Gotta Get Theroux This: My Life and Strange Times in Television

Nancy and I married at Marylebone Registry Office on Friday 13 July 2013 – the inauspicious date was the only one available at short notice. With nine years and two children already on the clock, the idea of a wedding was a little after the fact. The delay – which resulted from a combination of my inborn misanthropic qualities and a lamentable failure on my part to recognize how much I owed Nancy, how much I loved her and also how important a public declaration of love might be to her – in a way demands less explanation than my miraculously managing, against the odds, to see clearly what a plonker I was being.

I was – and continue to be – a confused person in many important respects. I told myself I believed the best way to honour our relationship was for us to love one another and make it last, and that I viewed the idea of a public statement of intent, like a wedding, as attention-seeking and phoney. But undoubtedly amidst those inclinations was an inability to commit – certainly that was what Nancy felt – and it was only when I came face to face with the real risk of losing her that I realized what a calamity that would be.

The rapprochement that followed took months and involved relationship counselling in West Hampstead with a woman whose clear impression was that Nancy was right about almost everything – afterwards we would eat lunch at a Middle Eastern café on West End Lane in almost post-coital fashion. A few months after the counselling ended we were in a posh restaurant at the top of a skyscraper in Los Angeles when I finally did something I’d never quite been able to imagine myself doing.

I didn’t have a ring. I’ve never been good at picking jewellery and with the knowledge that, worst case scenario, the ring would be on her finger for at least a few months – or, all being well, for life – the pressure was on. So, instead, I had the brainwave of presenting her with the business card of a Hatton Garden jewellers.

The idea was the card would speak for itself – I slipped it into a menu, and after we’d finished our main courses, I waved the menu at her in nonchalant fashion.

‘Have you got room for something else?’ I asked.

When she saw the jewellers’ card, she looked confused. It didn’t quite say ‘big romantic gesture’ in the way I’d hoped, so to remove any ambiguity I got down on one knee and said, ‘Nancy, will you marry me?’

She smiled in a way that seemed to say it was both too late and welcome all the same.

The official part of the ceremony took place at Marylebone Registry Office. My dad had flown over from Hawaii with his wife, Sheila; my mum and her partner Michael were also there – there was something unifying about having all the parents and step-parents together in one place. Naturally we had included our two boys, then four and six, dressed in little linen outfits. The older one, Albert, was supposed to do a reading, a quotation about friendship from Winnie-the-Pooh, but he panicked and went dry. My brother Marcel, who was acting as best man, stepped in, hoisted him up and filled in, reading the text while holding Albert in his other arm.

After the signing of the paperwork we retired for a lunch at a grand Victorian pub in Kensal Green. Marcel gave a speech that took its cue from a Twitter handle I once used, ‘Loubot2000’. Its conceit was that I was a temperamental bit of high-tech kit that needed a troubleshooting guide:

With Nancy at our wedding, dancing to ‘In Dreams’.

Congratulations on purchasing your new Loubot 2000! The Loubot 2000 is precision engineered to work straight out of the box and give you a lifetime’s trouble-free use. If you feel that your Loubot 2000 is malfunctioning or faulty, please take time to read the following list of FAQs before contacting the helpdesk. ‘My Loubot 2000 is unresponsive.’ The Loubot 2000 is highly introspective and may sometimes go into power-save mode. To restore normal functionality, try asking one of the following questions: Was Jimmy Savile really a paedophile? What do Scientologists actually believe? Are chimpanzees dangerous? This should reboot the system. ‘My Loubot 2000 seems tense and anxious.’ Try oiling your Loubot 2000 with red wine.

I then gave my own speech, expressing my love for my new wife, my awe at her intelligence, her kindness and humour. ‘Nancy continues to sprinkle stardust on my life,’ I said. ‘One of life’s mysteries is how I’ve hung on to her.’ My cousin Justin was then in a relationship with the actress Jennifer Aniston and I recalled a conversation we’d all had one night at a restaurant in LA when Jen had compared Nancy to Cate Blanchett. ‘Personally I think Cate Blanchett should feel flattered by the comparison,’ I said. ‘Jen didn’t mention which film star I looked like,’ I added. ‘Probably because it might have been awkward mentioning Brad Pitt.’

