In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (23 page)

Savile’s star continued to rise and his banner year was capped when he was hired as compère of The Beatles’ 1964 Christmas 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.’
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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,’
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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.’
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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.
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30. TCP TONIGHT

T
ime
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’.
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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 despite 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.’

Given that Jimmy Savile regularly entertained police officers and plied them with teenage girls, it is perhaps not surprising that
he felt empowered enough to advertise to a journalist that he was having sex with teenagers, albeit a young journalist who he knew and felt confident was too overawed to say anything. But the fact that Savile then exhibited the contempt he felt for these girls by washing his penis in the kitchen sink in front of that journalist speaks volumes about how he viewed sex as a cold, emotionless act. It also demonstrates his technique for avoiding censure, one that worked by making those who witnessed his behaviour feel a sense of complicity in it.

The girl, Leeke says, eventually came back into the sitting room. ‘I thought to myself, “He’s not going to want me here.” So I made my excuses and said to him that I’d see him on Sunday at the Top Ten Club when we’d sort out arranging to take some photos of the cars. And that was it.’

Alan Leeke says he subsequently went out with three girls who had all had sexual relationships with Jimmy Savile. They were aged between 16 and 17 at the time, and each said the sex was always quick, and took place in his car or in his flat.

‘One or two of the girls told me [washing himself off] was something he did [after sex],’ Leeke adds. ‘But the more I think about it now, I wonder whether that was all set up, what with me being a member of the press. Just to set it up to show a member of the press that he could do that.’

In October 2012, Mary (not her real name), a grandmother of four, recounted how Jimmy Savile had taken her virginity in 1966. She was 15 at the time, flat chested and just entering puberty. She said that she’d developed a crush on the DJ after attending the Top Ten Club, and sent him a drawing she had done of him. When she didn’t get a reply, she approached him in person one Sunday evening at Belle Vue.

‘I said I was the girl who sent the picture and was sorry not to hear from him,’ Mary said. ‘He looked me up and down and said, “I didn’t know what you looked like then.” We exchanged telephone numbers and he started to call me. He invited me to his flat in Higher Broughton, on the border of Manchester and Salford.’
She maintained her parents thought little of their 15-year-old daughter being dated by a man approaching 40.

On the day he took her virginity, Mary recalled going to Piccadilly station in Manchester to change out of her school uniform before catching a bus to his flat. ‘He was lying in bed, with his clothes on, waiting for me,’ she said. ‘He was disappointed I’d changed out of my uniform and asked me to put it back on, so I did.

‘He beckoned me to the bed. I was still clothed, but he was all over me. When he got on top and I felt him start to slip his penis in, I said “No, no”, but he said it was OK, it was only his thumb. He said we wouldn’t go all the way until I was 16, but he was having sex with me. I thought I loved him and I wanted to please him.’

On two occasions, Mary claimed Savile’s friends watched while he had sex with her. Another time, he took a call from his mother while he was having sex with her. ‘He kept on talking to her for quite a few minutes, but never stopped having sex,’ she said. ‘Even as a naive girl, I felt humiliated.’

She claimed to have visited Savile’s flat frequently, and on each occasion they had sex. Afterwards, he might occasionally offer her a cup of tea before giving her the bus fare home.

Mary said her parents were taken in and charmed by Jimmy Savile. One evening she recalled he drove her home for dinner. ‘We arrived in his Rolls-Royce, having just had sex at his flat. My dad was thrilled, guiding the Rolls into the driveway, enjoying the looks from the neighbours. Jimmy leapt out and kissed my mother’s hand. But as we stepped through the dining-room door, he couldn’t resist touching me between the legs.’

On another occasion, she wrote to a friend to tell her how Jimmy Savile had taken her to bed. The girl’s mother intercepted the letter and contacted Mary’s parents. Mary said her father refused to believe that Jimmy Savile would behave in such a manner. She also said that Jimmy Savile dumped her when she turned 18.

So, far from being a dirty secret that Jimmy Savile strove to conceal, his desire to have sex with teenage girls, and the frequency with which he was able to satisfy this desire, had mutated into an expression of power.

