DARK SECRETS OF THE FREUDS
Did his wife, who at 47 seduced a boy of 16, turn a blind eye to Clement’s depravity?
THE greatest skill of the late Sir Clement Freud was never to reveal what he was thinking. Friends would say that you could look him straight in the eyes and they would give nothing away. Someone else had that ability – fellow Knight of the Realm Jimmy Savile. and now, it seems, Sir Clement, once one of the most popular and enduring figures in broadcasting and public life, was also hiding paedophile secrets.
Tonight’s ITV programme has a woman in her late 70s, Sylvia Woosley, claiming that from the age of ten she was ‘groomed and abused’ by Freud. another woman makes similar allegations adding there could be ‘thousands more’.
The allegations will dismay Freud’s many friends and millions of fans. But they have elic- ited no protest of his innocence from his widow Lady Freud, the actress Jill Raymond — born June Flewett — now 89.
Instead, in the film she apologises ‘for what has happened to these woman’, expressing her shock, and her deep sorrow. Given the shocking nature of the revelations, it is almost unbearable now to repeat the tribute to the amusingly lugubrious Freud — a Liberal MP for 14 years — given by his friend Gordon Brown after Freud’s death seven years ago.
‘Sir Clement Freud made a huge contribution to public life in many different ways,’ declared the then Prime Minister, who got to know Freud when he was Rector of the University of Edinburgh and Freud was Rector of Dundee University.
‘I was proud to have known him and the whole country should recognise the achievements in his life.’
Eight days later, at the funeral at St Bride’s, in Fleet Street, Brown read the lesson from St John’s Gospel and gave an address to a starry congregation that included Stephen Fry, rock star Bono and an assortment of Freud’s fellow panellists from Radio 4’s enduring panel game Just a Minute, in which he said: ‘ He was more than a national treasure, he was a national institution.’
Until now, this was how practically everyone viewed Freud — the dry, acerbic, self- deprecating, achingly pessimistic figure the public adored.
Clement Freud — Clay to his friends — was one of those people who seem to have been placed on earth to remind everyone that it’s not all bad. His method of doing so was to insist, however, that it was.
His was the measured, slightly mocking, funereal voice on Just a Minute that audiences most wanted to hear. No wonder he appeared in every episode of the popular programme through 42 series from its inception in 1968 until he died. To listeners desperate for nostalgia, he was the embodiment of old fashioned and slightly mannered attitudes.
Who but Clement Freud could have taken on the hopeless constituency of the Isle of Ely for the Liberals in 1973 – and won it? He wanted to beat the Conservatives but couldn’t bring himself to stand for Labour.
With the bookies quoting odds of 33-1 against him, the famous gambling man put a £1,000 on himself — and won. One way or another, the overweight, almost Pickwickian Freud always appeared to be in crackling, curmudgeonly form.
He was a familiar, larger-than-life figure punting heavily at the races (visitors to his Marylebone flat were invariably shown the copy of a bookmaker’s cheque of £70,420.45 for his winnings which he kept in a frame on the wall), often with wife Jill on his arm.
Here was an ostensibly happy marriage that produced five children (and nearly 20 grandchildren) including multi-millionaire PR guru Matthew Freud, whose former wife was Rupert Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth.
Matthew has certainly followed the family’s dissolute, libidinous path. While married to his second wife Elisabeth, with whom he has a son and a daughter, he had another child with one of her close friends. Elisabeth even cradled the child in her arms, not knowing the father was her husband.
Friends said she was furious that he had ‘ betrayed’ her. They were divorced in 2014, two years after the child was born.
another of Clement’s children is Emma Freud, TV presenter and partner of Four Weddings and a Funeral filmmaker Richard Curtis. Emma and Matthew’s other siblings were Nicola, Dominic and ashley.
But behind the public image there were dark secrets. One emerged 15 years ago when author Jonathan ‘Joss’ Self, a friend of the Freuds and brother of the writer Will Self, revealed in a memoir, Self Harm, that he was only 16 years when he started an affair with a married woman who was 30 years his senior.
He named her only as ‘June’ and it went on for five years until he met his first wife. June is, of course, the real first name of Jill Freud, and it soon emerged that she was the married women involved.
(Incidentally, she is said to have been C. S. Lewis’s inspiration for the character of Lucy in the Narnia stories – in the World War II she was evacuated to Oxford and was taken in by Lewis and his lover Jane Moore.)
Self wrote of the affair with Freud: ‘I learned an awful lot, for me the experience was all positive . . . June taught and I learned; she nurtured and I grew; sometimes, with the callous
Stars turned out to pay tribute at his funeral ‘As I lay there I knew what he was going to do’
indifference of a teenager I inadvertently hurt her. I loved June and she loved me. Nevertheless, despite the strength and depth of our feelings for each other, we both understood the impossibility of our situation . . .
‘There was no question of deceiving June’s husband as they had an “open” marriage . . . although he and I never discussed the subject, he was fully aware with how things stood between his wife and me. Indeed, he treated me as a member of their family, offering me support, advice and even financial assistance.
‘Over time, the two of us developed a lasting and quite separate, if somewhat unconventional, friendship of our own.’ as for Freud himself, friends said he was not bothered by what happened between Joss and Jill — he once joked the secret to a long marriage was ‘several houses’ — and he dismissed it as ‘just tittle-tattle’.
at his home in Cork, in the West of Ireland yesterday, Joss Self, now 55, brother of the oh- so- self- opinionated, currently fashionable writer and commentator Will Self, declined to add anything about the Freud’s ‘open’ marriage on the grounds that ‘it’s all in the past’.