Mid-afternoon we adjourned to a second pub, where we hosted a wider ring of friends and guests. My dad gave an idiosyncratic oration, involving one of his favourite themes: his mystification – pride mixed with pain – that there were places where I was better known than him, and his confusion that people sometimes approached me when we were together to express enthusiasm for my programmes and yet, being told he was my father, did not shower him with attention as progenitor of whatever talent I possessed.

He then recited a poem from memory by Robert Frost, called ‘Provide, Provide’, which describes an ugly old witch called Abishag, who works as a washerwoman, but who was at one time a beautiful Hollywood star. This is the normal course of human affairs, the poem suggests, and goes on to recommend dying early. It was, all in all, a weird message for a wedding and afterwards I asked my mum what she thought he meant by it.

‘Oh, don’t read anything into that,’ she said. ‘He only said it because it’s the one poem he knows by heart.’

And it was here, at the second pub, with the music blaring as guests danced and ordered drinks from the bar and queued for a hog roast, that Will Yapp, the director of When Louis Met Jimmy, approached me, leaned in and confided, ‘So, Beth’s been in touch. ITV are doing a job on Jimmy. Big exposé for a new strand.’ I was happy but not drunk and I had to strain to catch his words as he described what he knew about the exposé. It was to be a scalding tell-all: women were coming forward with stories. Even his charity work would be revealed as a cloak for self-enrichment.

I nodded and took it in, not thinking too much about it – it all seemed so vague and speculative – and then we were swept up in the music and occasion: my new wife and I dancing to our opening song of Roy Orbison’s ‘In Dreams’.

The last time I’d seen Jimmy had been in the autumn of 2005, after I’d come back from writing my book in America. Even before that there had been a distancing. After I threw over the diary-book-thing, the relationship with Jimmy had tapered down quite naturally. By the time I’d gone back to doing stories in America – the brothel, the neo-Nazis – there was no contact between us, neither friendliness nor ill will, just a sense that a strange passage of life had come and gone and – not to put it too cold-bloodedly – we had no further reason to see each other.

For that last 2005 visit, the invitation to travel up had come from Will. It was late in the year and, though I was back in the UK, I was not yet back making television – the only professional pretext for the trip to see Jimmy was to promote my book. A TV reporter filmed parts of the evening for a segment on the local news – our conversation at the house and an outing to the Flying Pizza. But I didn’t take any notes. I have no recollection of what we discussed.

Friends of his, after he died, told me he’d continued to view me in a friendly way after we lost touch. But I also tend to think he felt a little bit abandoned. Our last conversation, when I’d called after a gap of several years, had been in 2009. I was booked on Chris Evans’ Radio 2 breakfast show to promote a new documentary about prisons or mental health – I’m not sure – and I’d thought it might add a moment of surprise and intrigue if I could say I’d just spoken to Jimmy.

Jimmy had answered the phone himself, as he always did, with a noise that sounded like: ‘Nyes?’ But as we spoke, he’d sounded distant, a little cold.

‘I’m going on Chris Evans,’ I said.

‘Ah, the height of fame,’ he replied with a sarcasm that was a touch unfriendly.

As the years passed, from time to time, I’d hear little bits of information. I continued, whenever I gave interviews, to be asked about him and also to pump my interlocutors for anything they might know that shed more light on his hidden side. Once, when I was interviewed by the Radio 2 DJ Johnnie Walker, he made a veiled and vague reference to a young woman, or girl, who, he’d heard, or said he’d heard, had had a relationship with Jimmy, or a something, which for unclear reasons, had ended badly, with her feeling ill-used. It was that vague and, though it sounded a little ominous on the face of it, it was impossible to chase up or know how much to make of it.

In another interview, the DJ Phill Jupitus commended me on air for my work exposing people whom ‘we know to be despicable’. I bridled at this a little, saying it wasn’t quite how I saw what I did. ‘Do we know Jimmy Savile to be despicable?’ I asked. Off air he told me he didn’t have the goods on Jimmy himself but that if I wanted to know more I should get in touch with the frontman of the rock group Slade, Noddy Holder. Noddy had told Phill personally that he kept a file on Jimmy ‘this thick’ – he made the appropriate gesture with finger and thumb – conjuring the unlikely image of the glam-metal icon sleuthing Jimmy’s crimes between Slade gigs and adverts for Nobby’s Nuts.