Alan Leeke says he discovered one of the girls he knew had fallen pregnant and given birth to Savile’s child in 1967. ‘She had the child adopted,’ he explains. ‘She got over it, they always do. I haven’t seen that girl for 30-odd years now and I would imagine it’s something that would still remain in her memory.’

He says Savile had dumped the girl on finding out, telling her he couldn’t possibly have made her pregnant because he was sterile. ‘I knew the girl and I knew that what she was telling me was true,’ Leeke insists. ‘She wasn’t the type to make these things up.’ He says the girl’s father went looking for Jimmy Savile on two occasions. Both times he was armed with a shotgun.

Dave Eager was in his late teens when he first encountered Jimmy Savile. He was studying to become a teacher and playing part-time in a band when Savile offered him part-time employment, first as a DJ at the Top Ten Club and then as his de facto assistant.

I met Dave Eager for the first time in London, shortly after the first stories about the shelved
Newsnight
investigation had appeared in the newspapers. Jimmy Savile’s exposure as a prolific sex offender was still some months off. Eager was, and has remained, adamant that he saw nothing in Savile’s behaviour that gave him cause for concern.

In our first conversation he told me how in the late 1960s, Savile paid him the handsome sum of £10 a week to sift through the hundreds of letters he received. ‘I used to come back to Manchester every Saturday to collect his mail,’ Eager said. ‘It got to the stage where, I can’t remember how much it was, but I could sign cheques up to a certain amount.’

I put it to Eager that Jimmy Savile must have trusted him to give him access not only to his mail but his chequebook, and that trust was something that went against Savile’s very nature. In a convoluted manner, Eager then seemed to inadvertently suggest that
evidence of his behaviour was beginning to emerge, even then: ‘He said, “What it is Dave, is I love my women, but if you ever fall out with somebody you’re never quite sure if it’s going to be a problem. So, with a guy, I’ve got no problems.”’

Because he was taking care of much of Savile’s administration, Eager knew that he stayed in the Adrian Hotel on Hunter Street when he was in London. He also knew that when girls came to visit him at the hotel, Savile insisted they were taken home afterwards in a car. ‘He used the same firm,’ said Eager.

At the end of each month, Eager said he would see the bill listing the times that the cars had been sent. ‘I said, “Jim, you’ve had a lot—” “Shut up and sign the bill,” [said Savile]. We used to have a joke about it but it proved to me that he always looked after the ladies to make sure they went home safely … Everything was done with absolute courtesy.’

When I referred to the allegations that had begun to surface in the reporting of the axed
Newsnight
investigation, Eager said that Savile was always wary of being ‘set up’ by a newspaper, but was not surprised that stories were now coming out about him. ‘If somebody 25 years later says, “Jimmy came to my house and Jimmy stayed the night and, by the way, I was only 14,” Jim would say, “Well I did know her but that was in 1976 when she was 18” … How do you start proving something 30 years later? I think Jim was always concerned. I don’t believe he did anything wrong but he was always concerned that someone might be prepared to say something for money.’

Ten months later, and in the full glare of the unfolding scandal, Dave Eager restated that he’d seen and heard nothing, and expressed his horror at the lurid revelations in the press. Among other things, he also admitted to me that he was privy to Jimmy Savile’s pathological fear of sexually transmitted diseases. ‘The one thing Jimmy always did, and told me he did, was he had a routine with TCP,’ he explained. ‘Everyone who knew him would know that. He wouldn’t say, “I’ve had a girl.” He’d say, “TCP tonight!” You don’t know if he was joking or serious. It was always
TCP. He was absolutely fastidious about that; it was his code word.’

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According to ‘Giving Victims a Voice’, the joint Metropolitan Police Service and NSPCC report into allegations of sexual abuse made against Jimmy Savile to officers working on Operation Yewtree, the peak years of his offending took place in the 10 years from 1966. And in the year that England’s place at the centre of the universe was sealed with victory in the World Cup final at Wembley, Jimmy Savile was everywhere, it seemed.