Читать книгу Spike: An Intimate Memoir - Norma Farnes - Страница 10

In all the time I knew him Spike was never boring. When you consider his parents’ characters this becomes understandable. Leo Milligan grew up in County Sligo, Ireland, and followed family tradition by joining the Army at the age of fourteen. Unusually he took dance classes and was soon appearing both on military and civilian stages – sometimes blacked up for a song-and-dance act, at others dressed up as a cowboy to demonstrate his skill with a lariat. He was also a mean trumpeter. This last skill served him well and he ascended the ranks, going to India as Lance Bombardier, trumpeter. He did not neglect his Catholicism and it was at St Ignatius Church, Kirkee, in 1912, that his eye was caught by the beautiful organist. Like her future husband, Florence Kettleband came from an Army background, emigrating with her family from their Leicestershire home to India at the age of eight. She was a trained contralto and when Leo heard her sing he was smitten. They married two years later and it was not long before they started performing at regimental theatres as a double act. In Ahmednagar, on 16 April 1918, Florence gave birth to their first son, Terence Alan Milligan, a troublesome baby. As Leo often told Spike, ‘You never stopped bloody screaming.’

The next year the family travelled on leave to England, having to be rescued when their ship struck a reef. When they finally made it back Florence got measles, which turned into pneumonia, and temporarily she went blind. To the end of her days she maintained that her sight was restored by a faith healer, and certainly her own faith never wavered, however much her older son liked to tease her about it. After she recovered the family returned to India where Leo, with Florence at his side, seemed to spend more time touring on stage, entertaining the troops, than he did on the barrack square. One of their greatest successes was putting on rodeos, with Leo trick-riding like a cowboy. These skills were entirely self-taught, another Milligan family trait. Spike joked that Leo liked the rodeos because his stetson covered a problem: he was completely bald. The rest of the time he wore a black wig which looked like ‘a dead cat nailed to his head’. One day a kite hawk snatched it from his pate and until another one arrived from England Leo wore his topee, even indoors. Spike enjoyed his parents’ shows, but he was an unwilling spectator to their passion for hunting. They would fire at ‘anything that had feathers or fur on it’. He went on to devote a large part of his life to trying to protect wildlife.

The Milligans moved on to Burma, and their second son, Desmond Patrick, was born in Rangoon on 5 December 1925, soon after Leo had been promoted Acting Regimental Sergeant Major. They continued their comfortable colonial existence until 1933, when the post of RSM was abolished in Leo’s regiment and they were sent back to England and a two-room flat in Catford. The country was still in the grip of the Depression, but it was not long before, at the age of sixteen, Spike was at work by day and earning another ten shillings a night to sing with a band at a dance hall in South London, doubling on guitar and double bass, both of which he had taught himself to play. Leo was less successful. He set out for interviews in a Homburg and grey kid gloves, with a silver-topped ebony cane, ready to consider offers from deserving employers. They did not realize what a bargain they were getting in an ex-sergeant major who could throw a lariat, ride bucking broncos and do a soft shoe shuffle. It took twelve months but finally he got a job with Associated Press. He and Spike always said he was a journalist but as those were the days of closed shops this might have been stretching the truth, which was never a problem for Leo. Spike always remembered how Leo reacted when he was sceptical about his claim to have shot a tiger. ‘Let me ask you something, son. Would you rather have an exciting lie or the boring truth?’ There was a lot of his father in Spike.

When he was nineteen Spike met the one true love that remained constant throughout his life, in the window of a shop in Lewisham High Street: a gold-plated Besson trumpet, price totally beyond him. No problem. He had enough for a deposit and bought it, figuring the rest could come from his employer. His bosses disagreed. Spike was still playing the clubs but his day job was with a wholesale tobacconist where he would wrap parcels of cigarettes and tobacco. It was conveniently cold in the warehouse so he wore his overcoat and some of the cigarettes found their way into its pockets. Spike sold them on at a cut price, but was caught by the foreman and arrested.

