Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  “I found Peter a great joy to work with, wholly generous and wonderfully inventive,” the actor Leo McKern recalled of his experiences with Peter in Brouhaha. (McKern played Tyepkin, the Soviet envoy, but he also appeared with Peter in four films.) “Innovation and continual invention was essential to keep him interested, and the straitjacket of conventional reproduction was not for him.” These inventions not only included ad-libs and funny if irrelevant accents. Peter also found it personally amusing to stroll up to the footlights and engage in conversation—albeit one-sided—with the audience. Peter Hall once commented on what it was like to direct him: “It was one of the most amazing and terrible experiences of my life, because one of the things about working in the theater is that you have to repeat what you do. . . . Peter couldn’t bear doing it again and again.”

  “I went to see him in it,” Alec Guinness noted. “It was pretty lousy. Sellers knew I was in the stalls. Suddenly, in the middle of a speech, he came down to the footlights and saluted and said, ‘That’s to you, Captain Guinness!’ The audience had no idea what he was talking about.”

  McKern remembered that one night Peter’s inventions got the best of him after he showed up for the performance absolutely drunk. It was, in McKern’s description, “after some kind of reception or other.” Actually, it was after a party thrown in honor of Alec Guinness’s knighthood. Peter had stopped by on his way to the Aldwych. Beaujolais flowed, much of it into Peter’s glass. Kenneth Tynan picks up the tale: “He arrived at the theater beamingly tight and admitted as much to the audience; ‘I am sloshed,’ he said, and offered refunds to those who wanted them. Few did, and he went on to give a striking, if bizarre, performance.”

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t just a single night’s worth of Beaujolais that was talking. By the first week of December, having appeared in Brouhaha steadily for five months—not to mention the fact that he was already shooting his next picture, in which he starred as three different characters, the male lead and two supporting roles—Peter had grown sick of the theater. He casually mentioned this fact to the press.

  “Very bored” were the precise words Peter chose to describe his experience as the star of a West End hit. He went on to add that he was only giving “about two good performances a week” and was thinking about leaving the show.

  Brouhaha’s presenters, the International Playwright’s Theatre, Ltd., were most displeased by this interview, having put up with Sellers’s lack of theatrical discipline all along. Dennis Selinger later said that he “used to get two or three phone calls a week from the management, saying ‘Come down here, he’s done something terrible.’ ” This time it was different, though. Peter had gone public.

  The firm quickly issued a multipronged statement: Peter Sellers had signed a run-of-the-play contract for Brouhaha; Peter Sellers, under the terms of his contract, could give four-weeks notice beginning in February 1959; Peter Sellers had not given, and at that time was not in a position to give, four-weeks notice to end his participation in Brouhaha; and, finally, Peter Sellers’s contract stated that “he shall appear at all performances and perform . . . in a diligent and painstaking manner and shall play the part as directed by the manager.”

  Peter Sellers was contrite, at least in public. “What I meant,” he told the press, who were only just beginning to sniff the first wisps of an aroma that promised to ripen over the years, “was what any West End actor will tell you—that you are only at your best two nights a week. You do your best every night, but it doesn’t always come over.”

  He gave notice on February 1 and the show closed four weeks later.

  Peter Hall, who had accommodated as best he could his one-time-only star’s tendency to make unscheduled entrances whenever he was fatigued by the nightly routine of stage acting, described Peter in retrospect: “He was as good an actor as Alec Guinness, as good an actor as Laurence Olivier. And he had the ability to identify completely with another person—to get physically and mentally and emotionally into their skin. Where does that come from? I have no idea. Is it a curse? Often.

  “It’s not enough in this business to have talent,” Hall continued, knowing the end of the story. “You have to have talent to handle the talent, and that, I think, Peter did not have. I think he was a genius. And I think his perfectionism made him extremely neurotic, extremely selfish.”

  Hall, who was later knighted, believes that a director can only throw up his hands in the face of such a psyche. Many other directors would find themselves in the same situation in the years to come.

  “I mean, I’m sure the play or the film was always about him in his view. It’s no good arguing with that.”

