by Ed Sikov
Peter could be friendly to total strangers. “One day I was at a cinema in Hampstead,” the director Joseph McGrath remembers, “and Peter Sellers was standing there as I came out. And I had just seen him in the film, so I went up to him and said, ‘You’re Peter Sellers, and I claim the reward.’ And he said, ‘Who are you?’ and I told him who I was. He said, ‘What do you do?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m an art student.’ He said, ‘Let’s go and have a cup of tea.’ ”
A few years went by, and McGrath became a television director. “I got his home phone number, and telephoned him, and he said, ‘Who are you?’ I said, ‘McGrath—Joe McGrath.’ He said, ‘I remember you. You’ve made it, and without my help.” They remained extremely friendly—again, with one notable exception—for the rest of Peter’s life.
“I had had surgery on my leg,” Max Geldray reports. (The Goon Show, of course, was still running to national acclaim and amusement.) “Harry Secombe started calling everybody and telling them I was in the hospital. Harry sent me flowers and fruit—typical of him—and I had telegrams from people. When Peter heard about it, he immediately came over and saw all the flowers and said ‘My God, I’m so stupid.’ He was very angry that he hadn’t sent things first.
“I’m sitting there not able to walk. He said, ‘What do you want?’ I said, ‘Peter, I can’t go anywhere. I can’t walk.’ He said, ‘I have a new car!’
“That meant absolutely nothing to me, since he had a new car once a week. ‘It’s a new Rover, and you’ve got to see it! I have to take you for a ride!’ So he carried me, physically, bodily, into the car. We drove away. We went for a five-minute drive and stopped. He said, ‘Just sit there. I’ll be back.’
“After a long time sitting there, I see him coming down the street with another guy who was carrying a lot of packages. He said, ‘That’s yours.’ What it was I had no idea. We drove back home, he carried me inside, and there was a whole new sound system.
“I said, ‘Peter, I have a sound system. I don’t need one.’ He said, ‘Yes, you do. This is a newer system.’ ”
Things were always important to Peter Sellers. What he missed by lacking a stable or even single self he tried to make up with possessions. Like Charles Foster Kane, he collected himself by collecting buyable objects—cars, cameras, stereo systems, toys, radios, recorders, expensive suits—things that proved to himself something so fleeting that he inevitably had to buy something else as soon as possible. Buying and giving was Peter’s way of expressing love. Empty and needy, he bestowed what he wanted—to himself as well as to his friends and family.
“He was impatient if he wanted something,” Geldray says. “He was definitely an ‘I want it now’ kind of person. There used to be a saying—we all said it: ‘You’ve got to have it.’ The whole cast of The Goon Show said it, but it came from him: ‘You’ve got to have it!’
“There was a Ford Zephyr, an English car, that had won the Monte Carlo rally. I got a call from him: ‘Did you hear? The Ford Zephyr won the Monte Carlo rally!’ ” Geldray told Peter that he’d already ordered one from a dealer they both knew. “I had ordered the car, and it was going to take a long time because it was a very popular car. Peter said, ‘I’ve got to have it.’ To make a long story short, he had it two or three months before I got mine, because he went crazy. He had to have it!
“He said ‘Let’s go to the car show.’ So he, and Anne, and I went. All of a sudden, Anne and I see him talking to the Bentley people. Anne said, ‘Uh-oh.’ I saw it from afar, this Bentley, and to me it looked like it sagged in the middle. It obviously didn’t, but it appeared to. I said to Anne, ‘You know, I don’t think I like that car. It looks like it’s sagging in the middle.’ So she goes over to him and says, ‘Peter, Max thinks it sags in the middle.’ He said, ‘What? Oh. Okay.’ He said to the salesman, ‘Never mind,’ and he walked away. All I had to do was say something negative, and he would immediately act upon it.
“However, several weeks later he had a Rolls-Royce.”
But as Wally Stott kindly reflects, “He was fond of all those things, but there was no harm in that. I hate to believe that there was any harm in Peter. He was a very likeable person.”
Anne was always the first to acknowledge her husband’s likability, but for her, marriage to Peter Sellers “was like living on the edge of a volcano.” On October 16, 1957, she got burned. That was the night she gave birth to their daughter.
Sarah Jane Sellers always had her mother, but beginning in a literal way at the instant of her birth and continuing metaphorically throughout her life, Peter simply wasn’t there. On that particular night he simply had to see Judy Garland open at the Palladium.
