Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  Musical numbers by Max Geldray and the Ray Ellington Quartet continued to break each program up into discrete episodes, even as the plots (or what passed for them) became more or less coherent. These interruptions became a standard part of the show for the duration of its long run. They served to regularize the chaos, and they did so in a familiar sort of music hall way that the absurdist Goon Show’s rather less-than-intellectual listeners could hook into whenever the senseless noises and bizarre jokes got to be too much. Ying tong iddle I po, and here’s Max Geldray with “I’m Just Wild About Harry.”

  Even Goonish senselessness hadn’t quite hit its stride yet. Spike, it comes as little surprise to learn, was a more or less undisciplined writer. And the Goons were all anarchic as performers. They did what they pleased, and what pleased them included mumbling and stepping on each others’ lines. The producer, Dennis Main Wilson, was tolerant of their unpredictable behavior as well as their equally lawless comic thrust—possibly to a fault. Only during the third series, after Wilson left and Peter Eton took over as producer, did The Goon Show begin to achieve its lasting quality.

  Peter Eton was scarcely humorless, but it wasn’t easy to make him laugh. It took work and self-restraint. As a result, this new, tough audience of one was therefore able to exercise some control over what Wilmut calls the Goons’ “tendency toward self-indulgence.” It was not an easy task, though the Goons themselves grew to appreciate the beneficial effect Eton had on them. Harry Secombe credited Eton as being the program’s best producer. Before he came on board, Secombe noted, The Goon Show had little in the way of shape, and in Secombe’s description, the characters all spoke so fast that “it was a gabble.” Eton, though, “was great. He used to get quite choleric [and] go all red and shout, ‘You bastards sit down!’ Peter Sellers would say, ‘I’m pissing off,’ and Eton would just say, ‘Well, go then.’ ”

  Still, Max Geldray declares, no matter who was producing the program, “it was Spike who was the manic and inventive driving force behind every detail of the production.” Spike, of course, could also be “one of the most annoying people you could meet.” The BBC executives loved the show’s success, but as the months went by they grew to despise Milligan, who, as Peter once remarked, had a wonderful knack for explaining the simplest things in such a way that nobody could possibly understand them.

  • • •

  The end of the second series signaled the departure of Michael Bentine. Creative differences were cited. He and Spike were seeing eye-to-eye less and less. According to Secombe, “Only when Michael Bentine left did The Goon Show really begin—really take shape.” It was also becoming legendary, not only with the average bright Briton, but with the next generation of satirists, comics, and puckish intellectuals.

  For instance, the physician- turned- comedian- turned- avante-garde- opera- and- theater-director Jonathan Miller remains a dedicated fan. “The Goon Show really is the best thing Sellers ever did,” Miller declares. “He did some films that are interesting, and of course Dr. Strangelove has some nice jokes, but I think the characters that everyone in England remembers, and will remember all their lives, were from The Goon Show. At its best it was as good as Lewis Carroll.”

  Does the director of such works as Leoš Janáček’s Katya Kabanova at the Metropolitan Opera really think that The Goon Show is art? Dr. Miller is insistent: “Unless it’s printed, people don’t think it’s literature, but actually, at its best, The Goon Show is on a par with Alice in Wonderland. I don’t think people have registered the importance of Milligan’s imagination; Milligan is an important writer.

  “It’s a series of pastiches of English boys’ literature of the ’20s and ’30s, which they grew up on—The Lives of the Bengal Lancers and that sort of thing. People in England of my age, people in their fifties, can still speak to each other in very detailed Goon Show voices—particularly Bluebottle and Bloodnok and Grytpype-Thynne.” Miller proceeds to prove the point.

  “There’s a session between Bluebottle and that sort of Mortimer Snerd–like figure called Eccles. They’re soldiers in a trench, and Bluebottle says, [in perfect imitation of Bluebottle’s nasal squeal] ‘What time is it, Eccles?’ Eccles says [again in impeccable imitation], ‘I don’ know, but I’ll tell you sumthun’—last night a very kind gen’leman wrote down the time on a piece of paper for me.’ And Bluebottle says, ‘Show me that. Hey! This piece of paper is not working!’

