Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  Still, Peter was also funny and engaging. His appeal outweighed his ability to enrage or appall, and the bright young couple soon patched things up again despite Peter’s notable failure to replace the diamond ring. Not to mention the hostile telephone call Peg placed to Anne’s mother: “Anne is going to ruin his life—his whole career! Surely you can recognize this. He is going to be a star. Keep your daughter away from my son!”

  Peter Sellers married Anne Hayes in Caxton Hall, in London, on September 15, 1951. Peg made a point of staying home. Bill did, too.

  Anne gave up her career. “I would think I probably laughed more with him than with anybody I’ve known in my life—probably cried more, too,” she says in retrospect. “He was amoral, dangerous, vindictive, totally selfish, and yet had the charm of the devil.” After all, it could be most entertaining to spend time with Peter and his multiple personalities, as long as his mood allowed it. As Anne used to remark to their friends, “It’s like being married to the United Nations.”

  • • •

  In January 1950, Peter and Harry, billed as “Goons,” performed a bit of comedy business on the radio show Variety Bandbox, but their communal ambitions were running much higher than a single appearance on radio’s answer to vaudeville. From Peter’s perspective, this drive wasn’t for lack of work. His solo career was prospering. In the two years after his initial Show Time appearance, Peter Sellers was heard on over two hundred radio broadcasts. He’d been on Variety Bandbox any number of times, Stump the Storyteller and Speaking for the Stars, too, not to mention the comedian Ted Ray’s hit show Ray’s a Laugh. (Late in his life, Sellers credited Ray with teaching him the crucial art of comic timing.) But group Goonishness held a powerful appeal, one that his solo gigs failed to satisfy. Playing four or five separate characters by himself was no longer enough; he needed to multiply voices in collaboration with others—an artistic hunger as well as an appetite to work with a team of good friends. Talk at the Grafton Arms continued to revolve around ways to crack the BBC together.

  Because Peter was on the best professional footing at the time, Jimmy Grafton wrote a spec script featuring Peter as the centerpiece, with the other Goons in supporting roles. In fact, the program was called Sellers’ Castle, and it focused on the stately but broke “twenty-second [a gunshot, a scream] I beg your pardon, the twenty-third Lord Sellers” and his schemes to keep his dilapidated residence from being taken from him. The four comedians recorded what they considered the best moments—Bentine and his mad scientist routine, Harry singing, and Spike filling in a bunch of outlandish voices—and through Grafton’s agency they got their pilot-of-a-pilot to the BBC producer Roy Speer, who liked what he heard and quickly gave the go-ahead for a full-scale pilot to be recorded. But in a decision worthy of the military, the BBC decided not to assign Speer himself to produce the program but, instead, an inadvertent clown named Brown.

  With wisdom born of instinct (comedians are born, not made) and stand-up experience (comedians may be born, but they die repeatedly until they learn what works), the Goons themselves knew that Sellers’ Castle required the zip of a live, laughing audience. But despite the group’s insistence, Jacques Brown felt that, no, a studio audience was not at all necessary for this particular comedy recording, and so Sellers’ Castle was taped in isolation and consequently fell flat. The BBC brass, whom Bentine later described as “a moribund collection of interfering knighthood aspirants,” was decidedly underwhelmed by the pilot of Sellers’ Castle. They found it nutty and incomprehensible and scotched the program, thereby returning the Goons to the morose state with which they were most familiar.

  Secombe described their situation coolly: “There was this terrible sense of humor that nobody else really understood.” Grafton likewise, though with drier wit: “Spike was still searching for the right formula in between bouts of depression and withdrawal, alternating with occasional music hall appearances.”

  Enter Larry Stephens, a coscriptwriter for Spike. Grafton, whose memoirs display a sparkling knack for nailing the spirit of things without showing off his insightfulness, describes Stephens as “an ex-commando captain who had seen some tough service in the Far East. He had a natural flair for comedy scriptwriting.” Having gone through the war, Stephens understood the Goons. Sellers, Milligan, Secombe, and Bentine possessed the core anarchic attitude; what they lacked was anarchic structure, and Stephens supplied it. “When we first met up we had this thing inside us,” Sellers later said. “We wanted to express ourselves in a sort of surrealistic form. We thought in cartoons. We thought in blackouts. We thought in sketches.” Stephens helped make this nascent style cohere—to a point.

