Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  Peter himself didn’t find the Conservatives’ landslide victory in the fall of 1959 a complete coincidence to his film’s extraordinary popularity: “I heard the Tories liked it. It probably did more good to them than it did to Labor.”

  Ironically, Peter didn’t want to do the film at all. It wasn’t because he didn’t approve of the film’s politics, which never seem to have crossed his mind. (“I don’t vote,” he later said. “Never have. There are things about the Tories I like, and things about the Socialists. I suppose the ideal would be some kind of Communism, but not Soviet Communism, so what could I vote for?”) It was because he didn’t think his part was funny.

  He later claimed to have been offered the role after playing on the director John Boulting’s cricket team in a charity match, but there was a bit more struggle behind it. As Roy Boulting, the film’s producer, describes Peter’s response to the offer: “He read it. And he didn’t want to do it. So we asked him, ‘Why, Peter?’ He said, ‘Where are the laughs? Where does one get a laugh?’ We had to explain to him as best we could that we didn’t regard him as a Goon for this film—that he was going to be playing a real character.”

  Peter grew more interested in the role, but he was also attracted by the complete package the Boultings were offering. In January 1959, Peter and the Boultings announced their new five-picture nonexclusive deal. (A nonexclusive deal permits an actor to appear in other producers’ films.) “It’s worth £100,000,” Peter declared; an American newspaper put the figure at $280,000. I’m All Right, Jack would be the first made under the new terms. “For an actor,” Peter explained, “a term contract is a bit like a marriage. You’ve got to have confidence in your partner.”

  • • •

  I’m All Right, Jack was not Peter’s first picture with the Boultings. In 1958, he’d filmed a supporting role—Terry-Thomas was the lead—in a weak foreign-policy satire called Carlton-Browne of the F.O. (1959), though that film had not yet been released when I’m All Right, Jack began shooting in January. Terry-Thomas plays the title character, the bungling head of an obscure subsection of the Foreign Office. He’s sent to the remote and ridiculous island nation of Gaillardia, a former colony granted the privileges of self-government fifty years before, but nobody in either Britain or Gaillardia has yet been informed of the decision. Peter plays the slimy Amphibulos, who sounds disconcertingly like a Greek waiter.

  Gaillardia is a mix of burro-driven carts, unbearable heat, assassinations, and a Baroque palace enjoyed by its handsome, young, British-educated, British-looking king (fine-featured Ian Bannen under brownish makeup). The rest of Gaillardia is treated to fairly harsh satire, though the conquering Britons are scarcely more competent. Peter, clad in a rumpled, ever-damp, and ill-fitting white cotton suit, and wearing boot-black hair and a matching droopy mustache, provides a precise blend of obsequiousness and contamination as the king’s greasy-palmed minister. His best moment in the film is a simple one: Conferring on the Gaillardian crisis on a beach with Carlton-Browne while being fanned and rubbed by two nubile native girls, Amphibulos, who has been lying on his back, rolls himself over (with some labor) and says, gesturing toward a nipple, “Over heeere, dar-leeng.”

  According to Roy Boulting, I’m All Right, Jack’s Fred Kite was based on the Electricians Trades Union shop steward at another studio: “He was a very funny little man—unintentionally funny, but he was funny.” Peter, who took the Boultings’ word for it that his role would certainly pull laughs if performed realistically, received confirmation when the Shepperton Studios Works Committee, which represented the various filmmaking trade unions, showed up on the set to watch the filming of one of Peter’s earliest scenes. They recognized Fred Kite’s type immediately and, according to Roy Boulting, reacted all too well during a red-light-flashing, camera-rolling take: “They burst into laughter, which they couldn’t contain. I saw the change in Peter’s face. He hadn’t thought it was funny himself, but now he knew. It was funny.” Thanks to Peter’s skill, Fred Kite was also poignant. As the critic Raymond Durgnat has noted, “There is something sadly sympathetic about his pig-headed notions.” Maxine Ventham, who chairs the lively Peter Sellers Appreciation Society (Spike Milligan, patron; David Lodge, president; HRH the Prince of Wales, honorary member) notes that this “sadly sympathetic” effect derives mainly from Peter’s sensitive, vulnerable eyes: “Fred Kite is betrayed by them,” Ventham rightly declares.