I did some half-hearted follow-up on the Noddy lead, but it went nowhere.

In early 2006, Jimmy made a cameo appearance on Celebrity Big Brother series four. The house that year included the politician George Galloway, the glamour model Jodie Marsh, and a rapper from Wales called Maggot. Jimmy, looking stooped and ancient, held court in a red tracksuit, discoursing about show business (‘Whatever The Beatles did, they wanted to have me not too far away. They reckoned I brought luck to them’) and making insinuating jokes. ‘Don’t forget, ladies, I am available most weekends for home visits.’ It was striking how much the housemates deferred to him. The retired basketball player Dennis Rodman took an unlikely interest in Jimmy – or maybe, given his incongruous friendship with Kim Jong Un, Rodman had a penchant for mercurial men with strange hair.

Later, a couple of victims were to say that it was this appearance that prompted them to go to the Surrey police. This in turn led to the one recorded police interview with Jimmy in 2009. The interview, published after his death, took place at Jimmy’s office at Stoke Mandeville and was, on Jimmy’s side, a masterclass in evasion, consisting of flannel, legal threats, bluster, and lies. The police investigation was dropped soon afterwards.

In my own mind, I had by the end settled on a view of Jimmy as simultaneously creepy and mysterious but also someone to whom I felt a degree of affection; a manipulator, with a troublingly detached and transactional attitude to human relations, but also, weirdly, as someone somehow dependable.

How strange it is to write that now.

When he died in 2011 Jimmy was still riding high as the nation’s most famous charity fundraiser and icon of eccentricity. Celebrities and dignitaries queued up to salute him. His funeral was a jamboree in Leeds involving the usual Savile flare and showmanship: thousands of attendees, a gold coffin, a massive marble headstone. I had passed up an invitation to go to the commemoration. I’d like to think it was because I was too wary of being part of a tribute to a man whom I knew to be, at the very least, flawed and possibly far worse. But it may be that I simply didn’t have the appetite to be a bit player in an over-the-top media spectacle.

I wrote a blog post of thoughts on his passing, mentioning my sadness and a mild sense of guilt that I hadn’t seen more of him before he died. I talked about the dark rumours and how they had been my motivation for making the original film. I recounted the irritations of dealing with him, his evasions and pranks, his dark references to physical intimidation in the nightclubs but also the toughness I’d come to respect – the way he was ‘unfazed by negative attention’.

I ended: ‘He was a complete one-off. Wrestler, charity fundraiser, DJ, fixer, prankster, and professional enigma. He was also a plainspoken Yorkshire philosopher and psychologist. There won’t be another one like him.’

But I was also careful about what I didn’t say. I turned down various offers to write a piece for a national paper or comment on the radio or take part in a Christmas TV tribute. My feelings were too complicated for me to know how to do them justice, and even then I was aware that, as much as we’d played the role of friends in newspaper profiles and even on occasion with each other, our relationship was chillier and warier than that, and at its base, on both sides, somewhat transactional.

Six months later a journalist for the Yorkshire Evening Post emailed a colleague, trying to reach me. She was preparing an official biography of Jimmy. ‘I was a dear friend of his,’ she said. ‘He often spoke of Louis but did say he hadn’t kept in touch recently . . . I read bidding prayers at his funeral and am really sad he has passed away as we had lots of fun together.’ The working subtitle of the book was The Life and Times of a National Treasure.

I spoke to her by phone about my experience of filming and our friendship, such as it was. During the interview, I went off the record and asked if she’d heard the rumours that he had an unpleasant secret sexual side. The book, How’s About That Then?, came out early in 2012, a benign appreciation of the man and his good works. She included a couple of pages on the rumours. It was, she later told me, ‘the worst-timed book in history’.

In the months after he died I noticed one or two small news stories about Jimmy, referring to a Newsnight segment and allegations to do with an ‘approved school’ – a government-funded boarding school for wayward girls of high intelligence, Duncroft in Surrey. The Newsnight segment had been shelved, for reasons unknown.

