Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (9 page)

Chronically underhoused after the war, Spike moved into Jimmy Grafton’s attic, whereupon his friends dubbed him “the prisoner of Zenda.”
The Grafton Arms, the pub on the first floor, had been in the Grafton
family since 1848 and was now being operated by Jimmy, fresh back from
the war, where he had served as an infantry officer. Grafton was no ordinary
publican, however, since he also wrote comedy scripts for BBC radio. But
it was not Grafton’s scriptwriting talent that initially drew Michael Bentine
and Harry Secombe into the pub as patrons. It was the fact that the Grafton
Arms served drinks after hours.

Bentine and Secombe had shown up at the pub one day in 1946 or
’47 and immediately began complaining about the poor quality of a radio
comedy show they had recently heard—
Variety Bandbox
, the author of
which was none other than Grafton himself. Then again, Grafton was writing
Variety Bandbox
for the comedian Derek Roy, whom Spike described
as “about as funny as a baby dying with cancer.”

Since Harry’s strange friend Spike began spending a lot of time at
Grafton’s anyway, Grafton offered him the attic space, where Spike, too,
began typing comedy scripts for Derek Roy’s new program
Hip Hip Hoo
Roy
and peering through a keyhole at a monkey who was living in the next
room. Milligan went so far as to claim not only that “Jacko” peed into the
pub’s pea soup but that he, Spike, actually watched the cook stirring it in.
Jimmy Grafton disputes this repulsive accusation, though Grafton himself
admits that another pet, a bulldog, came close to biting off Harry Secombe’s
balls.

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:

S
ECOMBE:
Why are you all persecuting me like this? Are you from the
Church?

S
ELLERS:
No, we are poor traveling Jews of no fixed income.

S
ECOMBE:
Oh, just a minute. (He replaces the bulb.)

B
ENTINE:
See! See the light! It is a sign!

S
ECOMBE:
You must help me escape from here. I’m being kept prisoner
against my dick!

B
ENTINE:
You mean will.

S
ECOMBE:
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 mace, of course, is spiked.

“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.

S
pike 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.’ ”