Oh, what a rollicking life!
Four marriages, mistresses galore (from Billie Holiday to Barbara Castle), a glittering TV career – and he could have been PM. The awe inspiring story of John Freeman, a star from the age when celebrities really were talented
WITHIN a few months of their arrival, it was clear that the glamorous Freemans had conquered Washington DC. As British ambassador, John Freeman had quickly gained the trust of the notoriously tricky President Nixon. Meanwhile, his wife Catherine, a former BBC television producer, was winning renown for her warmth and energy as a hostess. Behind the scenes, however, something was amiss. A chill wind seemed to have entered Freeman’s relationship with his wife — and Catherine was growing uneasy. ‘Are you having an affair?’ she asked him one day, point-blank. Freeman fixed her with his steely blue eyes. ‘You have the mind of a housemaid to ask such a question,’ he replied.
It was a snub cruelly engineered to throw her off the scent. And it had the desired effect: for the entire two years they were in Washington, Catherine remained naively unaware of what was going on right under her nose . . .
While still in the U.S., Freeman had lunch one day with economist Robert Casson, who needed some career advice. He told the younger man: ‘You should change your entire way of life every ten years.’
This was indeed how Freeman chose to conduct his own life: coolly changing both his wife and his career roughly every ten years.
As well as four spouses, he had numerous lovers, including the politician Barbara Castle, the novelist Edna O’Brien, the film star Eva Bartok and the singer Billie Holliday.
But he never allowed himself to dwell on past loves and glories. As an old friend of his put it: ‘John has spent his life moving through a series of rooms, always shutting the door firmly behind him and never looking back.’
This alone would mark him out as a remarkable character. But as well as all the women, Freeman, who died last year, actually managed to pack in nine different careers.
Not only that, but in at least four of these, he achieved more than the vast majority of us could manage in a lifetime. Had he stuck to politics, for instance, many believed that he would have become prime minister — and a great one, according to the U.S. statesman Henry Kissinger.
Today, however, most people remember John Freeman only as the cool inquisitor in the (occasionally repeated) TV series Face To Face. Until it began in 1959, most interviews had been deferential; he changed all that for ever with his polite but penetrating questions.
Guests included many of the towering figures of the late Fifties and early Sixties, including Martin Luther King, the philosopher Bertrand Russell and the novelist Evelyn Waugh.
But the interviews that probably had the most impact at the time were one that probed the insecurities of comedian Tony Hancock and another that nearly made TV personality Gilbert Harding cry, when he asked about the death of his mother.
THE viewer never saw Freeman’s well- cut features. He sat with his back to the camera, in the shadows, 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 a*** on the public,’ commented Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman.
The fact that the public seldom saw more than the back of Freeman’s head helped to cultivate an aura of mystery. And that suited him admirably.
Almost pathologically private, he not only loathed public attention but rarely talked about his personal life, even with close friends.
As the years passed, he seemed increasingly shy of the limelight. He turned down a knighthood and a peerage. His Who’s Who entry became briefer and briefer; his letters and personal papers were ruthlessly discarded. Who was this extraordinary man, I wondered? Why was he determined to forget what other old men would be proud to remember? What secrets was he trying to hide?
The psychiatrist Anthony Clare, who met him twice, believed that the clues lay in Freeman’s childhood.
AS THE son of a London barrister and his pretty wife, I discovered, Freeman had lacked for nothing except love. His father Horace discouraged closeness, consenting to have dinner with John and his younger brother only once a week.
From the age of six, Freeman once said, he had disliked his father and despised his mother — ‘a pretty but silly woman’. Largely abandoned to his own devices, he’d quickly become self-sufficient.
He first smoked when he was four. London became his playground: he used to travel alone to the Royal Court Theatre and ask at the box office: ‘Is this a suitable play for a boy of seven?’
This bizarre childhood may well have been the source of the coldness that many detected beneath his charming manner.
