A Very Private Celebrity

Introduction

‘
I WISH EVERYBODY
would forget I was alive,’ he said. And most people did. But living a very private life in south-west London, until nearing his centenary, was one of the most extraordinary public figures of twentieth-century Britain: an achiever and
thrower-away
of high office after high office; a celebrity who sought anonymity. ‘John Freeman’, said an old friend, ‘has spent his life moving through a series of rooms, always shutting the door firmly behind him and never looking back.’

He was a chameleon. In the 1940s he was a war hero, then an MP who reduced Churchill to tears. In the 1950s he was tipped as the future Labour leader, but resigned from politics and became a famous TV interviewer. In 1961 he left the BBC to become editor of the
New Statesman
– at that time, the most influential political weekly. Four years later, he resigned and became a diplomat, first as
High Commissioner to India and then as ambassador to Washington. In 1971, he resigned again to become chairman of London Weekend TV and then of ITN. In 1984, he resigned once more and moved to California as a visiting lecturer, until his return to the UK in 1990. In retirement, he became a well-known figure on the bowls circuit of south-west London. No one knew about his past.

In very old age he still did not look back. He said in 2010: ‘I don’t remember the past because I’ve always put it behind me. Not just now, I’ve always been like that. I like to think about the present and even the future, but my past is a closed book, even to me.’

John Freeman was a man who believed in changing his life, and his wife, every ten years. He had four wives and three families, his last child being born when he was seventy-two. His lovers included the politician Barbara Castle, the writer Edna O’Brien, the film star Eva Bartok, the singer Billie Holliday, and the actress Rosalie Crutchley. It’s possible he did not remember them either.

The paradox of Freeman, the private celebrity, was symbolised by the TV series that made him famous in 1959:
Face to Face
. The viewer never saw Freeman’s face. He sat with his back to the camera, in the
shadow, smoke from a cigarette curling up between the fingers of his right hand. ‘John is the only man who has made himself celebrated by turning his arse on the public,’ said Kingsley Martin, former editor of the
New Statesman
. Freeman was the grand inquisitor, exposing the real personality behind the public figure – but never his own.

Thirty years later, the BBC repeated
Face to Face
and sent the radio psychiatrist Anthony Clare and myself to California to film an introductory interview with Freeman, in which the roles were reversed. The programme was a failure. Freeman had an intimidating physical presence and a manner that combined an old-fashioned, somewhat insincere charm with a complete put-down: ‘I’m sorry, I don’t want to sound rude to you, but that’s the sort of portentous question I don’t think I want to answer.’ As always, he gave nothing away.

An old friend of Freeman’s had warned me: ‘John has the capacity to put up the shutters that is excelled by nobody except a shopkeeper during a time of riots.’ After the interview I noticed that the interior of Freeman’s house in Davis was like a hotel room – devoid, as far as I could see, of personal memorabilia.

I became fascinated by John Freeman’s life, particularly by his chameleon-like quality to change it every decade or so, and I wanted to write his biography. His third wife, Catherine, was discouraging: ‘Don’t think he has mellowed and will say, “Now is the time to review my life”; he hasn’t and he won’t.’ Nevertheless, I persisted and asked Freeman, with the proviso that if he objected I would go no further. His reply was one I didn’t expect: ‘I do not feel able to take any part in the project you propose.’ But did that Olympian response leave the door open for others to take part? I asked Nigel Lawson, former Chancellor of the Exchequer and a friend of Freeman, to intercede on my behalf, as he had once thought a biography should be written. He tried and failed: ‘Unsurprisingly, knowing him, he is not prepared to
approve your project, even grudgingly. However, he did make clear that, equally, he does not disapprove and will not sue.’ So, despite feeling that chill air of non-approval on the back of my neck, I obtained a commission from a publisher in 2004 and began to research.

It was not easy. John Freeman’s
Who’s Who
entry had become briefer and briefer over the years and nearly all his early contemporaries were dead. He had written no autobiography, kept no diary and even destroyed private correspondence. Yet his story quickly became tantalising.

Like other celebrities who give nothing away about themselves, anecdotes stuck to him that might be accurate but could be myth. Was it true that as a schoolboy he had heard Mahatma Gandhi speak and decided to become a socialist? Was it true that as a staff officer at Lüneburg Heath in May 1945 he had conducted the German generals to surrender to Field Marshal Montgomery? The answers lay in his school and war records, which I required his permission to access. And why would he withhold that? It seemed little enough to ask. He’d had a distinguished education as a scholar and head of house at Westminster School, followed by a heroic, decorated war with the Desert Rats – Monty called him ‘the best brigade major I have’. Or was this also a myth?

I wrote to him again. Once more his reply combined flowery charm with blunt dismissal:

I was deflated by his answer, but all the more intrigued. His final sentence both disturbed and excited me. Why was he so pathologically private? Why was he determined to forget what other old men would be proud to remember?

I pressed ahead, hoping, frankly, that Freeman would pass away while I was writing. He was ninety. His death would enable me to access his records and encourage those friends who respected his privacy to talk to me. By 2013, however, Freeman was in his ninety-ninth year and appearing to fulfil his wish that ‘everybody would forget I was alive’. By then, I had completed a long essay entitled ‘Face to face with an enigma: the extraordinary life of John Freeman’. I could not wait any longer. I offered it to the
New Statesman
(which was about to celebrate its centenary), as Freeman had been editor there when its readership was at its highest in the 1960s. The present editor, Jason Cowley, liked my essay – always an encouragement to a writer – and published it in the first week of March.

