by Ed Sikov
But anyway, says Grafton, the monkey was a vervet, not a rhesus, and its name was “Johnny.”
Whatever the case may be, Spike’s relationship with the monkey was ultimately more productive than his relationship with Derek Roy, since Roy rarely found Spike’s scripts very funny and most of them went unused.
• • •
A gang was forming, though none of the members knew it at the time. Peter knew Bentine and Secombe; Spike knew Bentine and Secombe; Jimmy Grafton knew them all. But Peter didn’t know Spike, and that was to be the key.
They were living very different lives. While Spike was lodging with a monkey in Grafton’s attic and writing scripts for the trash, Peter, flush with his new success as a radio personality and cabaret performer, was growing even more dapper in many new sets of clothes—and cars. Between the summers of 1948 and 1949, he bought and sold four of them. His comedy routines continued to center on impersonations and improvisations, but he’d also begun to court danger onstage by adding a surrealistic twinge to his act. On one occasion he walked brazenly onstage completely shrouded in a plastic raincoat, most of his face covered by the hat he’d yanked down well below its intended level, and delivered his entire routine without showing anything of himself to the audience. Although he was well on his way to becoming the sought-after talent he always knew he was, his very success was serving to intensify the distaste he had always held for the average spectator. They were, after all, the sons and daughters of the good citizens he’d seen gaping at his barely clad mother in Ray Brothers revues. Now that Peter himself was regularly facing the crowds, he was feeling more and more contempt for what he considered to be idiot audiences—“just a bunch of no-brow miners and tractor makers,” he once declared.
On October 3 and 10, 1949, two successive Mondays, Peter earned £100 for opening for Gracie Fields at the London Palladium. They were his most important live performances to date, and as the theater manager Monty Lyon recorded in his journal, he was “very well received indeed.” Peter’s act consisted of a marvelous drag character he’d recently created, the plump and lovely Crystal Jollibottom, a dim-witted sod called Sappy (or Soppy), and a sentimental tribute to Tommy Handley, who had died rather recently. Sellers didn’t simply perform these impressions one after the other; he tied them all into a sort of storytelling performance, gliding in and out of the mimicry in an ingratiating and conversational way.
The most extravagant bit was an avant-garde impression of Queen Victoria. This was no mere “We are not amused” queen. No, this was Victoria “when she was a lad.”
Rude and hilarious, it involved Peter dressing himself in a ginger-colored beard, an undone corset, and combat boots, and walking to the footlights and announcing, “I’d like to be the first to admit that I do not know what Queen Victoria looked like when she was a lad.” He may also have carried under his arm a stuffed crocodile. Accounts differ.
• • •
It was around this time that Harry Secombe was doing a show at the Hackney Empire. Called “a fucking death hole” by one of Spike’s knowledgeable friends, the Empire was not known for the kindliness of its audiences, but Harry Secombe’s shaving routine, followed by the Jeanette MacDonald–Nelson Eddy duet, were crowd pleasers nonetheless. But it was not Harry’s act itself that brought the evening to the level of an historical event. It was what occurred before the curtain went up that mattered—the meeting, in the Empire bar, of Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan.
“He looked like a nervous insurance salesman,” was one of Spike’s recollections of Peter that evening. Another: “Peter wanted to look like a male model—posh suit, posh collar and tie, Macintosh, gloves he carried in his left hand . . . oh, and a trilby hat” (a soft felt number with a deep crease on top). Milligan was struck by the faintness of Peter’s voice (“I thought I was going deaf !”) and also by his comportment: “He was quite dignified, apart from the fact that he didn’t buy a bloody drink all night. Dignified but skint.”
After the show, Milligan, Sellers, and Michael Bentine came around to Secombe’s dressing room. For whatever reason, Secombe responded by removing the lone light bulb from its socket and plunging the room into darkness. Milligan re-created the dialogue, notably leaving out his own contributions:
SECOMBE: Why are you all persecuting me like this? Are you from the Church?
SELLERS: No, we are poor traveling Jews of no fixed income.
SECOMBE: Oh, just a minute. (He replaces the bulb.)
