A Very Private Celebrity (32 page)

On their final evening in America, John and Catherine were guests of Dan and Joanna Rose at a smart Manhattan restaurant, La Lutèce.
Henry Kissinger was there, Wes Pruden with Corinna Metcalf, David Frost with the actress Diahann Carroll. There were toasts and speeches. The next day a photographer caught the ambassador crying as he left the residency, a most unusual sight and perhaps a sign of the strain he was under. Catherine had no idea what was about to happen.

The family moved back to London into a small rented house in South Hill Park in Berkshire, which had been found by Lizi. The house was ugly and the atmosphere miserable. After three awkward days of near silence, Catherine could bear it no longer. She asked Freeman what was wrong: ‘You're very quiet. Why? You've stopped the job you didn't enjoy and now we are all safely back at home.' Freeman replied that he was unable to stay with her any longer, that he would go mad if he didn't get away. For the second time in their life together she asked if there was somebody else. This time he said, ‘It's Jude.' She remembers:

Freeman could not leave straight away because of diplomatic protocols. He needed to attend a farewell dinner at Chequers so he begged Catherine to accompany him ‘otherwise it would look odd'. He left for South Africa a few days later. The very next day, bizarrely, Catherine was rushed to the Middlesex Hospital with acute appendicitis, leaving her mother and the ever-loyal Cynthia to look after the children.

Back in the United States their friends were in a state of shock. ‘We were all dumbfounded,' said Joanna Rose. ‘She deeply, deeply loved him. She did not know about the Edna O'Brien story, she did not know about the affair with Judith; not a clue! Not a clue! It was cruel for Catherine. She was hurt for a very long time. He was the love of her life.'

After the shock came the speculation. The press took the view that the former ambassador had a low boredom threshold and liked to change careers and wives regularly. Every ten years was the figure John Freeman had given to Robert Cassen, probably sounding semi-flippant. Joanna Rose said the view in Washington and New York society was that Catherine was too much for John, too demanding, too extrovert, while John behaved like a Roman, cold and sensual. Corinna Metcalf agreed with both views:

Dan Rose's thoughts went in the same direction. ‘Professionally he was very impressive, knowledgeable, tough-minded and clear thinking. His interpersonal relationships were odd. Troubled. Abnormal.
I think at the time we felt that. Either he was born that way or he acquired it through childhood experiences. He was a wounded person; no empathy.

Lord Renwick took a professional view: ‘I don't think he resigned as ambassador because of the scandal. The Foreign Office by then could take divorce in its stride, why not? The fact is that after Washington there is nowhere else to go. You have occupied the most important foreign post. Where do you go after that?'

It would have been very difficult, however, for Freeman to continue as ambassador for a second term with the former social secretary at the embassy as his official mistress; particularly when his wife had had such a high profile and admired reputation. Freeman must have realised that.

Chapter 11

Media mogul

T
HE ORIGINS OF
John Freeman’s seventh career may be traced to a BOAC flight from London to New York on 21 January 1967. The current maker and shaker of British television, David Frost, had an inspired idea. Borrowing a typewriter from another passenger he excitedly tapped out a letter to High Commissioner Freeman who was in New Delhi. He invited him to ‘control and direct the whole programme output’ of an ‘unstoppable
television
[his italics] team’ that would take on the ‘moguls’ of the commercial television industry in a bid to start a new weekend television service in London. This would become London Weekend Television, LWT for short.

Freeman replied that he was interested: ‘It would be a wonderful achievement for the practitioners of television to seize part of the
franchise from the moguls and I should like to be associated with it. Whether I can is a more difficult question.’ On 9 February, David Frost flew to New Delhi and made a secret deal with the High Commissioner. Freeman told Frost that his India posting would probably end in July 1968, after which he would like to become ambassador to either the United States or the Soviet Union: nothing else would do. Nevertheless, he was enthusiastic about heading LWT at some stage. Frost suggested that the solution was to name him, confidentially, as deputy chairman on the bid to win the weekend franchise. ‘The date on which he would join us,’ wrote Frost, ‘would be the conclusion of his service in India, unless he was asked to serve in Washington or Moscow, in which case he would join following his service there.’
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This deal was to have repercussions throughout the history of LWT.

Why Frost pinned his hopes on a diplomat who might be out of the country for six years and had no experience of the rapidly evolving commercial television industry, although he had been a celebrated performer for the BBC, we do not know. Probably he would have agreed with Lord Renwick that if the newcomer was of sufficient calibre he would cope as well if not better than the professionals, but only if he was of the highest calibre. In fact, when a desperate David Frost did eventually call on Freeman’s services in March 1971, poor management at LWT had reduced the station to meltdown. Its very survival was at stake. To appreciate the mess that Freeman had to clear up – he said the offices reminded him of a casualty clearing station after a major battle – we need to go back to 1967.

