Norma Farnes
Secretary, manager, ‘psychologist, mother figure and umbrella when it rained’ to Spike Milligan
NORMA FARNES, who has died aged 83, was by turns secretary, dogsbody, agent and manager to Spike Milligan, a role that equated to running a latter-day madhouse, controlling the demons and protecting the fragile ego of the complex comedian inside.
Based in offices in an elegant red-brick Edwardian block, Orme Court in Bayswater, headquarters of Associated London Scripts, Norma Farnes also became – as Eric Sykes crisply put it – Milligan’s “psychologist, mother figure and umbrella when it rained”. Milligan’s lifelong insecurity, black moods, hysteria, fits of despair and chronic manic depression meant that it rained often.
One evening in 1972, for example, Norma Farnes arrived home to find Milligan on the telephone demanding she return at once to the office. He was huddled there alone, fire and radiators turned full on, windows closed, blinds drawn. From a filing cabinet he pulled a leather holster containing a loaded pistol and begged her to shoot him.
“Suicide was out of the question,” she wrote later. “I was the only person who would do this for him. It would be easy. He would turn his back and it would take no more than a second.
“The heat was unbearable, and in that unreal atmosphere I thought for a split second that I would do it. He was crying silently, the tears running down his cheeks, pleading with me to pull the trigger. But then I knew I could not do it.”
She learnt to cope with Milligan’s mood swings, rages and sulks, the stand-up rows, barrack-room swearing, obsessive tidiness, his women (“the Bayswater Harem”), discarded lovers, the slamming down of phones and the outlandish behaviour (walking across the landing at the office, stark naked), the fits of pique, parsimony and rash extravagance.
He would dispatch taxis to Harrods for lavatory paper and to World’s End for wicks for his oil lamps (Milligan was paranoid about power cuts).
Norma Farnes made the leap from secretary to agent in the late 1960s when BP sought out Milligan for a television advertising campaign in which he would be required to dress as Batman. She protested that she had never negotiated a fee for a performer before, but Milligan pointed out that there was no one else to do it.
When she rejected the company’s lavish initial offer of £10,000, however, Milligan was furious. Norma Farnes asked for double, and when she settled for £18,000 plus perks, a grateful Milligan wrote her a cheque for 10 per cent on the spot.
As his manager she looked after all his financial affairs, seeing that his personal and professional bills were paid, as well as those run up by his wife Paddy during her regular spectacular spending sprees in Oxford Street. Unlike the comedian Eric Sykes, another partner in Associated London Scripts, whom she also managed, Milligan seldom carried more than a little loose change, for a newspaper or a slice of his favourite Battenberg cake.
Milligan never understood banks, and once, finding himself with no money on him and with Norma Farnes away, walked round the corner to his local Barclays to ask them for a fiver to tide him over.
Never an easy client, he would think nothing of telephoning her at 2am from the bed he kept in his office, asking if she was awake, and when she said “No,” would reply: “Well, you are now.”
During his long periods on medication he would hang a sign on his office door: “In Bed, Under Drugs, Leave Alone”. More than once he locked himself in his room for days on end, pinning up a note announcing: “Norma has made me ill. Leave me alone.” On another occasion he scrawled a personal message for the long-suffering manager he always called Norm: “F--- off and leave me alone – and that means you.”
When the other partners in Associated London Scripts – the comedian Frankie Howerd, the scriptwriters Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, and their respective agents, Beryl Vertue and Tessa Le Bars – left to join the Robert Stigwood Organisation in 1967, Norma Farnes remained at Orme Court with Milligan and Sykes. Milligan died in 2002 and Sykes in July 2012.
Norma Farnes was born on New Year’s Eve 1934 at Thornaby-on-tees, between Middlesbrough and Stockton. Her father had a well-paid construction job at ICI Billingham while her mother was a sales assistant at an upmarket department store. Norma excelled at secretarial skills and taught shorthand and typing at night school while still a teenager.
She was 16 when she took a job at the local Head Wrightson steel works, moving to the ICI headquarters outside Stockton 18 months later to join the typing pool. Taking leave of absence, she attended the Lucie Clayton modelling school in London.
Her first media job was in Newcastle-upon-tyne as secretary, researcher and later personal assistant to Jack Clarke, a driven, enterprising journalist who sold northern stories to Fleet Street, worked for Tyne Tees Television and later became ITN’S stringer in the North East.
In 1962 she moved to London, registered with a temping agency, and worked for the women’s editor of the Daily Mirror, Granada Television in Golden Square and a member of the House of Lords before taking a permanent post with the Independent Television Companies Association (ITCA) as assistant to the information officer.
When her boss was sacked two years later, Norma Farnes took over his job. But she found the Civil Service ethos suffocating and the work dull – ITCA was then the watchdog body for the independent television industry – and longed to move into television production.
In January 1966 she spotted a small ad in the London Evening Standard: “Showbusiness personality requires personal assistant.” It mentioned that the job was based in Bayswater, only two Tube stops and a fourpenny fare from her flat in Kensington. But when the employment agency told her she would be working for Spike Milligan, she demurred.
She felt that as secretary and researcher to Jack Clarke she had had her fill of temperamental bosses, curses, tantrums and books flung across the office.
But she kept the appointment for the interview, and took the job not knowing that Milligan had hired five secretaries in the previous 18 months, all of whom had left in short order.
Also working at what became known as the “Fun Factory” at Orme Court were Eric Sykes and two sets of comedy scriptwriters, Galton and Simpson, and Frank Muir and Denis Norden. Another writer, Johnny Speight, the former insurance agent who had recently met with great success with his television series Till Death Us Do Part, worked from an office there, and regular visitors included Milligan’s former partners in the Goons, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe.
As well as representing Milligan for his stage and television appearances, Norma Farnes also acted as agent for his many books. She persuaded him to change the title of his first collection of war reminiscences, originally to be called It’ll All Be Over by Christmas, to Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (1971).
The first of seven volumes of wartime memoirs, the book went on to be a bestseller. Before sending it to the publisher, Milligan scribbled a single top sheet which he pinned to the typescript: “I dedicate this book to Norma Farnes, my manager, who puts up with me.”
Her own biography of the comedian, Spike: An Intimate Memoir, appeared in 2003. In 2006 she edited his papers in Box 18: The Unpublished Spike Milligan, and in 2011 came Memories of Milligan, in which she interviewed people who had known him.
Norma Farnes married, in 1968, John Hyman, a solicitor. She later had a relationship with Jack Clarke, her former boss at Tyne Tees.
Norma Farnes, born December 31 1935, died February 8 2019