I was Spike Milligan's secret mistress: TV producer Liz Cowley's riotous affair with the comedian that outlasted ALL his three marriages

By Corinna Honan for the Daily Mail
Updated: 18:33 EDT, 29 October 2010

'To hell with all this, let's just go to bed!'. With those fateful words, Liz began her eccentric affair with the legendary Goon. Now, finally she's telling her story...

For years, the TV producer and the famous comedian were just good friends who met from time to time for an Indian meal. She married someone else and so did he — yet they still made time to share the occasional poppadom. 

It was Liz Cowley, in the end, who cranked the relationship into a different gear. ‘To hell with all this — let’s just go to bed,’ she said to Spike Milligan. As a proposition, it was distinctly lacking in finesse, but it led to a clandestine affair that lasted longer than any of Spike’s three marriages.

No whisper of the liaison reached the Press ­during their five decades as friends and lovers, though many of the people closest to Spike — including Richard Ingrams, the former editor of Private Eye, and Spike’s manager, Norma Farnes — knew of Liz’s role in his life.

Secret lovers: Spike Milligan and Liz Cowley were friends and lovers for 50 years, yet there was never a word in the press about their relationship with even Spike's wife agreeing with the liaison

In fact, Norma heartily approved of the affair, while fully aware that her apparently uxorious client also had a retinue of other mistresses. She says now that she wishes Spike had actually ­married his long-term lover.

‘Liz was small, very attractive and rippling with an innate sexuality,’ she recalls. ‘In my opinion, she was the perfect partner for him — bright, witty, funny, warm and a great conversationalist. I watched them closely for almost 40 years, both of them taking other lovers, but then, without rancour, resuming their ­relationship over ­intimate dinners and in the bed at his office in Orme Court, Bayswater. There were others, but Liz remained the ­constant in his life.’

Liz and Norma are still in touch. Now in their 70s, they call themselves ‘the ladies who lunch’ and meet regularly for what Norma describes as ‘a couple of hours of nostalgia and laughter,’ in which the comedian remains a frequent topic of conversation.

So when Norma decided to interview many of Spike’s old colleagues and friends about him for a new book, Liz was naturally asked if she would take part. She agreed.
It was, in some ways, a brave decision. Even though Spike has now been dead for eight years, she knows that she opens herself to criticism for her seemingly blithe ­disregard of both her marriage vows and his.

Where it all began: Liz first met Spike during the 1950s when he appeared on the radio as a member of the Goon Show - alongside Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers

When they first met in the Fifties, she was a journalist on the old Army ­magazine, Reveille, and he was just starting to enjoy fame as the writer of The Goon Show, the surrealistic radio comedy show in which he also played characters alongside Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe. 

‘This Goon Show thing. What’s it all about? I don’t understand it. Go along and interview them,’ her ­editor had said.

So she did. Peter Sellers, she says, was very rude and Harry Secombe was so sweet that she wanted to put him in her handbag. ‘And then there was this gangling, sexy, tall, skinny man named Spike. And, damn it, I didn’t pay much attention to him.’

The next day, her phone rang. It was Spike, asking if she’d like to ­accompany him to a party.

She went, but the evening was a ­disaster. ‘Everybody was terribly, ­terribly smart and witty. Spike stood in the corner, very shy, humble and gauche. And I stood in the corner ­feeling very shy, humble and gauche.’

At one: Liz says that she felt more at home with the comedian than she ever did with her husband - whom she later divorced

So she left. ‘And I thought that was the end of that, but the next day Spike rang again. ‘Did I understand you to say you had a university degree?’ he asked. She said she did.
‘Ah, well, I can’t consort with you. You’re educated. I’m not.’ 

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

Consorting turned out to mean ­serious conversations over Indian meals, in which he impressed her with his erudition. Then, in 1964, Liz, by now a producer of the popular BBC TV Tonight show, asked him to bed.

‘And he said, “Oh well. What shall we do it to? What have you got?” ’ 

Initially, she though he was asking about contraception, but she soon twigged that he was talking about music. They agreed on jazz and repaired to his office in Bayswater, where he kept a handy camp bed.

To her irritation, her ‘gauche, gangly’ lover leapt up at one point to stop the tape. ‘Did you hear that bit? That was particularly good,’ he said.