Professor Clare went further: he felt that Freeman had the characteristics of a social psychopath, which include a lack of empathy, superficial charm, egocentricity and an incapacity for love.
At 13, he became a boarder at Westminster School. Fellow pupils noticed that Freeman — who boasted of losing his virginity at 15 to an under- matron — was unusually self- possessed and at times arrogant.
By the time he won a place at Oxford, he decided he’d had enough of books, and vowed not to read another. Instead, he spent much of his time drinking, gambling and womanising.
Did Freeman have a wild streak that later needed to be icily controlled? ‘ Quite possibly,’ his third wife told me. ‘He’s capable of a furnace of feeling, which is why he tamps everything down and is so ultracontrolled.’ One of his Oxford lovers, Susan Hicklin, remembers him as a tall and dashingly handsome undergraduate, with wavy red hair.
‘He must have found womanising very easy,’ she said. ‘I never asked him if I was his only girl. I was just jolly glad that this Olympian figure took me out sometimes.
‘He had this self- sufficiency, you see, which women find a challenge . . . He was gracious, charming, but you could never get the measure of him.’
After leaving Oxford with a thirdclass degree, Freeman joined a London advertising firm, lived on a houseboat and apparently romanced Diana Sandys, the married daughter of Winston Churchill.
Then he got married himself, to Elizabeth Johnston, the 25-year-old daughter of a chartered accountant. Susan Hicklin, who was still in touch with him, said he treated the marriage as a joke.
Freeman himself said much later that he’d married Elizabeth only to annoy his father.
He disparaged her cruelly. ‘I went to war to get away from her,’ he claimed, adding that after their divorce in 1948, he wouldn’t have recognised her if he’d seen her in the street.
In any case, he’d found a new lover during the war years: Mima Kerr, a journalist, who later became his second wife.
He may have seemed a less than promising recruit to the Coldstream Guards, but he acquitted himself with distinction during World War II. Field Marshall Montgomery, Freeman’s commander in the West- ern desert, later described him as ‘ the best brigade major in the Eighth Army’.
By the end of the war, Freeman had won two awards for gallantry — the first an MBE and the second, which even his family didn’t know about, a Croix de Guerre awarded by the French, who praised his ‘hard work, efficiency and drive’.
Typically, after leaving the Army, he never again used his title of major. But his Army service left a lasting legacy: until old age, he was ramrod straight and always well-groomed.
Some found his neatness obsessive. At least one of his later lovers was infuriated by his habit of folding his trousers precisely before jumping into bed with her.
Career number three came about
almost by accident. He’d put his name forward to be the Labour parliamentary candidate for Watford in 1945, assuming he had no chance whatsoever of being elected. But Labour won by a landslide, and Freeman was in.
As a major still in military uniform, he was asked to give the traditional Humble Address of Thanks on the first day of the new parliament — and exceeded all expectations with his oratory skill.
Barbara Castle, the new Labour MP for Blackburn, was bowled over. ‘John was a charismatic figure who seemed to have a dazzling career in front of him,’ she wrote in her memoirs. ‘As he stood there in his uniform, erect, composed and competent, everyone felt his star quality.’ Later, in the Commons smoking room, the new prime minister, Clement Attlee, introduced Freeman to Winston Churchill and the great man broke down and wept. ‘Now all the best men are on the other side,’ he said.
The government, however, saw fit to park Freeman in uninspiring departments as a junior minister. Then, in 1951, when he was finally in line for ministerial promotion, he suddenly resigned in protest at the government’s plans to impose charges on NHS spectacles and dentures.
Attlee was appalled, letting it be known that Freeman could have a place in his Cabinet for the asking. But once Freeman made up his mind, nothing was ever likely to Marriage-go-round (clockwise from left): John Freeman and second wife Mima, Catherine (left) with Judith, and first wife Elizabeth change it. Power, for its own sake, never attracted him: ‘I personally find the pursuit and exercise of power arid, unsatisfying and distasteful,’ he once said.