  Spike Milligan, of course, took a contrarian view of the film’s politics: “He was heavily pressurized by the Boultings, through the writing, to become this character, because the Boultings were violently against trade unions. And they used this as the spearhead of their attack: Peter Sellers representing something that they hated. He ended up making a very great film for them.”

  The sarcastic title I’m All Right, Jack refers to the Boultings’ original satirical target, the money-grubbing, every-class-for-itself attitude the filmmakers ascribe to all of England in the 1950s. (As David Tomlinson’s Lieutenant Fairweather explains to the admiral in Up the Creek, “To put it in the Queen’s English, ‘You scratch my back, and we’ll scratch yours, Jack.’ ”) The film begins with a pre-credits sequence. Sir John Kennaway, an old white-haired man, sleeps peacefully in a deserted clubroom. The camera tracks slowly forward. A servant appears and informs Sir John that the Germans have surrendered—that World War II is over at last. Crowds are shouting in triumph outside the window; Sir John barely registers the news. “Look hard,” a bland voice over intones, “for this is the last we shall see of Sir John,” who rises from his club chair and totters out of the room—“a solid block in an edifice of what seems to be an ordered and stable society. There he goes, on his way out.” There is another reason to look hard at Sir John. He’s Peter, all but hidden under bleached hair and a prosthetic nose.

  After a rock-and-roll credits sequence featuring the title song, we meet the protagonist of I’m All Right, Jack—Stanley Windrush (Ian Carmichael), Sir John’s well-named symbolic heir, a man whose class would have entitled him to the same clubby, do-nothing life had a catastrophic world war not provided the working class with some political muscle. Stanley’s father has blithely withdrawn to a nudist camp. Stanley, though, feels the need to earn a living. Too bad he’s incompetent at everything but reading the Times. Interviews and training programs at a variety of industries (soap, candy, corsets) having failed miserably, Stanley lands at Missiles, Ltd. It’s a setup: Stanley’s aristocratic Uncle Bertie (Dennis Price), in collusion with the equally corrupt but bourgeois-born Sidney De Vere Cox (Richard Attenborough), knowingly sends the idiotic Stanley into Bertie’s munitions factory in order to muck everything up. The reason: so that Missiles, Ltd., won’t be able to fulfill its new Arab-contracted munitions order, thereby forcing the contract to go—at a higher price, naturally—to Cox’s own company, of which Bertie, of course, is a hidden partner.

  With his sparkling smile and utter ineptitude, Stanley is perfect for the job. He instantly arouses the workers’ suspicions, and they call in Fred Kite, the shop steward. Kite marches into the office of Major Hitchcock (Terry-Thomas), the personnel manager, and in a complicated, dead-on accent Peter hadn’t employed before—a Cockney base overlaid with semieducated pretension and its carry-along insecurity—Kite demands that Stanley be sacked: “In permi’in’ him to drive one of them trucks, I would say the management is willfully je-ro-podizing the safety of its employees!” Hitchcock quickly agrees, but when he mentions that Stanley has been sent into the factory by the Labor Exchange, Kite, who sees himself as the embodiment of labor, instantly demands that Stanley not be sacked: “We do not—and cannot!—accept the principle that incompetence justifies dismissal. That is victim-I-zation!”

  Kite takes Stanley in as his lodger and suggests that he read some Lenin. “I see from your particulars,” he tells his perplexed guest, “you was at college in Oxford. I was up there meself. I was at the Baliol summer school in 1946. Very good toast and preserves they give
you at tea time, as you probably know.” Kite’s English-heimish wife (the marvelous Irene Handl), and his voluptuous daughter, Cynthia (Liz Fraser), welcome him with open arms—particularly Cynthia. She quickly whisks poor Stanley away to a necking session in a garbage dump.

  By the end, Stanley has succeeded in driving all of British industry to its knees by causing a national labor strike. He becomes a national hero, briefly, and eventually exposes the various scam artists on a televised debate led by Malcolm Muggeridge (playing himself), only to find that the keystones of British power are not so easily dislodged. Told by a judge to acknowledge his own mental illness, Stanley withdraws to the nudist camp.