  • • •

  In early 1951, the producer Pat Dixon pitched yet another new comedy series to the BBC. It was to be a series of bizarre sketches broken up by musical interludes. The comedians would do funny voices, make funny noises, and generally act strange, and then a jazz band would come on. Dixon was young and driven, and along with Larry Stephens he perceived the coherent incoherence behind Goon humor, the inchoate sense behind the nonsense. Perhaps more important than his appreciation for the Goons’ sense of humor, Dixon had earned himself enough of a reputation at the BBC that he could make this pilot happen without Brown-ish interference. A talented young producer named Dennis Main-Wilson assumed the reins.

  A pilot was recorded before a live audience on February 4, 1951. Spike recalled the experience: “The audience didn’t understand a word of it. God bless the band. They saved it. They all dug the jokes.”

  The pilot was successful enough that the knighthood aspirants approved the production of a full-fledged series of comedy programs featuring Sellers, Milligan, Secombe, and Bentine, with scripts by Milligan and Stephens as edited by Jimmy Grafton. But with their fingers firmly on the pulsebeat of the bureaucrat in the next office, the BBC executives drew the line at the proposed title. The Goons, needless to say, desired that their series be called The Goon Show. The BBC declined, insisting that nobody would know what it meant. The first replacement title proposed was The Junior Crazy Gang, but the Goons refused it, citing not only its demeaning blandness but also its pointless reference to an already-existing comedy troupe, the Palladium’s Crazy Gang.

  The BBC’s second idea was revealing: They suggested Crazy People. In their own dull way, these executives knew who they were dealing with. This group’s comedy really was evidence of mental illness.

  Sad to say, the BBC’s paper-pushers were probably right to deny the Goons their billing of choice, at least at first. After all, the national communications corporation was about to unleash the Goons on an unsuspecting public, and it would take some time to make the show popular. The word Goon could only come to mean what the Goons wanted it to mean on the air. Even when the series was a big enough hit that the stars were granted their own famous title the following year, the four men who’d named themselves after a species of cartoon morons were still faced with at least one clueless BBC planner who asked the question that continued to remain on many listeners’ minds. What exactly was this “Go On” show about, anyway?

  • • •

  Peter was very much employed between the recording of the Crazy People pilot in early February and the first program’s broadcast in late May. He was busy making movies.

  Penny Points to Paradise (1951) came first. Despite its obscene-sounding title, it was little more than a tentative, practically undirected effort to provide employment and exposure for Sellers, Milligan, Secombe, and Bentine. (Also appearing were Alfred Marks, Bill Kerr, and Felix Mendelssohn and His Hawaiian Serenaders.) The 77-minute Penny was an insignificantly small movie even by the standards of bilge-budget British independent filmmaking in 1951, and it nearly achieved the supreme ignominy of never even earning a bad review let alone a mediocre one. But by virtue of its stars, a term one must use loosely since none of them actually shone at the time, Penny survived to become a rare and important bit of Goon juvenilia.

  In the film,
Spike tells Sellers about some scheme, using a hip slang reference to cash. “Spondulix!” the befuddled Sellers cries. “Dreadful disease!” Spike: “No, major, the spondulix!” Spike makes the universal gesture for money-grubbing, prompting Sellers to reply, “In the fingers?! Worst place you can have it! It travels straight up the brain and crumbles the arm! No, no, it travels up the arm and crumbles the brain. Yes!”

  We see Sellers doing a pratfall over a garden wall; we see him grasping a rifle being shadowed by an Angel of Death figure in a black shroud; we see him swinging his arm around and rapping Harry Secombe straight across the face.

  Peter emerges in a shower cap and towel: “This is a bathroom and not a confounded beehive!” he explains, only to return to the same business a little later and declare, “Madame, this is a bathroom and not a nursery!” (In both cases the towel threatens to slip off, and one notices that David Lodge’s description of the youngish Peter was substantially correct: He was big, and he was hairy, too, with great tufts of the stuff on his shoulders.)