Liz shivered. ‘Spike! I’ve got nothing on and I’m cold.’

The affair progressed, even after she got married and became pregnant. Once, she says: ‘He put his hand on my enormous tummy and said, “I wish this little person was mine.” ’

But by the late Sixties, Spike was experiencing violent mood swings, later diagnosed as manic depression, which often made him argumentative and nasty. 

On one occasion, they had a row because she thought she could detect a design in some crazy paving below their feet. He started yelling at her in the street, like a demented Victor ­Meldrew. ‘It’s rubbish — it’s f***ing rubbish! Workmen have hacked the pavement to bits and you think it’s arty. Typical, bloody typical.’

Ladies man: Spike Milligan was never short of female attention, and had a group of girlfriends known as the Bayswater Harem. Here he gives away his watch to two women during an Australian show

Another time, he invited Liz to visit him in Manchester, where he was ­performing a one-man show. ‘Let me know when you arrive,’ he told her. 

After finding a ‘do not disturb’ sign on his door, she started pushing ­cartoons and notes under his door. 

‘I was bending down with a note that said, “It’s nearly 7 o’clock and you’re due on stage at 7.30,” when he opened the door and sent me flying. He shouted, “What are you doing on your hands and knees outside my room?” 

‘I said, “Actually, you invited me up here, Spike.” 

‘He said, “I don’t want to talk to you now.” And he left.’ 

Although Liz understood that, at such times, he was in the grip of a ‘black-dog’ depression, his casual ­cruelty could be hard to bear. 

‘He could and did hurt me,’ she says. ‘When he was making a film in Cyprus, he asked me to fly out to be with him. Then he ignored me totally — he went out to dinner with other people and never invited me. That was terrible. I came home early.’ 

Why did she put up with this sort of treatment? Liz candidly admits that part of the reason was simply because ‘as the years went on, I thought: “Here is a rich and famous man and he ­bothers with me.” A lot of it was ego. I thought: “This man is interested in me and I need my ego building.”

Great friends: Spike and Harry Secombe who Liz described as so sweet that she wanted to put him in her handbag and take him with her

‘The fact that he was willing to spend time with me was very flattering. But he was never one for honeyed ­compliments, however hard you’d worked at the slap and silk.
‘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. I ­remember he once wrote: “Some ­people might even say I miss you. I haven’t said that.”’ 

Yes, she concedes, he was always on the defensive. But she adored him, to the point of playing up to his desire for a pre-feminist, Fifties-style pin-up. 

‘He was diabolically clean and I think to him the act of sex was perhaps a bit dirty,’ she says. ‘He was constantly ­trying to put me back into a mould of innocence and Doris Day-ism. 

‘He said one of the things he liked about me was that I was very Fifties, wore red lipstick, had a hairstyle of that period and looked like Betty ­Grable. That was all right by me.’ 

And certainly Liz readily accepted her role as the acolyte who — despite her family life, a distinguished TV career and a later job as the Daily Mail’s TV previewer — should always be at the great man’s beck and call.

Another life: Spike Milligan at home with his second wife Paddy and children. Amazingly his affair with Liz lasted longer than any of his three marriages

Once, he rang her at three in the morning and her husband, Mike, picked up the phone. Spike said: ‘I’m here to commit verbal adultery with your wife. Put her on.’ 

Mike was not best pleased.

When Liz was producing a daily ­programme, Spike would sometimes phone in the early hours to say he knew a restaurant where they were still serving curry: ‘So get in your car and I’ll meet you there.’ 

She may have desperately needed her sleep — but she always went. 

‘I was never bored by him,’ she explains. ‘Otherwise, I wouldn’t have rushed out in my Mini at three in the morning. I sometimes wondered how many other girlfriends he’d phoned before me, but I never asked.’

Many in her position might have objected to the existence of other ­lovers — whom his manager caustically labelled the Bayswater Harem — but Liz insists she never minded. 

‘He was married to [his second wife] 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. I had no jealousy whatsoever about the ­Bayswater Harem. I knew one or two of them slightly. Lovely people. 

