Savile - The Beast: The Inside Story of the Greatest Scandal in TV History. John McShane
of the bouncers, Dennis Lemmon, who almost acted as Savile’s bodyguard, recalled one incident when Savile was in his early 30s. ‘He came in and just ignored us all, walked straight past us. I remember saying: “what’s up with him?” and someone in the club replied: “He’s up in court tomorrow – interfering with young girls. He’s worried”.’
A few days later it was business as normal for Savile; his old bounce and confidence was back. ‘He was really worried but everything was dropped. I was told he had paid them [the police] off. And apparently that wasn’t the first time either but I don’t know about that. He had a lot of friends though.
‘I would go on walkabouts with him around the club,’ he said. ‘He would make a point of talking to all the girls in the younger end, the girls who were 14 or 15. Those were the girls he always wanted to speak to.’
Life could be tough on the Northern dance scene, but that didn’t bother Savile; quite the opposite. ‘I never had anyone beaten up, but I did not take any nonsense in the dance halls. I had to look after the welfare of hundreds of youngsters. I was protecting my young patrons from drugs and other immoral influences.’
In the early 1960s, according to the DJ’s autobiography, Savile had another brush with the law after being approached by police asking him to help trace a missing girl. ‘If she comes in I’ll bring her back tomorrow but I’ll keep her all night first as my reward,’ he wrote of his meeting with a woman police officer, who had gone to question him.
Sure enough, that evening the young girl came in. Savile claimed that he took her into his office and told her: ‘run now if you want, but you can’t run all your life.’ The girl stayed at the dance and then overnighted at Savile’s before he took her to the police station the next morning.
He went on: ‘The lady of the law…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.’
Savile also worked at The Plaza dance hall in Manchester, where one of his first stunts was to label one evening ‘Saturday Night is Crumpet Night’, and he also bought a second-hand Bentley which he managed to fit the unmistakeable Rolls-Royce radiator grill to, thereby giving him a black and gold ‘Rolls-Royce’. Of those days he later wrote: ‘To run a dance hall is better than running a harem because all your wives go off home to reappear fresh and lovely the next night.’
He added that there were two reasons why he would never disclose ‘the story of all the girls I have known’. One, he said, was because he respected them too much ‘for their incredible days and nights’. The second was that ‘no one would believe it’ and he would have to take refuge in a Himalayan village as a result.
There was even a spell at Ilford Palais in High Road in 1959 where he ran records-only dance sessions on Monday nights, popular with teenagers. He was quoted in an Essex newspaper years later saying: ‘Some of the happiest days of my life were spent in Ilford’. When asked how he got to Ilford he answered: ‘I came out of my front door and turned left and it was about 186 miles from there because I lived in Leeds’. When asked how long he was at the Palais for he replied: ‘About five feet ten inches’.
Once, after he had achieved fame, he also calculated in arithmetical terms, how many young women were available to him every night. He reckoned that at the large dance halls when he was in charge there would be 200 ‘who would take kindly to any suggestion I might make’ on any given evening. If a portion of those were shy, that would still mean ‘at least 50 girls would actually do the chatting up’. He added: ‘If I only fancied half of the 50, that left 25 super, dolly-birds actually putting the pressure on me or my disc-jockeys’. Those figures, he mused, only applied to personal appearances. ‘Multiply those figures by the millions who watch TV or listen to the radio and life gets interesting or complicated according to your state of health’.
Back in Leeds in those early days, Savile was the ballroom’s DJ as well as its manager and this led to his biggest break yet when a Decca executive who also happened to DJ for Radio Luxembourg came in one evening, liked what he saw and arranged for Savile to have a Luxembourg audition.
Radio Luxembourg was a remarkably important player in the British music business at this time. Broadcasting from abroad, it was the only presenter of continuous pop music that young people could rely on for the latest records from both the UK and, even more importantly to begin with, America. That impact was reduced with first the arrival of the pirate radio stations based in the waters off mainland Britain and eventually the launch by the BBC, who realised they had fallen way behind the times, of Radio 1. Luxembourg brought Savile to the attention of a nationwide audience at last. Not just the city dwellers either, but youngsters all over the country, in the remotest parts of the land, could now listen to the unique delivery of his patter between records, especially on his Teen and Twenty Disc Club show, a type of ‘club of the air’ where for a fee you could join for life and receive a small medallion with your membership number on it. Its most famous member was Elvis Presley, whom Savile was to meet years later, and for many teenagers the Club helped fulfil their adolescent dreams of belonging to a youthful group with a shared love of music.
Savile would record the programmes on Thursday, his day off from Mecca, and he also began to write a column for the Sunday People newspaper. It meant he was working seven days a week and also earning big money.
His fame was increasing daily and, as he later described it, ‘I decided it was about time I saw Elvis’. The purpose was to give Presley a gold disc for his record sales and that meant going to Hollywood where the star was filming. Savile’s impressions of California were later written down in his autobiography and, after mentioning the pleasant sight of oranges growing on trees and the differences between sights such as that and the desolate nature of the Yorkshire Moors, his observations take on a far more worrying tone: ‘Gleaming cars and gleaming bodies of beach girls made the head turn and I felt it officially criminal that the age of consent is that admirable state is eighteen. It really is unfair because everyone knows that everything matures quicker in the sunshine.’
Reading those words written in 1974 they sound, at the very least, distasteful. Based on what was to become known of Savile’s behaviour and attitude to young women, they give an early, sinister, indication of his true nature.
Savile boasted that by the early sixties he was earning £500 a week, and he splashed out on a genuine new Rolls-Royce for £7,500. He also decided to buy a flat on the seafront at Scarborough and install his mother there as he did not think the family home was suitable for her any more.
He later wrote: ‘The Duchess was my nickname for her and she was life, by the simple fact that there was no one else. It was our joint regret that my father was not alive to enjoy the halcyon days that were to come.
‘The first thing was to get her out of our old family house in Leeds. Whereas I would only leave when it was pulled down, big old houses are not good for 70 year old ladies.’
He claimed that in their early days he gave advice to the young Tom Jones, told Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits that he should ‘sing little boy stuff and smile while you do it’ in order to capture fans’ hearts and he championed the cause of the Rolling Stones when others were calling them ‘five layabouts.’ Also, he bragged how Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein asked him to compere the group’s three-week Christmas show at the Hammersmith Odeon, after which he shamelessly spoke of his relationship with the Fab Four: ‘We enjoyed, and still do, mutual respect’.
It wasn’t just the Beatles’ manager who wanted him, he claimed, as one day BBC producer Johnny Stewart contacted him and said he was launching a programme called Top of the Pops and he wanted Savile to be the host of the first show. ‘And so ended the Springtime of my pop career’ he was to write. ‘Here then started the 100 degree Summer with no clouds to cover the burning brilliance of total recognition by, eventually, nearly all of this country’s 53 million people’. It is hard to asses which was the worse; Savile’s prose style or his inflated ego.
He had appeared in a short-run pop programme for