In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (11 page)

11. I DIDN’T ASK

G
iven the widely held belief that there had never been a regular woman in his life, in death the opposite suddenly seemed true. In the days before his funeral, Janet Cope, Jimmy Savile’s secretary for 28 years at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, became the first to break cover and share her memories of the ‘eccentric whose life wasn’t always quite what it seemed’.
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The 70-year-old recalled that the pair had met in 1971 when Savile began doing voluntary work at the hospital. As the medical records officer in the National Spinal Injuries Centre, Cope said she agreed to type a letter for him, and the relationship snowballed from there, to the extent where she dealt with all his correspondence during the three-year national appeal to rebuild the unit, and was available to him on the phone at all hours of the day. In 1990, she perceived their relationship was such that she asked him to give her away at her second wedding. She recalled spending the night before the service ironing his white shell suit.

After driving her to the ceremony in his white Rolls-Royce, Janet Rowe, as she was, reported that Savile took centre stage. ‘When the ceremony started he lay down across four chairs so people would look at him rather than us. Later he gave a speech which outlasted the best man’s.’
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Cope claimed that working for Savile was a ‘non-stop, seven days a week’ commitment, particularly during the period of intensive fund-raising. In the course of administering the hospital’s Jimmy Savile Charitable Trust and attending to his every whim, Cope claimed to have glimpsed the private man beneath the
familiar façade. ‘He never talked about women and nobody asked,’ she said. ‘People knew he was a bit different.’ Interestingly, she added that she saw no evidence ‘he had any other proclivities.’

According to Cope, Jimmy Savile was a man who loved to be alone and yet lived for the adoration of the public. When he embarked on a round-the-world cruise in 1992, he made her promise to call him at every port. ‘I’d chat to him about what post he’d had, but I think speaking to me was really a reminder he hadn’t been forgotten,’ she said. ‘A lot of the people on the ship were American and they wouldn’t have known who he was, which was hard for him.’

It is clear that Janet Cope doted on Jimmy Savile, and from her tales of cooking for him, doing his washing, polishing his jewellery and even allowing him to dominate her wedding, a picture emerges of a man who found such emotional entanglement a bind. Theirs was a one-way relationship, to the extent that she gamely went on answering his letters even while she lay in a hospital bed recovering from a mastectomy that caused her to temporarily lose the use of one arm. Savile’s response was to buy her an electric typewriter.

He took pleasure in irritating her with his smoking, his unwillingness to take his shoes off in a house that she kept fastidiously tidy, and his refusal to thank her for all that she did for him. ‘I could tell that I annoyed him sometimes but he never lost his temper with me,’ she explained. ‘I didn’t mind the way he could sometimes be because there was a lot about him I admired.’

She also believed he was terrified of getting old, which was why he wore the tracksuits and liked to be photographed with women much younger than himself. ‘He was fearful of the day he wouldn’t be famous anymore,’ was how she put it.

In 1999, Jimmy Savile decided to cut back on the costs of running his charities and dispensed with Janet Cope’s services. She said it was ‘like a marriage coming to an end’ and told me that she cried for weeks.

‘Everybody in the hospital thought it was my fault,’ Cope told me in April 2014. ‘I clearly remember Jim saying to me, “Do not go back
in that hospital.” He was frightened of what the staff were going to say to me. He did not want people saying things about him to me that he had no control over … He was quite lethal in lots of ways.’

The Jimmy Savile that Janet described in the days after his death was a man who always needed be in control. It was, she believed, why he discharged himself from hospital in his final days so that he could die at home, on his terms. ‘I bet he has written his own eulogy,’ said Cope a few days before his funeral, which she did not attend. ‘He’ll want to be in control until he passes through those Pearly Gates.’
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Less than a month later, Sue Hymns, a glamorous 61-year-old former PA, decided it was time to tell her story. It was printed under the banner headline: ‘I Was Jimmy Savile’s Secret Lover.’
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Hymns told the
Daily Mail
they had met for the first time at Leeds General Infirmary in September of 1968. She was 18 years old and on her way to a doctor’s appointment; Savile was 41 and on one of his regular stints as a volunteer hospital porter. Interestingly, on the day before his funeral, the
Yorkshire Evening Post
had run a short interview with Sue Hymns in which she claimed she was 17 when she had met him in a lift.
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This could easily have been a mistake, but it could also say something about why she decided, or was urged, to break her silence on a relationship that lasted over 40 years. ‘After much soul-searching,’ wrote reporter Natalie Clarke, ‘[Sue] has concluded it would serve Savile’s memory better to “set the record straight” rather than allow unkind rumour to tarnish his memory.’