‘Another thing to consider is Spike’s love of experiences. If he’d given ­himself completely to one woman, that would have blotted out much of the opportunity to have the experiences he was always looking for.’

Naturally, there were good times, too. Liz often felt ‘at one’ with this crazy comedian, in a way she’d never been with her ­husband — whom she later divorced. 

The best evening they ever spent together, she recalls, was when he invited her to his office for a nightcap after a television show. 

There, he produced a 400-year-old, mud-caked half cask of brandy that he’d found with his metal detector on the banks of the Thames.

‘Here’s to Drake, Shakespeare — well I found it near the old Globe — and the Royal Navy generally,’ he said. And they drank the lot. 

When Liz nervously embarked on a series of late-night chatshows for Radio 1, she asked Spike if he and daughter, Laura, would take part in a ‘fathers and daughters’ debate. There was no fee, but he did the show. 

For a series on BBC1, he also obliged Liz by agreeing to sit in as an ‘agony uncle’ alongside the singer Lulu, and to offer advice to ­teenagers. To his lover, this seemed the height of generosity. 

‘Isn’t the mark of a really great man his ability to stop and do little things to help others? This was a man at the ­pinnacle of his career. No wonder I loved him.’ 

The last time Liz saw Spike was in one of his favourite restaurants, the Trattoo, in Kensington, West London. It was the year before he died, and she could tell his health was fading. As they parted, he said: ‘Please. You stay alive and keep your enthusiasm. I think I’ve lost mine. Yes, this time, I really do.’ 

Today, her most intimate reminder of Spike is the Wolseley knitted vest he gave her daughter. It was so big it would have swamped the child, so she kept it for herself. ‘I still sleep in it to this day,’ she says.

He sent a telegram to his wife from the bathroom

Riotous: Spike Milligan could behave atrociously. On one occasion he sent his wife a telegram asking for breakfast because they were not talking to each other

During an almost 50-year ­relationship with Liz Cowley, Spike Milligan never talked to her about his wives, but his friends knew all about his life and loves. And The Beatles producer George Martin says Spike could behave atrociously. 

‘Once, when [he and first wife June] weren’t on speaking terms he locked himself in his room. Then he picked up the phone in his bedroom and sent her a telegram. 

‘In those days, telegrams often meant something disastrous, so June must have thought the worst when she saw the telegraph boy. She tore it open — and the ­telegram said: “I would like a boiled egg, two slices of toast and a cup of tea. Thank you very much. I’m upstairs. Spike.” ’ 

Many of his friends knew about his Harem of illicit lovers, which sometimes placed them in an awkward position. Comedy writer Barry Cryer was friendly with Spike’s second wife, Paddy, whom he describes as ‘an extremely warm-hearted woman and very tolerant of him’. 

Once, he says, Paddy phoned him at his home in Little Venice, while Spike was there. ‘She asked whether I had heard from Spike, but he was making frantic gestures I shouldn’t say he was with me. 

‘Then she added, “I just wondered because he’s in Australia and he hasn’t called me.” I didn’t like to say that he was sitting in front of me. But that was Spike.’ 

Alan ‘Groucho’ Matthews, a lifelong Spike fan who also became a friend, says the one thing he really disliked about his hero was the existence of the harem. 

‘He seemed to believe that the usual mores didn’t apply to him. He said he loved them all and they were all aware of one another. Can you believe it? And yet it was true. They did. 

‘With him it was the old adage: “He was a one-woman man — one woman at a time.” Whoever he was with would be the object of his total affection. Then he would walk away. ’

George Martin, who’d first met Spike in The Goon Show days, says he was always ‘the target for a lot of women because he was enormously attractive to the opposite sex, and that made [his co-star] Peter Sellers extremely jealous. In those days, we called Spike “Golden Balls”.

‘In fact, Peter never really made it to first base with any of his leading ladies, whereas most of Spike’s fell for his charms fairly quickly.’ 

When he married for the third and final time, in 1983, Spike’s new wife Shelagh took remedial action and they moved away from ­London to Rye in East Sussex.

Extracted from Memories Of Milligan by Norma Farnes, to be published by Fourth Estate on October 28 at £20. © 2010 Norma Farnes. To order a copy (p&p free) for £16.99 call 0845 155 0720.