The results exceeded my expectations. My worries that no one would be interested in this figure from the past were completely dispelled. The essay was the ‘most read’ on the online
New Statesman
for months and has been at the top of the Google rankings for ‘John Freeman’ ever since. When Freeman eventually died in December 2014, the lengthy obituaries and accompanying feature articles proved without doubt that he continues to fascinate the British public. Several acknowledged my
New Statesman
article – fairly, I think, for I am now the only person who knows the details of the public life of this most private of celebrities.

For the past decade, on and off, I have been researching and writing John Freeman’s biography. For a long time I searched for a title. ‘Private Celebrity’ suggested itself, and ‘Nine Lives’ refers, of course, to his chameleon-like quality of moving from life to life, leaving little
baggage behind. All these lives stand for his professional roles, except the last: ‘the ordinary man’. I believe he worked at this in the same self-aware way he worked at his previous roles – as one to be mastered to the best of his ability. There is a whimsical reason for my subtitle too: John Freeman loved cats – particularly his Abyssinian pair, Pushkin and Dulcie, whom he named after the Coleridge poem ‘Kubla Khan’ (from the lines: ‘It was an Abyssinian maid / And on the dulcimer she played’). There was something feline about him too; he walked on his own through his many lives, conscious of his own attractions but showing little interest in others’.

My challenge was to answer the question ‘Who was John Freeman?’ and in this quest I became certain of two things. The first is that there was sufficient written and oral material to attempt an answer. He was true to his word that he had no intention of writing memoirs and had never kept a diary (‘not a single paper’, in fact). This, of course, was frustrating. But, fortunately, Freeman was a professional communicator and much of his life is on the public record. Each of his nine lives has its own, very different archive. There is his head of house ledger at school; his brigade major’s official weekly war diary; his speeches and articles as government minister; his Flavus diary in the
New Statesman
for over a decade and many, many articles for that journal and also for the
News of the World
. Then there are his television programmes (in transcript or recording), particularly
Face to Face
, his diplomatic despatches and his TV chairman memoranda. Even his lectures as university professor are preserved in a California museum. Only Freeman’s ninth life lacks a written archive – when he was trying hard and self-consciously to be ‘an ordinary man’. But about that, the bowls players of Priory Park in Barnes have much to say.

There is no shortage of writing about Freeman either. My favourite sources are diaries, with their gobbets of gossip and anecdote;
Woodrow Wyatt, Hugh Dalton, Richard Crossman and Tom Driberg do not disappoint. A close second come the press portraits in which, for over half a century, journalists in the UK and the USA have tried to come ‘face to face’ with Freeman. Most have failed. Some have partly succeeded, particularly those portraits written by friends and colleagues such as Norman MacKenzie, Tom Driberg, Anthony Howard, Francis Hope and Wesley Pruden.

Such was the ubiquity of Freeman that he is indexed in innumerable biographies and histories too – I have half a bookcase full. These include Carl Jung’s
Man and His Symbols
(Freeman wrote the introduction), Henry Kissinger’s
White House Years
and David Frost’s
An Autobiography
. He is also, famously, the scarcely disguised ‘love object’ in Edna O’Brien’s short story of that title.

Over the last decade, I have interviewed numerous family members, friends and colleagues of Freeman. Some of them pre-deceased him: the politician Michael Foot; his
New Statesman
colleagues Anthony Howard and Norman MacKenzie; his first lover, Susan Hicklin (née Cox). They and others, like the statesman Dr Henry Kissinger, the writer Paul Johnson and the diplomat Lord Renwick, knew him over many years. Above all, John’s third wife Catherine has been hugely supportive and helpful in pointing me towards important contributors to this story. My thanks are also due to Judith Freeman, his fourth wife and the mother of his two younger children, for allowing me access to his army service record.

My second certainty is that in writing this biography I have discovered much that is new. The beginning was not promising. Freeman wrote to me: ‘I cannot see why my life is of any possible interest to anybody.’ His eldest son Matthew said, ‘That became his mantra’ – a warning shot across the bows of any biographer. In my view, this dismissive attitude was less a case of modesty or the reticence of a
pre-war gentleman than one of perversity. Here, after all, was a man admired by Field Marshal Montgomery; a populariser of Carl Jung; the eponymous lover of Edna O’Brien in ‘The Love Object’; a close friend of Henry Kissinger; and a respected boss of Rupert Murdoch – to name but a few from his hall of fame.

Freeman makes a challenging subject for a biographer. I discovered that he was not only dismissive of different episodes in his life, but he seemed to mislead on purpose. For instance, he told both his wife Catherine and his friend Tom Driberg that he had wasted his time at Oxford, doing little except drink heavily and court girls. In fact he edited the university paper
Cherwell
under a disguised name and he was also Flavus, the political diarist who interviewed Ellen Wilkinson on the Jarrow March, reported the fight between Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts and students at Carfax Hall in Oxford, and attended meetings in support of the Republic in the Spanish Civil War. In other words, he was already politically engaged as a socialist and a participant in the dramas of the 1930s.