In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (15 page)

On one occasion, as we trudged back to his flat on the Esplanade in Scarborough, Savile revealed that he sometimes went too far. ‘The only time I ever got in bother was because I was too heavy-handed with some of the villains,’ he said. ‘People knew there was never, ever any trouble in my place because they knew they would get a spanking, and two, they would never get in again, ever. With me, if you were barred you were dead.’

On other occasions he admitted the police came in to inquire why there were so many young girls on the premises. His account of what he told them was typical of his tactic of making everyone feel a degree of complicity with what he was doing: ‘I said to the police chief, “You do know that your 16-year-old daughter comes in here, don’t you? Would you rather she was safe here with me or being preyed on by all those scumbags and slags?”’

For all Savile’s boasts about zero tolerance and brutal bouncers, Donnelly scoffs when asked whether the upstart dancehall manager was a major player in the Manchester underworld of the late 1950s. ‘He wasn’t a worry to anyone,’ he spat. ‘Fucking hell, you’d knock him over. At one time everyone thought he was a poof, thought he was gay. That was his persona, and that’s why I think nobody worried about him with the young birds.’

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The polio scare of the mid-Fifties had led to much hand wringing in government circles. Children left crippled by the disease were commonplace, and more than 3,000 died in the epidemic of 1952. Six years later, in 1958, when a vaccination programme was finally approved, a national information campaign was launched to quell the public’s fears. Mecca Ltd decided to offer its support by offering to make injection facilities available at each of its dancehalls. Jimmy Savile told me he placed a trestle table on the middle of the dance floor at the Plaza so people could be inoculated while the dancing continued all around them.

Studio chiefs at Granada Television, located within walking distance of the Plaza, were on the lookout at the time for someone who regularly engaged with the younger generation who could talk on camera about the vaccination programme. When the call came, Jimmy Savile jumped.

‘I didn’t have a television set, I didn’t even know what a camera looked like,’ he explained. ‘I got showed in and sat down at a desk with a geezer. I was giving him the crack and all of a sudden two big barn doors opened at the end and about eight geezers rushed in and said, “That was terrific.” I said, “What was?” They said, “You’ve been on television. Can you come back next week?”’

At six o’clock that night, an hour before the doors to the Plaza opened, Jimmy Savile claimed to have walked back up Oxford Street to find queues of people outside. When he asked what was up, they told him they’d been seen him on television. ‘Being conscious of body language, when I walked around I could see them all fall back a bit,’ he said. ‘There was this great difference because I had been on television and I thought, “Fucking hell, this is like having the keys to the Bank of England.”’

Granada asked him back, hiring him to do a regular series of book reviews on a youth-orientated show. Savile claimed he was sacked after only a few weeks. The reason for his dismissal gives an insight not only into what was on his mind at the time, but also into how in later life he seemed to get a kick from hinting at his secrets. As he told the
Guardian
in April 2000, ‘I said [to Granada],
“I want to expose a book. It’s for children and it’s dreadful; there’s this girl who’s well underage and she takes up with a geezer who’s yonks old and eventually they schlep off together …” Now bear in mind this was live TV, and I’m saying personally, I don’t think it’s a good thing because I don’t think an underage girl should be exhorted by her parents to strike up a relationship with a guy five, six, seven times older than she is.’
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The book he was referring to was
Peter Pan
, and the journalist from the
Guardian
reported that when Jimmy Savile finished his story, he laughed himself silly.

18. SONDERKOMMANDOS

I
t was November 2009 and in the fug of Jimmy Savile’s front room in Scarborough we were now onto the fourth 90-minute cassette of the first day. In the time I’d been with him he had regaled me about cycling, wrestling, and run at least three marathons. And that didn’t take into account the two length-of-Britain epics – one a walk from John O’Groats to Land’s End and the other a cycle trip in the opposite direction.

He’d just finished rebuilding an entire hospital wing and described how he lent his name, and his time, to the ‘I’m Backing Britain’ campaign of the late 1960s. And yet despite these considerable endeavours, he never once stopped smoking his cigar. At 83, he didn’t look in the slightest fatigued.

