Part A
Warning: this post contains references to trauma and abuse
Jimmy Savile with trademark cigar
This autumn the BBC have serialised a drama of the life of Jimmy Savile with The Reckoning. Whilst Steve Coogan’s performance has been applauded, the series moves us on very little in either understanding Savile or regaining our confidence in broadcasters like the BBC. The issue of abuses carried out by celebrities is far from being a historic problem. Theory of narcissism offers an understanding of the links between celebrity, abusive behaviour and trauma. What does it say about Savile? This blog is about narcissism and not sexual abuse specifically. Here, I will not go into detail about Savile’s sexual crimes but will focus on narcissistic strategies that were highly developed and relied upon: his persona, his need to be idealised, extreme avoidance of vulnerability (in himself) and his association with people of power.
The auction of Sir James Savile’s belongings
On Monday 30th July 2012, an auction was taking place in Leeds in the north of England. It was a warm day, and the auction would last over 12 hours, raising over £300,000. Everything sold would raise money for a selection of charities. Everything sold had belonged to a single wealthy celebrity: Sir Jimmy Savile, who had died at the age of 84. The auction, in Savile’s hometown, took place within the Royal Armouries Museum, in ‘Savile Hall’.
Jimmy Savile was on one level a very British kind of celebrity. Until his death, he was known to every British household as an eccentric, charismatic cigar-smoking, Roll Royce driving man who almost constantly played word games. After making his name in music, he became truly a man of the nation – for the young (hosting a prime-time TV show making children’s’ dreams come true), the teenaged (a pioneer club and radio DJ), the old (visiting the elderly in Stoke Mandeville Hospital) and the marginalised (championing the inmates of secure psychiatric hospitals). He gained unprecedented access to the royal family and the prime minister. His systematically gained access to senior police officers was more private.
At the time of the auction, as Savile continued to be celebrated as a “national treasure” (Prince Charles), something less public was happening that would make these same auction lots worthless. Work was beginning on an independent investigation into the sexually abusive activities of Jimmy Savile in hospitals across the UK and police failures to apprehend him. The final report of this investigation – conducted by the Metropolitan Police together with the National Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) was published in 2015. The report turned the country’s idea of who ‘Sir James Savile’ really was, on its head.
From the investigation report, we now know that Savile’s victims numbered more than 400. Most victims were under 161, but the range in their ages was huge. It was as a nation that we celebrated Savile. But as the auction drew to a close, a dam was about to burst – a dam holding back revelations of Savile’s prolific, organised and predatory sex offending.
Two childhoods
There are no records of items sold at the auction that related to Savile’s childhood. Jimmy was born in Leeds in June 1926, to Vince and Agnes Savile who had married in 1911. Jimmy was their seventh child – born five years after their sixth. Agnes was apparently dominant in the home and towards her husband she was judgmental and at times frustrated. With biographers, Jimmy Savile was noticeably reluctant to speak about his father – a man motivated by little, he said, except horse racing and training pigeons. Savile was evasive and contradictory about his childhood. Contradictions were an important part of Jimmy Savile and so I am going to summarise two stories.
Jimmy the ‘miracle child’
There are two reports from Savile’s parents of major health impacts on Jimmy during his infancy. One is that a mysterious illness struck little Jimmy down– making him thin and weak. As an adult Savile persistently avoided talking about this1. Secondly, according to Agnes, Jim as an infant caused his own pram to overturn – severing a neck muscle. After this, Jim suffered spasms and periods of vacant staring. She recalled that she and the family fervently prayed for a cure. And to their amazement, the boy was cured quite suddenly. Agnes from this day identified Jim as a child saved for a purpose - needed by the world. Biographer Dan Davies concludes that secretly, “Jimmy Savile regarded himself from the very beginning; a miracle child, the chosen one.“ His sister Joan did remember Jimmy always being different to his siblings – and his mother’s favourite.1 Savile till his death maintained that his mother was his “only true love” and he came to nickname her “The Duchess”.