In October, ITV aired Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile. Presented by Mark Williams-Thomas, it featured a series of women who spoke about his assaults on them as teenagers – tongue pushed into the mouth, unwanted groping, much of it taking place on BBC premises, a lot in NHS hospitals, and all of it dependent on a sense of celebrity and glamour conferred on him by his BBC TV shows. The women’s defences were down; they trusted Jimmy Savile, and he assaulted them. Several of the contributors had attended Duncroft, where it was said teachers and staff turned a blind eye to reports of Jimmy’s sexual misconduct.

Reaction to the programme was immediate and overwhelming. A dam had burst and a torrent of further allegations from other women – and some men – crashed over anyone who’d ever had any dealings with Jimmy. The BBC was immediately in the firing line – not just for its failure to stop Jimmy in all the years he was assaulting women on its premises but also for the decision to pull the Newsnight investigation. Inquiries were set up, and within a few weeks I was on the phone to one of them, telling what I knew: principally about Beth and Alice, and the fact of their having had relations with him in the late sixties when one of them was fifteen, but also about comments made by Johnnie Walker and Phill Jupitus.

In those early days I imagined it might all be over quite quickly. In a kind of stubborn adherence to the facts as I understood them – and maybe in a spirit that was unconsciously having trouble facing the reality of having been friendly with a sexual predator – I tried to tell myself it couldn’t be quite as bad as it seemed and I found myself parsing the data to find ways in which it might be questionable or speculative. But what I couldn’t explain away or extenuate was the testimony of the girls from Duncroft – how plausible it seemed that he might take advantage of vulnerable girls – girls already so ill-used by life as to make them easy pickings for one so-minded, plied with cigarettes and sweets and the promise of tickets to the TV show Clunk-Click – girls who I could all too easily imagine him viewing as ‘damaged goods’ and grateful, in his transactional understanding of the world, for the attention of an ageing DJ and therefore, in his mind, fair game for his predatory attentions.

A BBC colleague told me that all the rushes from When Louis Met Jimmy were being viewed by an in-house investigator or maybe by the police. Requests to speak to various inquiries trickled in – a police investigation in Scarborough, another in Leeds. I spoke to these, confirming that I’d seen nothing during filming in the way of depraved or criminal behaviour. For several weeks after the Exposure piece, more of Jimmy’s victims and survivors came forward, on an almost daily basis, in tabloid articles and in TV appearances: on morning chat shows, on a follow-up ITV documentary and a BBC Panorama entitled ‘Jimmy Savile: What The BBC Knew’. This last one featured Kat Ward, whose interview for Newsnight had been spiked. The calm and measured detail of her testimony, its description of a quid pro quo of TV tickets for oral sex in the back of a Rolls-Royce, was utterly persuasive.

With each new revelation, the image of a free-ranging predator whose charity work gave him access to restricted areas with vulnerable people came into sharper focus. In many of the accounts I struggled to recognize the man I’d imagined I knew, but occasionally there were details that reminded me of him. One – an anonymous letter from 1998, sent to the Scotland Yard vice squad – alleged, ‘His fundraising activities are not out of altruistic motives; but purely for selfish advancement and an easy living. He has slimed his way in wherever possible. He has tried to hide his homosexuality, which in any event is an open secret with those who know; but did you know that he is also a deeply committed paedophile.’

It went on to describe Jimmy getting involved with a rent boy who had blackmailed him and threatened to expose him for paedophilia, even alleging that it was Jimmy’s practice to seek out rent boys after doing charity runs. ‘Now I’ve had a run, I feel like some bum,’ he would allegedly say.

I thought back to his conversation with me about rent boys. All you have to do is buy them a bun. They run off at the mouth like they’ve got verbal diarrhoea. Even – ridiculously – the rhyming motto had the ring of truth. If it ain’t a game it’s a shame, I’d heard him say many times. Was it possible in his strange, almost medieval, Catholic view of things – like a Medici buying indulgences before committing a crime – he viewed his vice as having been paid for by the good work of the charity run?