Increasingly disenchanted, he nevertheless stayed on for another four years as a backbencher.
He started an affair with Barbara Castle. No longer bothering to hide his distaste for politics, he doodled incessantly during ‘unspeakable committee meetings’ or tested his memory with mental arithmetic.
In the evenings, when MPs hung around to vote, he whiled away the hours by gambling on illegal canasta games in his office. The croupier was his close friend Tom Driberg, a homosexual Labour MP with a reputation for loucheness.
It was Freeman who arranged Driberg’s marriage in 1951 as a cover-up for his sexuality. The bride, Ena Binfield, was reputed to be one of Freeman’s former lovers. Inevitably, the marriage was a disaster.
Freeman later told a friend that he considered his ten years as an MP to have been worse than his five years as a soldier.
The Labour party, however, continued to rate him: after Harold Wilson was elected PM in 1964, its most reluctant MP was offered a guaranteed place in the Cabinet.
He turned it down. And after 1996, I’m told, he never voted Labour again.
His next two careers — as editor of the New Statesman and budding TV star — overlapped. Staff on the Leftwing periodical remember him as an exacting boss who staunchly resisted pressure to support the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
On Thursday afternoons, he often disappeared when he was supposed to be at the printers. In fact, he was having trysts with the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien, who later wrote a thinly disguised — and sexually explicit — short story about them called The Love Object.
The plot revolves around a young woman’s obsession with an older man and her breakdown when he leaves her. ‘I adore you but I’m not in love with you,’ he tells her at the end. ‘With my commitments, I don’t think I could be in love with anyone.’
By THIS point, Freeman was married to his third wife. His second had died of skin cancer in 1957, and he’d soon afterwards fallen for a beautiful BBC producer, Catherine Dove, who was 16 years his junior.
Unfortunately, when they met, Catherine had just married Charles Wheeler, later a distinguished BBC foreign correspondent. He’d had to fly off to a new job in India and the plan was for her to join him.
But first she had to produce a three- part series called Press Conference, in which Freeman was a panel member. He decided to marry her, he said later, the moment he set eyes on her.
Just before the third programme went out, Catherine’s phone rang. ‘John asked, “Are you too busy packing or would you come over for a drink?” she recalls. ‘I did, and that was that.’
Charles Wheeler was appalled: ‘I thought Freeman was a gentleman,’ he told her.
Once Catherine was free, Freeman immediately asked her to give up her career. She bore him three children — and didn’t find out about the Edna O’Brien affair until 13 years later.
Meanwhile, her new husband was becoming a household name. His interviews in Face To Face not only captivated millions of viewers but were sold throughout the Englishspeaking world.
yet, by 1962, it was clear that the series was flagging. Even the BBC’s director- general noticed that the interviews were no longer unmissable.
Was the famously restless Freeman growing bored? The truth is a little more complicated. Not only was he deeply uneasy with his celebrity status but he’d taken great umbrage at a BBC drama by Terence Rattigan, which featured a TV inquisitor uncomfortably similar to himself.
Worse, the fictional interviewer was an alcoholic and a womaniser. Freeman consulted a lawyer and eventually settled with the BBC — but
he stopped making Face To Face. A fifth career soon beckoned: out of the blue, Harold Wilson — whom he privately despised — asked him to become the High Commissioner in India.
So the Freemans decamped to New Delhi. In their grand official residence, they were visited by such luminaries as Marlon Brando and Lord Mountbatten, prompting Tom Driberg to call it ‘Camelot in Delhi’.
It was Catherine who presided at the receptions. Freeman, she says, ‘was very proud of his ability to shake hands and then disappear. He had the whole routine down to three minutes.’
Freeman, who wrote brilliant dispatches, was considered to have done so well in the post that Wilson next asked him to be U.S. ambassador. At the time — 1968 — the Labour government were confidently expecting the Democrat Hubert Humphrey to be elected president.