Leo had missed the drama of the theatre and wasted no time in offering his services as advocate. After several rehearsals at home to hone his act he was ready to take centre stage at the police court. As ever, the boring truth was disregarded. Theft? Nonsense. Entrepreneurial flair in a time of hardship. ‘Look at him,’ he declared to the magistrates, pointing a finger at Spike. ‘His crime was a love of music. He needed the money to buy a violin and study classical music, but he was so poor he could never – you hear – never afford one. His only way was to pilfer stockroom goods and sell them. This has afforded him a secondhand violin which, even now, he is learning to play. Have pity on this boy. As a result of his action he could become a virtuoso.’

It was a triumphant performance. As Leo correctly reckoned, burgeoning classical violinists got far more sympathy from magistrates than trumpeters. Spike was discharged and played his gold-plated trumpet in the Harlem Club Band, all because of an exciting lie.

Although Spike’s family was Army on both sides he was not keen to join up when Britain declared war on Germany in 1939. He was conscripted the following year, on his twenty-first birthday, and took this trumpet with him to the 56th Heavy Regiment, Royal Artillery. Every morning he would sound the reveille, and aspects of the life must have recalled the pleasures of his childhood. It was at this time that he acquired a new name. In the services there were three common nicknames: Clarkes were called Nobby, Joneses Taffy, and tall and skinny ones often became Spike. He decided this was preferable to Terence and so, to everyone apart from his mother, Spike he was from now on.

Spike saw a lot of action in North Africa then moved to Italy, escaping injury until he was caught in heavy fighting outside Naples in 1944 and blown up by mortar fire. Although his wounds were slight the stress of battle and the sight of his friends perishing had caused him intense suffering. He was diagnosed with combat fatigue, the Second World War term for shell-shock. This episode was, though he did not know it at the time, the first manifestation of the illness which would dog him for the rest of his life.

After he recovered Gunner Milligan joined an Army dance band and reached the rank of sergeant. As soon as peace was declared in May 1945 he was posted to the Central Pool of Artists, whose rôle was to entertain the troops waiting for demobilization. One day he was practising guitar in a rehearsal room, when tall ex-Gunner Bill Hall, a brilliant violinist, invited him to form a trio with a double-bass player, Johnny Mugrew. Spike accepted, reckoning they sounded like Le Hot Club de France, a famous Parisian jazz combo. It was when they were playing at the Officers’ Club in Naples that he was struck by one of the cabaret acts, ‘someone from Mars, Gunner Secombe H., singer and lunatic, who had been pronounced loony after a direct hit from an 88mm gun in North Africa. He rushed on chattering, screaming, farting, sweat pouring from him like a monsoon.’ Spike could not understand a word Harry said and thought he was ‘a Polish comedian’, although they had met in North Africa.

The Bill Hall Trio was a great success and on demob they were offered officer status if they would continue to play for the troops for six months. They accepted and Florence was able to tell the neighbours that her son was a ‘banjo-playing officer’. It was then that Spike developed his first manic act, which would eventually lead to The Goon Show. A natural front man, Spike would do the links between songs, and these quickly mutated into riffs with funny voices, then sketches, with Bill and Jimmy playing a part. He did not tell jokes as such. But then Spike is famous for being the first comic who didn’t need punch lines to make people laugh. They toured through Italy and when they reached Naples the Italian Corps de Ballet joined the show. They were thrilled to have women on board, and Spike was particularly keen on the prima ballerina, Maria Antoinetta Pontani. For months Spike and Toni were inseparable and I believe she was the love of his life. They spent an idyllic weekend in Capri and planned to marry. Spike wrote home with the good news. But his mother would have none of it. ‘We don’t want a foreigner in this family,’ she told him. Apparently Spike accepted, which I have never understood. There is no doubt he was in love with Toni and she with him and it would have been in character for him to ignore his mother’s opposition. By the time I knew Spike he was someone who always did what he thought was right, regardless of anybody else’s opinion. Toni married an Italian diplomat who was sympathetic to their friendship, and Spike flew to Rome to take her out. When her daughter moved to Paris it became much easier for them to see each other. This continued until a couple of years before his death.

In 1946 the Bill Hall Trio arrived back in Britain and toured the halls, earning seventy-five pounds between them a week – affluence indeed when the average wage was about five pounds – but Spike was not satisfied. After a few months he decided to go solo with his wild act. The parting was acrimonious. Bill said, ‘I hope you never get another fucking job.’

