Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  Apart from his anxiety attack, Sellers’s offscreen emotional state was relatively normal, especially in comparison to Milligan, who is said by this point to have been sedated much of the time. The combination of Milligan’s tenuous emotional state and the increasingly radical absurdity of his comedy style led ITV to grow more and more nervous during the run of Son of Fred, and at the end of eight weeks the executives pulled the plug. There were no plans to spawn Fred’s grandchild. As for Spike, he had to wait eight years before returning to British television with Milligan’s Wake.

  • • •

  Peter and Spike returned to the movies. Together with their friend Dick Emery, Peter and Spike filmed a half-hour comedy quickie at the Merton Park Studios in deepest southwest London. The Case of the Mukkinese Battle Horn, scripted by the film’s producers with help from Spike, Peter, and Larry Stephens, was directed by Joseph Sterling, but more important, it was filmed (as the title sequence tells us) “in the wonder of SchizophrenoScope, the new split-screen.”

  Compared to any of the Freds it’s tame stuff, but The Case of the Mukkinese Battle Horn does have its moments. Peter plays a trenchcoat and mustache–clad Scotland Yard inspector investigating the theft of the rare eponymous instrument, a twisted contraption said to be the only one in existence except for the identical twin kept in the storage room. Spike is his assistant, Brown, and the night watchman, White; White is Eccles under another name. Emery is the museum’s curator:

  EMERY: We had a robbery last night.

  SELLERS: A robbery? Anything stolen?

  Back at Scotland Yard, a rock comes crashing through the window. There’s a note attached, etc.

  Henry Crun shows up as the doddering owner of a pawn shop; Minnie shrieks offscreen. A much more fetching Peter turns up lounging on a chaise under a heavily pomaded platinum wig and a satin smoking jacket, languidly drawing from a cigarette holder. Sir Jervis Fruit was hardly the first screaming queen in Peter’s repertoire; footage of an early cabaret performance shows him mincing hand on hip across the stage. And one historian of gay images in British culture claims that Sellers performed these flaming faggot bits on a routine basis and that at least one gay audience member was so offended by it that he stood up in the middle of the sketch and told Peter to stop it.

  What’s striking about Sir Jervis Fruit, though, is that while he makes Quentin Crisp look like a rugby player, Peter invests him with the same core dignity he lends all of his most flamboyant creations. He believes in Fruit. There’s no contempt or derision. Like Crystal Jollibottom, Sir Jervis would be a delightful tablemate at a dinner party. The same can’t be said, say, for Spike’s moronic Eccles, who, toward the end of The Case of the Mukkinese Battle Horn, gets the chance to perform the Dance of the Seven Veils in drag before a captivated Peter. It is an unnerving spectacle.

  • • •

  Because Peter’s star was rising higher and higher, he was booked to appear on any number of television specials: The Billy Cotton Band Show, Six Five Special, Don’t Spare the Horses, the third of three specials called Secombe Here!, and others. He was supposed to be on Jack Benny in London, too. He was great in rehearsals. In fact, he may have been a little too great, for Benny took the show’s producer aside and told him that he thought Peter’s line deliveries and timing were so similar to his own that Peter’s appearance would be detrimental to the show as a whole, and so, perhaps, they should let him go.

  As the comedian Steve Allen points out in regard to this incident, Benny and Sellers “were not at all alike in their natural manner of speech.” Perhaps Benny felt Sellers was upstaging him. Either that or Peter’s routine included a devilish impersonation of Benny, and Benny felt that one of him was enough on his own British television special. In any event, they paid off Peter’s contract and sent him home in disappointment.

  For Peter, the rejection stung, but it didn’t hurt his chances in the industry. Far from it. Peter starred in two of his own television specials that year, both called Eric Sykes Presents Peter Sellers.