Jimmy the “not again” unwanted child
As an adult, Savile would say there had been ‘no tactile affection’2 from his mother during his childhood. He described her at different times as “ruthless and “ferocious”1. Late in his career, Savile agreed to be interviewed by TV psychiatrist Dr Anthony Clare who ran a series on BBC radio called ‘In the psychiatrist’s chair. Clare made a statement after the interview, without knowing about the crimes that would later be exposed, which now sounds like a window into his secret life:
“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 relationships with women. Such a son may spend a lifetime taking revenge”2
During the interview with Clare, Savile gave some impressions about the feelings his parents had towards him. As was often the case when talking about feelings, Savile resorted to numbers:
Clare: “Did you ever have a sense as a child that your parents had mixed feelings about your arrival?”
Savile: “No, no, no, no they didn’t have any feelings. It was complete equanimity [absence of feeling] in so far as I was there and that’s all there was to it. And there was another mouth, there was six mouths to feed, so the difference between six and seven wasn’t even one.” 2
Jimmy was often alone as a child and spent time in the corridors and wards of St Joseph’s Home for the aged, run by Little Sisters of The Poor (Vince was a Trustee). Jimmy became accustomed to the residents dying. He would say goodbye and ride in the hearse sometimes. Savile said later,
“I didn’t have a childhood…I grew up with adults…I finished up with big ears, listening to everything, big eyes, watching everything, and a brain that wondered why grown-ups did what they did”1
This quote is typically somewhat enticing and seems to express a fundamental loss of innocence. We now know that Savile became a sophisticated, prolific and compulsive sex offender who was able to groom and control both his victims and those in power who might expose him. Some have asked: was he sexually abused himself? He never said he had been. But he wasn’t the only one in his family accused of sex-offending. Savile’s nephew – his sister’s son was imprisoned for four years for assaulting a 14-year-old. His older brother Johnnie was accused of assaulting patients in a psychiatric hospital in London – a strikingly similar pattern of offending to Jimmy’s.1
Savile’s mother, Agnes
From the age of 12, Jimmy was taken by his parents to the Mecca Locerno Ballroom with his parents – where he would watch the adults dance. On one night, he was approached and taken home by a woman of around 20 years. Savile as an adult remembered “terror mixed with embarrassment” during this sexual encounter.1 Whilst many remarked, including Savile himself, that he did not have emotions, here when recalling this, he was different for a moment.
An observation that hints at trauma came from music executive Tony Calder who spent a lot of time with Savile. He remembered episodes of something ‘coming over’ Savile mentally;
“We’d be sitting having a meal and something would come over him and I’d ask him what was wrong. He’d say, “I’ll be alright in a minute. It’s hard to explain. I was in a mine and there was an accident.””1
I am not completely convinced, based on the complexity and nature of Savile’s coping strategies, that a mining accident in his 20s was the whole story of his trauma. But as an explanation, it would have served perhaps, as a non-shameful one.
Whilst the accounts of Savile’s childhood are contradictory and incoherent, there are references to both emotional neglect and being admired as special – special in a way unrelated to who he really was (not connected with actual achievements or qualities). Perhaps, sadly, it is possible to be a “not again child”, left exposed to abusive experiences, and yet still treated as ‘special’. What narcissism theory (see theory post) predicts in the adult, is an outcome of both the emotional neglect and the specialness: the child develops a performing persona (seen and heard, on the outside) as a protection from the unmanageable experience of having emotional need (on the inside) ignored or worse. In Savile’s life, the developing of a persona was taken to the extreme. He was, as he put it himself, a “complete phenomenon”.1
The map of narcissism3*
Persona and power
Back at the auction, many lots spoke of the complex persona Savile developed. There was the gold Gymphlex lamé tracksuit, and one of the 17 Rolls Royce cars Savile had bought during his lifetime. Savile was eccentric, cheeky, loved doing work for charity, liked helping children and loved music. We now know this was one side of a man who had at least two. Savile once claimed,
“It would be beneath anybody’s dignity to be frightened of someone dressed like this…it is a kind of smokescreen, but it is not a gimmick.”1
We now hear this as containing a veiled confession.
