Memories of Milligan

Liz Cowley

If to plumb the soul of a man it is necessary to share his bed then Liz Cowley, once the producer of what is still regarded as the finest of daily current affairs programmes, BBC’s Tonight, fronted by the seemingly affable Cliff Michelmore, can claim to be the ultimate authority on Spike Milligan. I watched them closely for almost forty years, both of them taking other lovers but then without rancour, resuming their relationship over intimate dinners, absorbing conversations, anointed by sharing his bed in Room 5 at 9 Orme Court. Others came and went, but Liz remained the constant in his life. There was something special between them.

Liz, small, very attractive and rippling with an innate sexuality that would be the envy of the boob tube generation, still continues to bed her lovers, but it is obvious that the one dearest to her was Spike. In my opinion she was the perfect partner for him – bright, witty, funny, warm and a great conversationalist, one of the few people who, when he was depressed, actually phoned me to find out how he was. She didn’t want anything from him, she just cared about his well-being. All she would say was, ‘When he’s better, tell him I phoned.’ A caring person. Very rare.

We have remained friends. She calls us ‘The Ladies Who Lunch’ and I always look forward to our lunches because I know it will be a couple of hours of nostalgia and laughter.

LIZ: I first met Spike when I was working for an old army newspaper, Reveille, which is now defunct, and the editor said, ‘This Goon Show thing. What’s it all about? I don’t understand it. Go along and interview them.’ So I did and there was this dreadful man, named Peter Sellers, who was very rude. And a lovely fat Welshman who was so sweet you wanted to hug him and put him in your handbag, if indeed he had shrunk a bit. And then there was this very gauche, gangling, sexy, tall, skinny man named Spike. And I thought to myself, ‘That’s why he’s called Spike, because he looks like a spike.’ And damn it, I didn’t pay much attention to him. I got my story on the Goons.

The next day the telephone rang. ‘Spike Milligan here.’

‘Sorry, who?’

‘I think you interviewed me yesterday. Would you like to go to a party with me tonight?’

I thought, ‘My goodness! A Goon inviting me to a party.’ Sounded good. ‘Yes, please.’

‘It’s at Tom Wiseman’s house.’ My Lord! He was a very well-known journalist at that time.

‘You’ll be all right. He’s a scribbler and you’re a scribbler, so you’ll get on and I’ll get on because you’re getting on.’

But neither of them did. It was dreadful because, as I suspected, everybody was terribly, terribly smart, witty and drinking goodness knows what. Spike stood in the corner, very shy, humble and gauche. And I stood in the corner feeling very shy, humble and gauche, and I couldn’t wait to get home and very soon that’s what I did. And I thought that was the end of that, but the next day he rang again.

‘Did I understand you to say you had a university degree when you were talking to someone at the party?’

‘A Canadian BA, with honours.’

‘Ah, well, I can’t consort with you. You’re educated. I’m not.’

‘Well, let’s try, shall we? Let’s try consorting.’

Consorting meant going out to an Indian restaurant and talking, talking and talking. And for years, consorting, that was all that was involved.

That would be in the Fifties. So roll on the Sixties. I got married and Spike got married and divorced. But in between all those bits, and during them, we had our Indian meals. And finally, in about 1964, I said, ‘To hell with all this. Let’s go to bed!’ And he said, ‘Oh well. What shall we do it to? What have you got?’

‘What do you mean, what have I got? I’ve got a Dutch cap.’

‘Woman! You don’t use language like that. I mean what music shall we do it to?’

‘If we go to Orme Court we’ll hear Ravel. Please, not the Bolero, because I know you’re into Ravel, or the Beatles.’

‘Okay. Jazz.’

‘If you go to my place. You’ll hear the Beatles and you’ll hear jazz, but I don’t know about Ravel, so let’s go to my place.’

But we didn’t. We went to Orme Court. The same gauche, gangly person getting very involved with the music, stopping the tape and saying, ‘Did you hear that bit? That was particularly good.’ And I said, ‘Spike! I’ve got nothing on and I’m cold.’ And he said, ‘I think it’s time we went home.’ So that was our first, as it were.

I didn’t fall in love with Spike, but I loved him. I thought, ‘Here is a man I could spend any amount of time with.’ The humour had to grow, because don’t forget the surrealism that was the Goons, and was Spike of course, was something new. We’re talking pre-Monty Python and pre-everything else. So I loved it because I was a great fan of Alice in Wonderland, and that was the sort of thing he was tapping into. He would talk and talk and then say, ‘I’m talking too much. You talk. You’re the one with the degree.’ He was obsessed with people who had been to university and as a result thought he had been deprived of a whole layer of formal knowledge. He was quite wrong. ‘Ah,’ he’d say. ‘Yes, that’s what I’ve been missing.’ Little did he know that when I was going to meet him for supper, I would bone up on the New Statesman, New Scientist and Time magazine. I got my science and politics all ready in a superficial way and I’d blind him with this because I knew he didn’t have time to read these magazines.

No academic, but the man could put the erudite to shame with his colossal knowledge of what made the world tick. And he was no egoist. However humble the opinion you might offer, he would listen so intently it was almost embarrassing. And then say, so wistfully, ‘You see, you went to university. I never did.’ Silly man! Renaissance man. A hugely sensitive friend and lover.

He was someone you wanted to hold on to and listen to. I wish he’d done more with [his talent], particularly his music. I remember The Snow Goose. It was lovely. He was too clever by half and he didn’t know what direction to really milk. He was so proud of the Goons. Once I offered to get his portable typewriter cleaned and he told me to handle it carefully because he had written all the Goon Show scripts on it.