  “It’s such a brilliant, logical joke, that. Carroll would have given his eyeteeth to have made a joke of that quality.

  “These characters are a brilliant gallery of British social life. That wonderful character Sellers plays—Major Bloodnok, a sort of drunken, gin-shaken, shortly-to-be-cashiered English major living on the northwest frontier and afflicted, obviously all the time, with catastrophic attacks of Indian diarrhea.” Dr. Miller can’t help but launch into another routine from memory: “ ‘Meanwhile, in the smallest and coldest room in the fort on the northwest frontier, Major Bloodnok is experiencing difficulties.’ And then you hear this wonderful pppffoooosh. [Bloodnok’s huffing voice:] ‘Oh, it goes right through you, you know—I’ll never eat Bombay duck again!’

  “I don’t know if that comes across to Americans,” he admits with a touch of scolding. “You Americans get very prudish about lavatory jokes. You think they’re infantile. I think it’s far more infantile when you don’t laugh at them.”

  John Lennon, too, found it all precisely, gloriously English and expressed concern that others just wouldn’t get it: “I was twelve when the Goon Show first hit. Sixteen when they finished with me. Their humor was the only proof that the world was insane. . . . What it means to Americans I can’t imagine (apart from a rumored few fanatics). As they say in Tibet, ‘You had to be there.’ ”

  • • •

  The third series began recording in November 1952. Bentine’s departure and Eton’s arrival were not enough to dispel all the tension. Geldray tells of the time a young BBC underling rushed up to him and breathlessly reported the day’s gossip: He’d heard that Spike had just charged over to Peter’s house with a gun. “Yeah? So what else is new?” was Geldray’s response.

  In late December, Spike actually suffered the nervous breakdown.

  Always high strung, on the brink, too many thoughts in his head and many of them unhygienic, Spike crashed. The pressure of weekly creation—and the success it was bringing him—pushed him over the edge. He was hospitalized and ended up missing a total of twelve shows—nearly half the third series, though he began contributing scripts after only a few tentative weeks of recovery. Madness was the point, after all.

  • • •

  In 1953, Peter made his phonographic recording debut under the production of George Martin, who went on to produce the Beatles. His first single, released by Parlophone, was a skit called “Jakka and the Flying Saucers”—a Chipmunk-voiced boy, Jakka, and his doughnut-shaped dog, Dunker, both from Venus, embark on a quest for the Golden Cheese.

  Martin once called it “probably the worst-selling record that Parlophone ever made.”

  But Peter was undaunted; “Jakka and the Flying Saucers” was followed by many more successful records in the 1950s alone, including the singles “Dipso Calypso” (1955), “Any Old Iron” (1957), and a rather sick rendition of the detested “My Old Dutch” (1959), the song Peg made him perform as an infant in white tie and tails. These 45s and 78s performed substantially better in the marketplace than “Jakka and the Flying Saucers.”

  Around this time Peter suffered a disappointment of a more personal nature. Max Geldray reports that Sellers had gone to see the French comedian Jacques Tati’s most recent film, M. Hulot’s Holiday and was tremendously impressed—so much so that he wrote a fan letter to Tati, who replied with a casual invitation to Peter to visit him some time. Peter left immediately for France.

  He returned deeply let down. Tati spent most of their time together lecturing Peter on the subject of comedy. As Sellers told Geldray,
“All he did was talk to me about how great he is.” Years later, Tati wrote his own fan letter to Peter after seeing one his pictures. Peter didn’t bother to reply.

  • • •

  The Super Secret Service (1953), released in late summer to little notice, works much better than either Penny Points to Paradise or Down Among the Z Men, perhaps because it’s too short to require much in the way of plot or structure. A 24-minute comedy scripted by Spike and Larry Stephens, the film begins with Sellers, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and a thin mustache gracing his lip, opening a door into a bleak film-noir office. He frantically reaches into his trenchcoat pocket for a gun. Unable to find it, he waves sheepishly at the camera and backs out of the room. The credits roll.