  The film’s editor, Anthony Harvey, believes that Peter’s performance in I’m All Right, Jack is due in large measure to his trust in John Boulting, who “had the most wonderful rapport with Peter, I think, of all the directors” for whom Harvey witnessed Peter performing. (This is quite a claim, for Harvey went on to edit Lolita and Dr. Strangelove, among other films.)

  Ian Carmichael, who plays Stanley, found Peter both easy to work with and companionable in their off-hours. “During I’m All Right, Jack he seemed to get on terribly well with everybody. He was a very amusing man. He could be amusing sitting in his chair in the studio waiting for takes. He was always amusing. I like peace and quiet when I’m working; I don’t like to be distracted by a lot of loose gossip. But Peter was very light and frothy with everybody all the time. Of course it all changed later.

  “He was a zany sort of chap in many ways. He would have great fun with a tape recorder, and he had great fun in sort of recording things and conversations with you. Also, he played the ukulele, singing songs into his microphone and then playing them back at different speeds. That gave him enormous pleasure.

  “He had a cinema in the attic in his house, where he had a 16mm projector,” Carmichael recalls. “And a couple of times he said, ‘Come and have a meal on Saturday night and see a film. What would you like to see?’ ”

  (Anne has a rather different memory of St. Fred’s: “a house with cameras, lights, and lots and lots of cable all over the place. And drawers and cupboards full of cable, and plugs and lamps, and everything.”)

  Carmichael continues: “He had a set of drums there, too. [But] his main fixation really was motor cars. He used to change his cars about as often as he changed his socks.” Still, Peter liked to give others gifts as well as himself. “He was very generous with his money,” Carmichael points out. “His makeup man was Stuart Freeborn, and as the picture was coming to an end, he bought him a real top-of-the-range tape recorder with huge speakers and everything—the Rolls Royce of tape recorders.”

  There was some tension involving Terry-Thomas, however: “Peter hated a lot of takes. I mean, he would [want to] print the first and second take if possible and not go on. He thought that by every take his performance diminished. He had a bit of a problem with Terry-Thomas because Terry had a problem with lines. I’d been with Terry when he’d gone through thirty and thirty-five takes.” With Carmichael’s comments in mind one can’t help but notice that Anthony Harvey has edited Peter and Terry’s first scene together in such a way that the two actors are mostly in separate shots, and that when they do appear onscreen together, Terry is for the most part sitting behind his desk listening to Peter rather than delivering any lines himself. Those moments are handled in medium shot from a different angle.

  Liz Fraser, who played Kite’s daughter, had troubles of a different sort: “I do remember some scenes—and I don’t mean film scenes—that he and I had, and which I tried to extricate myself from. In retrospect he wasn’t so much a nasty man as a childish one.”

  • • •

  At home during the holiday season each year, Peter and Anne set up a classic Christmas negativity scene. At 1 P.M. on Christmas Day, a full holiday luncheon was served to the kids and Anne’s parents, who, according to Michael, “would have to vacate the house” by 5 P.M., at which time Peg and Bill arrived for an equally elaborate Christmas dinner. Peg, by this point, was smoking two packs a day and drinking heavily, even to the point of hiding fifths of gin under the mattress. Whenever she greeted Michael and Sarah, she kissed and hugged them both. The trouble was, these fierce displays of grandmotherly love often lasted for ten minutes at a time.

  Anne and Peter had begun to argue. A lot. When they fought, Peter tended to grab Anne’s left hand, pry her wedding ring off her finger, and throw it in whatever direction was handiest. One flew out of a Paris window.

  Then the Sellers family moved into a twenty-room Elizabethan estate after Peter nearly torched St. Fred’s.