It was time to take a detour from his long list of sporting and charitable achievements and cross over into some darker, more intriguing territory. We returned to Manchester of the 1950s. I told him I had read that Bill Benny was known as a bit of a gangster and wanted to know more.

‘Between us we were an unbeatable pair,’ Savile said, which was a relief because if he didn’t like a subject he’d feel no compunction at chopping it off at the knees. ‘We struck up this strange relationship stroke friendship. We’d look like Laurel and Hardy because he was this big, hulking geezer and I was a slim geezer and we developed into being a couple of local characters as a pair. We were characters individually but as a pair we were even bigger characters. I copped for the lord mayor and he copped for the mafia.’

Savile explained that Benny had a reputation as the meanest man in Manchester – a title he was keen to wrestle off him. To settle the matter, he said they went on holiday together to the south of France. The bet was that both would take £50 spending money and the winner would be the one who returned home with the most.

Savile claimed they were level pegging as they arrived at Nice airport to catch the return flight. At this point, he said, Benny suddenly disappeared. ‘I thought he was going for a piss until I thought, “Hang on, he went for a piss when we left the hotel.” Ah ha, now then. Sure enough …

‘What you need to know about grossly fat people,’ he continued, warming to his task, ‘is they freak out over perfume and aftershave. Their body odour is such that they think they are worse than everyone else. Bill is standing at this perfume counter and because he has no neck, he can’t turn his head. So I went up behind him and said, “That’s a nice one over there.” And he realised I had sussed him. He didn’t turn round, he just said, “You dirty, mean, tight-fisted, oyster-faced bastard.” The whole of Manchester was hanging on this thing … And from then on Bill Benny called me “Oyster” because I was so tight.’

I wanted him to tell me how the doors were run on Oxford Street, and whether the success he cultivated at the Plaza made him a target for extortionists, racketeers and mobsters. We were talking about an era when chucking-out time was regularly accompanied by a mass punch-up and the blare of police sirens.

‘Not with me,’ he said. ‘I knew ’em. I knew the west coast mafia, they were friends of Frank Sinatra’s and they wouldn’t touch me. They left me alone.’

So nobody was going to mess with you, then?

‘Nobody messed with me because I didn’t upset anybody. If they wanted to at least I was half prepared for it, you know. If you start wrestling with somebody in the street you could finish up pegging it.’

What about the hoodlums and heavies in London, Manchester and Leeds?

‘The English mafia was the Kray twins,’ he replied. ‘The Kray twins influenced the whole thing. They operated from east London but such was their reputation that they influenced the whole country. All the gangsters wanted to be like the Kray twins. Ronnie was my patient for 11 years [at Broadmoor]. Ain’t nobody was going to mess with me because if I complained to Ron …,’ – he was now laughing slowly – ‘that would be it. I was the man leaning on the gate as far as Ron was concerned and I could make life hard or easy for him. We got on dead well. Nobody bothered me. Half of the people that worked for them [the Krays] worked for me. It’s about reputation. If you have a reputation that you know and employ these people … none of my lads ever, ever had to fight anybody, it was the reputation.

‘I brought three Hungarian lads who worked in the concentration camps in Germany – they pulled the dead bodies out and burnt them and things like that. For some reason, they finished up in Britain and I heard about them and sent for them.

‘They had dead white faces. They were Hungarians who had been pressed into service by the Nazis. They were called
Sonderkommandos
. They were not Nazis but they did Nazi work. And they worked for me. To them, life and death was a strange non-event. They’d pulled hundreds and thousands of bodies out of the gas chambers.

‘So what I did was for five pounds each I bought them a black evening dress suit, with a white shirt and a black tie. Every now and then I’d put on a bit of a party after the dance in honour of the saints where they came from.’ He cackled, the sound dampened against the thick Cuban cigar clamped in the centre of his mouth.

‘Well these guys, all I’d need to do was ask and they’d go and knock someone off, that was all there was to it. Nobody could talk to them because they didn’t understand the nuances of the English language. They never smiled, they had dead white faces and they were completely besotted with me.’

