Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (12 page)

“Gradually,” Milligan reflected, “piece by piece, this chemistry of Secombe, Bentine, Sellers, and myself . . . suddenly we were like a magnet
drawn toward itself, unexplainably so. We only told lunatic jokes. Everything was lunatic. It wasn’t like any other jokes you’d hear.” And strangely,
week by week, audiences began to embrace them. The Goons’ comedy
began as a kind of idiolect and turned into widespread slang.

From its genesis in the Grafton Arms, Goon humor was always clubby
and fraternal, but thanks to the BBC, now it spread across the airwaves like
a social disease, a kind of mental herpes. The
Daily Graphic
predicted as
much: “Listeners who like it will, according to the Chief Goons, become
Goons of varying degree, depending on the strength of their liking. They
will be associate Goons, honorary Goons, and Goon followers.” The prophecy was fulfilled. The first
Crazy People
episodes attracted listeners in the
370,000 range, but by the end of the first series of seventeen weekly broadcasts the audience was up to 1.8 million.

Still, only a relative few of these listeners could possibly have realized
that they were the first initiates in what would become a fanatical worldwide
cult, one that would eventually destroy the minds of millions, including
John Lennon, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Elton John, and Charles, Prince
of Wales.

• • •

Like children left unsupervised in an isolated orphanage, the Goons developed their own private language, only some of which they shared with their
listeners. Secombe recalled the genesis of what became a classic Goon expression, an utterance so devoid of meaning that its very idiocy resonated
as profound. Other comedy shows were full of catch phrases, Harry once
explained, so Spike decided that the Goons needed one as well: “And he
made up ‘Ying tong iddle I po,’ which means nothing. Within weeks
people were saying ‘Ying tong iddle I po,’ in the street. It frightened us
a bit.”

“Ying tong iddle I po”—a truly meaningless string of sounds with
vaguely Chinese undertones. Because it meant absolutely nothing, “Ying
tong iddle I po” was the perfect repeatable nugget of Goonspeak, a motto
of linguistic anarchy, a kind of password. Spike inserted it in his scripts
randomly, as was of course its very nature:

S
EAGOON:
I’m looking for a criminal.

B
LOODNOK:
You find your own—it took me years to get this lot.

S
EAGOON:
Ying tong iddle I po.

Just among themselves, the Goons’ private language could be rather
more vulgar. “Secombe read a book on South America,” Spike once noted
with glee. “There’s a South American monkey who, when it’s attacked, shits
in its hand and throws it at the opposition. So whenever Secombe and Sellers used to meet, one would go ‘
ptthhp!
’ ” At this point in the telling Spike
reached down to his ass, grabbed an imaginary handful, and hurled the contents aggressively forward. “And the other would go
‘mmmhmmmhmmgh!’ ”
Under threat, the second monkey emitted an equally intense straining
sound, reached back and grabbed nothing, and threw his hands in the air
in a gesture of abject surrender.

This was how they dealt with one another out of the range of the
microphones.

The Goons didn’t do comedy the way anyone else did. “Probably,” says
Harry, “because we couldn’t tell jokes very well. I could never remember
the endings.”

• • •

With Anne, Peter moved out of his mother’s domain and into a penthouse
overlooking Hyde Park. Anne had already introduced her best friend, June
Marlowe, to Spike over dinner, an evening that was enlivened greatly by
the fact that Peter had earlier convinced Spike that it would be a lot more
fun if Spike pretended to be Italian. The unsuspecting June spent much of
the dinner trying to teach English to the happy immigrant. They soon
became engaged.

With the notable exception of Beryl Reid, women were largely excluded
from the Goons’ professional world, a fact Milligan tended to reiterate with
some degree of pride. Spike: “Do you know there were only three women
who appeared in
The Goon Show
? The first was Margaret McMillan, a classy
girl. I was going out with her at the time.” Spike again: “The girls appeared
from time to time according to who was dating them. Peter Sellers had one.
Her name was Charlotte Greenwood, and I wrote a line for him to say to
her: ‘You’re a dull scrubber!’ Peter said, ‘I can’t say that to Charlotte—I’m
going out with her!’ ” Where was Anne, one wonders? He was married at
the time, after all. Or are Spike’s recollections to be fully trusted?

