In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (22 page)

Dave Eager recalls one particular conversation in the 1960s. They were discussing relationships and Savile said, ‘You could meet somebody, think, “You look beautiful” now and … have a great relationship. But if they had a stroke would you be prepared to look after them for the rest of your life? If the answer is you’re not sure, you’re not giving them 100 per cent commitment.’ Eager says that years later Savile confirmed this was exactly how he felt about marriage.

‘That’s why he had his mother living with him,’ Eager says. ‘[Savile said] “I don’t want to think there’s nobody looking after her. She’s my mum.” And that’s what he meant about family. That’s why he got involved with all the charities because they were his family. He was giving to them and getting back emotion.’

In the aftermath of the revelations about Jimmy Savile, Jeff Dexter said he believed Jimmy was a victim himself. I have wondered this myself and suggested to Dexter that Savile could have been abused as a child. ‘He never had a proper girlfriend,’ he replied. ‘He loved his mother. He should have really been in care. Instead he created millions and millions of pounds of charity for lots of other people because he really didn’t know who the fuck he was.’

Not long after his difficult encounter with Jimmy Savile for the
In the Psychiatrist’s Chair
series, Anthony Clare wrote a newspaper article about the hold powerful mothers can have over their sons: ‘The denigrating, rejecting mother can breed in her son a view of women as controlling and castrating that survives into adult life and affects and contaminates his relationship with women. Such a son may spend a lifetime taking revenge or trying to win the approval that eluded him in childhood. Either way, it is the women in his life who will bear the brunt.’
¹¹

Savile preferred to see it another way: ‘[The Duchess] doesn’t nag me to get married and settle down, but in any case there is no question of it. If I fell into the arms of some other woman, I wouldn’t be able to look after my Mum so well, and that wouldn’t be fair.’
¹²

29. AN OLD MAN EVEN THEN

W
ith its limited capacity, the Upper Broughton Assembly Rooms was only ever going to be a staging post until something bigger came along. Fate intervened just 12 days after the first episode of
Top of the Pops
when the building was gutted by fire. Everyone was forced to flee the building, including 40 people preparing for a wedding party on the floor below. A night porter had to be plucked from the roof by firemen.

Savile had already moved on. The Belle Vue complex was Manchester’s self-proclaimed ‘Showground to the World’, containing myriad attractions including hotels, pubs and theatres, zoological gardens, a fairground and a speedway stadium. It also boasted Europe’s largest ballroom, the New Elizabethan. Sam Mason was its general manager, and hired Savile to bring his crowd-pulling skills to Sunday nights at his vast venue.

Savile went to take a look around. He was not overly impressed by what they saw. Belle Vue’s team of joiners were instructed to build a revolving stage tiered like a wedding cake, with a DJ box flanked by two specially commissioned 6ft by 4ft speakers containing huge bass bins. When the stage revolved, the guest groups would appear from the other side.

Forty years later, Savile told me that he regarded Mason’s invitation to fill the 3,500-capacity dancehall as a challenge: ‘I’d never do anything from a purely egotistical point of view,’ he maintained. ‘I’d do it for money, I’d do it to get a crowd going for a charity do, yes.’ He took on Belle Vue, he explained, ‘just to see if the brain still worked’.

Posters and newspaper advertisements for the new-look Top Ten Club promised ‘Fabulous Top Recording Groups and Artistes’ plus ‘Top international DJ Jimmy Savile with his unique Sound Power Disc Deck’. Curiously, Savile was pictured alongside holding a small chimpanzee from the zoo. ‘It’s a Gas! It’s a Ball! It’s Like Crazy Man!’ screamed the text, and the teenagers of Manchester seemed to concur.

On Sunday evenings, the Top Ten Club’s star attraction pulled up either in his Rolls-Royce, E-Type or bubble car, which would be parked outside the entrance for the young patrons to gawp at. And when the stage revolved bringing him to the front, he signalled his entrance by blowing on a hunting horn. A conspicuous adornment to the specially commissioned DJ box was a framed picture of Savile shaking hands with Elvis Presley.

Alan Leeke remembers his first visit to the Top Ten Club in 1963. He was living with his parents in Gorton, just a 10-minute walk from the venue. ‘[It] was membership only to get round the Sunday laws at the time,’ he says. ‘You had to be 16 to go but lots of people, myself included, altered the date of birth on the membership card. It was only typed on. I was probably 15 when I started going.’ He describes the clientele as ‘completely teenage’.

Leeke recalls that Savile came on last, after the featured band had played, and that none of the other DJs were allowed to play records from the current Top 20. Leeke also says he witnessed Jimmy Savile regularly going off with girls from the Top Ten Club in his car, either before he went on stage or after he came off. ‘He’d go off and come back 20 minutes later or half an hour later. He always had girls from their mid to late teens, from what I could see.’ Leeke says it was well known that Jimmy Savile liked them young.

When I ask how he thinks he got away with it, Leeke replies, ‘Because a lot of the girls thought they were the only ones that it happened to. I think they realised afterwards it wasn’t, but by then it was too late to say anything … [Savile] loved them. That was his attitude. The more he could get the better he liked it.’

As a young man, Leeke admits to being ‘star struck’ by the famous DJ, and reveals he was among a group of youngsters invited back to the Black Pad one night after the ballroom closed.

Another visitor confirmed there was a steady stream of people coming to the flat: ‘Girls came round to the pad to have a coffee and a tea and a chat. They’d stay for a while … and then they’d go away smiling having enjoyed themselves.’

He went on to say that when Savile wasn’t working or doing gigs at dancehalls, girls would start arriving from lunchtime. ‘Then when they’d gone another group would come round at four o’clock. And they’d have a nice time and go away. And then at about six o’clock, another couple of girls would come round for a cup of tea. And they’d go away smiling. It was nice, friendly things.’

I asked what was meant by ‘nice friendly things’. The reply? ‘Tea and friendliness.’ When I asked what sort of girls Jimmy went for, the answer was: ‘I think Jim preferred girly girls rather than smart girls. When the girls lost the giggle, it’s gone; that sort of girl. Girls who are prepared to do a cartwheel and jump and dance and have a giggle and a laugh. Not the ones that go to work and be dead straight and sensible. He liked fun girls, show girls.’

*

In 1964, Jimmy Savile was advertising his taste for teenage girls in his weekly newspaper column. There were numerous mentions of ‘Miss Twinkle’, otherwise known as Lynn Ripley, who was only 16 and dating Dec Cluskey of The Bachelors when she entered the charts in November that year with ‘Terry’, a teenage tragedy song recorded for Decca about the death of a boyfriend in a motorcycle crash. The record was banned by the BBC who considered it to be in bad taste. Savile wrote about ‘Miss Twinkle’ calling round, most probably to the Aaland Hotel, and seemed to be very interested in the state of her love life.

As well as being Savile’s reliable hunting ground for teenage girls, the Top Ten Club was also where the BBC recruited youngsters for the studio audience of
Top of the Pops
. Cecil Korer was
an assistant producer on the show who although only 29, looked considerably older; so much so that he wore a wig during recordings to disguise his balding head among all the dancing youngsters. One of Korer’s duties was to go talent spotting on Sundays at Belle Vue and hand out tickets for the next week’s show.

‘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.