Savile let out a low, menacing gurgle of pleasure. ‘One of my minders in Leeds weighed 36 stone. He was the fattest kid you ever
saw. He was a good-looking lad and he had slicked back hair. He was giant, giant, giant. His name was Bernard. If someone called him a fat bastard …’ By way of illustration he explained that back then Coca-Cola was sold in bottles with metal caps. Bernard, he says, would pick up the cap, put it between his ring finger and his little finger and flatten it.

‘Nobody ever fronted me up. They realised it was a job that didn’t carry any bonuses. I had these people – so it was reputation.’

19. SOMEONE THE KIDS COULD LOOK UP TO

T
hose early television appearances released the genie of Jimmy Savile’s ambition. And yet not long afterwards, Mecca took the decision to remove him from the Plaza. As Bruce Mitchell correctly stated, even if he was fiddling the takings he was worth too much to the company to lose. The company’s chief, Carl Heimann, also saw something of himself in the lippy young hustler doing brisk business at previously failing venues.

It was decided to make him area manager for the north. He was informed he would be returning to Leeds where he was to apply his Midas touch to the ballroom that had nurtured him during the war.

Jimmy Savile was in his early thirties when he returned to the Mecca Locarno in Leeds. The dancehall still seemed an incongruous addition to the genteel emporiums, mahogany and marble of County Arcade, one of architect Frank Matcham’s trio of matching glass-roofed shopping emporiums and a hymn to Victorian ambition. When he stood outside the front doors, the Mecca’s new manager could look straight down Cross Arcade to Queen Victoria Street and the very first branch of Marks & Spencer, smiling at the thought that he was now a neighbour of one of the city’s other great exports.

The Mecca was a very different proposition to the ballroom he left behind. Originally opened as a grand teahouse at the end of the nineteenth century, it was far larger than the Plaza. With its entrance off the arcade, the main space was accessed through a set of double doors beyond the pay kiosk. There was no seating in the
ballroom area, but down a small flight of stairs was a café area named the Del Rio. It was decorated in Hawaiian-style bamboos and served snacks and soft drinks, and its most famous resident was a large and foul-mouthed African parrot named Jackie that lived in a cage in one corner.

Situated off a balcony offering views onto the dance floor, the Tudor Club resembled an old-fashioned pub, with dark wood, chandeliers and furnishings in gold and red. It had its own small cocktail bar called the Pompadour and was popular with the local villains. Savile maintained that once he got going most of its regulars voted with their feet and joined the throng in the main dancehall.

Further along the balcony was the manager’s office, which proved to be more popular with the Mecca’s younger female customers. On the instructions of Mecca top brass, its previous occupant had already started running the lunchtime teen disc sessions that Jimmy Savile had initiated in Manchester.

Spinning the records on stage at these sessions was a young man named Jeffrey Collins. Known as ‘Little Jeff’ because he needed to stand on a crate to be able to see over the turntables, Collins was a hit with the crowd. But as he soon discovered, there was only ever going to be room enough for one star turn at the Mecca.

Jimmy Savile immediately set about pulling the strokes that would get him, and less importantly, the Mecca, noticed. An exotic American saloon and a bubble car were added to the sham Rolls, although he found less extravagant modes of transport to be every bit as effective when it came to publicity. He took to cycling into work dressed in a red, white and blue tracksuit topped off with a big hat, pink glasses and gold shoes. A flag with the words ‘Mecca Dance Hall’ was fixed to the back of his bike and he insisted on doing two complete laps of the city centre before freewheeling down through County Arcade.

Before the scandal broke, Brian Thomas, a Mecca regular in the late 1950s and early 1960s, explained that a whole social scene sprang up around Jimmy Savile. On Sundays, he said, it was not unusual for as many as 40 cyclists to set off with him to Bridlington,
Scarborough or Filey. He also encouraged teenagers to enter dancing competitions, driving his ‘team’ to Manchester for heats in a minibus. ‘I think that’s how he made his name – becoming involved with the kids,’ said Thomas. ‘He made it into more of a club than a dancehall really. He was big character, with his cigar and so on. He was someone the kids could look up to and speak to.’