The humour was obviously there, but he didn’t practise humour when he was with me. He talked seriously most of the time. He didn’t talk about relationships. He didn’t talk about people in his life, and I thought that was odd because I rattled on about everything. I got married, got pregnant, and he put his hand on my enormous tummy and said, ‘I wish this little person’ – because they didn’t know whether it was a boy or a girl in those days – ‘I wish this little person was mine.’ And I thought it was the most delightful thing he could say. Suzy was born on 16 April, which is his birthday. Spike added, ‘And Hitler’s birthday as well!’

NORMA: Spike always said that he and Hitler were born on the same day and it’s not true. Hitler’s birthday was 20 April. I told him a thousand times but he always chose to ignore it. I asked Liz if she ever had a serious disagreement with him because he could be very argumentative when he was in that sort of mood.

LIZ: Funny thing! I only remember disagreeing with him about two things. One was the shape of lines in a crazy pavement and I said to him, ‘I think these are made in a kind of design although it’s called “crazy”. If you look carefully –’ He snapped at me and said – ‘You are not looking carefully. You are walking all over them.’ And I said, ‘No, stop! The rain is falling on them and they are shiny. They are like a piece of art and they zigzag this way and that way. It’s very good.’

He shouted at me, ‘IT’S RUBBISH! IT’S FUCKING RUBBISH! Workmen have been here. They’ve hacked the pavement to bits and you think it’s arty. Typical, bloody typical.’

I remember another disagreement. He was very close to a man called Harry Edgington, an army friend. I never met him, but Spike did go on and on about him, and I think I said something very ill-conceived. I once suggested that his love for Harry was quite unusual and amazing. He said, ‘What do you mean? What are you saying?’ He stamped out of the room and when he got back to the office he got his revenge by tearing a leaf out of a leather-bound volume of Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall. He’d been presented with it for selling 25,000 copies, so it was special and he sent me the page that referred to Harry Edgington. I must have hit a nerve because his reaction was so over-the-top and I could never understand why. To suggest that there was anything homosexual in Spike was absolute rubbish, although I have to say he wasn’t your jumping up and down, wahey, hairy-chested lover, and that was nice, but satisfying? ‘I ain’t got no satisfaction.’

It was an extraordinary friendship. It certainly had nothing to do with sex at all. He seemed to know what I was going to say before I said it and, I’d like to flatter myself, quite often I knew what he was going to say. I just needed to know that he was in my life because as the years went on I thought, ‘Here is a rich and famous man and he bothers with me.’ That was tremendous. I remember when I was in the throes of my divorce. The divorce papers weren’t yet on the table and my husband and I were trying to make one last go of it by having a second honeymoon in the Algarve, which was a disaster because he would get up early just so that he didn’t have to look at my face over breakfast, and go off with his camera into the mountains. I didn’t see him all day, so I would go down to the beach where there were little rocky coves and I sat in a small cave with the sea coming right up to my knees, and then it washed out. It was very nice, so I wrote in the sand, ‘Spike – you are the one I love’, and then I watched the sea wash it away. Then I did it again and that’s how I spent a whole morning in the Algarve. I knew that the man I was married to was not a man I could be at one with, whereas Spike I could. I also think a lot of it was ego. I thought, ‘This man is interested in me and I need my ego building.’ The fact that he was willing to spend time with me was very flattering.

He never proposed. The only things he proposed were when he thought it was time I left or that we should have a race in our Minis. And yet when he was working in Australia or South Africa he wrote to me two or three times a week, not ordinary love letters. Sometimes they would begin ‘Hi, Cowley.’ I remember he once wrote, ‘Some people might even say I miss you. I haven’t said that.’ So he was always on the defensive.

Spike never liked formal dates, though once I took him to a movie, The Way We Were, starring Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford. Perhaps selfishly I felt it mirrored so much of my own past and might help him to understand where I was coming from. As we left the cinema I expected some sort of sympathetic comment. What I got was, ‘What the fuck was that all about?’ I realised then that my part of the world, rapidly receding the longer I stayed in England, struck few chimes with him. Perhaps that’s why we didn’t marry. That and the fact that he never asked me.

NORMA: The film reflected West Coast, leftish academe, a world away from the tourists Spike wrote about so scathingly in letters he sent when he was doing his one-man show in Australia in 1972.

Liz, with her lovely face, as lively as a linnet, and her memories of Spike that will never fade, looks many years younger than she is. She remembers Spike’s kindness and his requests to meet up in the early hours. There is no sadness in her reminiscences.

LIZ: Perhaps it’s a cliché, but isn’t the mark of a really great man his ability to stop and do little things to help others? When I very nervously started a short series of late-night chat shows on Radio 1, I asked Spike – by then running just to stand still – if he could possibly take part in a ‘fathers and daughters’ debate. There wouldn’t, er, be any money in it but we could send a taxi. He agreed immediately and brought along his daughter, Laura. Thus my humble, local first programme got off to a flying start.

When I began a series for teenagers on BBC1 he came up trumps again, agreeing to sit in as an ‘agony uncle’, offering advice to young people alongside agony aunt Lulu. Now this was a man at the very pinnacle of his career. He didn’t lack for money and certainly not for TV coverage. No wonder I loved him. But perhaps, too, there was some thing very Christian, in the best sense of the word, in 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.