• • •

In December 1951,
Charlie Chaplin’s Burlesque on “Carmen”
(1916) enjoyed a brief revival run in England, albeit in a newly burlesqued version
that wasn’t approved by Chaplin. Chaplin had made the film for Essanay
as a takeoff on Cecil B. DeMille’s 1915
Carmen
. DeMille’s epic melodrama
starred Wallace Reid as Don Jose and Geraldine Farrar as Carmen; Chaplin’s spoof starred himself as Darn Hosiery with Edna Purviance as the
eponymous gypsy, with the cross-eyed clown Ben Turpin doing a turn as
the lover of the fat Frasquita.

But with the new release of
Charlie Chaplin’s Burlesque on “Carmen,”
English audiences were treated to a burlesque of a burlesque, for Chaplin’s
comedy now sported a facetious voice-over commentary by Peter Sellers.
Chaplin’s original two-reeler was left open to this farcical adulteration from
the start. He left Essanay soon after filming it, whereupon the company
shot new footage and doubled its length without his participation at all.
Charlie sued, lost, and was distraught, but as he wrote in his autobiography,
“It rendered a service, for thereafter I had it stipulated in every contract
that there should be no mutilating, extending, or interfering with my finished work.” There are no reports as to whether Chaplin ever saw or heard
Peter Sellers’s interference.

As one of the British trade papers sniffed, Sellers “impersonates the
characters of the story, plugs away energetically and may amuse the unsophisticated.” It would take a few more movies for him to rise above that
level.

I
n March 1952, after being married to Peter for six months, Anne suffered
a miscarriage, a tragedy that only served to enflame Peg’s maternal instincts. While Anne was recuperating in the hospital, Peg invited Peter to
dinner every night, along with a series of his former girlfriends. Ever thorough, Peg is said to have made a point of including one who Peter believed
had borne him a daughter (and put her up for adoption) during the war.

Peter Sellers was the painstaking product of a terrible mother, the
fucked-up labor of her love. As even his best friends acknowledge, he could
be a selfish, childish man, responsive to every need as long as it was his
own. His cars, gadgets, and RAF and
Goon Show
buddies (not to mention
his mother) occupied at least as crucial a place in his heart as his wife, with
the RAF and
Goon Show
buddies (not to mention his mother) outlasting
all the others in terms of duration. When, for instance, in the spring of
1952, Peter and Anne moved to a house in Highgate, Spike moved in along
with them and stayed until he got married. “He was tired of sleeping under
people’s carpets,” Anne later explained.

There was little restraint in Peter’s life. Interests became manias. After
Graham Stark became a proficient photographer, Peter, always entranced
by mechanical equipment of any sort, grew equally fascinated by his friend’s
ability to convince beautiful women to pose for pictures. Photography had
much to recommend itself—one of his best friends loved it; it involved
instruments that could be purchased and replaced; and girls, girls, girls—so Peter swiftly developed a passion for the art. At the very start of it,
according to Stark, Peter beelined “to Wallace Heaton’s in Bond Street, the
Rolls-Royce of camera dealers, and apparently bought every piece of equipment in the shop.” Stark claims that Peter even called in sick for a
Goon
Show
recording one Sunday so he and Stark could meticulously retouch the
breasts and buttocks depicted in one of Graham’s bikini-oriented pictures.

At the same time, Peter could be good-hearted and generous, sometimes
exceedingly so. He simply could not keep himself from buying gifts for
people he liked.
He
wanted things, and so, he concluded, must they. And
if, stubbornly, they would not acquire these objects for themselves, he would
step in and provide them. “He used to call me when he wanted to go
downtown in London,” the
Goon Show
harmonica virtuoso Max Geldray
remembers. “He would say, ‘I’m going to the camera shop’—which he did
all the time—‘and why don’t you come with me?’ One particular time he
said, ‘I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.’ ” Geldray told him, no, he had other
errands to do and he’d meet him there, especially because he, Max, needed
a new flashbulb for his own camera. When he got there, Peter was admiring
a new and very small Swiss camera.