• • •
By 1958, Peter, Anne, Michael, Sarah and a horde of stuffed animals from Harrods were living in a large white stucco house on Oakleigh Avenue in the fashionable, even-further-north village of Whetstone. It featured a lovely bay window overlooking a large terraced garden. Peter called it “St. Fred’s” and had a sign painted for the front gate to announce it. As he’d explained, “You can ruin anything with ‘Fred.’ ”
Michael, on the brink of four, was the titular owner of an electric car set, a pair of walkie-talkies, a number of radios, and a vast army of toy soldiers, but, as Michael later noted of his father’s playtime needs, “Only when he grew tired of playing with them himself was I permitted to touch them.” One evening, Peter spent several hours setting up opposing toy battalions for combat. Michael made the mistake of staging the engagement the following day when Peter was out of the house. It was a glorious battle with lots of dead bodies, but it paled in comparison to the rather more unequal clash that occurred when Peter returned home. Today we call it child abuse.
The children’s first nanny was named Frieda Heinlein. The kids loved her. Peter called her a “German swine” and fired her. Nanny Clarke arrived. Peter became so enraged by something she said that he stormed out of the house, drove to London, checked into a club, called Anne, shouted something about “that bloody nanny,” returned home, and picked up the nearest carving knife. Awakening Nanny Clarke with shouts of “I’ll kill you, you cow,” Peter plunged the knife into her bedroom door, which split. Quick-thinking but not as nimble as she might have been, Nanny Clarke hurled herself out the window, crawled to the house next door, and ended up in the hospital with a sprained ankle. Frieda Heinlein returned.
• • •
As abusive a parent as Peter could be at times, he wasn’t without affection toward his children. He loved them to the extent that he was capable of love. Blame Peg, of course. She made him what he was. But blame Peter, too. A rotten mother doesn’t absolve her son’s rotten fathering.
Home movie footage shows Peter playing with a grinning Michael on a swing set in the yard at St. Fred’s. Another has him helping toddler Sarah learn to walk. Still another features Michael, resplendent in a plaid playsuit, examining Peter’s newest car. This little vignette is clearly staged, although the child star remains quite unaware of the fact. Peter, in voice over, plays the role of a showroom car salesman: “Try the driving position!” he cries as customer Michael climbs in—“I’m sure you’ll find it Ab-So-Lute-Ly First Class!” Then: “I’m going inside now to see to the projector, so I’ll see you in just a few moments. Jolly good luck!”
It’s cute to outsiders, but Sarah Sellers, in retrospect, finds this sort of thing to be painful to watch. “There’s not really very much just ‘natural’ footage of us playing or anything,” she notes. “It’s all staged. It’s all telling us exactly what to do, and when to laugh, and ‘Be happy!’ and ‘Enjoy yourself ! Have a good time!’ ”
Peter liked to drive Michael and Sarah down to London for a stroll in the zoo on Sunday mornings. Of course, being Peter, he followed up by taking them to lunch at the Ritz or the Savoy. Like everything else, much depended on his mood.
One particular Sunday, Peter was driving his brand-new red Bentley Continental. Michael Sellers claims that Peter’s other luxury cars
had been previously owned, which helps explain how Peter afforded an unending slew of top-of-the-line luxury automobiles before he was pulling in the extraordinary income necessary to sustain such a habit. The Bentley Continental, however, was unblemished by other hands. It featured handmade fittings, cost £9,000, and was the trophy of trophies. Peter adored it.
A barrage of pebbles hit the car during a family drive. Chips appeared on the bright, shiny surface. Helpfully, Michael took it upon himself to fix them. He found touch-up paint in the garage and, with a child’s logic, painted a long stripe down the length of the car to make sure he’d covered every nick.
Peter screamed when he saw his disfigured Bentley Continental. Then he grabbed his son and dragged him upstairs, whipped him with a belt and sent him to bed hungry, took away all of his toys, and didn’t give them back for several months. “I thought he was going to kill him,” Spike Milligan said.
As totalitarian as Peg could be, hers was a tyranny of baby’s-breath-sucking love. She is never said to have hit her son and, given what has been said, it’s impossible to imagine. Rather than striking, she pampered. Peter’s rage toward Michael, uncontrollable and bordering on psychosis, was clearly of a different order, in one sense the flip side of Peg’s indulgence. Peter had a violent streak even as a child, as the incident involving him shoving his auntie into the roaring fireplace well demonstrates. And because Peg abhorred disciplining him for such outbursts of physical fury, he grew into manhood without several of the key inhibitions that sustain civilization, let alone a healthy family life. He excused himself anything. After all, he was Peter Sellers.