  EIGHT

  Walter Shenson, the London-based head of European publicity for Columbia Pictures, ran into Tyrone Power on the street one day in 1958. Power mentioned the novel he happened to be reading at the time and recommended it to Shenson, who read it, bought the film rights, and thereby turned himself into an independent producer. The Mouse That Roared (1959) was his first picture.

  There was something odd about Peter Sellers’s interest in signing onto this particular production. Having never produced a film in his life, Walter Shenson was not exactly in the top ranks of the profession when he approached Sellers through Dennis Selinger. But as Shenson recalled, “Peter said he wanted to meet me. The first thing he said to me was, ‘Are you a producer?’ I said, ‘Well, if I make this picture I’ll be a producer.’

  “What I found out later was that the clairvoyant he used to talk to every morning had said to him—something rather obvious to Peter Sellers—‘An American producer is going to ask you to be in a film.’ I don’t even think he’d read the script yet when he wanted to meet me, because the first question he said to me was, ‘Are you a producer?’ He could see I was an American.”

  The clairvoyant in question was Maurice Woodruff, a nationally syndicated columnist of the old Jeanne Dixon school. In short, Woodruff was a showman and a fraud. Peter began to rely on him.

  Peter had been superstitious since at least his teens. Later on, he added a bit of paranoia; his postwar girlfriend Hilda Parkin states that he used to insist “that ‘mad mullahs’ haunted him whenever he slept in a certain four-poster bed in one of my relatives’ homes in Peterborough.” Now he turned to a syndicated soothsayer.

  “He would live, die, and breathe by Maurice Woodruff,” the director Bryan Forbes declares. “He wouldn’t take a foot outside the house unless he’d spoken to Maurice.” Woodruff had seen his mark.

  In Graham Stark’s view, Woodruff “clung like a leech.”

  • • •

  The Mouse That Roared is a satirical comedy. The Grand Duchy of Fenwick has fallen on hard times. To extract foreign aid from the Americans, the Prime Minister concocts a war with the United States. The express purpose is to lose immediately and reap thereafter the benefits of Marshall Plan–like foreign aid.

  At first, Shenson only considered Peter for the role of Tully Bascombe, the bland and well-meaning gamekeeper who leads the Fenwick forces against the United States—and wins. But another Columbia executive mentioned the idea of Peter playing two supporting roles as well, and despite Peter’s later claim that he resisted the notion, he told Shenson at the time that he knew he could play all three: Tully; Prime Minister Mountjoy, a goateed aristocrat; and the Grand Duchess Gloriana XII, a full-figured regent. As it happened, Sellers was least comfortable playing Tully, the role he’d originally been offered and the most lifelike of the three: “I don’t quite have a handle on the leading guy,” he confessed, “but we’ll come up with something.”

  Whether because of the original benevolent augury or simple good will, Peter caused no trouble during the production of The Mouse That Roared. “He got along with everybody,” Walter Shenson said. “I think he liked the idea of working for Americans.” Peter’s costar, Jean Seberg, later told a reporter that “to work with him is to love him. He’s angelic.”

  The film’s director, Jack Arnol
d, described him in somewhat more detail: “Peter was a marvelous improvisational actor, brilliant if you got him on the first take. The second take would be good, but after the third take he could be really awful. If he had to repeat the same words too many times they became meaningless. But it was such a joy to work with Peter because he was such an inspired actor. Sometimes he would literally knock me off my feet. I’d fall down convulsed with laughter.”

  With Peter having to rush back to the Aldwych nearly every evening to star in Brouhaha, filming of The Mouse That Roared began in mid-October with three weeks on location in Surrey and on the Channel coast. The production moved on to Shepperton sound stages on November 10. Despite the general goodwill on the set, Arnold described the first day of shooting as being somewhat tense, owing to the seemingly countless takes it took Jean Seberg to get her lines right. Seberg was used to being directed, at times to the point of browbeating, by Otto Preminger, for whom she had starred in two dramas, Saint Joan and Bonjour Tristesse (both 1957). (Seberg was only seventeen when Preminger cast her in Saint Joan, her first film.) The Mouse That Roared, however, was a comedy, the director wasn’t a tyrant, and Seberg was consequently cut adrift from her method. According to Arnold, “By take twenty-five Peter didn’t know what he was saying either. He was just spouting gibberish. I could see he was really getting crazy.”