Early on in his tenure at Leeds, and still sporting dark, slicked-back hair, Savile accepted the offer of a free haircut from a group of young female hairdressers who attended his record nights. Arriving at Muriel Smith’s, a salon in Leeds, he surprised the staff by requesting that his hair should be dyed blond. It was the moment that perhaps the most defining aspect of his singular image took shape.

‘The next time I went into my dancehall it brought the place to a grinding halt,’ he told me. ‘One of my disc jockeys didn’t recognise me and told me to get off the stage. When they realised it was me there was a stampede of a thousand people to see or touch this weird thing with blond hair. I realised at that moment that I had stumbled on something.’

Naturally, he was straight on the phone to the local paper and a photographer was despatched to capture the new Mecca manager with his extraordinary ‘mother of pearl’ hairstyle.

Those who witnessed it still remember the impact it made. Tony Marshall was another Mecca regular who saw nothing that gave him cause for concern. He recalled walking through County Arcade and seeing Jimmy Savile standing outside the dancehall. ‘By this time his zany personality had come through,’ he explained. ‘One side of his clothing would be all black and the other side would be all white: he’d have one black shoe on and one white shoe. His hair would be dyed black on one side and white on the other. Or everything he wore would be tartan and he’d have his hair sprayed tartan as well. He was a fantastic publicity figure.’

Alan Simpson was a teenager working part-time at the Wakefield Locarno when he came across Savile for the first time. He said he regularly dropped in to pay a visit or to borrow something. ‘He
used to dye his hair every colour under the sun,’ confirmed Simpson, shortly before Savile’s death. ‘You don’t realise how radical that was at the time. Managers were expected to be flamboyant, but collar and tie flamboyant. Savile used to get away with murder. Some people said he was a tartan-haired idiot.’

Simpson acknowledged that Jimmy Savile was very far from being an idiot. His new programme for the Mecca – based on more records, less band – paid instant dividends. But his most dramatic change was to decree that the lunchtime hops would now run from Monday to Saturday. The Mecca would also be opened on Sundays for another record-only session, the Sunday Dance Club, aimed exclusively at the teen market he had exploited at the Plaza.

Savile trained up a team of young disc jockeys to help him, and to cover when he was off talking to girls, leading them up to his office or taking care of his expanding number of ‘outside interests’. One of the DJs would not last much longer, however. At the Wednesday night talent contents, ‘Little Jeff’s’ impersonations of Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard had started to get a little too much attention for the manager’s liking.

‘He used to do it to their records with a piano as a prop,’ remembered Peter Jackson, who regularly attended the Mecca, where he met the woman he’s now been married to for more than 50 years. ‘He always ended up bare-chested, so frantic was his performance. We all thought he was brilliant.’

‘I had a following when Jimmy arrived,’ confirmed Collins from his home in America. ‘When Jimmy saw me he didn’t want me there because he was a personality himself. He wasn’t nasty to me, or anything like that, but he said, “Look, I will get you gigs in Scotland.” So I went up to Scotland with him and he put me in the Locarno in Glasgow and then he put me in Edinburgh.’

Jimmy Savile’s reputation was still intact when I spoke to Collins. ‘It would be a great compliment if he saw me as competition,’ he added. ‘Between you and I, I think he did. He was a bigger personality than I was and he was the manager, he could do whatever he wanted, when he wanted, how he wanted.’

Savile once told me about the strict rules he put in place for his DJs. ‘Number one, if you’re going to say something to the people, let them hear what you’ve got to say … Number two, when you are on stage you will be the object of affection of many of the girls in the place. Don’t touch one of them, don’t even put a friendly hand on their shoulder because you don’t know whether that girl has a very irate boyfriend who will want to chin you afterwards. Talk to them but don’t touch any of them.’

It was clearly not a rule that applied to him. In each one of our lengthy discussions, I quizzed Savile about his thoughts on sex and the rumours he liked young girls, and he served up a variety of evasive answers. His version of how he regarded his opportunities at the dancehall, however, demonstrated that he applied the bald laws of economics to every area of his life.

