Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  Birds aside, Peter could certainly produce a flawless working-class Teddy Boy voice, but his casting in The Ladykillers caused him great anxiety nonetheless. This strange, morbid satire might bomb; his film career might be scuttled; he was terrified of failure. Michael Balcon later described him as being “desperately anxious” while shooting his scenes: “He kept asking: ‘Is it all right? Am I any good?’ ”

  Mackendrick’s painstaking directing style, combined with the sheer length of time it took to shoot in three-strip Technicolor, resulted in multiple takes of almost every scene. Peter was used to cheaper productions, of which the one-take, two-week Penny Points to Paradise was only the most extreme example. And he was quite unnerved by the careful and methodical Mackendrick’s demand that he—and Guinness, and Katie Johnson, and everybody else—play the same scene over and over again in front of fully loaded, softly humming cameras. Mackendrick simply wanted to use the best of a variety of takes; Peter kept assuming that something had gone wrong each time, but he never could tell what it was.

  From Peter’s perspective, Alec Guinness was a soothing influence as well as a generous performer with whom he could share a scene. During the production of The Ladykillers, Guinness offered Peter a piece of advice: “Don’t ever let the press know anything about your private life.” Peter told the press later that Guinness had been “patient enough to listen to me for hours as I spoke about my problems and aspirations.”

  Peter also claimed that Guinness was so impressed with his performance that he sent a note to a prominent English film critic, Cecil Wilson: “If you want a hot tip for the future,” Guinness is said to have written, “put your money on Peter Sellers.”

  But in private, Guinness grew concerned about Sellers’s influence on him. According to the critic Kenneth Tynan, during the production of The Ladykillers, and for a long time thereafter, Peter “sought Guinness’s advice at every opportunity, so assiduously that Guinness began to be worried, and even to suspect that his own personality was being absorbed by some process of osmosis into that of Sellers.”

  A dogged apprentice and a paranoid master: Sellers’s relationship with Guinness played perfectly into the film. Like so many of his performances, Guinness’s rendition of Professor Marcus is one of exquisite gestures and exacting timing: an insinuating tilt of the head, a jaunty hip jiggle to the tune of the string quintet, all with an air of suspicion toward everyone around him. Sellers’s Harry is much less flamboyant. Peter lets his face and body go absolutely slack when Harry listens to Professor Marcus’s instructions. Enthralled to the point of stupefaction, Harry is a stylish Teddy Boy, but not a particularly smart or hammy one.

  Mrs. Wilberforce inadvertently ruins the criminals’ scheme from the start, but the old bat’s suspicions are aroused only after she closes the front door too soon on One-Round, who, with the strap of his cello case stuck in the door, gives a hard yank and money flies out, all over the street. She has got to be killed:

  MARCUS: It ought to look like an accident.

  HARRY: (with a dawning inspiration) How about suicide?! (The other crooks gaze in amazement at his stupidity while Harry eagerly moistens his lips.) Get her to write a note, you know? “I just couldn’t stand it no more, signed Mrs. Wilberforce,” and then somebody goes down and hangs her! (He jerks enthusiastically on his own black Teddy Boy tie.)

  But one by one the men kill each other instead. Mrs. Wilberforce survives. Because the police know she’s batty, she gets to keep all the money for herself. Peter’s Harry meets his end in a farcical chase during which he emits pipsqueaky sounds of panic until his final line: “Where’s your sense of humor, One-Round?” at which point One-Round clobbers him to death with a plank.

  • • •

  “He struck me as a very charming, chirpy little spiv with a big car—a red Bentley—prominently parked every morning,” Herbert Lom says, looking back on his first film with Peter Sellers. “He was very nice. We struck up a friendship.” Lom makes a particular point about working with Peter. As an actor, Lom declares, Peter “was very generous,” meaning that he didn’t find ways of upstaging his colleagues, stealing their thunder with distracting tics and gestures of his own.

  There were offscreen pranks. Lom, his fellow actors, and some members of the crew couldn’t help but notice Peter’s ostentatious devotion to the big red Bentley, so they thought they’d pull a little joke at his expense by painting a long scratch on the side of the car. Peter reacted poorly. But the fact that it turned out to be washable paint led him to wreak vengeance in harmless, practical-joke kind. A few days later, Lom smelled something fishy on the way home from a day of shooting. Peter “had pinned a kipper at the bottom of my engine, which started frying every time the engine got hot.”