  The move to Chipperfield had been planned, of course. One can scarcely trade in a fire-damaged fake Tudor for a much larger real one—one of England’s legendary stately homes, a seven-acre park, a tennis court, a swimming pool, paddocks, and two Tudor barns—without some advance planning. In fact, Peter had sold St. Fred’s by early November 1959, though he and Anne and the children were still living in it, when he decided to throw a party on Guy Fawkes Day. (On November 5, 1605, thirteen profoundly aggrieved Roman Catholics attempted to blow up Parliament in an attempt to launch a Helter Skelter–like uprising against King James I and the Anglican church. The conspirators got as far as loading thirty-six barrels of gunpowder into a cellar under the House of Lords, but at nearly the last minute the plot was foiled. Guy Fawkes, one of the conspirators, was in the cellar when the king’s soldiers burst in. He was tortured and killed, of course, and ever since, Guy Fawkes Day has been celebrated each year by British pyromaniacs, though it remains unclear whether they are honoring Guy’s death or his urge to blow up the government.)

  Wally Stott was one of the horrified guests: “I had nearly bought Peter’s house! I paid a deposit on it, but after we were in escrow I decided I didn’t want to buy it. It was a long way from the center of London—it was on the outer fringe, and I’d always lived in town. So I backed out. After that [Peter’s friend, the actor] Alfred Marks bought it. But Peter was still living in it for a short time, because his new house wasn’t finished.

  “During this time, November 5 came around. On Guy Fawkes Day there are always a lot of fireworks and bonfires. Peter loved fireworks—this was the very, very childish element in him, like the walkie-talkies and the cars—and of course he had to have fireworks. He got some of his friends around, and they were letting off rockets in the garden. Peter’s living room had a big plate glass door that opened onto the garden, and on the inside he had his Arriflex movie camera on a tripod, and he was taking movies of the fireworks. There was a rogue firework, which instead of going up went straight at the house, into the living room, and set fire to it. It caused tremendous destruction. I thought, ‘My gosh, that could have been my house!’ ”

  • • •

  “I wanted a place I could walk around without crossing any streets. It is a very civilized exile,” Peter said of his new £17,500 estate. Twenty-three miles north-northwest of London on the border of Hertford and Buckingham, Chipperfield was magnificently excessive. “You’ve bought bleeding Buckingham Palace!” Graham Stark exclaimed on his first visit. Peter also paid for the staff to match. As Anne later described the array, “We had three gardeners, two dailies, a nanny, a nanny for Peter—his dresser, Harry—a cook, and a butler.”

  Peter had bought the place on impulse. “We saw this advert in the Sunday Times for this manor house in Chipperfield,” Anne remembers. “So we went out to have a look at it, and Peter decided, there and then, he had to have it.”

  It was at Chipperfield, says Anne, that the marriage “really turned sour.”

  It didn’t start off that way, according to Michael, who has described his life as being “comparatively happy at this time. I think Sarah and I had both learned how to fade into the landscape.” By the expression “at this time,” Michael seems to be referring to a period of several months.

  At both St. Fred’s and Chipperfield, Peter tended to bring pets home. Hams
ters. Goldfish. Kittens. Puppies (two Labradors, a cocker spaniel, a pair of white Maltese terriers). Guinea pigs. Rabbits. The trouble was, he almost always gave them away at the first provocation. Except for the terriers, who stayed for a while, a single poorly timed bark or puddle and out the animal went.

  There was a parrot, too. Peg, cleverly, taught it to say “Bollocks.” Peter, reactively, became enraged the first time “Henry” swore at him and immediately forced Anne to call Peg and insist that his mother keep and care for the bird herself. That Anne had to place the call is itself notable, since Peter called his mother at least once a day and usually more often. But despite the fact that it was phrased as Anne’s demand and not Peter’s, Peg complied. She took Henry and fed it nothing but the best seed until Henry swooped down on her one day as she lay naked in her bathtub and began pecking. At that point Peg dispatched Henry on a hastily arranged, one-way trip to its birthplace.

  • • •

  In 1960, after all the receipts were totaled, I’m All Right, Jack turned out to be the biggest box office hit in Britain. British Lion hadn’t given the film a larger-than-usual advertising budget, but word of mouth had made it an initial success, and its sheer longevity did the rest. The only region in the United Kingdom in which this industrial satire didn’t work was the working-class mining districts of Wales; the characterization of the union steward may be blamed.