A Very Private Celebrity
The Nine Lives of John Freeman
Hugh Purcell (Biteback, 384pp, £25, Oldie price £20)
THE CHALLENGE in writing a biography about the remarkable career of this remarkable man was the subject’s ‘pathological reticence’: he kept no diaries or personal documents. So Hugh Purcell has spent the past ten years pursuing Freeman’s surviving friends, family and colleagues, and persistently making polite requests to the man himself — usually to little effect. In spite of Freeman’s ‘jaw-dropping’ achievements, said Dominic Lawson in the Sunday Times, even those who appeared to know him best ended up informing Purcell that, well, perhaps they didn’t really know him at all.
Purcell has nevertheless pieced together Freeman’s life in a progression of vignettes so astonishing that it is almost impossible to believe they are portraits of the same person, said Marcus Field in the Independent. They reveal an extraordinary human being, but the real Freeman — the heart and soul of the man — remains an enigma.
His life was a biographer’s dream. In his 99 years, as Daisy Goodwin noted in the Times, Freeman was Monty’s favourite brigade major, a cabinet minister in the Attlee gov- ernment, television’s most famous Torquemada with Face to Face, editor of the New Statesman, high commissioner to India and ambassador to the US, executive chairman of London Weekend Television. What this biography lacked, however, was evidence of Freeman’s humanity — we know that he was tall, had red hair and walked ‘as if he wore a corset’, but it is hard to convey the measure of the man. Was he the ruthless philanderer and distant father or was he a romantic seeker after truth? Probably both, but Freeman ensured we would never find out.
In retirement, he was chairman of the Barnes Bowls Club, where he sublimated his competitive skills on the bowls circuit. Rebuffing all socialising attempts from the great and the good from his past, he insisted he would much rather spend time with ‘Triggsy’, a ‘gorblimey ex-boxer’ with whom he won several bowls tournaments. Even more characteristically, said Lawson, when Freeman died last year, at his insistence there was no eulogy at his funeral: just as he had turned down every offer of a knighthood or a peerage, he was to the last determined not to be noticed.