BENTINE: See! See the light! It is a sign!
SECOMBE: You must help me escape from here. I’m being kept prisoner against my dick!
BENTINE: You mean will.
SECOMBE: No, Dick. Will died last week.
They clicked.
• • •
Joking, drinking, deriding other comedians, and carving schemes for professional advancement, Peter could now amuse himself in the company of kindred discontents at the Grafton Arms. The core group—Spike, Harry, Michael, Jimmy, Graham Stark, and the writer Denis Norden—were joined over the next year or so by other rising comedians like Terry-Thomas, Dick Emery, Alfred Marks, Tony Hancock, and even a stray woman, the comedienne Beryl Reid. They’d play pub games of their own invention. “We used to go through this insane mime routine, which kept customers out of the pub for months,” Spike recounted. Another game they called “Tapesequences.” It was a pseudo-narrative version of “Pass It On” in which one person would start to tell a story into a microphone in a voice so low nobody else could hear it, after which he or she would pass the mike around for the others to continue the would-be tale, which was necessarily nonsense.
At the heart of the group were four men suffering varying degrees of mental distress, a tendency Sellers, Milligan, Secombe, and Bentine codified by nicknaming themselves after the one-eyed mutant lugs in the Popeye cartoons.
Goons.
It wasn’t a flattering label. Most people who have seen a few Popeye cartoons are familiar only with the relatively benign Alice the Goon, who in the later years of the series became so upstanding a citizen that she up and joined the Marines. But as the cartoonist E. C. Segar originally drew them, the primordial Goons were hulking, hostile creatures, verbally incoherent, prone to violence. Their charm was their charmlessness. They were butt ugly with brains to match, and Peter and his friends related to them. (The word goons also referred to the henchmen, usually dumb as planks, in American gangster movies; more peculiar by far is the fact that goons are what RAF prisoners of war called their Nazi guards.)
According to Michael Bentine, it was he who came up with the term. “I was the first of the Goons to make a hit in London’s West End,” Bentine declared in his memoir, The Reluctant Jester. “I have a two-page centre-spread from Picture Post dated 5 November 1948, illustrated with pictures of myself and my chairback in action and headed ‘What is a Goon?’ ” (“Chairback” is a reference to one of Bentine’s standard comedy acts: appearing on stage armed only with the broken back of a wooden chair, he would proceed to turn himself into a jack of all props, with the chairback becoming in rapid-fire succession a rifle, a saw, a flag, a door, a jackhammer, a pillory, a cow’s udder . . .)
According to Milligan, it was he who came up with the term. “It was my idea for us to call ourselves the Goons. It was the name of the huge creatures in the Popeye cartoons who spoke in balloons with rubbish written in them. The name certainly predates the beginning of the war. I started using the [word] ‘Goons’ in the army.”
What can one say, other than what Milligan himself used to interject, in his own voice, after a typically incomprehensible stretch of dialogue in the radio program he, Bentine, Secombe, and Sellers went on to create: “Mmmmmmm—it’s all very confusing, really.”
In any case, Milligan liked to doodle on his scripts. On one of them, dated November 1949, he drew a Goon. Its head is made up mostly of nose. Its hairy body is shaped like a large fat bullet. It vainly tries to conceal a medieval mace behind its back. The mac
e, of course, is spiked.
FOUR
“He taught Laughing and Grief, they used to say.”
“So he did, so he did,” said the Gryphon, sighing in his turn; and both creatures hid their faces in their paws.
Spike Milligan’s imprisonment in Grafton’s zoolike attic came to an end when Spike rented a flat in Deptford, a considerable distance away. After one particular night of joint carousing at the pub, Peter was aghast at Spike having to travel so far just to sleep and invited him to spend the night at his own place, which is to say Peg and Bill’s. (Peter had more money than his friends did, not only because he seems to have been paid more for his more-steady work, but also because he still lived with his parents.) He packed Spike into his latest car, a Hudson, drove him to North London, and set him up on a slowly flattening air mattress on the floor, where Spike slept for quite some time.