• • •
The Peter Sellers Show, a comedy special written by Eric Sykes, aired on ITV in early February. The April 8th Show (Seven Days Early) appeared two months later on the BBC; Peter starred, with support from Graham Stark and David Lodge. There was a record, too—“The Best of Sellers.”
The Goon Show’s eighth series had been running since September 1957. In March 1958, an episode called “Tiddlywinks” aired. It was based on the real-life match that had occurred on March 2 between the Cambridge University tiddlywinks team on one side and the three Goons and Graham Stark on the other. The college boys had originally thrown their challenge to the Duke of Edinburgh, but the Duke, knowing of his son’s admiration for Sellers, Milligan, and Secombe, gallantly nominated them as his stand-ins. Although they did have the last laugh with their broadcast, the Goons lost the match itself by a lopsided score of 120 to 50.
But Peter Sellers had other winks to tiddle. He was making movies, superindustriously—two completed in 1958, another two started in 1958 and finished in 1959, three started and finished in 1959, and two started in 1959 and released in 1960.
He was working steadily (to say the least) and earning good money, and he still believed—with Dennis Selinger assenting—that he needed as much exposure as possible. Does it matter if some of these movies aren’t masterpieces?
Returning Peter to the drab territory of Orders Are Orders, Up the Creek (1958), directed by Val Guest, is a comedy about the British Navy. It’s both rum and bum. Having fired a homemade rocket through the bathroom window of an admiral (Wilfrid Hyde-White)—it homed in on a sudden rush of water—Lt. Fairweather (David Tomlinson) is exiled to a command in “the mothball fleet,” specifically H.M.S. Berkeley. The ship is virtually dry-docked in Suffolk, and in the absence of a commanding officer, the Berkeley’s shady bo’s’n, Chief Petty Officer Doherty (Peter), has turned it into a money-making operation for himself and the ship’s skeleton crew. Sellers’ bo’s’n is an Anglicized Sgt. Bilko from The Phil Silvers Show (which was then in its third hit season on American television). With Peter’s nasal, fast-talking Doherty keeping the books, the sailors tend chickens on deck, pigs in the cabins; they sell the eggs and bacon to the townspeople. They wash laundry in the boiler and deliver it directly to customers’ doors. There’s rum-running involved. And pork pies. Doherty has requisitioned paint, presumably for the Berkeley, and none of it remains:
FAIRWEATHER: Do you mean to tell me that you sold that, too?
DOHERTY: Well, we couldn’t very well give government property away.
Peter declined to appear in Val Guest’s hastily filmed sequel, Further Up the Creek (also 1958); they replaced him with Frankie Howerd. But he did show up for tom thumb (1958), based on the tale by the Brothers Grimm. A rustic and his wife, granted three wishes by the beautiful Queen of the Forest, waste them on two meaningless requests involving a lengthy sausage that grows on the rustic’s nose. After using up the third wish to make the wiener disappear, they’re granted one extra: teenage Russ Tamblyn wearing an off-the-shoulder pea leaf. He shall be their son. Only he’s two inches long. Tall. Whichever.
The lithe and virile boy dances with animated cartoons and claymation animals, and all is well in his childhood until his father takes him near the Black Swamp, “an evil place where horrid birds and animals live.” That’s where Peter and Terry-Thomas come in. Peter’s done up in a fat suit and heavy black fur. Terry wears a domed Zeppo Marx hat. “I like you,” says Terry to the father. “So do I,” says Peter, leaning in close with a vocal insinuation entirely lacking in Terry’s previous line delivery. “I don’t like the looks of those fellows,” says Dad after the villains leave. “I thought they were kind of nice,” says Russ.
Peter, affecting a bizarre gypso-Fagin accent, plays a total dolt, Terry as well, though somewhat less so. They decide to bump Tom off by taking him to the edge of the swamp, tossing a coin in, and telling Tom to go chase it. Tom skips happily into the swamp and promptly falls into the muck. Unfortunately, he’s saved by the Queen of the Forest and another hour of the film ensues, but it ends happily after a character named Woody teaches Tom how to kiss a girl. It was the 1950s, after all.