  Sellers shows up again as a fast-talking American salesman, complete with chewing gum: “I represent my friend the Wonder Atomic Aspirin Company, our product is guaranteed to banish any headache, take two of these red pills and your headache will vanish, but your hair falls out. [Conspiratorial giggle.] Don’t worry though, take two of these green pills and your hair grows again and your eyebrows fall off. . . .”

  “It was an awful film,” Harry Secombe once said with a hearty laugh, and he’s probably right, though Secombe’s claim is difficult to prove. Only snippets of the movie have ever been screened since its brief release in the late spring of 1951 to no attention whatsoever.

  • • •

  More noteworthy if only by degree is Let’s Go Crazy (1951), a short-subject cabaret show with Peter in the center spotlight. He does five good impersonations in the course of the half-hour film, but singers, tumblers, and a comico-musical group called Freddie Mirfield and his Garbage Men keep breaking in. “Moderate variety filler” was Today’s Cinema’s seen-it-all-before assessment, though Peter’s subsequent superstardom now provides the spark the film lacked when Peter actually made it. It’s riveting to see brilliance in the making. In one characteristic skit he’s Giuseppe, the cabaret’s broadly Italian maître d’, who sports a huge handlebar mustache. Giuseppe laboriously attempts to talk a wealthy diner into ordering something Italian, but all the man wants is boiled beef and carrots. Giuseppe weeps.

  Even better is Peter’s delightful Groucho Marx—not a caricature at all but an appreciative and subtle rendering. Groucho asks the waiter (Spike) if the restaurant serves crabs. Receiving an affirmative response, he hands over a crab and introduces it as his friend.

  It’s not the gag itself that makes it work; Let’s Go Crazy’s writing is about as inspired as an elbow. (The waiter appears a little later and bumps a diner. “That was a close shave!,” the diner says, whereupon the waiter begins to shave him—a Loony Tunes shave complete with seltzer in the face.) It is instead the warm precision of Peter’s style that connects, the odd sort of painterly quality he lends to what is essentially a cheap burlesque. Countless other mimics have been drawn irresistibly to Groucho routines over the years—the stooped, leggy walk; the black Brillo eyebrows; the inevitable cigar incessantly flicked—but, being lesser talents, they tend to out-Groucho Groucho. Peter underplays him, and out of it emanates the essential spirit of Marx.

  Peter’s Groucho is an aficionado’s pleasure, but he could also play to the raucous mob. Toward the end of Let’s Go Crazy there’s an all-too-brief appearance by the proud and robust Crystal Jollibottom. Wearing an absurd boa, she sits on a flaming celery stick. It’s the best moment in the film.

  • • •

  May and June 1951 were bustling months for Peter Sellers. On Monday, May 7, Peter began an eight-week run at the Palladium. Since his last Palladium gig he’d played several other London houses—Finsbury Park, Balham, the Prince of Wales, the Hippodrome. He was by that point a proficient stand-up comedian, impressionist, and crowd pleaser. But as the theater management report pointed out, his audiences’ responses were largely if not entirely dependent on their familiarity with radio characters—others’ as well as Peter’s own—because those were the voices upon which Sellers played.

  The manager also noted a certain tendency in Peter’s onstage demeanor, one that his friends had been noticing in his private nature: “I think that this act is getting better with each visit and could be exceptionally good if only there was a little more personality.”

  • • •

  On Sunday, May 27, 1951—less than halfway through his run at the Palladium—Peter, along with Spike, Harry, and Michael, showed up at a small studio on Bond Street to record the first official episode of Crazy People. It aired the following day at 6:45 P.M. Sixteen more programs followed in the first series, one per week, over the course of the next four months.

  As disjointedly manic as Goon Shows were in the years to come, the first year of the series was even more so. Each Crazy People program was composed of staccato, essentially unrelated comedy skits interspersed with irrelevant jazzy musical numbers—irrelevant to the comedy, that is. The Ray Ellington Quartet, a singing group called the Stargazers, and Max Geldray on the harmonica provided a form of musical relief from the comedy, though apparently the Stargazers weren’t relieving enough because they got bounced in the middle of the second series.

