Spike: An Intimate Memoir. Norma Farnes

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       Chapter Six

      Peter Sellers may have been an international star but, far from feeling left behind, Spike often felt sorry for his friend. One evening he invited Spike to dinner at his luxurious new flat at 30 Clarges Street in Mayfair. Britt greeted Spike dressed stunningly from top to toe in silver – and then went out for the evening. Spike thought that was peculiar but Pete did not seem at all surprised and showed him round the flat with its three bedrooms, one for Britt, one for their daughter, Victoria, and the other for the chef.

      ‘Where’s yours?’

      ‘I haven’t got one. I walk to the Dorchester every night, go in the back way so nobody sees me, stay the night and come back here in the morning.’

      Spike was sceptical; he knew that Pete valued the truth about as much as he did monogamy.

      ‘What has the chef got for us?’ he asked.

      Pete turned those mournful eyes on him. ‘Britt has given him the night off. But we could do ourselves egg and bacon.’

      The Hollywood star frying an egg! So that was their dinner and afterwards Spike walked him to his hotel.

      The next morning he told me the story.

      ‘Do you know, he hasn’t got a fireplace in his life.’ He shook his head and sighed, ‘Poor Pete.’

      Spike placed enormous importance on the ideal of a happy domestic life, but for him it was more often an idea than a reality. Nobody found his ideals more difficult to live up to than his wife, Paddy. He often claimed that she made him ill. This was an exaggeration but occasionally it was true. She lived in chaos, while he was obsessively tidy and orderly. Having been brought up in a military regime, punctuality had been drummed into him; for Paddy, time was something the clock kept but not her. For all his whims, Spike was paranoid about falling into debt and never spent more than he could afford, whereas Paddy was reckless with money.

      When I took over as Spike’s manager his accountant suggested all Spike’s financial affairs should be looked after by me. Paddy had an allowance for clothes but everything else went on accounts which came to the office and were settled each month by me – greengrocer, grocer, fishmonger, butcher, chemist, garage for petrol, taxis, electricity and gas bills, rates, coal, clothes for the children and their school fees. She would go out for a day’s shopping in the West End and take a minicab for the whole day while she disappeared into Oxford Street department stores. Friends thought I spent a fortune on make-up but I was a Scrooge compared with Paddy. The bills from the chemist where she bought hers were mind-blowing. After she had exhausted her monthly clothes allowance she ran up huge overdrafts, which Spike had to settle.

      When I told him the bills were in his reaction varied. Sometimes he would say ‘Just tell me how much and by when’ or ‘Give me the bottom line’, or even ‘Don’t put me in a bad mood. I don’t want to know.’ On other occasions it was rocket time. His temper could be searing and their rows would be momentous. ‘Are you trying to bankrupt me?’ he would shout down the phone. Or he would race home to have it out with her. Their rows were cataclysmic and after some of them he returned to the office looking shattered. In calm moments Spike believed Paddy could not help herself. ‘She lives life in a rush,’ he once said to me. ‘Sometimes the ink is still wet on the birthday cards she gives me.’

      Spike was wonderful with all children, particularly his own. He had the gift of being able to understand the workings of a child’s mind. That ability produced poems that have bewitched several generations of children.

      Eric still recalls a Christmas, after June had left Spike, when his wife Edith invited him and his children to share Christmas with them. ‘It was simply magical, and it was all down to Spike. I’ll never forget it.’

      On Christmas Eve Spike dressed as Father Christmas and, out of sight in the garden, put a tube through the sitting-room window and announced: ‘Father Christmas is coming tomorrow. Ho, ho, ho. And you must light candles in the garden so the reindeer will be able to see their way.’

      That is what they did, with lots of laughter and screams from delighted children.

      Spike then reappeared as himself and gave everyone a torch. They ran through the woods СКАЧАТЬ