Up the Creek was released on November 11, 1958, tom thumb on December 24. But by then Peter was back on the BBC with The Goon Show’s ninth series, and oh, yes, he had also been starring for four months in a West End play.
• • •
A year earlier, the producer Robert L. Joseph had been talking to Alec Guinness about starring as an Arabian sultan in George Tabori’s comedy Brouhaha; Peter Brooks was supposed to direct. By July 1957, that plan had fallen apart, but in July 1958, the play opened. Peter Hall directed. Peter Sellers starred.
As Anne Sellers noted, Peter had long been nursing a not-so-secret desire to add theater to radio, television, film, cabaret, and music hall. Tabori’s thin farce, entirely dependent on the ridiculous Sultan of Huwaiyat, provided the perfect vehicle:
Huwaiyat has fallen on hard times. To extract foreign aid from both the Americans and the Soviets, the Sultan concocts a revolution.
By signing on to Brouhaha, Peter took the risk (to reap the glory) of making his legitimate-theatrical debut in a play in which he’d be onstage almost all the time. There would be touches of slapstick and lots of costume and personality and accent changes, and he’d be given relatively free rein to improvise dialogue and bits of comedy business at will. All of this came with a price, of course. For an actor, any role onstage, especially on Broadway or the West End, demands an extraordinary commitment of time and energy. Still, Peter took on the challenge and the work, agreeing to appear in Brouhaha for at least seven months, all the while continuing his radio and film careers. In addition to the regular evening performances of Brouhaha there would be two shows on Saturday night as well as a Thursday matinee.
After previewing in Brighton for three weeks, Brouhaha opened in London. From its printing presses 3,000 miles away, the New York Times was delighted. Dateline London, August 27: “Gales of laughter greeted George Tabori’s new comedy Brouhaha, which opened at the Aldwych Theatre tonight. It left the newspaper reviewers indulgently tickled, too. But the laughter and the warm newspaper notices were more for the players, particularly the star, Peter Sellers, than for the play.”
It hadn’t been an easy road to opening night. For one thing, Peter decided h
e didn’t like one of the young actors and refused to rehearse with him. Then, at the dress rehearsal, he declined to provide the proper cue lines. “I can’t stay,” Peter Hall confided to a cast member, “because if I lose my temper with Peter, he’ll walk out and close the play.” So the director left the theater rather than argue with the star.
Much, if not all, was forgiven after opening night, when Brouhaha proved to be a hit, though not all the reviews were quite as glowing as the Times correspondent led his readers to believe. One English critic snorted that Brouhaha “will appeal only to addicts of the type of humor served up by the Marx Bros.,” a remark that was apparently meant to be an insult. Another commented that “a mildly absurd initial situation is put through the mill of verbal and situating extravagance: deliberate irrelevance, banality, wild quasi-improvised pantomime twist it and turn it, inflate it only to prick the bubble.” As for Peter, the critic wrote, “calculated inconsequence and a kind of dynamic helplessness are mother’s milk to him. Tall, plump and dark, he also revealed a personality of enormous kindliness and charm.”
The Daily Mail was more abrupt: “Brou, but not enough haha.”
Still London scribes did tend to agree that Brouhaha’s success depended entirely on Peter, and that he more than carried it off in his appealing, gleeful, manic, multipersonality way. In the trial scene, for instance, Peter played judge, counsel, and prisoner. The judge turned up at one point in a garbage can.
Advance ticket sales were brisk enough that even on opening night British theater wags were already mulling over the most obvious risk of taking the show to New York: “Careful casting would likely be needed for a Broadway presentation, because the comedy has been re-written and tailored to suit the particular requirements of Sellers.”
In other words, Sellers’s Brouhaha was radically open to improvisation. On the night of October 16, Peter got carried away, waltzed off the stage, and fell into the orchestra pit. He pulled Hermione Harvey (playing Mrs. Alma Exegis Diddle) right along with him. The audience thought it was hilarious, but when they saw Peter’s face contorting in agony they fell into silence. Sellers’s leg was badly cut. Harvey suffered bruises as well. Peter, still a trouper, made an effort to go on with the show but simply couldn’t manage it, and his understudy finished the performance. Anne, who was in the audience that night, thought at first that the whole thing was just a new bit—a little extreme, perhaps, but given Peter’s tendency to depart from the script, not entirely without precedent. “But when I went round to the dressing room poor Peter was lying there saying some very unfunny things.” She whisked him home in their latest Rolls-Royce.