UNITED KINGDOM
The Globe and Mail (Canada)
CAROLINE BYRNE
LONDON — Special to The Globe and Mail
Sir James Savile, knighted by Queen and Pope, bought a brand new Rolls-Royce every year so he’d have a getaway car in case a scandal erupted and he needed to flee.
By 1991 – a year after Pope John Paul II made him Knight Commander of St. Gregory the Great in honour of his charity work – Mr. Savile had bought and sold 17 new Rolls-Royces, telling a BBC psychiatrist it would be easier to sell a new car if he had to move abroad quickly with little money.
“I could then go and be very unhappy in the south of France, covered in shame and sunshine and mad birds with bikinis on,” Sir James told Anthony Clare, a psychiatrist who interviewed the BBC Top of the Pops TV presenter in 1991 for a radio show at the peak of his celebrity and – it would now appears, his sexual crimes.
Jimmy Savile, the youngest of seven children and a star who made children’s wishes come true in the BBC TV show Jim’ll Fix It, described himself that day as a child-hater with no emotions. He said he had no attachments, had never been in love, would never marry and had never spent more than one or two nights in one location, preferring to carry an overnight bag throughout his life. He mused about how he was drawn to mortuaries and enjoyed spending five days alone with his mother’s corpse because he finally had her to himself.
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