and corresponded with how he determined the world should see him as. Although he continued to exhibit a perverse pride in his tight-fistedness, especially when it came to his own living arrangements, Jimmy Savile was becoming increasingly well known for his charity work; the do-gooding somehow counterbalancing what he was demanding and taking from the young people who looked up to him. His increasingly high-profile acts of spontaneous kindness to help others, he claimed, influenced how he came to organise his perpetual motion lifestyle.

  ‘I came to a crossroads,’ Savile said. ‘I found I was making enough money out of one or two days of work to live like a millionaire. What do you do in this situation? Do you turn into a money grabber? Or do you see if there is anybody to be helped along the way? I chose the latter path.’5

  *

  But like the many facets of Jimmy Savile’s existence, the reality wasn’t quite as simple as that. While he undoubtedly generated very significant sums for a variety of good causes over the course of his life, he was and remained a money grabber to his core. And if his charitable deeds were designed to salve a guilty conscience, there is evidence he knew he had to raise a lot to balance the ledger.

  In early October 2012, a woman came forward to reveal that Jimmy Savile raped her in his hotel near Russell Square in 1964. She was a 16-year-old virgin at the time.

  The woman said they had first met when she appeared on his Radio Luxembourg show to talk about her Elvis Presley fan club. Savile was due to fly out to America soon afterwards to pay his second visit to ‘the King’, and he asked the girl for a picture of herself that he could take and show to her idol.

  According to the woman, who did not want to reveal her identity, on returning from the States, Savile phoned her house and told her that he had a present for her from Elvis. She was understandably thrilled and recalled walking to the London hotel where Savile was staying. She said he met her in his pyjamas. He then took her into his room, pinned her to the wall and started kissing her. The woman said she pleaded for him to stop. He whispered, ‘You’re an angel,’6 before pushing her onto the bed and raping her.

  The woman, who said she weighed just six and a half stone at the time, said, ‘I couldn’t stop him. I was telling him it hurt. I was holding my body so tight to try to stop him, but he was so heavy, he was too strong. Afterwards, he said to me, “You’re alright now,” as if he’d done me a favour.’ Savile then got dressed and went out to dinner with a friend, offering her some badges from Kissin’ Cousins, Elvis Presley’s new film, before he left.

  The girl returned by train to the family home in Essex, and after missing her next two periods, the awful realisation dawned that she was pregnant. She says she tried, and failed, to induce a miscarriage. Not long afterwards, her parents confronted her. ‘They knew it was Jimmy because he called the house the same week to speak to me,’ she said. ‘My mum told him I was pregnant and he said, “It’s not possible.” Those were his words. He didn’t call again.’7

  The woman recalled her father wept when he realised what had happened, and that she was taken one Sunday morning to a local GP who performed an illegal abortion. It cost £150, money that she had to borrow from her grandmother. She said she went through the ordeal without painkillers, and went on to suffer a series of miscarriages in her twenties.

  Not long after this story was published, the Metropolitan Police announced it had discovered an intelligence record held by its Paedophile Unit, also dating from 1964. The first entry on the record related to a house on Battersea Bridge Road in London that was inhabited by four older girls and a youth, possibly a homosexual. It stated absconders from Duncroft Approved School used the house.

  A second entry contained the notes ‘Absconders’ and ‘Vice Ring’ and mentioned three ‘coloured’ men who were charged with living on the immoral earnings of two girls identified as having absconded from Duncroft. One of the men was given a prison sentence of two years, one failed to appear at the Central Criminal Court on 5 November 1964 and the third was found not guilty. In the ledger, Jimmy Savile was recorded as being a regular visitor to the house.8

  30. TCP TONIGHT

  Time magazine’s cover story on 15 April 1966 anointed London as ‘The Swinging City’. Postwar austerity felt like a fading memory, affluence and individuality were changing the face of society, and old class divisions were dissolving amid the influx of young people from the provinces to the capital. From John Lennon and Paul McCartney to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards; Michael Caine to Terence Stamp; Jean Shrimpton to Twiggy, the icons of this new age were young, British and, for the most part, working class.

  The country also had its youngest prime minister for 70 years, a pipe-smoking Yorkshireman by the name of Harold Wilson. But another son of the West Ridings was determined to defy the ageing process, picking up Disc Jockey of the Year awards in numerous polls while protesting to newspaper reporters that he was still only 17. The truth is Jimmy Savile was fast approaching 40.

