Memories of Milligan. Norma Farnes
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this colourful lapsed Catholic. I once asked him whom he would most like to meet in the afterlife and without hesitation he said ‘Jesus Christ.’
But perhaps what I remember most fondly touches on the magical. Here was a man you could walk with down a bleak, rainswept street and he could make it an adventure. ‘Look at that outdoor guttering. Just look! It’s so ill-fitting it’s swinging in the wind. See up there! They’re crashing about like metal cobwebs.’ Or the manholes under our feet, so delicately etched, said Spike, they belonged in a museum. ‘And the ones in the British Museum aren’t much better.’
He was never one for honeyed compliments, however hard you’d worked at the slap and silk, and although gauche he was immensely kind and tried so hard to bite the bullet of his depressions. I visited him once in hospital with a basket of Canadian Golden Delicious apples. Years later he couldn’t recall that particular episode of his ‘black dog’ but he never stopped talking about the apples. ‘Whereabouts in Canada do they grow them? The Okanagan Valley, you say. Do they use a special kind of fertiliser? Can you find out? And to think you brought them all that way to the hospital!’ [She smiled at the memory.] He seemed to think I’d made the trip to Canada to get the apples for him so I didn’t explain that my sister had sent them.
I always felt I could confide in him and his response always was that if I was in trouble he would help, but not if it was boring. I was never bored by him, otherwise I wouldn’t have rushed out in my Mini at three in the morning because he had telephoned and wanted to see me. I sometimes wondered how many other girlfriends he had phoned before me, but I never asked. He was married to Paddy at the time and I think Spike was looking for something he wasn’t getting at home. Obviously, he didn’t get it from me otherwise he wouldn’t have had other girlfriends. At that time I was pretty naïve about sex. Perhaps he didn’t give enough of himself to his wives. That possibly alienated them so that they couldn’t give enough of themselves to him. Another thing to consider is Spike’s love of experiences. If he was to give himself completely to one woman that would blot out much of the opportunity to have the experiences he was always looking for. He loved experiences. Talking, moving, shifting around and a woman tends to be more possessive than that in marriage. Perhaps he didn’t want to be tied to one woman.
He was diabolically clean and I think to him the act of sex was perhaps a bit dirty, in a liquidy kind of way. I remember him saying, when we were deciding whose house we would go back to, ‘I’ll bring the dangly bits. You bring the juicy bits.’ And I said, ‘Okay.’ He said, ‘You are not supposed to agree with things like that.’ He was constantly trying to put me back into a mould of innocence and Doris Dayism. He said one of the things he liked about me was that I was very 1950s, wore red lipstick, had a hairstyle of that period and looked like Betty Grable. That was all right by me.
Once he rang at three in the morning. Mike, my husband, picked up the phone and Spike said, ‘I’m here to commit verbal adultery with your wife. Put her on.’ Of course, Mike had been woken up and he wasn’t a happy man. When I was producing a daily programme and needed the sleep, Spike would sometimes telephone at two in the morning and say he knew a restaurant where they were still serving curry. ‘So get in your car and I’ll meet you there.’ And I always did. I always came whenever he asked me. He had no jealousy because I was married and I had no jealousy whatsoever about the Bayswater Harem. I knew one or two of them slightly. Lovely people. But when he was hurt or suffering it tore my heart apart. I remember silly things. Once I took a Sara Lee frozen apple pie to Orme Court because I’d just discovered them. I thought they were very good. He thawed it and ate the whole pie and then sent one of his people out to get nine more.
There were so many evenings I remember fondly. The most fun night I can recall was when he came over all mysterious and invited me back to Orme Court, nothing unusual about that, for a night-cap after a television show. He was one of the unsung heroes of the Thames mud banks at low tide. He found odd artefacts with his metal detector and dug them out with his bare hands. But this particular evening he said he had something special. He opened his ‘secret’ drawer and brought out an ancient, mud-caked half cask of brandy. ‘Here’s to Drake, Shakespeare – well I found it near the old Globe – and the Royal Navy generally.’ He prised it open, 400 years old perhaps, and we scoffed the lot. Now that’s friendship.
I’ve often read so much and heard so much about his treachery. It was a closed book to me and I never came across it at all. There was a time when I ventured into one of his black dog depressions. It was when he invited me to go to Manchester and he was doing a one-man show, all those ad-libs that I knew off by heart. He had booked me a room next to his in the hotel. He had said, ‘Let me know when you arrive,’ so I arrived and started to put notes under the door of his room saying, ‘Hello. I’m here.’ There was a big sign on his door that said, ‘DO NOT DISTURB. I’M SLEEPING.’
I wouldn’t dream of knocking on the door so I kept pushing notes under it and then I sent him cartoons and little poems. I was bending down with a note saying, ‘It’s nearly 7 o’clock and you are due on stage at 7.30,’ when he opened the door and sent me flying because I was down there with my nose on the end of the door. He shouted, ‘What are you doing on your hands and knees outside my room? It’s theatre time, woman!’ I said, ‘Actually, you invited me up here, Spike, and I thought you’d be amused by the notes. And you asked me to let you know when I arrived.’ He said, ‘Go to the theatre. I don’t want to talk to you now.’ And he left.
NORMA: I asked Liz if she was ever the butt of his treachery.
LIZ: Treachery is not a word I would use, but he could and did hurt me. When he was filming Ghost in the Noonday Sun in Cyprus he asked me to fly out to be with him. Then he ignored me totally, went out to dinner with other people and never invited me. That was terrible. Otherwise I had a lovely trip – enjoyed the beach and the sunshine – but it seemed he didn’t want to know me. It was very hurtful. I came home early.
NORMA: I told Liz my memory of her on that trip. The sun was shining, she went into the sea, lay on her back and said, ‘Thank you, Spike.’ So it wasn’t all bad.
LIZ: No. At least I got away from the English weather.
NORMA: Spike was a strange person and Barry Humphries said he could be an absolute shit but that people forgave him. I asked Liz why she thought people forgave him.
LIZ: Because he had such a kind and sweet way of making up afterwards. He could be sweet beyond belief. This was my experience, anyway. Sweet beyond belief. I remember when I was sacked by a Fleet Street editor. I was doing television previews for him and was absolutely demolished by this. Spike was at the Mermaid Theatre doing Ben Gunn, or whatever, and I went there straight from my Fleet Street sacking to see him. I was crying and the doorman was so flustered he let me into Spike’s dressing room. Spike said, ‘I can’t talk to you. I’m just about to go on,’ and I said, ‘I know. I know.’ I told him what had happened. He gave me a bottle of wine, half full. He’d had the first half. He told me to take it home, drink it in the bath and I would feel better. I did exactly that and when I arrived at the house there was a huge bouquet from Interflora. How he managed to get it there before I got home I don’t know. That was the sort of radiant kindness that touched me again and again. When I hear of his treachery and his racism I can’t associate these things with him at all. It was silly, wasn’t it, just because he’d blacked up as an Indian in Curry and Chips, for heaven’s sake.
He was very kind in his own way and he loved my little girl, Suzy. I was talking to Suzy the other day – she’s a fully-fledged shop-owner now – and she said, ‘I didn’t think much of him.’ She had brought him breakfast in bed one day when he came to stay. She put a little flower in a vase and he shouted at her. He didn’t want toast, he wanted a roll, or it could have been the other way round. Suzy was demolished. She came back and said he wanted a roll. I said, ‘We don’t have a roll. It’ll have to be toast.’ He shouted from the bedroom, ‘I heard that. And make sure it has butter and strawberry jam on it.’ Suzy took it upstairs and Spike said, ‘Take it away. I’m not hungry now.’ And that from a man who loved children! It was very hurtful. She was only about