by Ed Sikov
Goon art was evolving. Under Peter Eton’s supervision, the show’s structure really began to cohere in the fourth series (1953–54), though Spike and Larry Stephens still weren’t developing single story lines for the duration of each half hour. But by the fifth series (1954–55), with scripts by Milligan and Eric Sykes, each episode began to feature a self-contained plot, albeit in a Milliganesque way. These plots, such as they were, might be steered as much by the sound of the words as by character motivation or narrative drive—hence the subsequent comparisons to Carroll and James Joyce.
And they were often bleak. Modernist disaster abounded. In “The Phantom Head-Shaver (of Brighton),” for instance, the charming seaside resort is thrown into chaos by a goofy terror: a lightning-fast, hair-obsessed criminal wielding a razorblade. The story makes no sense, but it’s a story, and its governing principle is that no one is ever safe. The episode features the shrieking Prunella Dirt (Sellers), whose husband is rendered bald by the eponymous villain; the broadly Jewish Judge Schnorrer (Sellers); Major Bloodnok (Sellers); Professor Crun (Sellers); and Willium, a dopey window cleaner (Sellers).
And it was rude. British humor, even on the BBC, was even less culturally sensitive than American comedy was at the time. “The Phantom Head-Shaver” episode features this breathtaking introductory remark: “Tonight’s broadcast comes to you from an Arab Stench–Recuperating Centre in Stoke Poges.”
“Hitler—there was a painter for you.” A Peter Sellers World War II joke.
Spike’s longtime assistant and editor Norma Farnes has observed that each of the Goons had suffered military service during World War II, and it was this direct experience of the armed forces, not to mention their experience of the war itself, that made them so skeptical of authority. They were also morbid by nature. In an episode called “The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler (of Bexhill-on-Sea),” Seagoon and Crun are standing on a beach during a blackout. Crun insists that no Nazi could never see “a little match being struck,” so Seagoon strikes one. They’re instantly hit by an exploding shell. “Any questions?” Seagoon asks. “Yes,” Crun responds. “Where are my legs?”
Wally Stott ties one of the Goons’ ruder, lewder jokes directly to the war: “Sometimes there was material that the boys tried to get away with, which the BBC wouldn’t allow. There was a lot of British-Army coarse language that they tried to get through. I mean, there was a character called Hugh Jampton!”
The American interviewer falls silent. “You don’t understand that? Well, Hampton is a crude word for penis. So Hugh Jampton would be a very big one, wouldn’t it? Of course anybody who’d been through the war in Britain would know.”
• • •
On the home front, Michael Peter Anthony Sellers was born on April 2, 1954. He was a cute baby with his mother’s light complexion and twinkling eyes. They called him Pooh.
Now Peter had a son to go with the train set, and Anne had a real infant to go with her husband. Peg was overjoyed. She was Anne’s first visitor at the hospital, the arrival of Pooh having reduced her to grandmotherliness.
• • •
Peter began filming another movie. Even after Much Binding in the Marsh and other postwar radio comedies had left the airwaves, British cinema still produced war-inspired comedy-dramas and even outright farces, as did Hollywood. The Boulting brothers, Roy and John, featured Gene Kelly in Crest of the Wave (1954); Billy Wilder had William Holden in Stalag 17 (1953); and John Ford showcased James Cagney in What Price Glory? (1952). Peter Sellers’s next film, Orders Are Orders (1954), is part of the same cycle, though it lands on the far side of Francis Goes to West Point (1952).
Filmed at Beaconsfield Studios (and no, there are no reports of Peter having tried to impress the front gate by signing in as the Fifth Earl), and released in the autumn, Orders Are Orders is a military farce in which an American film company overruns a British army camp in an attempt to film a B-grade, ray-gun–filled sci-fi movie on the grounds. Despite his increasing fame as a Goon, Peter is far from the top of the cast, a position occupied jointly by Margot Grahame, Brian Reece, and Raymond Huntley. Peter plays the subservient but graft-grabbing Private Goffin. Looking purposely dumpy, he’s stuck with an ill-fitting white valet jacket that pulls severely at the bottom button. Corrupt but ineptly so, Goffin takes a conspiratorial attitude with the brash Hollywood director, who wants to pay somebody off to get the camp’s cooperation. This is not high comedy. At the vulgar moment when Goffin first encounters the glamour-puss starlet tagging along with the production he actually licks his lips.