Sure enough, the act flopped and Spike joined another trio which travelled around Italy, but he still wanted to succeed in his own right and returned to England in 1948. He was doing his best – ‘it wasn’t good enough’, he said later – to break into radio. It was then he heard that the ‘Polish comedian’ was appearing at the Windmill in Soho. This theatre was the place for post-war talent. Alumni of the Central Pool of Artists would try out their acts there between the more risque performances, including the famous female ‘statues’, nudes who were not deemed obscene so long as they did not move. Spike went along to see Harry and when they caught up after the show he was introduced to another comic performer, Michael Bentine, who was also on the bill. The three became friends and, while Spike struggled to eke out a living, of an evening they started to hang out at the Grafton Arms in Sutton Ground, Westminster.

The landlord Jimmy Grafton, formerly a major, was very handsome and a tireless entrepreneur. He had taken over the pub, was struggling to write scripts, and always had an eye for talent, becoming Harry Secombe’s agent. One night in the bar, after Spike had played piano while Harry sang, they had a few drinks and told stories. Jimmy heard some of Spike’s and immediately asked if he would like to write with him for Derek Roy. Roy had sung with the band leader Geraldo and now had his own comedy guest spot on BBC radio. Spike was always very dismissive of Derek Roy, the ‘unfunniest man in the business’, and reckoned he ‘killed ninety-nine per cent of all known jokes.’ But this was the break he had been waiting for.

In 1949 Spike was invited to appear in one of Roy’s shows to do ‘an idiot voice’, which he told me developed into Eccles for The Goon Show. Ever hopeful of making it alone, Spike developed an act based on the voice for the music halls but quickly died a death and it was back to the Grafton Arms. He had no money and nowhere to stay but Jimmy had three attics free above the pub and offered one to Spike. He took his typewriter up there and continued to hammer out jokes for Derek Roy. Occasionally he was disturbed by a noise in the next room so he looked through the keyhole and a monkey looked back at him. Jimmy had bought it as a present for his wife. A friendship developed between Spike and the monkey but this came to an abrupt end when it bit him and the monkey was consigned to the garage.

Meanwhile Harry was prospering and had got a spot at the Hackney Empire. In the bar after the show Harry introduced him to a man Spike said ‘wanted to look like a male model – posh suit, posh collar and tie, Crombie overcoat, gloves carried in his left hand and a trilby hat.’ This suave fellow was Peter Sellers, who came from a stage family and made quite an impression on Spike, although he never forgot that Pete ‘didn’t buy a bloody drink all night’: he was ‘dignified but skint’.

Pete started to join them of an evening at the Grafton Arms and he and Spike became close, the attraction for Spike being that he had ‘such a mad, abstract mind’. Spike and Pete had many traits in common. Both could be loyal, yet occasionally betray people without a smidgen of guilt, both liars when it suited them, both adulterers, both sometimes generous and other times incredibly mean, and both adored their mothers but could occasionally spit bile about them. They blurred the margins of fantasy and reality, loved pranks, and shared an amazing amount of talent. I experienced the good and the bad aspects of both men. Peter Medak, who directed them in the disastrous film Ghost in the Noonday Sun, assessed them like this: ‘They were identical but with one important exception. Milligan had a heart.’ That summed them up for me.

When they first met Pete was already working for the BBC. It had happened because his mother Peg, a woman as redoubtable as Florence, had a brilliant idea. In 1946 Pete rang the BBC and impersonated Kenneth Horne, the star of Round the Horne. He recommended an outstanding new talent, one Peter Sellers. ‘Just listen to him’, he said, ‘and you’ll recognize that he’s a star in the making.’

With the proceeds of his radio performances Pete had bought a tape recorder and he and Spike started to record funny voices on it. They discovered that if they did them at the slowest possible speed when played back quickly the voices became hilarious. Spurred on by this Spike experimented with writing scripts for more mad voices. Pete and Harry, who was also doing the odd job for the BBC, showed them to an innovative producer, Pat Dixon. Pat commissioned a trial script from Spike and his co-writer, Larry Stephens, and Pete suggested some voices. Spike later described it as ‘the crappiest script ever’ and the BBC planners rejected the pilot programme they recorded. But Pat was persistent and the first show, starring Michael, Harry, Pete and Spike, was broadcast on 28 May 1951 as Crazy People. It was a hilarious, anarchic comedy sketch show. After an incredible response the planners did not hesitate to commission a second series, starting in January 1952, and increased the number of episodes from seventeen to twenty-five. And this time the BBC caved in and let them call it The Goon Show.

