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

of its audiences, but Harry Secombe’s shaving routine, followed by the Jeanette
MacDonald–Nelson Eddy duet, were crowd pleasers nonetheless. But itwas 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. “Weused 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