The ‘
television
team’ that set up LWT in the first place, to use Frost’s stress on the word ‘television’, considered themselves the best in the business because they were the elite of BBC TV departmental heads, led by none other than the director-general-in-waiting of the BBC. They had defected as a group to join the opposition, which says much
for the insouciance of Frost, the money on offer and the well-known saying ‘no one is
entirely
loyal to the BBC’. The reason Frost chose them in opposition to ‘the moguls’ who he implied ran the rest of commercial television, thus pitting the Greeks against the Philistines, as it were, went back to the Pilkington Report of 1962 on the future of the broadcasting services in the UK.

The high-minded writers of the report had been extremely critical of the contention of the commercial TV ‘moguls’ that their job was simply to provide programmes the public wanted to watch: ‘Those who say they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste, and end by debauching it.’ Instead, the Pilkington Committee wrote in a succinct and careful sentence, broadcasting ‘should give people the best possible chance of enlarging worthwhile experience’.
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What better way of doing this, David Frost thought, than by assembling a team of television practitioners from the heads of BBC TV’s children’s, arts, music and comedy departments and placing them under the controller of the main BBC channel, BBC One, the universally admired Michael Peacock? (see Chapter 5). The new team lost no time announcing that their first principles were to show respect for the creative talents of those who made programmes and for those who watched them, and whose differing interests and tastes aspired to new experiences.

This is what the Independent Television Authority (ITA) wanted to hear. The ITA was, as always, in a difficult position. It was a public authority established by Parliament to maintain the standard of programmes provided by a handful of public limited companies, financed largely by advertising and answerable to shareholders. In practice, this meant that the ITA invited ITV companies from different parts of the UK to submit their programme schedules in order to obtain a licence to broadcast for a limited period. The ITA selected the best on offer
in a competitive process and then tried to ensure that the successful companies lived up to their submissions. From time to time, in a headmasterly way, the ITA issued guidance as to what it meant by ‘public service broadcasting’. This had to be less stringent, less demanding than the standards expected of the BBC, which, after all, was paid for by a compulsory licence fee. It was a question of where to draw the line. There was bound to be tension between the ITA’s regulatory remit and the commercial needs of ITV companies. From the time Freeman arrived at LWT in 1971 to the time he left in 1984 he challenged basic ITA assumptions, from its awarding of contracts to its definition of public service. That, however, was for the future.

In 1967 the ITA was hugely impressed by the manifesto of David Frost’s new team. It had complained for some time that the standard of children’s, arts, music and comedy programmes on ITV was too low and here were the former heads of those very departments at the BBC promising to lift them. The chairman of the ITA, Lord Hill, wrote: ‘It is an understatement to say that the authority liked this application. It was difficult to resist the thought that here was a group who would bring new thinking, fresh ideas and a lively impetus to weekend broadcasting. It had to have its chance, whatever the repercussions.’
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On 12 June 1967, the ITA took away the franchise for supplying commercial television in the London area at weekends (Friday to Sunday) from Associated Rediffusion and awarded it to what became LWT. ‘Bloody hell,’ thought Frost, ‘we’ve really got to do it now.’ The bid had taken just three months to put together, from start to finish – but that was the easy part.

The new management team gave themselves an effective voice in the running of LWT because they had a substantial equity holding. They saw no reason why, as people who cared about television and
made television, this should be otherwise. But they suffered from a handicap familiar later to BBC programme makers who left to set up independent companies in the 1990s, which was that they had no business or legal or personnel background. Neither the chairman, Aidan Crawley, nor Michael Peacock had run a company before. They stuck to the mantra that the quality of the programme was what really mattered, but their weekend schedules in the early days were naive to say the least.

On Saturday evenings, when viewers in the London area wanted to relax, all LWT had to offer was a mixture of ‘Brecht, Britten, some uninspired situation comedies and uninteresting variety programmes’.
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Up against this, a ruthless BBC responded to the challenge by offering its best police series,
Dixon of Dock Green, The Val Doonican Show
and
Match of the Day.
Unsurprisingly, audiences in the early months of LWT dropped by 16 per cent from the size of audiences obtained by Associated Rediffusion. This could not be allowed to continue.

