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

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 inthe 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.

F OUR
     
     
“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