  ‘He never struck me as being that old,’ says Stephen Hayes, who joined the Manchester City Police as a cadet in 1963 and went on to work in A Division, based at the Bootle Street station in the city centre. He recalls the centre of Manchester, where the city’s thriving nightlife unfolded, as being an area ‘full of old warehouse properties … separated by a web of narrow entries and alleyways … the type of dark alleys you’d use to film a Jack the Ripper movie’. He says that ‘as the evening’s entertainment turned steamy, the doorways became occupied with couples … having sex under the cover of darkness, making good use of the stone steps to adjust for height and optimum penetration without the knee ligaments collapsing, or a disc slipping out of place’.1 He adds that police officers, even those on duty, were as likely to be found indulging as civilians.

  Later, as a plain-clothes officer, Hayes says he was one of a small group of police officers who paid social visits to Savile at his flat. ‘One of the lads used to be a bit closer to him than the rest of us,’ he explains. It would seem to confirm what Tony Calder says about Savile going out of his way to cultivate close relationships with police officers wherever he was.

  ‘We used to tag on for the girly element,’ adds Hayes. When I asked him what he meant by ‘girly element’, Hayes confirmed Savile always had girls in his flat, although he was adamant they were above the age of consent. Of the three or four police officers that went at any one time, some would disappear off into another room with them. He also says one of the officers was from the drug squad and would sometimes take along cannabis which he would smoke with Savile at these social meetings.

  ‘[The officer Savile was close to] used to go wherever [Savile] was, wherever he was appearing,’ replies Hayes. ‘We all did really. It was part of the social life; let’s go and have a laugh at Savile, sort of thing. It wasn’t gigs; we’d just turn up anywhere and everywhere where drugs were likely to be. In those days, there was very little serious hard stuff. It was always speed, especially purple hearts, and the cannabis.’

  I ask Hayes why they were in Savile’s flat, and what they were doing. ‘It was a case of “What shall we do?”’ he says. ‘Let’s go and look at Savile, that sort of thing. It wasn’t laid on, it was just there and there were girls in the place. They never struck me as children. They were like 18 or 20, I’d have thought … It was no big deal, Savile was just another mug to go and visit and take advantage of. Nobody had really heard of paedophiles.’

  When the crumbling house in Manchester was made the subject of a compulsory purchase order, Savile hung in long enough to make sure of being offered an alternative by the council. In his case, and d
espite the fact he could afford a mansion if he wanted one, it was an £8 a week council flat on Bury New Road in Salford.

  Alan Leeke, who first came across Savile at the Top Ten Club, was by this time working as a junior reporter on a local newspaper. He visited the one-bedroom, penthouse apartment, having been sent to write a story on Ascot Court’s famous new resident. He says he arrived to find Savile sitting in darkness.

  Leeke had got to know Savile through Top of the Pops while it was recorded at the converted church on Dickenson Road in Rusholme. ‘I had an entry pass to go in any time,’ he says. ‘I saw him there and would talk to him about various things. He used to introduce me to the various pop acts that were on: Charlie [Watts] of The Rolling Stones, The Bachelors and Cilla Black.’

  On another occasion, Leeke arranged to write a news item on Jimmy Savile and his many cars, which were being kept in a garage off Great Ancoats Street. When he went round to arrange a time for some photographs to be taken, he again found the flat in darkness. ‘Both times I went there the curtains were always closed,’ Leeke confirms. ‘Not a lot of furniture; a few records on the wall in frames, not very comfortable.’

  He recalls that on his second visit Savile was wearing a tracksuit. Soon after he arrived, he says, a girl turned up. ‘She was 16-ish and wearing a miniskirt,’ he says. ‘She went straight into the bedroom and [Savile] followed her. He said to me, “I’ll be back shortly.”’ The young reporter was left to sit alone in the darkened front room.

  ‘Then [Savile] came out of the bedroom and shouted, “Are you still there?”’ says Leeke. ‘I said, “Yes”, and stood up and went into the corridor where the other room was.’ Leeke recalls the kitchen was at the far end of the corridor. ‘I was stood in the corridor and could see straight into the kitchen. And that’s when he proceeded to wash himself off in the kitchen sink.’