The LWT board, composed of business men and investors with non-executive powers, regarded Peacock as impossibly arrogant, spoilt by the BBC and sheltered from economic realities. He resented board members’ interference and dismissed them as ignorant about television. The press saw the scenario of Hard-Faced Business up against Creative Talent, and put like that there was no doubt who would win. On Monday 8 September 1969, Michael Peacock returned from holiday, hoping that his new autumn schedules would rescue the channel. Instead, he was summoned to Aidan Crawley’s office and invited to resign. The prime movers behind this happened to be friends of John Freeman, the banker Lord Montague and the chairman of the
New Statesman
, Lord Campbell.
The Times
’ s verdict: ‘For all the splendour of his reputation as a broadcaster, Mr Peacock was in fact running a company that was providing neither the commercial success that
had been expected nor the programmes of the quality that had been promised.’
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In early October, department heads resigned in protest. They were mostly the former BBC talent, the LWT heads of drama (Humphrey Burton), entertainment (Frank Muir) and children’s, religious and adult education (Doreen Stephens). It was the end of a brave experiment.

There were three further reasons why the early LWT failed. The faults were not directly those of management but Freeman had to correct them when he arrived. The other ITV companies resented LWT because of its ‘best boy’ status with the ITA, and they had considerable power to undermine it. This was because no one company could fill its schedules entirely with its own programmes so the major companies like Granada, Thames, ATV and LWT were obliged by the ITA to produce a range of programmes that they offered to one another in order to form a network schedule – that is a selection of programmes that were shown by every company. Crucially, it was left to individual companies to choose when to schedule these network programmes. Jealous of LWT’s reputation and wanting to maximise their own audiences, the other companies were known to schedule LWT programmes at unfavourable times in their own regions. They also offered their own best programmes to Thames TV, the weekday supplier in London, despite pleas from LWT to show them at weekends. Worse than that, some companies like ATV in the midlands scheduled against LWT by placing some of their own poor programmes at the weekend so that the inherited audience for LWT output was minimal.

Then there was the economic climate. Commercial TV might have been in its early days ‘a permit to print money’, in the words of Lord Thomson who founded Scottish Television in the 1950s, but by 1969
after an economic slump and devaluation the printing presses had certainly stopped. It was hard to make a profit. Advertising revenue was down but the government continued to impose a large tax on it. In 1970, LWT actually made a modest profit, nearly £3 million, but this was reduced to a small loss after payment of a levy larger than the profit itself.

Finally, there were the trade unions, obstructive and expensive. LWT was forced to take over Rediffusion’s obsolete studios in Wembley, where the staff, demoralised and suspicious, delayed the start of programme production for two months. Then they pulled the plug on opening night, 2 August 1968, when, ironically, Frank Muir was introducing
We Have Ways of Making You Laug
h. The Association of Cinematographic and Television Technicians (ACCT) members were responsible. They had claimed, and been given, ‘a golden handshake’ when they left Rediffusion and an enhanced pay packet when they joined LWT the following week. When its members came up against John Freeman a few years later, they would not find the youthful socialist of 1945 who thought trade union power was the gateway to a New Britain; more the
Panorama
interviewer of 1960 who was prepared ruthlessly to expose trade union malpractice.

The one person who might have resolved this was the most important figure in LWT, David Frost himself. He was barred from membership of the board because he was a star performer;
Frost on Friday, Frost on Saturday and Frost on Sunday
were the staple output of the channel. Yet he had founded LWT, drawn up the franchise bid before Peacock joined, sat in on board meetings and had a seat on the programme committee. He also ran his own talent company, David Paradine Productions, which packaged shows for LWT and had under contract star entertainers like Tommy Cooper, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett. Peacock, understandably, criticised this
as a conflict of interest and resented Frost’s salary that was far higher than his own. Then he tried to prevent Frost opening another chat show in the United States, pointing out that this might jeopardise his primary commitment to LWT. He said he had nightmares that Frost might be over the Atlantic when he got his cue to be on air with
Frost on Friday.
There was deep enmity between the two that did diminish over the years.

On 3 October 1969, Frost interviewed Rupert Murdoch on
Frost on Friday
. Looking back at the early history of LWT this seems almost as significant an event as Frost writing to Freeman two years earlier. The Australian press baron had just bought the
News of the World
and this was his introduction to the British public. Taking the
News of the World
as his evidence, Frost invited the audience to question Murdoch’s values and morality. The Australian press tycoon was not a confident TV performer and he hated the ‘trial by television’. Frost thought it made good viewing and he invited Murdoch for a drink afterwards. Murdoch stormed out, pausing as he left the studios to vow revenge, as legend has it: ‘I’m going to buy this place,’ he declared.
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