  All the while, as Sir Alec remembered, Peter had been playing with his recorder. As the production neared its end in late summer, he showed up with his own limited-edition work of audio art—a spoof trailer for The Ladykillers in which Peter played not only all the central characters’ roles but also the voice of Sandy Mackendrick giving directions. He handed out the recordings as gifts, and they were a hit. Danny Green was amused to hear himself trying out important line readings (“I’m stayin’ with Ma! I’m stayin’ with Ma! I’m stayin’ with Ma!”). Guinness, Lom, and Cecil Parker were respectfully skewered as well. So was Katie Johnson. “It sounded exactly like all of us,” Herbert Lom declares, though other more critical listeners felt that Peter’s rendition of Mrs. Wilberforce bore a discomfiting similarity to Bluebottle.

  It was then that Peter presented his critique of Mackendrick. Assuming a neutral narrator voice, Peter announced that listeners would now be offered “a brief glimpse of the brilliant technique of Alexander Mackendrick, director.” The clapper boy (Peter) barks, “Scene 5, take 73!” whereupon Peter, in blithering imitation of Peter, emits a string of rapid-fire gibberish, to which Mackendrick (Peter) responds, “Er, Peter—Peter—that’s, er . . . that’s very good. We’ll do another.”

  • • •

  Herbert Lom remembers of Peter that “at the end of the film he came to me and said if I could help him get another film part. And he obviously wasn’t putting it on. He meant it. And I meant it when I said, ‘You won’t need my help.’ ”

  The Ladykillers was released in December to rave if rather less than perceptive reviews: “The most stylish, inventive, and funniest British comedy of the year”; “captivating”; “accomplished and polished”; “lots of laughs”; “wonderfully funny.”

  Typically, it took years before British film scholars pointed out what the reviewers had missed at the time. Neil Sinyard sees in The Ladykillers an “elderly, paralyzed, hallucinatory, hidebound England”; Roy Armes calls it “a black and surreal masterpiece.” Charles Barr reads the film marvelously as a political allegory: the gang of thieves as the postwar Labor government, who mask their radical plan to redistribute wealth by a cover of familiar, recorded classical music: “Their success is undermined by two factors, interacting: their own internecine quarrels, and the startling, paralyzing charisma of the ‘natural’ governing class.”

  After The Ladykillers, Alexander Mackendrick left Ealing—and England—and moved to Hollywood, where he made the beautifully rancid The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and was fired from his next two pictures. He didn’t make another movie for six years.

  Peter, meanwhile, found himself with no other film offers and turned instead to television.

  • • •

  While watching TV one evening in December 1955, Peter found himself unusually entertained, so the following day he placed a call to the show’s director. As Richard Lester later reported the conversation, “A voice said, ‘You don’t know me, but I saw your show last night. Either that was the worst show that British television has so far produced, or I think you’re onto something.’ ” Sellers and Lester met, quickly hit it off, and decided to make TV’s answer to The Goon Show. It would not be the radio Goons televised. It would be Goonavision,
a radical rethinking of visual comedy in the video age.

  Idiot Weekly, Price 2d premiered on February 24, 1956. (2d is two pence, or tuppence.) Notably, Idiot Weekly didn’t appear on the BBC; it was produced independently by Associated-Rediffusion and broadcast on the less hidebound ITV. Still, ITV had its limits. Idiot Weekly wasn’t broadcast outside of greater London, the obvious fear being that Peter’s nemeses—the no-brow miners up North—weren’t sophisticated enough to handle the show’s avant-garde humor.

  Peter was the star of the series, his most consistent character being the editor of a sleazy Victorian tabloid, the headlines of which served as lead-ins to comedy skits featuring Sellers, Spike, and Eric Sykes, along with Valentine Dyall, Graham Stark, Kenneth Connor, and Max Geldray. Spike Milligan wrote the scripts, along with a stabilizing—and very large—backup team that included Sykes, John Antrobus, Brad Ashton, Dick Barry, Dave Freeman, Ray Galton, John Junkin, Eric Merriman, Terry Nation, Lew Schwarz, Alan Simpson, and Johnny Speight. The comedy wasn’t simply manic and self-reflexive like The Goon Show. It was visually so, with purposely strange and ultramodern camerawork to match the vocal and narrative jokes.

