Читать книгу Spike: An Intimate Memoir - Norma Farnes - Страница 12

Peter Sellers may have been an international star but, far from feeling left behind, Spike often felt sorry for his friend. One evening he invited Spike to dinner at his luxurious new flat at 30 Clarges Street in Mayfair. Britt greeted Spike dressed stunningly from top to toe in silver – and then went out for the evening. Spike thought that was peculiar but Pete did not seem at all surprised and showed him round the flat with its three bedrooms, one for Britt, one for their daughter, Victoria, and the other for the chef.

‘Where’s yours?’

‘I haven’t got one. I walk to the Dorchester every night, go in the back way so nobody sees me, stay the night and come back here in the morning.’

Spike was sceptical; he knew that Pete valued the truth about as much as he did monogamy.

‘What has the chef got for us?’ he asked.

Pete turned those mournful eyes on him. ‘Britt has given him the night off. But we could do ourselves egg and bacon.’

The Hollywood star frying an egg! So that was their dinner and afterwards Spike walked him to his hotel.

The next morning he told me the story.

‘Do you know, he hasn’t got a fireplace in his life.’ He shook his head and sighed, ‘Poor Pete.’

Spike placed enormous importance on the ideal of a happy domestic life, but for him it was more often an idea than a reality. Nobody found his ideals more difficult to live up to than his wife, Paddy. He often claimed that she made him ill. This was an exaggeration but occasionally it was true. She lived in chaos, while he was obsessively tidy and orderly. Having been brought up in a military regime, punctuality had been drummed into him; for Paddy, time was something the clock kept but not her. For all his whims, Spike was paranoid about falling into debt and never spent more than he could afford, whereas Paddy was reckless with money.

When I took over as Spike’s manager his accountant suggested all Spike’s financial affairs should be looked after by me. Paddy had an allowance for clothes but everything else went on accounts which came to the office and were settled each month by me – greengrocer, grocer, fishmonger, butcher, chemist, garage for petrol, taxis, electricity and gas bills, rates, coal, clothes for the children and their school fees. She would go out for a day’s shopping in the West End and take a minicab for the whole day while she disappeared into Oxford Street department stores. Friends thought I spent a fortune on make-up but I was a Scrooge compared with Paddy. The bills from the chemist where she bought hers were mind-blowing. After she had exhausted her monthly clothes allowance she ran up huge overdrafts, which Spike had to settle.

When I told him the bills were in his reaction varied. Sometimes he would say ‘Just tell me how much and by when’ or ‘Give me the bottom line’, or even ‘Don’t put me in a bad mood. I don’t want to know.’ On other occasions it was rocket time. His temper could be searing and their rows would be momentous. ‘Are you trying to bankrupt me?’ he would shout down the phone. Or he would race home to have it out with her. Their rows were cataclysmic and after some of them he returned to the office looking shattered. In calm moments Spike believed Paddy could not help herself. ‘She lives life in a rush,’ he once said to me. ‘Sometimes the ink is still wet on the birthday cards she gives me.’

Spike was wonderful with all children, particularly his own. He had the gift of being able to understand the workings of a child’s mind. That ability produced poems that have bewitched several generations of children.

Eric still recalls a Christmas, after June had left Spike, when his wife Edith invited him and his children to share Christmas with them. ‘It was simply magical, and it was all down to Spike. I’ll never forget it.’

On Christmas Eve Spike dressed as Father Christmas and, out of sight in the garden, put a tube through the sitting-room window and announced: ‘Father Christmas is coming tomorrow. Ho, ho, ho. And you must light candles in the garden so the reindeer will be able to see their way.’

That is what they did, with lots of laughter and screams from delighted children.

Spike then reappeared as himself and gave everyone a torch. They ran through the woods backing onto Eric’s house, Spike leading the way with a red light that everyone had to follow.

Come Christmas morning, which according to Eric was the best time of all, with the children screaming excitedly over their presents, Spike was nowhere to be seen. Eric did not think he had done a bunk because he would not leave his children. Edith and he searched the house and grounds, but he was nowhere to be found, and she was upset that he had missed them opening their presents. Spike did not appear until eleven. Instead of his bedroom he had slept in the attic because he did not want to be disturbed by the noise of the children.

‘I need my sleep,’ he explained. Eric and Edith knew Spike well enough to take this in their stride.

Although Spike and Paddy had their problems I soon realized that his difficulties came from his personality as much as his marriage. In the little details of life his eccentricities and obsessions were beyond anything I had previously encountered.

He worked at a frenetic pace, always several ideas at once, with numerous television appearances sandwiched between long sessions of writing his books, and kept up vigorous physical activity, playing squash twice a week and cycling seven miles daily on his exercise bike. Even so, he rarely ate more than one meal a day, generally spaghetti if it was a Trattoo night, surviving on doughnuts and his beloved Battenberg cake the rest of the time. Yet his energy was extraordinary. But it could all stop at any minute.