“Look, it has a brighter picture, but the amperage is much lower,” said
Peter. “And he went on about the thing,” Geldray continues. “He said to
me, ‘Why don’t you get it?’ ”

“ ‘I don’t need it,’ ” Max replied. “Several hours later, I opened the
door of my home, and in the middle of the living room was a package. He
and Anne were sitting in my living room. He didn’t say anything—he just
pointed at the package. I opened it, and there was the new Swiss camera.
I said, ‘I don’t
need
a camera!’ He said, ‘Yes you do. Yours is broken.’

“He meant the flashbulb. For him, that was ‘broken.’ ”

Technicalities failed to impress Peter. He didn’t have time for them.
Graham Stark describes the frenzy that accompanied every new purchase:
“Pete believed in brute force. He’d tear the box open, ignore the instruction
book, and press every button until something worked.”

His equipment fever didn’t stop at still photography. New movie cameras were also purchased, used, and replaced by still newer and fancier
models. Off-hour Goons were a favorite subject of Peter’s cinematic eye, as
were his wife and mother. As he would continue to do for years to come,
he recorded his free time in the form of reel after reel of home movie
footage—Harry mugging in a striped bathrobe. Peter hamming it up in a
park. A glamorous-looking Anne posed in the driver’s seat of a shiny new
red sports car. Spike trying to keep hold of a manic dog. A gas station
attendant filling Peter’s mouth with gasoline. Anne, in a comedy skit, being
served a poisoned cocktail by Peter. . . .

“We liked undercranked film,” said Harry, the manic, fast-motion effect being characteristically Goonish. And, he also adds, “We were all devotees of Buster Keaton rather than Charlie Chaplin,” by which he meant
that Keaton’s dark absurdity resonated much more deeply than Chaplin’s
comic ballets, not to mention the fact that Chaplin’s Victorian sentimentality had no place in the brutal, existential world of the Goons.

“He had a 16mm camera,” Spike noted a little more brusquely. “He
was richer than we were—richer by 8mm.”

• • •

The second series of
The Goon Show
began in late January 1952. To the
Goons’ great satisfaction, the title of their program now actually
was The
Goon Show
. This victory, like many others, came at a price, one that was
paid largely by Spike Milligan. “I was trying to shake the BBC out of its
apathy,” Spike reflected in the mid-1970s. “And I had to fight like mad,
and people didn’t like me for it. I had to rage and crash and bang. I got it
right in the end, and it paid off, but it drove me mad in the process, and
drove a lot of other people mad. And that’s why I don’t think I could be
a success again on the same level—because I just couldn’t go through all
the tantrums.” By July, when the second series finished recording, Spike
was twitching in the direction of a mental collapse.

Peter, in contrast, tended to treat his Goon work precisely as the workmanlike job it was. He was always “the most serious of the group,” says
Max Geldray, but then he could afford to be. Unlike Milligan, Sellers didn’t
have to face the pressure of writing a hit series comedy script every week
only to perform it on the weekend. Instead, Peter showed up on Sundays
for the recording sessions, read the script, did the voices, and went back
home. His talent, at this point anyway, wasn’t agony.

That said, the Goons’ joint ambition was, if anything, intensifying.
They didn’t want to do just radio. Plans for the Goons’ first television
appearance,
Trial Gallop
, were drawn. The program was scheduled to air
in mid-February, but George VI put a crimp in the Goons’ schedule for
achieving stardom by dying in his sleep at Sandringham on Wednesday the
sixth. The Goons’ comedy show, which would necessarily have been in bad
taste even in the best of circumstances, was canceled. Peter and the others
had to wait until July 2 to make their joint television debut; they did so
with the one-shot
Goonreel
.

And they still wanted to make a good Goon movie.
Penny Points to
Paradise
had apparently taught them little. One can appreciate their artistic
ambition, but the execution remained problematic. At the core of the issue
was money. It wasn’t as though the big British studios—J. Arthur Rank,
Ealing, Hammer—were clamoring for the Goons. They were, at best, interesting new radio stars, still too small to generate movie buzz. If Sellers,
Secombe, Milligan, and Bentine were to make another film together, it
would have to be rock-bottom cheap. And so,
Down Among the Z Men
(1952).