  Despite the show’s chaotic nature, certain themes began to develop. Druggy in a world before drugs, Crazy People was irreverent, illogical, and not a little cynical. Authority was skewered, logic dismembered. The show was a triumph of facetiousness in the service of pointlessness—a philosophical statement. Even its title was inconsistent. BBC program listings called it Crazy People for the whole first series, but the Goons themselves insisted on referring to it on the air as The Goon Show.

  Goon comedy is a mix of pa-dum-pum jokes—Q: “Do you mind if I take a gander ’round the shop?” A: “As long as it’s house trained.”—with centrifugally disintegrating plots and significantly dumb noises. Like the poetic play of Lewis Carroll, ’twas brillig in a profoundly British way; it was Alice in Wonderland after the Great Depression and two devastating world wars. What held it together, increasingly so as the series progressed, was a group of recognizable if distinctively unrounded characters. For Spike, these creations erupted out of the bogs of his emotional landscape. For Peter, they gave a distinct if malleable structure to what had previously been merely feats of impressionism. Milligan later insisted that Sellers’s Goon characters were “the boilerhouse of his talent.” Spike brought out Peter’s loyal side; Peter, he was quick to say, “was instrumental in getting me into the BBC. He was very kind like that.” This particular kindness entailed a certain risk on Peter’s part. Max Geldray, for instance, reports that Spike stormed into the staid BBC “with all the panache of a walking unmade bed.”

  As for Peter, he credited Spike with shaping him into a work of art: “[I was] just a vase of flowers,” Sellers once said, “and Milligan arranged me.”

  • • •

  Sellers believed, as any performer must, that his characters actually had blood and muscle. “To all of us, they absolutely lived,” he claimed. His personalities became British legends.

  He was Major Denis Bloodnok, English military man par infériorité, whose dimness was only outpaced by his flatulence. (The name stemmed from Peter’s use of “nok” to describe a nose; he’d call someone with a pointy proboscis “Needlenok.”)

  He was Henry Crun, an elderly gentlemen with a crackly, halting voice who forever bickered with Spike’s magnificent, equally doddering Minnie Bannister.

  He was Hercules Grytpype-Thynne, a devil of an aristocratic villain who harbored a sly, insinuating voice and, in Spike’s off-air written descriptions at least, an insistent taste for other men. (Spike writes of Grytpype-Thynne’s shady background: “Subject of a police investigation on school homosexua
lity”; “subject of a military police investigation on homosexuality”; “subject of a prisoners’ investigation on homosexuality”; “implicated in homosexuality with a Masai goat herd”; and “recreations: homosexuality.”)

  And he was the young and endearingly unlovable Bluebottle, who tended to arrive late in the proceedings of whatever muddled story Spike had concocted that week, injecting himself into the midst of the chaos with a high-pitched, nasal, and truly hellish whine: “Cap-i-tan, my Cap-i-tan, I hear my Cap-i-tan call me!” Bluebottle was not a bright boy. He tended to read his own stage directions. “Wooky wooky wooky!” Bluebottle might shriek, after which Peter would squeal, in the same voice, “Make funny face, wait for applause!” And as Sellers told it—and the basic scene has been confirmed by the man himself—Bluebottle actually did live!

  Peter: “This fellow came over one evening, I’ll never forget it. He was tall and wide—he wasn’t fat, but he was wide—and he was dressed as a scout leader. In fact he was a scout leader. He had a blue briefcase and a scout hat [and] a big red beard and red knee socks and all the insignia, you know. He said—and I’m not kidding, this is how he spoke: [a daffy high-pitched whine, crammed through the sinuses] ‘Could I carry in for a moment, please? I have just seen Michael Bentine and he said that I am a genius.’ ”

  Harry Secombe noted that Peter didn’t merely do the voices. He became the characters: “He physically changed as he did the voice. He’d shrink for Crun, and then get very small for Bluebottle.” The comedy writer Eric Sykes put it in biological terms: “You’d be in a taxi with Peter, and he’d listen to the taxi driver talking. And when he would get out, he would be the taxi driver. But not only in words and voice. His whole metabolism would have changed.” That Peter was performing Bloodnok et al before a live audience may not have mattered to his style in the least, for like all of Peter’s characters, they were just as alive for him when he was alone.