A Very Private Celebrity (36 page)

Independent Television News (ITN) supplied news to the ITV companies in return for a budget and the fixed allocation of airtime. Freeman was chairman in the 1970s, a time of industrial unrest and staff dissatisfaction at ITN similar to that at LWT but on a much more disruptive scale. Coincidentally, at exactly the same time as the Selsdon Park conference at LWT discussed lack of communication at management level (1976) so at ITN the editor Nigel Ryan commissioned the Pearson Inquiry into the same thing. It reported that ‘24 per cent of comments and criticisms were the absence of any form of constructive communications’. Hitherto, when the political editor Julian Havilland had complained about this to the chairman, Freeman had given him ‘a dusty answer’ (a favourite Freeman phrase) but now a management structure was set up not very dissimilar to that by Brian Tesler at LWT. Soon after Nigel Ryan left, not because of this but because the board had turned down his proposal to expand news into current affairs with more programming. Here Freeman was
adamant: ‘I held the view that the only way ITN could survive was if it remained a nuts and bolts operation without fancy points.’ The ITV companies did not want poachers on their land.
34

Freeman was also chairman of United Press International Television News (UPITN). This was a partnership between the American television news agency United Press International and ITN, which provided much of the footage and coverage in the United States. UPI was always short of money because it was not directly connected with any of the big American TV broadcast companies. In 1979 it was rumoured that the government of South Africa was indirectly bankrolling it, just when it was supplying an interview with the proapartheid Prime Minister John Vorster. This was too much for ITN. Freeman wrote more than a ‘dusty’ ultimatum: ‘My board do not find it acceptable to be associated in any way with a company that is not in a position immediately and unanswerably to refute the allegation that it may have been covertly penetrated by foreign government funds.’
35

The rumour proved to be true and much to the embarrassment of ITN it had to buy out the South African shares in UPI. Not long afterwards, UPI went bankrupt and in 1985 UPITN became World Television News (WTN), owned by ITN and the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). Apparently, at one stage in the negotiations with ABC in New York, Freeman turned to Elmer Lower, the president of ABC News and said, in exasperation: ‘Elmer, it’s time to crap or get off the pot.’ This revelation comes from Dan Moloney of ITN, who was there. He adds that ‘John spoke in his mellifluous voice, likened by one reviewer to a vicar’s.’

By 1984 Freeman had enough. He wrote to me in 2004: ‘I served a very long sentence in public life of one kind or another, and I believe I have paid my dues in full.’ There speaks a man who must have wanted a rest. Now that Tesler, Birt and Miller were ‘operating on all legs’ as
he put it, and the franchise bid had been successful, he thought the sooner he got out the better. Typically, he had ensured his successor was in place. ‘I decided what LWT needed was a businessman to look after the affairs of the company. Christopher Bland was young, go-getting and exactly the right sort of person.’ He became chairman of the main board of LWT (Holdings) to universal approval on 1 January: ‘a stellar talent, a toughie’ is John Birt’s assessment. Brian Tesler became chairman of the TV company, a dual chairmanship that found less than universal approval at first.

One of Bland’s first decisions was to abandon the Freeman practice of holding a pre-board meeting in his office with the executive directors to work out their approach to the board meeting itself. ‘Whatever happened at the board meeting was choreographed in advance, which made the meetings rather dull,’ Sir Christopher Bland told me. ‘John didn’t like surprises or confrontation.’

Freeman had stayed longer at LWT than in any of his other careers and enjoyed it the most. He told an interviewer:

At Freeman’s farewell dinner, Ron Miller gave the speech. He concluded with a quote from the American political commentator Walter Lippmann: ‘The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation that common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.’ Once again there was the sound of a closing door. Sir
Christopher Bland told me: ‘He disappeared: went out of the room and shut the door, absolutely. He didn’t shut it on me personally but he didn’t ring up and say, “Why have you done that?” None of that. He didn’t look back.’

