Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers by Ed Sikov

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 comedyroutines 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