Spike awoke the first morning to the sound of Peter crying out to his mother, a wail to which Spike grew accustomed. Spike, who was constitutionally unable to stop being funny, did a wicked impression of Peter’s plea—a plaintive baby’s squeal, except that the baby is postpubertal and his voice has long since dropped. “Pe-e-e-e-g? Pe-e-e-e-ggg-y?!” According to Spike, the object of the squeal would fuss swiftly into the room at the sound of her boy. “Tea, Mum,” Peter would order, and off Peg would go to fetch it for him.
While eating scrambled eggs that first morning, Spike noticed a Dürer etching on the Sellers’s wall. “It’s only a print,” said a chain-smoking Bill. “Uncle Bert’s got the original.”
Spike gasped. “It must be worth a fortune!”
Peg, the dealer in antiques and objets d’art, rushed to the telephone and called her brother in extreme excitement. They’d be over immediately, she said. So they piled into Peter’s Hudson and sped to Uncle Bert’s only to discover that, no, Bert Marks of North London did not own the famous Albrecht Dürer hare.
“I think Peter Sellers’s father was dead, and nobody had the courage to tell him,” Spike later opined. “He was like a ghost in the background. Occasionally he would be seen smoking a cigarette. Sometimes he’d play a few tunes on the piano. Very accomplished—smoking and playing the piano at one and the same time. The family was full of talent.”
Spike, who slept often at the Sellerses and suffered the wretched air mattress in favor of the loneliness of Deptford, also recalled a distressing but characteristic incident involving Peter, a car, and a car salesman. In Milligan’s telling:
Peter was considering the purchase of yet another car that morning, so they drove over to the Star Garage in Golders Green to meet with “a salesman so Jewish in appearance as to make Jewish people look European.” (Spike, prone to extracreativity, claimed the man actually had two Jewish noses.) The salesman presented Peter with the car in question—a sleek green Jaguar. Peter asked if he could take it for a test drive and drove it all the way to Brighton. Spike expressed concern for the salesman. “Oh, fuck him,” said Peter.
Peter, Peg, and Spike dined at leisure at the Grand in Brighton, where Peter paid for the meal with a bum check. “Peter, darling,” Peg scolded, “that’s very naughty. Will it bounce?” Peter then explained to Spike the relationship he enjoyed with his banker: “I said [to the banker], ‘Look—once a month I write all my creditors’ names on pieces of paper, screw them up, and put them in a hat. I then draw one out and pay it. If you don’t stop bothering me I won’t even put your name in the hat.’ ”
The inevitable denouement: Upon their return to the Golders Green garage late in the day, Peter informed the now-apoplectic car dealer that he wouldn’t be taking the Jaguar after all. “Like many people,” Spike concluded, “he ended up on the Peter Sellers scrapheap.”
Spike could be cruel when discussing his old friend, but it was cruelty born of love. The bond between Sellers and Milligan was forged as solidly as it was because the two men understood each other’s hearts as well as their minds. For each of them, nonsensical comedy wasn’t simply diverting. It was as restorative as fresh blood, and if it brought with it a bit of cruelty, selfishness, and antisocial behavior, well, that was the price others must pay. For Spike and Peter, comedy wasn’t just comic—it was cosmic. That so few other people knew this spiritual fact only made the two depressives more convinced of its essential truth. Spike’s sense of humor, deeply rooted in anguish, found its most appreciative audience in Peter, a childlike, superstitious English half-Jew with too many voices in his head. At first, Peter Sellers was just about the only person who truly got the joke that was Spike Milligan. It was an insane joke, sick and absurd, and it resonated in Peter, who, for his part, showed his appreciation by facilitating its resonance to the rest of the world.
Jimmy Grafton writes in his understated memoir that “all the Goons, like most compulsive comedians, were manic depressives to some degree,” with Milligan taking a sizable lead in that particular race. But, Grafton continues, “If Spike was the most manic depressive, Peter was perhaps the next, though not to the same involuntary degree. His periods of elation after a successful performance or when sharing moments of fun with his friends were monitored by a shrewder, more pragmatic mind, as were his darker feelings of frustration.”