Biographer Davies – who tried hard to get behind Savile’s facade through a number of interviews observed that, “he had spent a lifetime drawing attention to himself without really revealing who, or what he really was”. It was “impossible to see beyond the towering walls of his self-constructed mythology.”1
But how did this complex public-facing persona, that suspicious journalists failed to break through, develop?
Making people dance
It was at the Mecca Locerno Ballroom where his parents used to take him, that at the age of around 12, Jimmy found a role as the stand in percussionist – leading and watching the adults dance. Another decade would pass, before Jimmy was told by his mother about an invention a local man had constructed with a wind-up gramophone. Instead of emitting sound through its small opening, the record player had been modified by wiring it to the amplifier of a large valve radio. Savile recognised that this device had a certain potential at a time when the only music being played at dances came from live instruments. This clumsy mess of wires playing 78 RPM Glen Miller records would be the start of something big. Savile staged a ‘Grand Record Dance’ and sold 12 tickets. A fuse blew in the radio, and Savile’s mother stepped in to play the piano – its lid now slightly scorched from the fuse burning. Later, Savile spoke about this early experience of what would become known as ‘disc jockeying’ and then just ‘DJ-ing’:
‘Even then, as I stood there and played the records, I felt this amazing…”power” is the wrong word. “Control is the wrong word. “Effect” could be nearer. What I was doing was causing twelve people to do something. I thought, “I can make them dance quick, I can make them dance slow or I can make them stop.” That one person – me – was doing something to all those people.’4
Reading this quote now, it is impossible not to make a connection between Savile’s public experience of DJing and his equally prolific but private exploitation of the vulnerable.
This dancehall pioneering continued. Savile started a new night called Off the Record – using two turntables together – another innovation he claimed as his own. As British youth culture began emerging, Savile’s persona developed to meet its demands. A “larger than life, odd ball persona” was being honed. There would be a fake roll of bank notes in his breast pocket. He surrounded himself with teenage girls and began making links with local gangsters and pimps. As part of his persona, he needed a Rolls Royce. The similarities to a stereotypical gangster rap persona are striking. But his first Rolls Royce was a fake – an old Bentley with a Rolls Royce radiator grill and hub caps added.
One thing that is easily missed in Jimmy Savile’s persona, is his intellectual bias with which he controlled every conversation intensely. Biographer Dan Davies said
“…he laid the brick of one anecdote on top of another, gradually disappearing behind the wall of his own mythology”1
Savile was always telling stories. But according to the producer of Jim’ll Fix It, he would “never tell a story in which he’s have a red face or look foolish. Everything was always triumph” (Roger Ordish, producer of Jim‘ll Fix It1 ). Dr Clare used the word ‘obfuscating’ to describe Savile’s technique of giving a lengthy and detailed answer that had the effect of shutting down the listeners ability to think or question. Always in control.
In part B, I will look at more of Savile’s complex set of strategies for finding distance from both emotional vulnerability and condemnation for his crimes. To this end, he gained not only the endorsement of the British royal family, but their dependence upon him.
Disclaimer: All views expressed are my own unless otherwise stated, and do not necessarily reflect the views of any institution I have been employed by. The content here is for information and should not be interpreted as advice.
*Ryle did not apply this approach only to narcissism. If this mapping approach has been used in your own therapy, this does not mean that you have narcissistic difficulties.
References
1. Davies, D. (2014). In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile. Quercus.
2. Clare, A. (1993). In the Psychiatrist’s Chair. Mandarin.
3. Ryle, A. & Kerr, I.B. (2002). Introducing Cognitive Analytic Therapy. Wiley.
4. Brewster, B. and Broughton, F. (2018). Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey. Lasco Books.