The highlight of this eminently inexpensive exercise is the preposterous fifties Martian Girl costuming employed to outfit the outerspace invaders. Complete with flapping antennae and bodices that resemble Jantzen swimsuits, they’re irresistible getups, especially when Peter ends up in one. His is composed of a sequined, V-shaped top that looks like two gaudy beauty-contest sashes meeting in the middle. It’s paired with a short black skirt. At one point Peter runs onto the makeshift sci-fi set in a little cardboard spaceship powered, like Fred Flintstone’s car, with his feet. The rest of the film is of no interest. Even at Peter Sellers’s bottom-rung position in British cinema, the material was beneath him.
• • •
Peter’s omnidextrous voice was still his best asset, and one day it reached the ears of the European production head of Columbia Pictures. Mike Frankovich was in his car on the way to the airport and, to kill time, he tuned into the BBC. At the end of the radio play that happened to be on, Frankovich was stunned to hear the announcer say, “All the characters were played by Peter Sellers.”
“We were doing Fire Over Africa with Maureen O’Hara at the time,” Frankovich told the Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham some years later. “I needed English and American voices of all classes. When I returned to London, I called Peter and asked him to do the seven voices and paid him £250 for the lot.” Disembodied movie voices were a fine sideline. According to Peter, by the time he did the voices in Fire Over Africa—and he always claimed that there were seventeen, not seven, and that they were all individuated Spaniards—he’d performed four voices for the sound track of John Huston’s Beat the Devil (1953), including that of the film’s star, Humphrey Bogart, who’d suffered tooth damage in a car accident and couldn’t provide some of his own dialogue. He also went on to perform his chestnut Churchill in the opening moments of The Man Who Never Was (1956), not to mention a drunk, a newsreel announcer, a taxi driver, and a couple of crones later in the film.
Peter also performed a more bizarre audio cameo, uncredited, in a Joan Collins South Seas epic called Our Girl Friday (1954). He’s the voice of a shrieking cockatoo:
Sadie Patch (Collins) is on a ship somewhere in the Pacific. There’s a shipwreck. Everybody piles into a lifeboat, but, in sight of shore, it sinks. Sadie is washed onto the beach, and, with her back to the camera, she removes her clothes to let them dry in the sun. She’s startled by a cockatoo and turns around. In short, Joan Collins takes her shirt off and Peter Sellers screams.
• • •
Just as he was assuming responsibility as the father of a newborn son, Peter’s professional life was becoming a whirlwind. The Goon Show’s fifth series began recording on the last Sunday in September and continued nearly every week for the next twenty-five weeks. He did guest spots on the BBC television show And So to Bentley (starring Dick Bentley). And on November 1, Peter performed for Elizabeth II. The Royal Variety Show was certainly prestigious; it brought Peter into the company of the show’s headliners, Noel Coward and Bob Hope.
Peter, Spike, and Harry continued to tour. Their acts couldn’t use the words Goon Show in the title, since the BBC owned the copyright, but audiences all over Britain knew precisely who they’d come to see and why. Pleasing provincial audiences was even more of a strain, however, and not only for Peter. In December 1954, Spike once again reached the end of his rope, this time literally.
They were doing a mock-acrobatic act
in Coventry. Billed as “Les Trois Charleys,” Peter, Spike, and Harry wore gold headbands and flaming red capes. The audience was already confused by the three comedians’ scattershot antics, but when Milligan appeared alone onstage and proceeded to blow a series of off-key trumpet solos, the audience rebelled with catcalls. Spike responded by clomping down to the edge of the stage and shouting, “You hate me, don’t you?!” The audience roared back its unanimous affirmation. And with that they Coventrated him.
Spike ran to his dressing room and locked himself in. Harry and Peter, knowing Spike well, understood that he might well be killing himself. They broke down the door and found Spike putting the noose around his neck.
For Peter, this incident was the last straw in an ugly pile that had been growing in size since he was three, and so he decided to quit doing music hall shows. It wasn’t just Spike’s suicidal state that convinced him. These tours were simply too grueling, too awful and demeaning. But he still had a contractual obligation in Coventry to fulfill, and thus he had a chance to effect vengeance.