  • • •

  The Goon Show’s seventh series began in October, but even before it finished in March 1957, Peter had done yet another television series, not to mention his first appearance on North American TV. Because his contract with Associated-Rediffusion required four short television series and he’d done only three, he was obliged to star in one more despite Spike’s departure after Son of Fred. With Richard Lester having moved on to other work as well, he called on his friend and former Goonmate Michael Bentine. Bentine’s quarrels, after all, had been with Spike, not Peter. Bentine, in turn, brought in the Australian writer-performer David Nettheim, whom he’d met in Australia while working on the radio series Three’s a Crowd. But this time there would be no confusion or dispute as to Bentine’s creative role: On this show he was to be billed as “Creator.”

  The result was Yes, It’s the Cathode-Ray Tube Show!, which enjoyed its surreal run on ITV from February 11 through March 18, 1957, six programs in all. It was Fred-like, but in a Bentine way: this time, the surreality was such that the show’s very title disintegrated over the course of the series. In a conceit worthy of both Tristan Tzara and Yoko Ono, one word fell off the title each week. By the last program it was a show called Yes.

  • • •

  About this time, Peter took a brief trip to North America, his first. His journey to Toronto owed to his appearance on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Chrysler Show. He was booked to do his Richard III bit; Graham Stark accompanied him as the Duke of Clarence. For whatever reason, the show itself terrified Peter.

  As Stark describes the scene in his memoirs, “large, well-dressed, cigar-toting Chrysler executives nervously prowled behind the cameras” all day during rehearsals, and Peter became increasingly upset. Moments before filming the scene, he looked at himself, all wigged and behumped, in his dressing room mirror and said in the voice of Laurence Olivier, “Now is the winter of an absolute bleeding disaster.” But as usual, when he actually performed the scene before a laughing audience he was fine.

  • • •

  Peter continued to appear in film comedy shorts in the twenty-minute to half-hour range. Even more than Mukkinese Battle Horn, these were steps backward in terms of artistic adventure, but they provided exposure, they occupied his mind, and they paid.

  Dearth of a Salesman, from A.B.-Pathé, was released in early summer. Hector Dimwittie (Sellers) attempts to become the best salesman in Britain, tries vainly to sell toilet supplies and moves quickly on to washing machines and tape recorders, suffering all the while the gross indignity of a too-successful brother-in-law. “Peter Sellers works hard,” Today’s Cinema opined; “handy footage appeal”—in other words, there was enough celluloid to keep the audience awake before the feature began. Insomnia Is Good for You, running roughly the same length, was released shortly thereafter. Typically for the businessman culture of the fifties, it featured salesman Hector again, now unable to sleep. “A normal, lazy, married man,” is how the film describes the newly successful Hector. His boss has demanded a meeting on Monday morning for reasons Hector can’t fathom. Unable to stop spinning fantasies of his boss’s fierce temper, Hector fails to sleep for sixty-two hours. Unlike the avant-garde comedy Peter did with Spike or Michael Bentine, the material practically writes itself, to its detriment. Hector tries to remember cherished verse; he can’t. He worries about his job; that he can do. And, in the end, the reason for the meeting? His boss wants him to take a client out for a night on the town. “Falls very flat,” Monthly Film Bulletin scoffed.

  And there was Cold Comfort, from C. M. George Film Productions. Today’s Cinema’s review, in toto: “Gentle thumbnail lecture on how to catch a cold and keep it. Radio star Peter Sellars (sic) illustrates it, mainly in pajamas, and the homely domestic touches will strike a responsive chord anywhere.”

  This was all very well as far as it went, but it hadn’t gone nearly far enough for Peter. Nightclubs, cabarets, radio, stage, televis
ion, big roles in short films, short roles in big films, and one sizable role in a masterpiece. Peter Sellers saw himself as stuck.

  He had his toys, his cars, his friends, his wife, his son. He had his mother.

  What he felt was lack.

  PART TWO

  IN WONDERLAND

  1957–64

  SEVEN

  “ ‘Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice,” as she finds herself growing to enormous proportions after having simply followed the directions given to her.

  She eats the cake, grows larger and larger, and discovers that she is unhappier than ever.

  Soon she is swimming in a pool of her own tears.

