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The inevitable denouement: Upon their return to the Golders Green garage late in the day, Peter informed the now-apoplectic car dealer that he wouldn’t be taking the Jaguar after all. “Like many people,” Spike concluded, “he ended up on the Peter Sellers scrapheap.”

Spike could be cruel when discussing his old friend, but it was cruelty born of love. The bond between Sellers and Milligan was forged as solidly as it was because the two men understood each other’s hearts as well as their minds. For each of them, nonsensical comedy wasn’t simply diverting. It was as restorative as fresh blood, and if it brought with it a bit of cruelty, selfishness, and antisocial behavior, well, that was the price others must pay. For Spike and Peter, comedy wasn’t just comic—it was cosmic. That so few other people knew this spiritual fact only made the two depressives more convinced of its essential truth. Spike’s sense of humor, deeply rooted in anguish, found its most appreciative audience in Peter, a childlike, superstitious English half-Jew with too many voices in his head. At first, Peter Sellers was just about the only person who truly got the joke that was Spike Milligan. It was an insane joke, sick and absurd, and it resonated in Peter, who, for his part, showed his appreciation by facilitating its resonance to the rest of the world.

Jimmy Grafton writes in his understated memoir that “all the Goons, like most compulsive comedians, were manic depressives to some degree,” with Milligan taking a sizable lead in that particular race. But, Grafton continues, “If Spike was the most manic depressive, Peter was perhaps the next, though not to the same involuntary degree. His periods of elation after a successful performance or when sharing moments of fun with his friends were monitored by a shrewder, more pragmatic mind, as were his darker feelings of frustration.”

Because of the Goons’ subsequent professional triumphs, Goon minutiae abounds, trailing along with it a number of finer-points debates. It has been universally resolved that Jimmy Grafton, muse, drinkmeister, and friend, took on the Cold War espionage-sounding nickname KOGVOS. But that is where the agreement stops. For what did the acronym stand? King of Goons and Voice of Sanity? Keeper of Goons and Voice of Sanity? King of Goon Voices Society? Take your pick. Whatever his unmelodic title stood for, Jimmy Grafton was a generous fellow who not only perceived his eccentric friends’ largely untapped talent but who respected and empathized with them as men, never seizing undue credit and always wishing them well. So good-natured is Jimmy Grafton that he even finds a positive note to strike about someone who never earned the praise and love of Peter’s other friends. “I came to like and admire her greatly,” Grafton writes of Peg.

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Peter was romantically active as well. “I was introduced to Peter in 1949 by his agent, Dennis Selinger,” says Anne Hayes. They met at the BBC’s offices on Great Portland Place. “It wasn’t instant attraction. That came when I saw him onstage for the first time.” Anne was an Australian-born theater student and actress, pretty, blond, charming, and very näıve. She says, from a safe distance, “I suppose I was happy in the beginning. I don’t know that I ever thought about it.”

It wasn’t just Peter’s offstage physical appearance that failed to appeal to Anne at first, though he continued to cut a rather large figure. “He was really very fat,” she affirms, “about fourteen-and-a-half stone. He had long, wavy hair, and he used to wear these huge suits with great, wide shoulders. He looked a bit like a spiv, really.” (In other words, he weighed two hundred pounds and was a very snappy dresser.) Since Peter was given to great displays, a multitude of phone calls ensued from their first meeting, beginning with one placed by Peter the morning after they met in which he insisted that he was already deeply in love with her. Flowers flowed. Telegrams flew. Peter was in flaming pursuit.

His raging displays of affection were paralleled, of course,