Long-suffering agent and manager on whom Spike Milligan came to depend
Life Story
Norma Farnes, who has died aged 83, was by turns secretary, dogsbody, agent and manager to the comedian Spike Milligan, a role that equated to running a latter-day madhouse, controlling his demons and protecting his fragile ego.
She also became – as comedian 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 it rained often.
One evening in 1972, for example, Farnes arrived home to find Milligan on the telephone demanding she return at once to the Bayswater office from which she ran her agency,
Associated
London Scripts.
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 learned to cope with Milligan’s tempers, rages and sulks, the standup 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).
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 she had never negotiated a fee for a performer, but Milligan pointed out there was no-one else to do it. When she rejected the company’s lavish initial offer of £10,000, Milligan was furious. Farnes asked for double and, when she settled for £18,000 plus perks, he 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 St. Milligan seldom carried more than a little loose change, for a newspaper or a slice of his favourite Battenberg cake.
He never understood banks, and once,
‘‘He was crying silently, the tears running down his cheeks, pleading with me to pull the trigger...’’ Norma Farnes on the time Spike Milligan asked her to shoot him.
finding himself with no money on him and with Farnes away, walked round the corner to his local branch to ask 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,’’ replied: ‘‘Well, you are now.’’
When the other partners in Associated London Scripts – comedian Frankie Howerd, scriptwriters Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, and their respective agents – left to join the Robert Stigwood Organisation in 1967, Farnes remained with Milligan and Sykes. Milligan died in 2002 and Sykes in July 2012.
Norma Farnes was born on Teesside, near Middlesbrough. She took a job at the local steel works at 16, before joining the typing pool at ICI. Her first media job was in Newcastle-upon-tyne as secretary, researcher and later personal assistant to Jack Clarke, a journalist who sold northern stories to the national press. In 1962 she moved to London, registered with a temping agency, and worked for the women’s editor of the Daily Mirror, Granada Television, and a member of the House of Lords, before taking a permanent post with the Independent Television Companies Association as assistant to the information officer.
In January 1966 she spotted a small ad in London’s Evening Standard: ‘‘Showbusiness personality requires personal assistant.’’ It mentioned the job was based in Bayswater, only two Tube stops from her flat in Kensington. When told she would be working for Milligan, she demurred.
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.
She also acted as agent for his many books, and it was she who persuaded him to change the title of his first collection of war reminiscences from It’ll All Be Over by Christmas to Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall (1971).
Her own biography of Milligan, 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. –