The assumption was that Freeman would now retire. He said so himself, more or less: ‘I want to just drop out and spend time with my wife and daughter [Victoria was born in 1978]. I may do some voluntary work. But if anybody wants me to do something, they will have to arouse my interest.’ In fact, he had taken up bowls and a few months later he was signed up by Granada TV to commentate on the six-day Superbowl tournament in Manchester. One activity Freeman resolutely turned his back on was writing his autobiography:

As ever, he was true to his word.

Chapter 12

University professor

I
N THE LATE
1950s John Freeman was travelling by train to Monte Carlo when he met a young American painter called Dan Snyder. They shared a bottle of wine and started a friendship. Dan was also a stage designer who worked for ITV in London on the glamorous cabaret show
Chelsea at Nine.
Perhaps this appealed to Freeman. In any event, the friendship lasted over the years. Dan married Jean, an Anglo-Brazilian ballet dancer, and John and Catherine became godparents to their son. Much later the Snyders moved to the University of California campus at Davis, near Sacramento, where he taught in the dramatic arts department. In 1984 the Freemans, John and Judith, were in California so they called in to see them. They went for a walk together by the lawns, streams and trees on the rural, car-free, campus.

‘This looks a good place to retire to,’ said John.

‘So why don’t you come and teach here?’ replied Dan, who was always on the lookout to attract international figures to what was then, in university terms, something of a backwater.
1

Randy Siverson was then chair of the political science department:

Larry Wade was on the committee that reviewed academic appointments: ‘The feeling was that he had had a remarkable career in public life that would be of interest to our students.’ What persuaded Siverson was that Freeman’s ‘reasonable salary’ would come out of the vice-chancellor’s fund and not from his department’s allocation. What caused him concern was that Freeman had no training as a political scientist and the bureaucracy forbade the creation of new courses. So a schedule for his teaching was drawn up with the history department and together they put him down for ‘Political Elites’, ‘End of Empire’, ‘British Foreign Policy since 1920’ and ‘Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century’.

His students were undergraduates, mostly between nineteen and twenty-one, and he was described on the official course lists as visiting lecturer or visiting professor. Larry Wade says his appointment was as distinguished lecturer. The point is that he was fully integrated into the international relations section of the political science faculty;
he taught a regular syllabus three or four times a week for ten week terms, marked essays and set exams. He was not a VIP who gave prestigious guest lectures to an invited audience, nor did he want to be. ‘Please do not call me Mr Ambassador, or Professor Freeman, I am just John,’ he said.

Professor Larry Berman, now Dean of the Honors College at Georgia State University, remembers:

The appointing staff did not seem concerned that Freeman had no experience as a teacher; that probably did not concern him either. He had already mastered seven very different careers, in advertising, the army, government, television interviewing, editing a political magazine, diplomacy and the TV industry. Why should the eighth create difficulty? In fact Jean Snyder remembers him coming over especially to give a trial lecture, on the stage of the dramatic arts department: ‘The powers that be all thought it was wonderful.’ So Freeman, Judith and their daughter Victoria moved to rented accommodation just off the campus for the academic year of 1985. He told Randy he was surprised not to find any shelves to put books on. Soon after their second daughter, Jessica, was born.

The following summer the British journalist Hunter Davis arrived to write about this small-town university that had started as an agricultural college, in 1909, and was making a name for itself as among
the greenest and most environmentally friendly campus anywhere. Much to his surprise he came across the Rt Hon. John Freeman PC riding around on a bicycle. What was he doing at Davis?

In his study he gave Hunter Davis a more reflective answer:

Today, UC Davis has a high reputation. It is classed as a ‘public ivy’, that is a publicly funded university to rival in its league the privately funded Ivy League universities like Harvard, Yale and so on. Using the American predilection for rankings, it is the ninth best publicly funded university in the States and the thirty-eighth best overall. Its research departments in Agricultural Science and Veterinary Medicine are among the best in the world and it has first ranking as ‘Coolest Campus’ for its devotion to environmental sustainability and climate change.