The morning after Spike’s episode—they saved him, he continued writing and acting, somebody finally invented Lithium, and decades later he took it—Peter bought one of the Goon Show conductor’s records (Wally Stott’s Christmas Melodies) along with a record player, and that afternoon, at a reduced-price matinee for an elderly crowd, he appeared onstage clad in an oversized leopardskin leotard. He put the record on the record player, stood there, and played three songs straight through, not saying a word. At the end of each song, he led the audience in a round of hearty applause and then he left the stage.
Strangely, the audience appreciated the joke and applauded happily when Peter’s essentially Dadaist routine concluded. The theater management was not nearly as entertained, however, and a furious manager challenged Peter on the basis of the “as known” clause. He had “performed”—no one disputed that—but not “as known.”
“I’m going into films,” the fed up comedian told his agent. “Not as a sideline, but all the way. This life is too bloody impossible. It’ll kill me if I don’t get out now.”
SIX
Peter Sellers was safely back in London in late December 1954, appearing at the Palladium in a stylish riff on Mother Goose. Written by Phil Park and Eric Sykes, the comedy was a top-notch production—the antithesis of “Les Trois Charleys,” with its headbands and capes and trumpets. The director was Val Parnell, a fixture of West End theater, and in fact, the production was officially billed as Val Parnell’s Seventh Magnificent Christmas Pantomime, “Mother Goose.” Erté codesigned the costumes. There was a Goose, a Vulture, a Bailiff, and a Policeman. There was a Sammy, a Donald, and the Pauline Grant Ballet. There was an evil Squire, too; that was Peter.
The actor-comedian Max Bygraves, who played Sammy, reports that Sellers couldn’t help but depart from the script and improvise throughout the show’s run. On one particular night, Bygraves well recalls, the evil Squire departed from the family-safe script, slipped without warning into Groucho Marx, and blurted, “Lady Dicker, that’s ridoculous!”
Mother Goose—grumpy Richard Hearne in drag—was not amused by Peter’s filthy joke, and immediately after the curtain fell she gave the management a piece of her fairy-tale mind. When the sympathetic Bygraves showed up at Peter’s dressing room the next day, he found Peter in tears. Val Parnell himself had scolded the errant Peter, telling him that if he continued veering so luridly off script he’d never work again.
This was a relatively empty threat, since Parnell didn’t control British radio, television, or film. But Peter seems thereafter to have stuck to the dialogue he’d originally been given—only for the duration of Mother Goose, of course, for by the end of March 1955, when the show closed (after 156 performances, usually two a day), he was once again free to exercise his dazzling improvisational skills.
But there was yet another new constraint. In late December 1954, toward the end of the Goon Show episode called “Ye Bandit of Sherwood Forest,” Maid Marian (Charlotte Mitchell, one of the rare female guests) suddenly squealed, “Oh! There’s someone crawling under the table! What are you doing under there, sir?”
“I’m looking for a telegram,” a familiar politician’s voice intoned. The studio audience thundered its approval, and from that moment forward Peter Sellers was officially forbidden to impersonate Winston Churchill on the British Broadcasting Corporation’s airwaves.
• • •
In February 1955, Peter and Anne bought their first house, a mock-Tudor in Muswell Hill, a neighborhood just north of Highgate. North London was still his orbit, though he was moving progressively farther away from the center of town. But the more significant turning point that year occurred on film. After appearing in the small role of a police constable in John and Julie (1955; two cheeping children make their way to London to see the coronation of Elizabeth II), Peter made his first great movie, The Ladykillers (1955), for his first great director, Alexander Mackendrick, who cast him in support of the first great star Peter was able to study at close range.
“I first worked with him on The Ladykillers,” Sir Alec Guinness recalled in one of his last interviews. “He was not difficult at all—certainly not in those days. He was cast by Sandy Mackendrick, who knew him already. He was always very courteous to me; we got on very well. I mostly remember him having some kind of recording machine into which he would do imitations of people.”