Spike’s parents had tired of the cold and damp and grey of London living and decided to emigrate with Desmond to Australia. Spike was still more or less homeless so Pete took him home to meet his parents. Bill Sellers had been a church organist in Bradford before being hired by Peg’s mother as pianist and driver for her touring company. Peg and he fell in love, married and became a performing team. When Spike was first taken to the Sellers flat in Finchley Bill was still doing the rounds with a ukulele act but Peg was overseeing her son’s career. They hit it off and Peg agreed that Spike could move from the attic to the flat where he slept on the floor on an airbed.

One night Pete took Spike along to meet his girlfriend, Anne Howe. On the way they picked up Anne’s friend, June Marlow, and Spike fell in love. The best friends married the best friends, Spike and June a few months after Anne and Pete, in January 1952. The Goon Show became a cult hit but the strain of producing such innovative humour led to a breakdown later that year and Spike was treated at a psychiatric hospital for two months. Over the years his depression became increasingly uncontrollable, and by his own admission he behaved abominably towards June. They had three children together, Laura, Sean and Silé, the last born in 1956, but things became so bad that in 1959 June left with the children and moved in with a porter from Covent Garden market. When they divorced in 1961 Spike was given custody. At least he could remain in the family home at 127 Holden Road in Finchley, one of the few constants in his life. It was a spacious Edwardian house in a quiet tree-lined street and he became a driving force in the Finchley Society, which he co-founded in 1971 with the aim of preserving the dignity and tranquillity of the district.

The year Spike met June was one which marked the beginning of a more lasting relationship. In 1951, while Eric Sykes was in hospital being treated for the first signs of ear trouble, he heard Crazy People on the radio. The writers were unknown to him. ‘I thought their material was the funniest I’d heard for some time and wrote them a letter saying so, with a few pointers to how I thought it could be made even better,’ he recalled. By that time Eric was already a hugely successful writer and performer. As well as writing for Frankie Howerd and with Sid Colin for Peter Brough as Archie Andrews, then later for Tony Hancock, he wrote for American comics appearing at the London Palladium and topped the bill there in his own right. The young writers were thrilled to hear from him.

A couple of days later Eric was propped up in bed in his private room. ‘Two faces peered at me through a window in the corridor, Spike and Larry. They were so grateful I’d written and thanked me.’ Later that year Spike visited Eric in his one-room office at Longridge Road, Earls Court. ‘He was bursting with ideas. Couldn’t keep still. He said his mind was so busy inventing them he hardly had time to sleep,’ said Eric. ‘We hit it off and decided to share an office.’

Eric found rooms to rent five flights above a greengrocer’s shop at 137 Uxbridge Road, Shepherd’s Bush and they moved in. The collaboration was fun from the start, although there were a few obstacles, particularly because rationing was not over. ‘At that time,’ said Eric, ‘oranges were still in short supply and when a shipment came in there was always a queue outside the shop. We had to wait with them until they were all sold before we could go to work.’

Eric and Spike got on extremely well because they were both idealists. An idea they had for a co-operative, with writers working alongside performers or producing scripts for their own use, at last came to fruition in the early Fifties. I suppose Spike was more of the dreamer, attracted by the vision of artists working in collective harmony. Eric told me that Spike helped to get the project off the ground and he made sure it worked in practice. They formed ALS and word soon got round among budding writers that it was worth sending them material to get advice and maybe more, if they were good enough.

ALS worked very simply. ‘We would all do our own thing,’ said Eric, ‘but subscribe to a fund that would be there when one of us hit a fallow period. There were several rooms so we invited two young chaps who were just beginning to get the odd success, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, to take one of them. I had more work than I could handle so passed Tony Hancock over to them.’

They needed an office secretary and Alan knew an ambitious young girl, Beryl Vertue. She was a brilliant organizer, and her rôle developed with the business, eventually becoming agent. Then David Conyers joined them to work alongside Beryl and the co-operative multiplied into an awesome collection of talent. Spike invited along a struggling television writer, Terry Nation. Then a script came in from a young fellow called Johnny Speight. ‘I thought it revealed enormous talent and sent for him,’ said Eric. ‘He was working as an insurance agent at the time and came to the meeting with his wife. I told him to give up his job and move in with us. He did and became one of our very best writers.’