In Freeman’s day it was getting there. Although Davis had become a general university in the 1950s, it still carried the legacy of its foundation, which was the farm for the University of California and then an agricultural college. The ‘Aggies’, embracing vegetarians,
conservationists and ecologists as well as those studying green subjects, were more prevalent than the ‘Jocks’ (sports hearties) or ‘Greeks’ (members of fraternities). The student restaurant, the Blue Mango, was, in Freeman’s day, a workers’ cooperative that was vegetarian and teetotal. ‘We at the Mango’, proclaimed the menu, ‘have defined our purpose as promoting nourishment, consciousness and creativity.’ According to Hunter Davis, there were more bicycles in the town per head, 30,000 in all, than in any other American city. He found it bemusing. At the Blue Mango a student ordered what sounded to him like a ‘Doubledee Caf Cap Togo’. It turned out to be a large, decaffeinated cappuccino to take away. Freeman liked it all:

Whereas today 40 per cent of the 30,000 students are Asian-American (and only 3 per cent Afro-American), in Freeman’s time the majority of the 19,000 students were from white, middle-class, three-car families. The small number of foreign students, 1,000, were based at International House. Here they were looked after by a Scotswoman, Julia Blair, who told Hunter Davis: ‘I have to admit there are a great many more pro-Reaganites, blond, blue-eyed, south California types, than you might expect.’ A behavioural scientist on the campus had just carried out a survey of 15,000 Davis graduates from the mid-’60s to mid-’80s. She concluded that the ’80s generation was more serious, more trusting, more religious and more accepting of authority than those twenty years before. ‘A new kind of student has emerged,’ she
concluded. ‘They are not like the “me” generation. They seem warm and caring and concerned about other people.’ Freeman could not make it out:

Julia Blair put the peacefulness down to Davis being ‘a
spiritually
small campus. There aren’t wide gaps. The students are all on good terms with the professors. People in Davis are extraordinarily gentle. It’s a very safe place.’

The director of International House in 2015 is Elizabeth Sherwin. In the 1980s she was a journalist on a local paper, the
Davis Enterprise.
She obtained Freeman’s permission to ‘audit’ one of his classes because, much as he sought privacy, he had quickly become a local celebrity: ‘the English ambassador’. Afterwards she gave ‘The Sherwin Notes’ to the Weber Museum at Davis. The class she chose, History 155a ‘The End of Empire’, held in the fall term of 1987, gave Freeman the chance of adding his personal recollections to what the set books had to say. And who can blame him? For once he could use the past in the service of the present.

Regrettably, perhaps, the unique opportunity of being lectured to in rural California by an eyewitness, indeed a maker of modern history, was somewhat lost on his audience. According to Elizabeth Sherwin,
few of the class were curious or confident enough to ask questions or respond in any way. Although he was talking about the end of the Raj there were no Indians present (today many of the students at Davis are of Indian descent): ‘Professor Freeman lectured and we listened.’

To set the scene: Freeman stood at a classroom podium, lecturing from notes for up to an hour to thirty or forty undergraduates, average age twenty. He was tall and imposing and dressed quite formally with a tweed jacket and tie. He was self-deprecating but not self-effacing. He was a most fluent, relaxed lecturer, who tried to engage with the audience. He did not ‘bore on’ and he was not ‘stagey’, Elizabeth Sherwin told me. These are verbatim extracts from her notes.

On David Lloyd George:

On the Privy Council:

On meeting Mahatma Gandhi – a very different account from the one he gave when he was High Commissioner to India!

On Lord Mountbatten:

Freeman did have one fan in this class. She was Cynthia Basinger, a mature student: ‘I hung on his every word. “This guy is amazing,” I thought. After he told us about the Privy Council I called him “Mr Right and Honourable”, though not to his face.’ Professor Freeman had marked her essay B+ so she used this as an excuse to visit him in his office: