Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [27]
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 comedy routines 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 of its audiences, but Harry Secombe’s shaving routine, followed by the Jeanette MacDonald–Nelson Eddy duet, were crowd pleasers nonetheless. But it was 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