  Peter Sellers’s cinematic stock rose again in 1957, paradoxically in a film called The Smallest Show on Earth (1957), in which he plays a loyal if drunken film projectionist. The film’s director, Basil Dearden, had been one of Ealing’s most prolific—twenty-one films in fifteen years, the most commercially successful of which was the 1950 drama The Blue Lamp, which caused a great stir thanks to its radical portrayal of British law enforcement. (For once the copper wasn’t a bungling boob.) But like Alexander Mackendrick, Dearden had had enough of Michael Balcon’s regimentation at Ealing, and by 1957 he’d left the studio. He made The Smallest Show on Earth, a surprisingly bitter comedy, for British Lion.

  The story: Matt Spenser and his wife, Jean, inherit a movie theater in the North. They’re a cute 1950s English couple—a pretty, sharp-chinned blonde cheerfully married to a beefcake husband. She’s good-natured, a great gal; he’s a little dim but not without a certain magnetism, a British Tab Hunter with lovehandles and a slightly higher IQ. A screwball couple updated to the 1950s, Matt and Jean are played by Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna, who went on to star in the wildlife movie that inspired the Oscar-winning song “Born Free” (1966).

  They’re looped when they arrive at their destination, so when they see the town’s theater, the Grand—a streamline-Moderne, quasi-fascist affair with a uniformed doorman and a crowd of eager patrons—they naturally assume it’s theirs. It’s not. Theirs is the decrepit Bijou, a Babylonian-Baroque-Revival heap under the train tracks.

  Margaret Rutherford is the ticket seller, Mrs. Fazackalee, except that she sells no tickets.

  Peter Sellers, as the weary projectionist, Mr. Quill, drinks:

  MR. QUILL: (all but overcome with emotion) Well, uh, Mr. Spenser, it’s like this ’ere. I would like you ’a know that I, well, I appreciate what you said, and what you’re tryin’ ’a do. And believe me, I don’t say this lightly—I am absolutely determined that I won’t take another drop! Not another drop I won’t touch, I won’t!

  MRS. FAZACKALEE; I don’t think you may realize, Mr. Spenser, what a big sacrifice this may mean for Mr. Quill.

  Basil Dearden may enjoy a reputation in Britain for a certain liberalism in his social problem dramas—after this comedy he made Violent Playground (juvenile delinquency, 1958), Sapphire (racism, 1959), and Victim (homosexuality, 1961)—but The Smallest Show on Earth bears a strikingly antipopulist contempt for movie audiences. Patrons of the Bijou, after the Spensers get it up and running, are comprised of a bunch of cruel rubes, teenage makeout artists, and a whore. At the same time, Dearden isn’t above sweetening his nasty streak with easy sentimentality when Sellers’s Mr. Quill projects a silent melodrama to an audience of two—Mrs. Fazackalee and Old Tom, the usher (Bernard Miles):

  Mr. Quill (describing the movie to the Spensers): “Old film. Classic, you might say. I’ve saved ’em for years, bits of ’em. We used to run ’em like this in the old days, but, not for years we haven’t done it. Now it seems like old times once more.”

  But the look on Sellers’s face saves it, an expression of meditative warmth. To his great credit as a dramatic actor-in-training, Peter learned in The Smallest Show on Earth how to subvert maudlin dialogue by photogenically sustaining silence.

  • • •

  Peter cut and released his third single record, “Any Old Iron,” with “Boiled Bananas and Carrots” on the flip side. A banjo-strumming, incomprehensibly fast-talking novelty song, “Any Old Iron,” made it onto the British pop charts and stayed there for eleven weeks in the autumn. It even rose briefly into the Top Twenty.

  His reputation kept growing and, inexorably, he won his first costarring role—as a faux-Scottish extortion victim in the black comedy The Naked Truth (1957). Written by Michael Pertwee and directed by Mario Zampi for the Rank Organization, The Naked Truth traces several prominent citizens’ attempts to avoid, stifle, and finally snuff the unctuous editor of a Confidential-like scandal sheet. Terry-Thomas, with whom Peter shared top billing, is a philandering lord, about to be exposed. Peter is a thickly brogued television star, beloved by his elderly audience and a slumlord on the side.