Because of the Goons’ subsequent professional triumphs, Goon minutiae abounds, trailing along with it a number of finer-points debates. It has been universally resolved that Jimmy Grafton, muse, drinkmeister, and friend, took on the Cold War espionage-sounding nickname KOGVOS. But that is where the agreement stops. For what did the acronym stand? King of Goons and Voice of Sanity? Keeper of Goons and Voice of Sanity? King of Goon Voices Society? Take your pick. Whatever his unmelodic title stood for, Jimmy Grafton was a generous fellow who not only perceived his eccentric friends’ largely untapped talent but who respected and empathized with them as men, never seizing undue credit and always wishing them well. So good-natured is Jimmy Grafton that he even finds a positive note to strike about someone who never earned the praise and love of Peter’s other friends. “I came to like and admire her greatly,” Grafton writes of Peg.
• • •
Peter was romantically active as well. “I was introduced to Peter in 1949 by his agent, Dennis Selinger,” says Anne Hayes. They met at the BBC’s offices on Great Portland Place. “It wasn’t instant attraction. That came when I saw him onstage for the first time.” Anne was an Australian-born theater student and actress, pretty, blond, charming, and very näıve. She says, from a safe distance, “I suppose I was happy in the beginning. I don’t know that I ever thought about it.”
It wasn’t just Peter’s offstage physical appearance that failed to appeal to Anne at first, though he continued to cut a rather large figure. “He was really very fat,” she affirms, “about fourteen-and-a-half stone. He had long, wavy hair, and he used to wear these huge suits with great, wide shoulders. He looked a bit like a spiv, really.” (In other words, he weighed two hundred pounds and was a very snappy dresser.) Since Peter was given to great displays, a multitude of phone calls ensued from their first meeting, beginning with one placed by Peter the morning after they met in which he insisted that he was already deeply in love with her. Flowers flowed. Telegrams flew. Peter was in flaming pursuit.
His raging displays of affection were paralleled, of course, by an equally intense possessiveness, but in Anne’s case Peter’s jealousy raged to the point of despising his actress-girlfriend’s audiences. On one occasion he appeared backstage before her show and announced that he had taken an overdose—of aspirin. (Peter would have had to have eaten at least 140 standard-issue tablets to have even made himself at risk of death by aspirin.) Another evening, when she was performing at the Lyric, Hammersmith, Peter found a better solution to his passionate resentments: “He locked me in the bedroom to stop me going into the theater.”
Because of his smothering mother, Peter was a man unable to tolerate any separation from a woman he loved—that is, any separation that he had not initiated himself. He found no difficulty
in scheduling his own performances. It was Anne’s he found unsustainable. “Peter hated me being in the business,” Anne explains, ascribing it not only to Sellers’s possessiveness but also to the fact that he, too, wanted to do legitimate theater and couldn’t seem to make it happen for himself. His ambition was boundless, but his theatrical training was nonexistent. Besides, at the time he was known strictly as an impressionist, not as an actor.
It was the performing Peter with whom Anne Hayes fell in love, the Peter of infinite color and possibility. It was the everyday Peter she dated, and yet she accepted his proposal of marriage in April 1950. The tantrums, the jealousy, the vigilance, the resentment of her career . . . Anne says she “got used to that in time. You’d think, oh, it was just Peter throwing a tantrum—like a spoiled child, really. At its worst.”
“She only wants your body.” That was Peg on the subject of Anne.
She was “an old harridan.” This is Anne on the subject of Peg. “And the way she kissed him goodbye! I’d think, ‘Ugh! Who’s engaged to him, you or me?’ ”
That awful question became less of an idle musing when, all in a period of a few days, Anne broke off the engagement during a spat and threw her triple-diamond engagement ring back at Peter, who handed it over to Peg, who quickly sold it.
• • •
Like everyone, with the notable exception of Jimmy Grafton, Anne blames everything on the harridan. Peg “would allow him anything. However badly he behaved as a child, he was allowed just to get away with it. That was instinctive in him. He thought all women would be like his mother.” She found his eating habits infantile: “I don’t think he knew the meaning of etiquette. He never knew which knife and fork to use, and he was the kind of boy who would immediately grab the first cake off the plate.”