  There was, in addition, a severe but vitalizing risk involved. Idiot Weekly was broadcast live.

  “The one thing we tried to do,” Lester later explained, “was to push the rather narrow bounds of television comedy. Spike and Peter were anxious not to fall into those traps.” What they wanted instead was “to produce material which was as visually anarchic and stimulating as their verbal work had been.” As with The Goon Show, Milligan was what Lester calls “the creative force,” Peter “the performer.” “I think Peter envied—in the best sense—Spike’s need to create. Peter was a wonderful adapter of other people’s ideas. He honed them and made them into something infinitely better than what they could have been. But in terms of raw creation, certainly, Spike was the creator of almost all the ideas that came up.”

  Idiot Weekly, Price 2d ran for its allotted six weeks, whereupon a follow-up series, A Show Called Fred, blasted onscreen on five successive Wednesdays in May. It too, was recorded live from A-R’s studios at Wembley. Peter’s name was now above the title: “Peter Sellers in A Show Called Fred.” Spike, having made it through the creation of Idiot Weekly without going unhinged, now retained full control of the writing; the backup team was dropped. Still, A Show Called Fred’s broadcast range continued to be limited to Greater London.

  Spike himself was productive; at this point it was only his writing that was unquestionably deranged, but it was deranged in an especially novel and exciting way. And it proved to be popular, striking a chord with the urbane public lucky enough to have been granted access to it. (Michael Balcon was right: England is a land of surface realism dotted with secretly crazed eccentrics.) To say that A Show Called Fred embraced the still relatively new medium of television fully is too mild a claim. It was Laugh-In and Monty Python a decade ahead.

  One show featured a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde routine: Peter appears onscreen mixing potions in test tubes and declaring that he wishes to remove all his evil and leave only the good. He sloshes it down; the camera swings wildly back and forth; the image goes drastically in and out of focus. Peter reappears with ghastly makeup. “It went wrong! I’m evil!” He rushes to Hyde Park, attacks a woman, drags her into the bushes, and flings a rubber dummy around. The woman returns, delighted. “Oh you kinky thing!” Back at the lab, Dr. Jekyll asks his assistant (Graham Stark) to drive him home. Stark places a steering wheel against Peter’s forehead and steers him out.

  Several years later, the New York Times asked Sellers the obvious question: Why Fred? Peter’s response: “You can ruin anything with ‘Fred.’ Suppose somebody shows you a painting. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘isn’t it beautiful—it’s a Rembrandt!’ ‘Beautiful!,’ you say. Then you look a bit closer and you see it’s signed ‘Fred Rembrandt.’ It’s no good. You can’t take it seriously if it’s by Fred Rembrandt.”

  But it was good, and everybody knew it—Spike and Peter, Richard Lester, Associated-Rediffusion, and ITV. Peter, who had originally been signed to do Idiot Weekly at £100 pounds per program was given a raise, to £500.

  In one of A Show Called Fred’s most celebrated incidents, Milligan wrote a sketch in which Sellers would play Richard III—not the character of Richard III, but all the major parts—dressed, madeup, and speaking precisely as Laurence Olivier. Milligan’s idea was to invite Olivier himself to end the scene as a lone sentinel on the battlements; having heard Sellers’s rendition, Olivier would simply shake his head in grief. Unfortunately, nobody had the nerve to approach Olivier himself, who, when told of it later, claimed to be disappointed not to have been asked. In any event, Peter played it all utterly straight, especially the part of Richard.

  The pace began to pick up, as did the mania. After Fred came Son of Fred. And The Goon Show entered its seventh series.

  Son of Fred ran from September 17 through November 5, 1956, eight programs in all, and with it, Peter and Spike’s disjointed proto-postmodernist video went national. Because of its father’s success, Son of Fred could now be seen in the Midlands and the North. The billing also changed and lengthened: “Peter Sellers in Son of Fred by Spike Milligan.” Spike, who limited himself mainly to walk-on roles, began aiming instead for an even sparer, starker comedy style.