Soon after becoming Spike’s agent I arranged for him to play J.B. Morton in a television programme. Morton wrote the famous ‘Beachcomber’ column on the Daily Express, which poked fun at the upper classes, and for Spike, he was ‘a light in the darkness’. Because he was due on location I took the opportunity to go out for lunch. When I returned there was a desperate message from the television crew. Spike had not turned up. I raced upstairs to find out whether he had taken a nap or forgotten about it. Pinned to the door was a note: ‘Fuck off and leave me alone – and that means you.’

There was only one thing for it. I told the crew to stand down. They were not very pleased because without Spike they did not have a programme. I would find scores of such notes over the years, all with different wording but expressing the same sentiment. And you could never argue with him about it.

If he was on location or on tour there would be a litany of conditions. Most important was that he had to have a quiet room. Indeed, he would inspect every one in the hotel to make sure they had given him the quietest before he could settle for the night. Once he left a comfortable bed and tried to sleep in a wardrobe because there was less noise. He was obsessed with sleep, not being able to sleep for worry about insomnia, it seemed to me at first. It never changed. He told me that if he possessed the world’s top secrets and enemies kept him awake for three nights he would tell all. Once, much later, when Prince Charles invited him to spend the weekend at Highgrove, the bedroom was not quiet enough for him. So he took the blankets off the bed and slept in the bath where there was less noise to disturb him. Years later he sent Charles a blue plaque inscribed ‘Spike Milligan Slept Here’ to be fixed in the bathroom. And that, I am told, is what happened to it.

He could switch from euphoria to deep dismay in a second. After touring with The Bed Sitting Room he was heaped with praise from every quarter. In an interview director Peter Brook pronounced him ‘a free genius’. ‘Spike Milligan is the greatest of all theatre artists of our time.’

Spike returned to the office in buoyant mood. One day he said he wanted to show me his handiwork in Kensington Gardens. ‘We’ll look at the Elfin Oak, walk through the park and have lunch at Fu Tong in Kensington High Street.’ He was very proud of the Elfin Oak, for without his efforts it would have disintegrated. It was a 600-year-old tree in Richmond Park which had been carved by a sculptor, Ivor Innes, in 1911, before being uprooted and moved to Kensington Garden nineteen years later, when his wife, Elsie, published a children’s book, The Elfin Oak of Kensington Gardens. Innes maintained the Elfin Oak until he died in the Fifties.

Spike was fascinated by elves, goblins and fairies and had been held in thrall by the book as a child. In 1964 he took his daughter, Laura, to see the tree and found it very neglected, the delicate carved figures all chipped and peeling. Laura was disappointed.

‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘what a pity someone can’t mend it.’

That was all Spike needed to spur him into action. He recruited a team of helpers, persuaded Rentokil to preserve the tree and British Paints to provide the waterproof paint. The restoration was a labour of love and now he wanted to be the one to give me my first glimpse of his beloved tree.

It was one of those spring days when the sun had the warmth of an early summer morning. He bounded, and I walked, over freshly cut grass. Then yards from the unprotected Elfin Oak he stopped abruptly. His face moved from horror to ineffable sadness. I asked what was wrong. It was the tree. Part of one fairy’s wing had been snapped off.

‘We must go back to the office. Now.’

We walked in silence. At Number Nine he went upstairs to his room and locked the door. I had never seen anything like it and found it difficult to believe that this upset could plunge him into such despair. Over the years little things could and did tip him into depression. He possessed a vein of sensitivity that reacted all too often, sometimes unpredictably, and produced hurt unimaginable to most of us. On that occasion he stayed in his office for three days and nights, never once eating, perhaps not even drinking. His silence unnerved me. I had yet to learn to slip notes under his door when it happened. When at last he emerged and came into my office his face was grey, his body stooped. It was amazing to me that the ‘vital’ man Peter Brook had described in such adulatory terms was the one standing before me – all because of an act of vandalism. A week later I asked what had made him so ill.

‘I’m not ill,’ he said. ‘I’m suffering from contemporary society. The sickness of it. Think of all the care that went into restoring those little people and animals living in that tree – and some sick yobbo snaps off a wing. They are the ones that are ill. Me? I just want to write scripts and books, poetry and music, to make the world a better place. I’m not the one that’s ill. They are.’

In the late Sixties and Seventies Spike’s mental state was extremely fragile. It was not only the damaged fairy on the Elfin Oak that could trigger a depression. A picture on the wall hanging out of true could do it. As time passed it came to seem almost normal for him to lock himself in his room for days.

Inevitably this meant I spent a lot of time on the telephone to Paddy and came to know her well. She warned me that he was a self-medicator. As the tablets were on prescription he should not have been able to get them without one, but he had a supplier. He consumed Tryptozole, a damaging anti-depressant drug, with as little concern as children pop Smarties, up to six tablets a day. Paddy advised me to put placebos in his tablet bottles, so I did when I could. He did not seem to notice the difference.