Hymns’s motives for telling her story show that while Meirion Jones and Liz MacKean were battling to get their story on air, Jimmy Savile’s close friends and family were closing ranks as a darker picture began to emerge, one that contradicted the glowing tributes in the period after his death. Hymns’s decision to go public and lift the lid on their unconventional life together was a clear attempt to redress the balance. ‘Our relationship was private for so long,’ she explained. ‘But so much rubbish has been said about him that I think people should know the truth.’

Despite the age difference, Hymns said she was initially bowled over by Savile’s fame and largesse. He took her to dinner at the Queens Hotel in Leeds, and to the InTime nightclub in the city. She told the
Yorkshire Evening Post
that one evening Savile collected her from the family home in his E-Type Jaguar, and her father had confronted him about the unusual garb he wore on television. ‘Don’t you feel like a bit of an idiot wearing a suit with bananas on it on the telly?’ he’d said. Savile’s reply was trademark: ‘What’s in your bank account, Reg?’

Hymns revealed that they would meet up in a café opposite Leeds General Infirmary or she’d stay with him in a cheap hotel in London when he was filming
Top of the Pops
. On one occasion, he invited her along to a photocall for the opening of the new offices for the
Yorkshire Evening Post
. Sue and a friend were persuaded to wear miniskirts and boots. ‘I think he even had his hand up my skirt,’ she admitted. The 22-year-old Prince Charles, who was guest of honour, seemed to find the whole thing hilarious.

The relationship petered out in 1970 when Sue Hymns moved to Munich. Three years later, she returned to Britain and settled in London where she met the man she would go on to marry. It was not until 1991, by which time she had divorced and moved back to Leeds, that their paths crossed again. The relationship was swiftly resumed, although if anyone ever inquired whether she was his girlfriend, Savile would reply that she was his cleaner or that he’d found her in a homeless hostel. She said he was frugal and not given to romantic gestures, although he did pay for dinner and regularly filled her car up with petrol.

Hymns insisted it never bothered her that she was kept in the shadows; she actually enjoyed the fact they lived apart. He had told her long ago that marriage and children would never work in tandem with his showbiz lifestyle. It was a life that saw him group his friends ‘into boxes’, she said. And as someone placed firmly in the Leeds box she learned not to ask questions of the others: ‘There may have been other women,’ she remarked. ‘I didn’t ask.’

Trying to discuss feelings with him was pointless. ‘Jim did have emotions, but he couldn’t show them,’ she said, although he was upset when she moved to London in 2004 to be closer to her daughter. Despite his desire to be seen as a flirtatious single man, kissing up the arms of strangers and being photographed with ‘dolly birds’ on his arm whenever the opportunity arose, he was said to have been ‘grumpy’ about her decision.

On their last night together, at Savile’s favourite pizza restaurant near his flat in Leeds, a member of staff offered to take their photograph. When the woman joked that they should look lovingly at each other, he whispered, ‘I don’t know what it would be like to be loved.’ Sue Hymns replied that she loved him, to which he said, ‘Yeah, I know you do.’

The popular image of Jimmy Savile as a famously private man with a regular, if larger than usual, sexual appetite was further underpinned less than two weeks after the
Daily Mail
article appeared, albeit in a manner that infuriated Roger Foster and Amanda McKenna, the relations who had assumed the roles of Savile family spokespeople in the aftermath of his death. In a story splashed across the front page of the
Sun
, Georgina Ray, a 40-year-old blonde divorcée from Cannock in Staffordshire claimed to be Jimmy Savile’s ‘love child’.

Ray insisted she was the result of a brief fling in 1970 between Savile and her mother, at the time a 19-year-old waitress in a greasy spoon café on the A5. She recalled her mother telling her that Jimmy had come in, made her laugh and carried her out across his shoulder and into his motor caravan. The fling lasted two weeks and her mother apparently made no secret of the fact Jimmy Savile was Georgina’s biological father.