‘I would stand on the stage with the record player with a thousand people in the room for four or five hours,’ he explained. ‘Of the thousand people 700 were girls. If half of them can’t stand you that leaves 350 who can stand you. If half of them are not too keen on you at all, then the other half is; that’s 125 people. If half of them don’t actually fancy you that leaves around 65 girls that might want to go off with you. You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to work out that you’re never going to be short of ladies’ company.’

He said he often let the girls in free because he knew they would be good for business. He also claimed to have ‘loved them all’ before immediately adding, ‘it never occurred to me to take a liberty with them’.

Alan Simpson insisted this anomalous caveat contradicted what his older colleagues were saying at the time. ‘One of the biggest laughs we had with [Jimmy] was either he was going to be a huge success or in prison for screwing 14-year-old girls,’ he told me. ‘Everyone knew about it. It was wink, wink, nod, nod. It was never made public. It was a different world. If he could get away with it – wink, wink, nod, nod – good luck to him.’

It was something Jeffrey Collins corroborated: ‘He was a naughty man, a naughty man. He’d go with teenagers … I don’t
know how he got away with it but he got away with it. Maybe it was because he was Jimmy Savile.’ When I asked Collins whether these underage girls were picked up in his dancehall, he confirmed this was indeed the case: ‘“Go up to my office, I’ll be up there later.” That sort of thing.’

Savile had moved back in with his mother on Consort Terrace, but often stayed at a flat owned by Mecca on St Martin’s Terrace. Avril Harris, who went on to have a relationship with him in later life, lived opposite and remembers Savile and his friends wolf-whistling at her when she was just 13.

‘I lived with my parents,’ she told Alison Bellamy, a reporter on the
Yorkshire Evening Post
who wrote a posthumous biography of Jimmy Savile that was endorsed by his family. ‘They strictly forbade me to go the wild parties in the house Jimmy and his friends shared. They would invite all the girls in the street, but my mother’s technicolour threats on such matters put me in an emotional straitjacket and she won. I remember them calling out to us as we walked past, inviting us in. We knew it was wrong, but when you are that age attention from older boys is very flattering.’
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Jimmy Savile was not an older boy by this stage, he was a fully grown man. ‘In those days nobody gave a shit,’ Simpson argued. ‘In those days, if you had a 14-year-old, nobody would bat an eyelid; “She’s a bit young for you, ’int she?”, nod, nod, wink, wink. In the Sixties, the band had their pick of the girls, some under 16.’

Collins agreed: ‘It was completely different than it is today. It was free love, free sex. In those days sex was so free and easy.’

In one episode in his autobiography, Jimmy Savile recalled ‘a high ranking lady police officer’ coming into his place to warn him to keep a lookout for an attractive young girl who had escaped from a remand home. He recalled telling her that if he found her he would keep her for one night as his reward. ‘The law lady, new to the area, was nonplussed,’ he wrote. ‘Back at the station she asked “Is he serious?”’
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He went on to explain that the girl did come in and he advised her not to run. He also claimed that it was agreed that he would
hand her over if she was allowed to stay at the dance before going home with him, and that he would promise to see her when she was released.

At 11.30 the next morning, Savile said he presented the fugitive girl to ‘an astounded lady of the law’. He added, ‘The officeress was dissuaded from bringing charges against me by her colleagues, for it was well known that were I to go I would probably take half the station with me.’

One of Jimmy Savile’s doormen at the Mecca, Dennis Lemmon, is now in his eighties. He recalls that his boss zeroed in on groups of 15 and 16-year-old girls. One day, he says, Savile arrived for work in a foul mood and when Lemmon asked a colleague what was wrong, he was told that the boss was due in court the following day for ‘messing about with a couple of girls’. When the doorman later enquired what had happened with the case, he was told charges had been dropped because ‘[Savile] did what he did last time – he paid them off’. As Lemmon adds, ‘Apparently that wasn’t the first time either.’
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