As it became clear how the BBC had missed the chance to expose Jimmy – alleged at the time to be because of a reluctance to disrupt the Christmas TV schedule, which included a Jim’ll Fix It tribute, though this was subsequently disproved – the organization went into meltdown. The Director General was forced to resign and the Chairman of the BBC Trust came in for heavy criticism. News managers involved in the decision to pull the Newsnight piece were suspended. Suddenly, anyone who had ever heard a rumour about Jimmy Savile was under suspicion – which was weird given that, as far as I knew, everyone had heard rumours about Jimmy Savile, from the DG of the BBC to my mates in the school playground in 1983.

For having made an exposing documentary about him while he was alive that at the same time failed to out him as a paedophile and a predator, I now occupied an ambiguous place in the whole affair. From some, I got credit for having shown him as the weird creature of narcissism and detachment that he was. It was also pointed out that I’d been one of the very few people who’d raised the issue of rumours of paedophilia to his face. But in some quarters – principally those reposing in the area of my brain known as the ‘self-doubt cortex’ – I was also the person who hadn’t managed to take him down despite two weeks of access and the resources of a TV production behind me. In general, I couldn’t shake the feeling of disappointment that I’d failed to see him clearly for what he was when he was alive or that I’d missed an opportunity to unmask him.

The Panorama documentary played the clip from When Louis Met Jimmy in which I talked to him about the rumours of paedophilia. I was, of course, pleased to be able to appear prescient. But I was also aware how far from a j’accuse that moment actually was.

In amongst the victims that were coming forward were the two women I’d spoken to and had tea with in 2001, and what played most on my mind was the thought that, if I’d handled the conversation differently, they might have been able to say more. Looking over notes I’d taken at the time, I was struck by how many clues there were. How quick and unexpected the sex was. ‘It would be up against the wall. In the dressing room or in his caravan at King’s Cross.’ ‘Very persuasive.’ ‘One thing would lead to another so you didn’t really know what was happening.’ And the sense of secrecy and social pressure. ‘Draws you in and draws you in.’ ‘Like a cult.’

At the time it had been wrapped in the tone of the original letter and the warmth of their conversation, which was about friendship and fun. It seemed so different in hindsight. Had they needed more of a nudge? But it was also true that I’d never had the sense I was supposed to do anything with what they were saying. They had just wanted to be heard. And I kept telling myself, if they’d wanted to out him as a predator, why didn’t they just say so, and what was to stop them going to the police?

I was also conscious how much there was about Jimmy that wasn’t being said – or that people weren’t getting quite right. The number of victims kept going up and up, along with the luridness of the details. There were allegations of satanic masses and dismemberings of small children. The sense of outrage at his having got away with his crimes and his supposed closeness to the establishment had created a slingshot effect: the truth had been suppressed for so long, with victims’ voices kept silent and complicit elements in the saddle, and now it was twanging violently back into a world of outlandish allegations in which everything was believed.

The person being depicted bore no relation not only to the man I’d known, but to anyone who ever lived. Someone with ‘no emotions’ whose entire life had been constructed with the exclusive purpose of committing crimes. The ancillary of this was that anyone who had dealings with Jimmy was under suspicion. How could they have not known when he was committing sexual assault on a daily basis? The leading investigator on a Metropolitan Police report said, ‘He spent every minute of every waking day thinking about it.’ One part of me took this as understandable hyperbole, given the sense of betrayal and anger that was flooding over the country. It was possible the nation needed to live through a moment of convulsive outrage. But at the same time, wasn’t it also important to tell the truth – in a forensic way like, you know, a police detective?

In a weird way, it did Jimmy too much credit to imagine he was capable of doing that much evil – that he was, as some seemed to feel, on a par with Adolf Hitler and Ian Brady. Further, in reducing him to a monomaniac and a caricature, it did a disservice to those who worked and helped him in his programmes and his charitable works in good faith but failed to see his dark side. I worried that it short-changed his victims, some of whom had a more complicated attitude; and perhaps most serious of all that it made further abuse in the future by other predators more likely by removing them from the real world and putting them in the realm of Grand Guignol.