Long before his stellar appearances in international blockbusters— The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), Star Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Return of the Jedi (1983), A Passage to India (1984)—Alec Guinness was a titan of British theater and cinema, and Peter admired him immensely. Guinness subsumed himself to an unparalleled degree into the roles he played. He was an apparently blank screen onto which he projected dazzlingly variegated characters. In the single year of 1951 Guinness did remarkable star turns in both Oliver Twist, as an especially vicious hook-nosed Fagin, and The Lavender Hill Mob, as the bland bank employee who casually steals £1 million. But it was in the great Ealing Studios comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) that Guinness gave his showiest chameleonic performance—that of all eight members of the titled d’Ascoyne family who are systematically bumped off by a distant relative, the ninth in line for the dukedom: Ascoyne d’Ascoyne, Henry d’Ascoyne, Canon d’Ascoyne, Admiral d’Ascoyne, General d’Ascoyne, Lady Agatha d’Ascoyne. . . .
The titan invited the nervous novice to lunch before The Ladykillers began filming in the summer of 1955. Sir Alec was not simply being kind when he spoke of the Peter Sellers he knew then. They did get along well at the time. After all, they had something in common. As Peter told Max Geldray afterward, “You cannot believe how quiet this man is. He’s shy! He’s got a switch inside. He turns it on, and another person pops up.”
The Ladykillers was the Ealing Studio’s last great comedy, a film both of the studio and against the studio. Ealing’s longtime head, Michael Balcon, had envisioned and created a dogmatically British cinema—films that were homegrown, popular, and inconceivable in any other national film industry. Under Balcon’s supervision, the best Ealing directors—Mackendrick among them—developed a style so consistent that by the mid-1950s it had become formulaic: An identifiably British setting (a city block in London, an island in the Hebrides, a manor house in the country) turns out to be populated by crazed eccentrics, or hurled into chaos by some fantastic event, or both. Surface realism meets absurdity—a biting comment on the kingdom.
But with The Ladykillers, Mackendrick set out to satirize not only British society but Ealing’s own internal culture as well. In The Ladykillers, the familiar British setting represented the very studio in which Mackendrick worked: Mackendrick himself was the chief eccentric, who, in this case, was so defeated by Balcon’s enforced conventionality that he left Ealing after finishing the film.
The Ladykillers concerns an elderly, Victorian-throwback
widow, Mrs. Wilberforce (Katie Johnson). She seems sweet enough at first glance as she walks down a residential London street, but at the steps of a police station she looks into a baby carriage and causes the baby to shriek in terror. The infant’s wail is predictive. In the course of the comedy Mrs. Wilberforce reveals herself to be so profoundly irritating that garroting her, knifing her, and shooting her become increasingly desirable outcomes in the minds of both characters and audiences alike.
She takes in a lodger, Professor Marcus (Guinness, wearing hideous ratlike teeth), who uses his upstairs rooms to plan a heist with four henchmen: a jovial, well-spoken major (Cecil Parker), a dopey, sentimental boxer called One-Round (Danny Green), a frightening thug dressed all in black (Herbert Lom), and a Teddy Boy named Harry (Peter). (The British historian Arthur Marwick defines the Teddy Boy as “the first nationally recognized figure representative of youth’s detachment from the rest of society and representative of the fact that for the first time working-class youth could take the initiative.” The name comes from the Edwardian-style suits the boys wore as a kind of uniform; they got the idea from upper-class spivs of the late 1940s.) The thieves tell Mrs. Wilberforce that they are members of an amateur string quintet and incessantly play a single piece—Boccherini’s String Quintet in E Major—on a record player to disguise their criminal planning sessions.
When casting calls began in the spring, Dennis Selinger arranged for Peter to meet with Mackendrick and the film’s associate producer, Seth Holt—but not for the role of Harry. They wanted Peter to read One-Round. It wasn’t a particularly successful audition. As Mackendrick told Selinger, “Frankly, we can’t see him with a broken nose and a cauliflower ear.”
Holt, however, had the inspiration of casting Peter instead as Harry—the role for which Mackendrick had originally considered Richard Attenborough. Peter may have ended up playing another role or two in The Ladykillers as well; both Guinness’s and Mackendrick’s biographers insist that Peter provided the voices of Mrs. Wilberforce’s two parrots.