  An “Idiot’s Postbag” sequence:

  We see a simple ship set—with a back-projection tracking shot of trains.

  Peter is wearing a Nazi uniform—just the jacket. He’s got on pajama bottoms as pants.

  A mountaineer writes in with a question from the Alps. We see him hanging on the side of a cliff. He asks Peter what to do. Peter advises him to take the only course of action an experienced mountaineer could take under the circumstances: “Fall off.” The mountaineer thanks Peter, lets go, and plunges to his death.

  Max Geldray strolls through the set with his harmonica. A black man in a hut appears with a violin. Max, playing “Anything Goes,” wanders out to the street, hails a cab, hops in, and rides away. He ends up in a field and gets carried away on a stretcher.

  Sellers turns up at a Lost and Found department looking for his mate—someone he misplaced on the London tube. Behind the counter there’s a body with a tag on its toe. But no, that’s not his friend. Sellers, wearing an oversized hat that sits on his ears, then lies down on a slab himself, along with Spike and Graham Stark. They each await someone to claim them.

  Son of Fred, episode four:

  Peter, wearing tiny black tights, attempts to bang a giant gong to open the show. (It’s a farcical parody of the great Rank Organization film logo, the British equivalent of the MGM lion.)

  Two musicians prepare to walk backward around the world while playing sousaphones.

  A skit set in nineteenth century France: Sellers, playing a character named Monte Carlo, effects a broad and ridiculous French accent until the chateau walls, which have obviously been made of fabric all along, are lifted up to reveal a large television camera. Peter addresses the camera in a British accent until someone throws a sheet over it to enable Peter to resume speaking French. An unrelated technician runs onscreen and speaks to the other camera—the one that’s actually filming. Suddenly there’s music—the old Gang Show chestnut, “We’re Riding Along on the Crest of a Wave”—at which point the chateau backdrop flies up and everybody launches into a music hall routine.

  Max Geldray begins playing “Lady Be Good.”

  Cut to Spike’s mouth, in extreme close-up, yammering nonsense syllables.

  Cut to Max Geldray, who attempts to finish “Lady Be Good.”

  Cut to Peter playing a squirt bottle, squirting in time to “Lady Be Good.”

  Michael Palin, interviewed about The Goon Show, responded by saying that “The Goon Show didn’t attempt to make any sense,” and that “the influence of The Goon Show on me was that when it came to Python, we could write whatever we wanted.” But it was A Show Called Fred and Son
of Fred that were Monty Python’s real precursors. They were visually anarchic as well as verbally brilliant and mentally abnormal.

  And they really made no sense.

  Other programs featured such things as an underwater violin recital. A meeting between someone called Fred Nurk and his son’s headmaster—that one ended with a meaningless waltz. There were parody commercials: one here for “Footo, the Patent Book Exploder”; one there for Muc, a detergent that chopped down trees.

  One (possibly apocryphal) Fred story involved a location shoot at a zoo, where unemployed actors were supposed to serve as understudies for animals on the animals’ days off. Graham Stark is said to have jumped into the sea lions’ tank and had great fun until one of the sea lions became aroused by the smell of his crotch. Stark appears to have survived the episode intact, but there were other tensions all around. Just before filming a Fred, Peter suffered a severe anxiety attack and attempted to alleviate it with half a bottle of brandy. He managed to speak his lines perfectly without slurring a word; it was his reaction time that suffered. The show was running eight minutes over schedule, which forced Dick Lester to cut the final sketch—not that anybody in the audience could tell the difference.

  On another program Sellers and Stark were to sit on a park bench and enjoy an absurd conversation, gradually coming to realize that they are caught in a dream. The question was, whose dream was it? Lester planned to reveal the answer by tilting the camera down to a St. Bernard asleep under the bench. Rehearsals went fantastically well; the dog was a pro. But during the live performance it stood up and attempted to leave. It was leashed. With increasing annoyance, the dog began dragging scenery to the floor, including Sellers and Stark. Lester, frantic in the control booth, pleaded to the broadcast technicians to yank the show off the air. “We can’t,” was their reply. Lester had no choice. “Tell them to keep going! Tell them to ad-lib!” Sellers and Stark, evidently more professional than the dog, did exactly that—not that anyone in the audience could tell the difference.