Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [37]
“Ying tong iddle I po”—a truly meaningless string of sounds with vaguely Chinese undertones. Because it meant absolutely nothing, “Ying tong iddle I po” was the perfect repeatable nugget of Goonspeak, a motto of linguistic anarchy, a kind of password. Spike inserted it in his scripts randomly, as was of course its very nature:
SEAGOON: I’m looking for a criminal.
BLOODNOK: You find your own—it took me years to get this lot.
SEAGOON: Ying tong iddle I po.
Just among themselves, the Goons’ private language could be rather more vulgar. “Secombe read a book on South America,” Spike once noted with glee. “There’s a South American monkey who, when it’s attacked, shits in its hand and throws it at the opposition. So whenever Secombe and Sellers used to meet, one would go ‘ptthhp!’ ” At this point in the telling Spike reached down to his ass, grabbed an imaginary handful, and hurled the contents aggressively forward. “And the other would go ‘mmmhmmmhmmgh!’ ” Under threat, the second monkey emitted an equally intense straining sound, reached back and grabbed nothing, and threw his hands in the air in a gesture of abject surrender.
This was how they dealt with one another out of the range of the microphones.
The Goons didn’t do comedy the way anyone else did. “Probably,” says Harry, “because we couldn’t tell jokes very well. I could never remember the endings.”
• • •
With Anne, Peter moved out of his mother’s domain and into a penthouse overlooking Hyde Park. Anne had already introduced her best friend, June Marlowe, to Spike over dinner, an evening that was enlivened greatly by the fact that Peter had earlier convinced Spike that it would be a lot more fun if Spike pretended to be Italian. The unsuspecting June spent much of the dinner trying to teach English to the happy immigrant. They soon became engaged.
With the notable exception of Beryl Reid, women were largely excluded from the Goons’ professional world, a fact Milligan tended to reiterate with some degree of pride. Spike: “Do you know there were only three women who appeared in The Goon Show? The first was Margaret McMillan, a classy girl. I was going out with her at the time.” Spike again: “The girls appeared from time to time according to who was dating them. Peter Sellers had one. Her name was Charlotte Greenwood, and I wrote a line for him to say to her: ‘You’re a dull scrubber!’ Peter said, ‘I can’t say that to Charlotte—I’m going out with her!’ ” Where was Anne, one wonders? He was married at the time, after all. Or are Spike’s recollections to be fully trusted?
• • •
In December 1951, Charlie Chaplin’s Burlesque on “Carmen” (1916) enjoyed a brief revival run in England, albeit in a newly burlesqued version that wasn’t approved by Chaplin. Chaplin had made the film for Essanay as a takeoff on Cecil B. DeMille’s 1915 Carmen. DeMille’s epic melodrama starred Wallace Reid as Don Jose and Geraldine Farrar as Carmen; Chaplin’s spoof starred himself as Darn Hosiery with Edna Purviance as the eponymous gypsy, with the cross-eyed clown Ben Turpin doing a turn as the lover of the fat Frasquita.
But with the new release of Charlie Chaplin’s Burlesque on “Carmen,” English audiences were treated to a burlesque of a burlesque, for Chaplin’s comedy now sported a facetious voice-over commentary by Peter Sellers. Chaplin’s original two-reeler was left open to this farcical adulteration from the start. He left Essanay soon after filming it, whereupon the company shot new footage and doubled its length without his participation at all. Charlie sued, lost, and was distraught, but as he wrote in his autobiography, “It rendered a service, for thereafter I had it stipulated in every contract that there