As they became more successful ALS found better offices at Cumberland House on Kensington High Street. Then Eric and Spike discovered Number Nine. Each bought a quarter, with Alan and Ray, and ALS moved in at the beginning of 1962.

Spike’s marriage was not the only thing to come to an end with the close of the Fifties. There had been ten series of The Goon Show, but the pressure of organizing nannies, writing the scripts, recording, then shuttling home to read the children a bedtime story, towards the end must have become unbearable to someone so mentally fragile. In January 1960 the last run began. The remaining Goons (temperamental Michael Bentine left after the second series) were being offered film and stage roles. Spike had already written and performed in three television series, and written dialogue for and performed in some comedy films, including, of course, The Case of the Mukkinese Battle Horn, and his future seemed bright.

In 1961 Spike was cast in a Second World War film, Invasion Quartet, and fell for one of the extras, Patricia Ridgeway, who everyone knew as Paddy. She was statuesque, very good-looking, but with a weight problem she battled all her life. Spike recounted how he sighed when he first saw her on set: ‘Oh, look at those legs.’ He asked her out to dinner and the attraction was immediate. When she went on to appear as a nun in The Sound of Music Spike was bewitched by her lovely voice and proposed.

She was from a very middle-class Yorkshire family, her father a director of Monsanto. They married in Yorkshire in June the following year with the Beatles’ producer, George Martin, as best man and Spike’s three children in attendance. But the dignity of the proceedings was destroyed when, as he stood at the altar with his bride, Spike put on a big black moustache and turned round. The congregation tittered, but Paddy’s father was appalled.

Although Spike and Paddy loved each other their temperaments clashed. Perhaps their first disagreement occurred shortly after they married, when she insisted that his children should go to private school, which he considered very Victorian. But she won and Laura went to a convent as a weekly boarder and Sean to a local private school. Soon more rifts occurred. Spike told me there were moments of great happiness but terrible rows. They were like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing against each other. Both had tempers and Paddy could be very forceful and stubborn, and with Spike’s volatility, the combination was lethal. Result: rows, passionate reconciliations, and philandering by Spike.

He had a bust-up with the British Government when passport regulations changed in 1962 and his Indian birth and Irish father denied him an automatic transfer to a British passport. Instead, he became technically stateless. As an ex-soldier he obstinately, but by his lights logically, refused to swear the oath of allegiance necessary to gain a new British passport on the grounds that he had shown enough loyalty to the Crown by fighting for the country. Instead he obtained an Irish passport, and began a love-hate relationship with the English. Later Prince Charles tried to persuade Spike to take the oath, pointing out that he had had to swear his allegiance to the Queen. And Spike said, ‘Yes, but she’s your mother.’

On a professional level, things became quieter for Spike. This marked the start of his obsession with the BBC. Like Harrods, it became a target for his campaigns of letter writing: I think this was a warped compliment from Spike, because he believed they were both great institutions which should maintain their standards. Then he was cast by impresario Michael White in Oblomov, based on Ivan Goncharov’s humorous novel about a Russian aristocrat too indecisive to leave his room. The run at the new Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith was a disaster, but somehow Spike persuaded Michael to let him rewrite the play and call it Son of Oblomov.

After the first night at the Comedy Theatre in December 1964 Michael was certain they had a hit, and Spike’s performance was hailed by critics and actors, who fought to get seats. He had hit a brilliant streak of inspired humour and it all came pouring out during the run. He often stood the script on its head and improvised, which brought the best out of some of the cast, shattered the nerves of the remainder and provided much hilarity for the audience, some of whom saw it again and again because each night was guaranteed to be different. It ran until April 1966 when Spike was so tired he had to call a halt.

The money poured into ALS and Spike became convinced that, rather than sharing a secretary from the pool, he should have a dedicated personal assistant. The others did not agree. Nobody else had one so why should he? He did not argue. He just moved out, taking his furniture with him. Eventually Eric and Johnny brokered a compromise. If Spike would pay half the PA’s salary then ALS would match the rest. With honour salvaged on both sides, Spike moved back in and employed me. It was love, light and peace again. But for how long?