How Paddy lived through the start of a depression and his brooding, raging moods I shall never know. She loved the man and to her it must have been torture. One refuge was spending, and then there were her uncontrollable splurges of gorging. ‘I might as well be living in the fridge,’ she told me more than once. Spike found this difficult to cope with and when he had had enough he moved into the office, which caused her to eat even more. Once he was locked in his office she would ring to talk to him, but he would not take her calls, so she either rang me or came to Number Nine to find out how he was. Although he would not talk to her he always wanted to know whether she had called. This was small comfort to Paddy. When her weight ballooned it was her turn to pop pills – diet pills. Never a week passed without her trying some new slimming aid. When those failed she found doctors who could be persuaded to give injections to curb her appetite.

During one episode she came to the office and her appearance was shocking. I told her things were bad with Spike. She sat down quickly, dived into her handbag and broke off a piece of chocolate.

‘Please have some. It’s Lindt and very nice.’

When I shook my head she burst into tears. ‘I can’t help myself when he gets a depression.’

The stress of being married to Spike must have been horrendous. The longer I worked with him the more fascinated I became by this complex character. One day he was totally incapacitated, the next a man brimming with ideas and energy enough to charge round a squash court. Why was he so driven, so talented, often impossible but so vulnerable? In a way his outrageousness was compelling; you never knew what he would do next, and so often he seemed to get away with it. For example, he suddenly announced, ‘I have had this bloody black and white television on rental from Granada for nine years. Write to Sydney Bernstein [Granada’s top man] and tell him I have paid for it twenty times over and he should give it to me.’ I did and Sydney obliged. And when once I explained I would have to leave the office for an hour to do the household shopping, he told me not to be so ridiculous. He picked up the phone, dialled and handed it to me. ‘Harrods. Give your order and they’ll deliver it.’

‘Don’t be silly. I don’t have that sort of money.’

‘But I do and I need you here.’

So Harrods delivered our groceries.

There was also the challenge of such remarks as ‘I’m always being overwhelmed by time wasting and you’re the biggest waster of my time.’

‘Get on with it’ became my response.

It was probably a combination of all these factors that made me stay with him. At times he made me furious, but my heart ached for him at the first signs of depression. I learnt to recognize them. Sometimes it would be caused by something in particular, like the Elfin Oak episode, at others it just came upon him. The first indication I would get was a slowing down of his normally lightning mental responses and bouts of exercise. Then the lethargy became total. The normally open office windows were closed, his blinds drawn, the electric fires put on, food ignored. I would sit with him when I sensed he needed the presence of another human being. Neither of us would speak. On other occasions he preferred to be alone. I once asked him to explain how he felt at such times and he gave me this poem, ‘Manic Depression’, published years later in Small Dreams of a Scorpion.

The pain is too much

A thousand grim winters

grow in my head

In my ears

the sound of the

coming dead

All seasons

All sane

All living

All pain

No opiate to lock still

my senses

Only left

the body locked tenses.

He told me he had written it in the psychiatric wing of St. Luke’s Hospital from 1953–4, and I realized that the poor devil had suffered like this for decades with little hope of a cure. At such times he could not bear any form of noise. His definition of noise was different from other people’s: the ring of a door bell, the shutting of a door seemed to him as bad as the sound of a pneumatic drill. Unless one had experienced it, he said, it was impossible to imagine the feeling of utter desolation that followed.

It was devastating to see him in this state, huddled in a chair, his shoulders rounded, his legs up against his chest. No matter how desperate he felt I never feared he would commit suicide because he loved his four children too much to put them through such an ordeal. But his habit of self-medicating worried me. He could so easily forget how many he had taken. Even worse than Tryptozole was a dreadful drug, Tuinol, which had the advantage of bringing him out of the trough more quickly than other medication, but after recovery would plunge him into even deeper misery than he was suffering before. I was told that eight Tuinol was a lethal dose so I started to sneak into his office when he was in the bathroom to see how many he had used. But he had his secret supplier so I could never be sure how many he had taken. Those were nightmare days.

As soon as Spike sensed that the black dog was about to take over he moved into his office, which must have seemed like a womb to him. There he was self-sufficient and I made sure the outside world could not intrude. He felt he was better alone, and above all was determined that the children should not see him. His system closed down to such an extent that he neither ate, drank nor went to the loo.

When I came to know him better I used to push notes under the door so he was aware that I was still in the office. I felt it was a comfort for him to know there was somebody else in the building. Often I stayed until nine-thirty or ten and would then write another note to let him know I would be home in twenty minutes if he wanted someone to talk to. On reflection I wonder whether this was more for my peace of mind than his.

Sometimes the phone would ring at two or three in the morning.

‘Are you awake?’

‘No.’

‘Well, you are now.’

On those occasions he never discussed himself or his depression. He just wanted to talk to somebody.

‘Tell me about yourself,’ he would say. ‘Are you all right, Norm?’ And then we would chat inconsequentially, sometimes for an hour or two.

I knew he was emerging from a depression as soon as a note appeared on his door. It meant he was preparing to come back into the world. It would say, ‘Leave me alone,’ or something else, less polite.

Then he would come out of his office, his whole appearance changed, with large purple bags hanging over his cheek bones, his body hunched and his gait unsure. The next stage would be a curt, nasty, ‘Why do you keep me unemployed?’ But I always shrugged it off.