In 2010, Georgina Ray defied the wishes of her mother and tried to contact Jimmy Savile. She wrote him a letter but heard nothing. Then, in early 2011, she travelled to Leeds and rang the bell of his flat. She told reporters that they spoke on the intercom but Savile pretended not to be in, shouting, ‘He’s away.’ She returned to Leeds to visit his coffin as it lay in state at the Queens Hotel.

Georgina Ray did not consider herself to be a gold-digger, although she was now pressing for a DNA test in order to be able to stake her claim to a share of Savile’s personal fortune, estimated at around £6 million.

On the same day, 16 December 2011, it emerged that Jimmy had in fact left £5.2 million, split between the Jimmy Savile Charitable Trust and the Jimmy Savile Stoke Mandeville Hospital Trust. The executors of his will, the National Westminster Bank, were still collating his assets and possessions. Roger Foster was reported to be furious: ‘For [Georgina Ray] to say this is outrageous. Her only reason must be money.’
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Six months later, in a joint television interview with Sue Hymns to rebut still more sinister rumours emerging about her late uncle, Amanda McKenna offered her view of what had happened with Georgina Ray. ‘I first found out about [her] in the newspapers, which isn’t a great way to find out,’ she said. ‘I’ve got 31 cousins anyway, we’re an enormous family, [so I initially thought], “Great, that’s another cousin and it’s fabulous that my uncle Jimmy’s got a child.” Before I’d had any opportunity to make contact with her, the next minute there’s legal letters coming through and then she was contesting his estate. I do have very strong feelings about that because all that money is earmarked for charity.’
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Five days before Christmas, Mark Thompson, the director general of the BBC, hosted a drinks party. In attendance was Caroline Hawley, a BBC World Affairs correspondent. Hawley had just heard about the shelved
Newsnight
report and as Thompson worked the room, she took her opportunity, commenting that he ‘must be worried about the
Newsnight
investigation into Jimmy Savile’.
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Thompson’s response was non-committal; it was a decision and an investigation he professed to know nothing about.

The following day, freelance journalist Miles Goslett contacted the BBC to inform them he had information about the
Newsnight
report. His allegations were that the BBC had covered up misconduct on its own premises and axed the Savile investigation to save the Christmas tribute programmes.

Goslett’s approach was dealt with by press officer Helen Deller, who knew about the Savile story. If the report had not been pulled, she was the person who would have written the press release explaining
Newsnight
had exposed Jimmy Savile as a paedophile. Indeed, just over a year before, Deller had written an email to Peter Rippon and Meirion Jones saying she understood the story was about Savile and focused ‘on allegations of abuse with victims willing to go on the record’. She had also warned, ‘we may have to do a bit of managing around this – despite such rumours circulating in the media for years.’
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Helen Deller contacted, among others, Peter Rippon to suggest a press response stating, ‘the angle we were pursuing could not be substantiated’.
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With the help of managers, including Peter Rippon, she now set about drafting their version of what had happened. Peter Rippon briefed her: ‘yes we did interview an individual about Saville [sic] with a view to pursuing a story involving the CPS and Police. We had been led to believe there had been a recent investigation into the allegations but these were dropped. However we could not gain sufficient information to stand this up.’
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Peter Rippon was at home on his Christmas break when he responded to Deller’s email. His minor correction was ambiguous as it suggested the woman who had alleged the CPS did not press charges due to Jimmy Savile’s age and infirmity was the same woman who had alleged that abuse took place on BBC premises. This was not the case. As Nick Pollard would later conclude in his report into the affair, ‘This elision of the two women’s accounts was extremely unfortunate and the consequences of the error were profound and resonated for months to come.’
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A final wording was quickly agreed between Deller and Rippon that emphasised
Newsnight
’s inquiries had been into the police/CPS investigation and why it was not ultimately pursued. It made
no reference to the fact it had been launched because of Jimmy Savile’s years of abuse at Duncroft, the new testimonies obtained by MacKean, Livingston and Jones or that abuse was alleged to have taken place on BBC property.
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