  In the film, Milligan and Stephens’s music hall absurdism takes the place of Z Men’s misguided conventionality:

  GRAHAM STARK: The phone is ringing.

  PETER SELLERS: Then answer it!

  STARK: But we haven’t got a phone.

  When the phone is located—it has been filed under T in the filing cabinet—Sellers answers it, but only after putting on a wig to disguise himself.

  A gun battle ensues—in the top drawer of the desk. Smoke comes pouring out to the sound of bullets.

  A rock comes crashing through the window. There’s a note attached:

  STARK: What does it say?

  SELLERS: Fred Smith, window repairer.

  STARK: I wonder what he charges?

  [Second rock]

  SELLERS: Three shillings and fifty pence.

  Enter Miss Jones. It’s Anne, coming out of Peter’s enforced retirement long enough to put on a big black beard:

  PETER What are you trying to hide?

  ANNE: This! (She pulls off the beard to reveal a goatee.)

  And suddenly, for no reason, the comedy grinds to a halt in order to give the Ray Ellington Quartet a chance to perform a jazzy version of “Teddy Bears Picnic.”

  • • •

  Thanks to Peter’s extended family, Highgate, where Peter and Anne were living, was turning into a neighborhood version of the Grafton Arms, a place where Goons and their friends could spend even more time together when they weren’t actually working as a team. “We became friends early,” Max Geldray says, “because we lived rather close. Peter had a cousin who was a real estate man, and he heard of a bunch of new apartments being built in Highgate. Peter called me and said, ‘My cousin tells me there are several apartments available there. Are you interested?’ That’s how we all came to live in Highgate—all meaning Spike Milligan and Ray Ellington [and Geldray and Sellers]. Actually Ray and I lived in the same apartment building. Peter lived around the corner.”

  He was sticking to the familiar neighborhoods of his youth but enjoying them with money. He had good friends, a beautiful wife, and his mother was nearby. He might even have felt a wave of contentment once in a while.

  But one day he called Peg on the telephone: “I’m at Bedford at the railway station. I’m feeling so low I’m going to end it all. I’m going to jump in front of a train.” Rushing to save him, just as she’d always done, Mother found him sitting alone on a bench, staring into an abyss only he could see.

  • • •

  Happy families may all be alike—since there are so few of them it’s difficult to tell—but as countless dysfunctional family memoirs so repetitively prove, unhappy families are similar, too. Marital tantrums sound the same. So do crying children. Peter Sellers’s family was no exception.

  Wally Stott took a benign view of Peter’s marriage to Anne, a perspective made possible by the relative distance from which he viewed it: “Sometimes I’d be at parties at Peter’s house. They were always very enjoyable affairs. There’d always be music we both liked. His wife, Anne, was a very lovely lady, and a great hostess.” (Years after his professional association with Peter ended, Wally Stott became Angela Morley. Spike Milligan commented with a mean sort of affection for his old friend: “He has now had a sex change. I don’t know why. When he undresses he still looks like Wally Stott. I think when Secombe undressed at night he looked like Wally Stott. Peter didn’t. When he undressed at night he looked like Diana Dors.” When I spoke with Angela Morley, I asked her how she wished to be identified in this book, and she replied, “It’s a judgment you’ll have to make and I’ll have to accept.” My judgment is to attribute her quotes to Wally Stott, since he was the person with whom Peter Sellers worked on The Goon Show, and to thank Angela Morley for them in the acknowledgments.)

  Anne was putting up a good front. In private, it was she who bore the brunt of Peter’s mercurial moods, the bleak stretches of silence as well as the hot rages, his tendency to grow bored with their living arrangements and insist that they go someplace else. “We did move a lot,” she notes. “I’m not quite sure why. I guess he got sick of wherever we were. I guess we lived in about [long pause] oh, I can’t think how many. . . . About eight different houses, I guess.” Her mother-in-law barely spoke to her, which, come to think of it, was probably for the best.