But it was Richard Nixon who won — of whom Freeman had once written that he was ‘a man of no principle whatsoever except a willingness to sacrifice everything in the cause of Dick Nixon’.
This sentence almost cost Freeman his plum post. Indeed, former President Eisenhower declared that his appointment was an insult to the presidency itself, and 22 Tory MPs called for Freeman’s dismissal.
WILSoN, however, defiantly invited his ambassador-in- waiting to a grand dinner he was throwing for Nixon, despite being told that the president would probably boycott it. He didn’t.
At the dinner, to everyone’s astonishment, Nixon looked squarely at Freeman, sitting opposite, and said: ‘ Some say there’s a new Nixon. And they wonder if there’s a new Freeman. I would like to think that that’s all behind us. After all, he’s the new diplomat and I’m the new statesman, trying to do our best for peace in the world.’
The usually imperturbable Freeman was close to tears. A month later, he had to travel to Washington ahead of Catherine, who had the flu. Accompanying him was her newly-appointed social secretary Judith Mitchell, aged 28, whom both had agreed was a breath of fresh air.
She was certainly a great help to Catherine, once she took her place as one of Washington’s top hostesses. And when Catherine sensed that Freeman was behaving coldly towards her, it was to Judith she turned as a confidante.
For his part, her husband soon forged an excellent relationship with Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger. So trusted was Freeman that he was consulted on matters of foreign policy and occasionally allowed to see the president’s speeches before they’d been delivered.
on all counts, his ambassadorship was a triumph: Whitehall was delighted with the continuous flow of first-hand information from Washington, and Catherine was feted for her social skills.
Then, suddenly, Judith handed in her notice. Catherine was stricken and begged her not to go, but her social secretary was insistent. Soon afterwards, Wilson lost the 1970 general election to Ted Heath, who asked the British ambassador to stay on in Washington. But Freeman had already decided he wanted to quit, and the family returned to Britain.
It was time to start on his sixth career.
At this stage, Catherine had no idea what was about to happen. Three days after their return, during which he’d been unusually silent, she asked what was the matter.
HE ToLD her that he was unable to stay with her any longer. ‘It’s Jude,’ he said. Catherine recalls: ‘ At first I couldn’t think what he meant, then it dawned on me that he was talking about Judith and that he’d planned all this with her in advance.
‘Later on, I realised that he must have started an affair in Washington when they had gone ahead to prepare the residency.’
Friends say that Freeman was the love of Catherine’s life, and that she suffered ‘ for a very long time.’
And Freeman? He married Judith, had two more children with her and embarked on his seventh career — as the chairman of London Weekend Television, then badly listing and in danger of losing its franchise. Several years later, he was hailed for turning the company round.
It was his decision to leave in 1984, and everyone expected him to retire. Not a bit of it: after taking up bowls, Freeman was signed up a few months later by Granada TV to commentate on the six- day Superbowl tournament in Manchester. The next anyone knew, he was living in California where he’d landed a job as a political science lecturer at Davis, a university near Sacramento. He liked it so much there that he decided to become an American citizen, asking Kissinger to act as his referee.
Before this could happen, though, Judith had persuaded him to return to Britain for the sake of their daughters’ education.
Freeman’s ninth life — as a house-husband — began in a Thirties semi-detached house in Barnes, West London. While Judith taught at a local junior school, he shopped, cleaned, cooked and looked after the children.
Far from playing on his celebrity, he was happy to be accepted in the community as a keen amateur bowls player. He didn’t keep up with former political colleagues, and even ducked out of seeing Kissinger when he was in town.
As always, Freeman was determined to live in the present and close the book firmly on his past.
In 2012, at the age of 97, he decided he was becoming a burden to his family and moved into a home for disabled ex- service men and women.
He died there last December, two months short of his 100th birthday. At his request, there was no eulogy at the funeral.