  With a studio audience in place and the cameras rolling, an enthusiastic announcer heralds his appearance: “The star of the show, the man who made it all possible! The jack of all faces! The king of kindness! And the ace of good hearts, ‘Wee Sonny’ MacGregor!” Enter a dimple-grinning Peter, literally jumping onstage in a roaring plaid kilt, a matching plaid banner on his shoulder held in place by a pin, a pair of equally screaming kneesocks, and an awfully frilly shirt. He’s the Liberace of Brigadoon:

  WEE SONNY: (Squeak of pleasure, gasp, grin and . . .) A great big welcome t’ all th’ old folk an’ the bonny young lad’s ’n lassi’s! I can’t tell the difference, you know! (giggle).

  Wee Sonny is about as Scottish as Peter himself, a fact Sellers reveals by pushing his brogue just a step too far. The blackmailing editor (Dennis Price) pays him a slimy visit and lets Wee Sonny know that while he doesn’t much care about the fake accent, he’s fascinated by the chance to reveal to the TV star’s aged fans the famous owner of a dismal old people’s ghetto in Eastditch. Soon thereafter, a guest on Sonny’s show mentions that he hails from Eastditch and begins to describe the wretched place in detail. Wee Sonny loses control. It makes the papers. (“Sonny Faded Out—Shouts at Aged Contestant. Overcome by heat, says producer.”) Sonny responds with nominally more control by planning to kill the blackmailer under one of the many identities the “jack of all faces” believes he’s able to assume: “I couldn’t. But someone else might! Any one of a thousand characters that I can create and then destroy, just like that!” Wee Sonny gets carried away: “Murder by a figment of my imagination!”

  Sonny’s valet (Kenneth Griffith), tethered more tightly to reality, tells him that the scheme is doomed to failure—not because it’s immoral, but because Wee Sonny is a dreadful actor.

  • • •

  Terry-Thomas recalled in his memoirs that Peter, whom he had known since the Grafton Arms days, had run into him one day early in his career and began complaining about a part he’d been asked to play (one Terry-Thomas doesn’t identify): “The trouble about my role,” Peter told him, “is that they wanted an actor with a Cockney accent. To me this is devastating because I’ve spent five years trying to lose my Cockney twang.” “He had lost it so successfully,” Terry-Thomas went on to write, that “by the time we made The Naked Truth he confided to me one day, ‘I’ve come to the part of the film which is scaring me to death. I’m supposed to use my own accent. And I haven’t got one.’ ”

  But Peter never had a Cockney twang to begin with; not everyone in London grows up sounding like Michael Caine in Alfie (1966). And since adolescence he could imitate any accent at all, practically at will. Although Terry-Thomas had no reason to realize it, what Peter was actually confessing was his sense of self—one that was depleted on the one hand and mutantly reduplicating on the other, a multiple emptiness he was trying to fill by turning it into a point of conversation.

  Terry-Thomas did sense another kind of trouble brewing. Peter was no longer the eager-to-please novice granted the chance to appear alongside Alec Guinness and grateful just to be there. Now that he was sharing top billing on The Naked Truth, Peter Sellers was getting a bit touchy.

  He “mad
e one of his ‘protests’ during shooting,” Terry-Thomas writes. “He turned to Mario Zampi and shouted, ‘The way you are making this film is ridiculous. You can’t direct! I know much more about the camera than you do. I’ll give you one more take and then I’m off.’ Mario didn’t reply. He stood there, shocked.”

  Characteristically, others had an easier time of it. “I was pleased to meet him,” Kenneth Griffith says. “Didn’t know much about him, but he was very pleased to meet me. And from that day to this—with one exception—he was an unshiftable friend to me. And as he became very influential, he was a great help to me.”

  However, even a friend as loyal and loving as Griffith adds, “He was notoriously treacherous. Of course, he was in a powerless mental and emotional state. He was a manic-depressive, and, well, yes—I have sympathy for people. I understood Sellers. Very complicated, you know. He was pretty well inarticulate as himself.”

  • • •

  The loyalty of Peter Sellers’s closest friends remains seemingly boundless. They loved him. And they still do. “Anne was a very nice woman,” Griffith reflected recently. “Of course he had lovely women. Anne was a nice woman, and that’s what he was like to me.”