At the same time as I was feeling all these things, at a deeper level, I was also doubting them. What if my emphasis on the need for ‘nuance’, and ‘truthfulness’, and a ‘forensic attitude’ came down to an attempt to minimize his crimes in some way? Was I trying to protect myself because I had been one of those groomed – the journalist who spent two weeks with him and then stayed in touch with him and yet still somehow failed to see him for what he was? I began second-guessing my impulses – the most basic principles that had guided twenty years of work: the importance of seeing complexity and ambiguity, and understanding most of what we term evil as a by-product of a kind of self-deception and confused good faith or simple selfishness. What if my journalistic radar had failed me in my hour of greatest need and all my clever notions of showing empathy for people who least seemed deserving of it was dangerous sophistry – ‘clever twat shit’, to use a phrase of Jimmy’s – and tortured apologetics for abuse and oppression? What if I had ‘contextualized’ and ‘nuanced’ myself into the profound failure of not recognizing sexual predation when it was blowing cigar smoke in my face? In my darkest moments of self-doubt I imagined myself as one of those ageing Nazis in Germany who spent decades post-Second World War quacking about ‘the real Führer’ and how much he did about crime and the economy.

In this spirit of over-sensitivity, soon after the first batch of revelations, I attended a charity function at the Globe Theatre on the South Bank with a smattering of random celebrities. In huddles in the bar, like an unofficial show-business conclave, we compared notes on the Savile latest. Part of my MO at that time was to air my own understanding of the situation, trying to make sense of it. In an attempt to explain their vulnerability, I made mention that some of Jimmy’s victims had been ‘star-struck’, and that this had led to their defences being down. The look of incredulity on the face of a female actor I was talking to was chilling. What she seemed to have heard me say was, ‘Those girls were throwing themselves at him.’

One part of me wondered if she’d lost the plot. But the greater part wondered if I’d lost the plot – the ability to navigate cocktail-party showbiz chat in a way that didn’t sound like I was OK with paedophilia.

One April morning, in 2013, I was summoned to give evidence to the Janet Smith Inquiry, the BBC’s all-encompassing review of its role in the Savile affair – assaults committed on BBC premises, against BBC staff, people under its care.

I was living in LA by this time, and the interview had to be done via some high-tech video-conferencing system on the umpteenth floor of the gleaming downtown offices of the international legal firm Reed Smith.

Dame Janet – snowy-haired and distinguished-looking, like the commander of a space ship on a progressive Star Trek spin-off – beamed in from her conference room in England somewhere flanked by young-pup legal aides, to ask about the circumstances of the documentary, how it had come to be made, how I’d found Jimmy, the rumours I’d heard before doing the show. The conversation proceeded in a friendly fashion for an hour or two and – bizarrely, given it was the question that preoccupied me – appeared to be over without me having been asked about Beth and Alice, the two girlfriends turned whistle-blowers, despite my having spoken about their letter and meeting them to at least two people months earlier who were working on the inquiry. Naturally my instinct was not to bring it up, since it was, I felt, my weak spot in the whole affair, but good sense prevailed and I tippled them to the meeting – ‘tippling’ being the sort of word Jimmy Savile liked to use.

Later I emailed Will Yapp to vent and express mixed-up feelings of confusion, shame and fear. We agreed to open a file to share documents – reports and newspaper cuttings relating to l’affaire Savile. It was like a scab I couldn’t stop picking. Nearly a year after speaking to Dame Janet, I heard via Will that Beth was upset with me for mentioning her letter and possibly compromising her identity. Had I told the Inquiry her and Alice’s real names? There was an awkward transatlantic phone call in which I told her I didn’t think I had mentioned real names but I’d shared the text of the letter. Afterwards I thought about the strangeness of worrying about not having done more earlier with what I knew and now being told I’d said too much. I wondered why I had a low-level feeling of guilt when I hadn’t, as far as I was aware, done anything wrong, and why was I racking my brains for something I might have done wrong. I thought about a remark of Nietzsche’s, that witches killed in witch hunts were often, by the end, persuaded of their own guilt. ‘So it is with all guilt,’ he writes.

And at the same time, in spite of all of it, with an almost vertiginous sense of anxiety, I couldn’t help thinking about a follow-up.