But just how ‘open’ the marriage was is bound to be a key question in the light of tonight’s revelations.
In her astonishing testimony, Sylvia Woosley — who met the Freuds with her wayward mother in the South of France in 1948, and was taken in by them in London in 1952 when her mother decamped to Ibiza — describes a morning when she joined the couple for breakfast in their bed. She was 14.
When Mrs Freud got up to make the breakfast, Sylvia offered to help, but Jill Freud told her to ‘stay where you are with Clay’.
She says: ‘I knew what was going to happen. I was in my nightdress, and he pulls it up and pulls me against him, touching me and kissing me.’
Who could have imagined that such a depraved scene could be played out by a man admired in so many
ways. But then, Clement Freud’s studied unflappability masked an incredibly complex family background which already encompassed dysfunction, feud and infidelity.
How bitterly ironic that the family would have made an intriguing study for Freud’s grandfather Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis who believed that sexual energy was the driving force behind our behaviour.
Sigmund and his family fled from Hitler’s Nazis to London in 1933 and, arriving in London, settled in Hampstead where he continued to develop his theories.
But the great Sigmund merited a mere two pages in Clement’s autobiography, Freud Ego, in which he describes, as a boy in Berlin being taken on a family visit to see his grandfather in Vienna. Later, in London, he would have tea with him.
Sigmund died in 1939, mercifully unaware of the bitterness that would divide his three grandsons, Clement, and brothers Stephen, who became an ironmonger in London, and Lucian, the infamous artist who womanised on an industrial scale.
Sigmund would perhaps have traced the roots of their enmity back to their childhood of considerable domestic comfort in which the brothers had a fulltime nanny, all made possible because their mother was rich.
Clement — whose architect father Ernst was Sigmund’s son — recorded in his memoir: ‘My mother was very beautiful and fairly distant. When she came into the nursery she nodded to Stephen and me, and sat down with Lucian and whispered. They had secrets.
‘I did not realise for many years that this is not what good mothers do.’
Just how these memories incubated in Clement’s mind — and in his brothers’ — one can only speculate about. But tragically, when Clay died the three had not talked to each other for years.
Lucian, who died in 2011 aged 88, was to become probably the world’s greatest living painter, whose works now sell for millions.
But his fame as an artist is rivalled by his rampant reputation with women — he is known to have fathered 14 children, two of them with his first wife and 12 with five mistresses — though it is rumoured he had up to 40 children.
The fraternal rift was so deep that when Lucian was offered a knighthood, he openly admitted he turned it down because Clement already had one. ‘I have the OM (Order of Merit) which is senior,’ he boasted.
So how did this bad blood come about? There are two stories. One tells of Lucian challenging Clement to a race around Green Park. Clement was in the lead when his brother cried out: ‘ Stop thief, he’s stolen my money.’ As passersby grabbed hold of younger man, Lucian swept by to win the race. The two never spoke again.
The second story concerns Lucian’s gambling debts of £19,000 in 1955, when Clement was running a nightclub at the Royal Court Theatre in London’s Sloane Square.
According to Clement, when his brother arrived at the club seeking a loan he kept him waiting and then turned him down.
‘I loved Lucian without liking him,’ said Freud years later. ‘There came a point where love was too painful and the dislike sufficient to say it really would be more sensible to end this relationship.’
For his part, Stephen, the ironmonger, saw himself as the ‘forgotten Freud’ while Clement simply dismissed their relationship as ‘not very close’. As for Clement Freud’s career, it was not exactly meteoric.
His celebrity happened by accident. No great scholar, he left St Paul’s school to become an apprentice chef at the Dorchester hotel in Park Lane when he was 16.
There he saw in the new year of 1942 with ten portions of Beluga caviar and a bottle of Dom Perignon pilfered from his employer — an evening that would give him a taste for high living and set a high bar for his culinary ambitions.
Conscripted into the Royal Ulster Rifles, he was a liaison officer at the Nuremberg war crimes trials after World War II.
From there he turned to cooking and sports writing and, being good with words in an age when TV chefs were in their infancy — he soon found himself dispensing advice onscreen in Freud On Food.
When Eamonn Andrews invited him on to his ITV chat show in 1964, Freud’s doomladen style was an instant hit.
But it was another four years before he became a star, and for this he always acknowledged the debt he owed to Henry the bloodhound.
As a TV chef and gourmet, he had declined many offers to endorse foods because he knew it could compromise his professional integrity. But dog food was different. The ads he made in three days with Henry for Minced Morsels earned him £45,000 (£750,000 today) — and stardom.
Sir Clement Freud then managed to achieve the ultimate goal of every celebrity — the public’s affection. It is not difficult to know what Sylvia Woosley felt, watching it happen.
For her, his abuse, which began, remember, when she was just tenyears old, ruined her life. There have been suicide attempts and bouts of depression.
‘I suppose it’s affected my behaviour all my life,’ she tells ITV.
‘I’ve been married twice, my relationships with men, my lack of trust, my lack of selfconfidence, my selfdestructions.’
Clement, knighted by Margaret Thatcher in 1987 when he lost his parliamentary seat, died of a heart attack while writing an article.
He always claimed to poohpooh his celebrity. Privately, he adored it. As with Jimmy Savile, the public affection will now turn to revulsion.