Millions knew Jimmy Savile as an eccentric TV personality. To some, he was Saint Jimmy, who changed lives by raising Dh270 million for charity. But after dozens of allegations of serious sexual abuse, it has transpired that few people knew the real Jimmy Savile.
What his fans and many friends did not know was that he was also, as police put it, a “predatory sex offender” who preyed on vulnerable under-age girls and boys in dressing rooms, his caravan and his Rolls Royce.
Savile once famously said he had no emotions.
“That would make me bad news for a psychiatrist or a psychologist because there’s nothing to find,” he told Dr Anthony Clare in BBC Radio’s In the Psychiatrist’s Chair in 1991. “What you see is what there is.”
But that was the carefully constructed Savile myth. It ensured very few people ever really got close to him, or knew the truth about what made him tick.
The public persona portrayed him as eccentric and flamboyant, but essentially straight-forward and good-natured.
The mask rarely slipped during his lifetime, and it helped him deflect accusations of anything more sinister. He would attract speculation because he was odd, he would say — but that was all he was.
“It’s a nice thing that I have nothing to hide from people,” he told a documentary titled The World of Jimmy Savile OBE in 1972.
“They ask me, are you queer? I say no, but if I felt that way I would have been. They ask me, why don’t you get married? I say, well I’ve never felt the need.
“I’ve got nothing to hide from people and when you come to think about it I lead a dead simple sort of life, which is OK, and definitely enough for me.”
But in one rare moment of candour, he was asked by the interviewer Louis Theroux in 2000 why he had said he had no emotions.
“’Cause it’s easier,” he replied. “You say you’ve got loads and then you’ve got to explain them for two hours. The truth is that I’m very good at masking them.”
Savile, one of seven children and the son of a bookmakers’ clerk, had survived serious spinal injuries while working in a coal mine as a teenager before becoming a dance hall DJ and manager after the Second World War.
His clubs included Mecca Locarno club in Leeds in the early 1960s. Post-war austerity was being blown away and Savile claimed to be the first person to DJ with two turntables so there were no breaks between records.
Roger Holt, a former record plugger who would visit the Radio 1 offices every week in the 1960s, says Savile’s predilection for young girls was “an open secret”.
Jim’ll Fix It was Savile’s most successful TV show, running for almost 20 years between 1975 and 1994. But the show’s producer Roger Ordish said he never suspected any wrongdoing.
One of Savile’s tactics for keeping his friends in the dark about his private life was to keep them apart.
Many fellow DJs, with whom he worked on BBC Radio 1 for decades, admitted that they barely knew the man at all. But it transpired that he had a separate set of friends in his home city of Leeds, with whom he would go running or have weekly meals in the Flying Pizza restaurant.
As well as Leeds, he had homes in Scarborough, London, Scotland and Bournemouth, and had rooms at Stoke Mandeville hospital in Buckinghamshire and Broadmoor in Berkshire.
Savile also revealed other foibles to Theroux, like the fact that he only took a single pair of underpants away with him, which he washed in the sink every night. After that documentary, the view many held of Savile shifted from odd to creepy.
Theroux managed to get Savile to open up when he asked the star why he insisted that he hated youngsters.
“We live in a very funny world and it’s easier for me as a single man to say I don’t like children because that puts a lot of salacious tabloid people off the hunt,” he replied.
Was that because such a reply would stop questions about whether or not he was a paedophile, Theroux asked?
“How do they know whether I am or not?” Savile said. “How does anybody know whether I am?
“Nobody knows whether I am or not. I know I’m not, and I can tell you from experience that the easy way of doing it, when they say, all them children on Jim’ll Fix It, is to say, yeah, I hate them. That’s my policy. That’s the way it goes. And it’s worked a dream. A dream.”
— Compiled from agencies