  Anne understood Peter. She knew that he was erratic in predictable ways. He would buy a car on a whim—a used Jaguar here, a used Rolls there—and sell it equally whimsically, usually at a loss, and buy another. He piled up more and more photographic equipment and turned the kitchen into a darkroom, where his chemicals took precedence over her milk and eggs, thereby rendering the sink unusable. He was making more money than he’d ever seen, but so drastically had he always overspent his income that his accountant, Bill Wills, once attempted to put him on a severe allowance—£12 per week. Peter inevitably exceeded it, and rather than raise the rate, Wills gave up, leaving Peter to spend as freely as he wished.

  Anne wanted children. She thought they might stabilize the marriage. And so it was in this rickety domestic context that in July 1953, Anne Sellers announced that she was pregnant again. Peter responded joyously. He went out and bought a £300 electric train set and began playing with it in earnest.

  • • •

  As cherished radio stars with bills to pay, Peter, Spike, and Harry were periodically obliged to leave London, head out to the various shires, and adapt recorded Goon broadcast comedy into live music hall routines. The more successful Peter became, the less willing he was to do it. Since he’d been holding provincial audiences in contempt since his squalid vaudeville infancy with his grandmother’s traveling water tank, his growing fame and fortune in the mid-1950s carried with it a lingering, ever-souring wrath. Late in his life, Peter described with unbridled contempt the Goons’ audiences outside London. They were Goonlike, he said, but in the worst possible sense: “You’re usually telling jokes to a crowd of people with two-thousandths of an inch of forehead.” In Peter’s increasingly lofty view, it was one thing to act like a moron but quite another to perform for one. When he looked out through the footlights at his audiences he saw a vision of hell.

  Still, apart from having to face the dreaded Cro-Magnons of the hinterlands, the regularized camaraderie of The Goon Show gave Peter immense pleasure, as did the lasting comic art he was creating with his friends. That several Goons and associates lived in more or less the same neighborhood of North London wasn’t simply due to Peter’s family real estate connection; having close friends close at hand was important to Peter. He enjoyed fellowship.

  When asked about his Goon Show years after they were long gone, his answer was inevitably a variation on a simple declarative statement: “It was the happiest time in my life professionally.” Beloved by its creators and its fans alike, the program provided steady employment, national fame, and bizarre comedy in equal measure. Peter craved all three.

  Sellers wasn’t exactly the star of the show, but he was certainly the most vocally gifted Goon, and as a result the United Kingdom experienced a rising tide of impressionists of the impressionist. Listeners loved to do Peter’s many voices themselves—their flattery was sincere—and Sellers imitators began popping up all over the country. Wally Stot
t tells of his experience in the mid-fifties when he learned, surreally, to fly a plane: “My instructor used to give me my lessons in Peter Sellers’s voices. One lesson he’d be Bloodnok, another lesson he’d be Bluebottle.”

  Stott fondly remembers Peter’s upbeat mood in the recording studio on Sundays: “Peter used to do a lot of clownish things. For instance, we used to warm up the audience before the show started. Harry would sing, and we would play. And Peter would go around the back of the studio and play the timpani, and put on a real show doing it. You know how timpanists, years ago, used to turn handles to tune them? Peter used to give a terrific impression of one of the old-time timpani players—playing it, listening to it, and darting his hand over it tightening the taps. And then one of the sound effects men would fire a blank—it was really crazy.” Peter may not have succeeded entirely in finding himself by clowning for an ever-growing public, but he was trying.

  “There were quarrels from time to time,” Wally Stott admits. “I don’t think Harry was ever involved in those things. They were between Peter and Spike. I never knew what they were about, but there would be certain weeks when I’d realize that all was not well.” But the Sunday recording sessions were generally merry—at least when Spike wasn’t suffering one of his spells—so much so that rumors of on-air drunkenness began to surface. Max Geldray dismisses these reports as absolutely false, though he does acknowledge that the Goons sometimes seized the opportunity afforded by Geldray’s harmonica interlude to swig a little brandy out of milk bottles. It was a smuggler’s trick. Wouldn’t you know it? The BBC banned alcohol on the premises.

  • • •