  Seberg’s need for multiple takes aside, Peter’s schedule was purely grueling—especially after The Goon Show’s ninth series began recording in November—so much so that he actually hired an ambulance to whisk him away from each day’s shooting of The Mouse That Roared to his evening’s performance in Brouhaha. It was much better than a limousine or any of his cars. He could lie down.

  A bit simplistic but still very funny, The Mouse That Roared did well enough at the box office in England, but it was much more widely popular in the States, probably because its satire struck a more genial note with the benefactors of American foreign relations largesse than it did with the recipients. And while Peter gives one great and two good performances in the film, he hadn’t yet achieved the kind of direct, natural rapport with the camera that eventually made him a superstar. Tully is the weakest of the three for exactly that reason; agreeable blandness barely registers on celluloid unless the actor is a technical genius. The two caricatures, Mountjoy and Gloriana, required much less skill because they were built on excess.

  Gloriana XII remains one of Peter Sellers’s greatest creations. With a bust too large and a voice too deep, she’s Margaret Rutherford with testes.

  Tully pleasantly introduces her to his American captives:

  TULLY: Your Grace, uh, this is General Snippet—he’s a rear general.

  SNIPPET: I warn you, Madam, I know the Geneva Convention by heart!

  GLORIANA: Oh, how nice! You must recite it to me some evening. I’ll play the harpsichord!

  A few years later, Shenson asked Peter if he’d be interested in starring in the sequel, Mouse on the Moon (1963). Sellers was by that point an international star, so he rather loftily turned Shenson down. In fact, by that point Peter had stated in public that he never liked The Mouse That Roared to begin with. Shenson ended up replacing him with two other actors—Ron Moody and, yes, Margaret Rutherford. (Moody played Mountjoy; there was no Tully.)

  But Peter did suggest a director for the picture: Richard Lester. “Who’s he?” Shenson asked. “He’s another American—you met him at my house at my Christmas party.” Lester did end up directing Mouse on the Moon for Shenson, after which the producer-director team went on to make A Hard Day’s Night (1964).

  • • •

  One summer day Peter took his new Paillard Bolex 16mm movie camera into an open field at the end of Totteridge Lane in North London and shot some footage of Spike acting up. Dick Lester added some stuff, and the film ended up getting nominated for an Oscar.

  The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film (1959) was a game played by buddies—a way of having fun for about £70. Graham Stark pitched in, along with his girlfriend, Audrey (who later became his wife). Joe McGrath did the titles. Bruce Lacey, a props manager at Granada Television, managed to come up with some props. Johnny Vyvyan and David Lodge appeared, as did the comic Mario Fabrizi.

  Milligan missed the second day of shooting, which occurred some time after the initial shoot. Bitterness resulted.

  Spike: “Most of the jokes in it are mine. I wrote the jokes, and I directed part of it. Then I had to go to Australia, and I left the film with Peter, and Peter gave it to Dick Lester to edit. And he did something I would never do. He put music on it in the background—what for I don’t know. Some kind of saxophone player. . . .”

  Lester insists on the other hand that “it was written in equal parts by Peter, Spike, and myself.”

  “We shot only one take for any gag,” Lester explains. “When we got the rushes, we took them to Peter’s house the next Sunday to edit in his study. The editing, which was really just topping and tailing, took two hours,” a process that occurred on a minimal editing machine perched on one of Peter’s drums in the attic of St. Fred’s. (“Topping and tailing” refers to the process of removing the first and last frames of a piece of film footage and leaving the usable center.) “Every gag we shot, every piece of film that we shot, is in the finished film. We showed it to our wives by projecting it onto the wall in the living room.

  “We never had any plan to distribute it when we made it,” Lester claims. “We were just friends who wanted to make a film to enjoy ourselves.” Nevertheless, the “just friends” were hungry, ambitious filmmakers. Peter quickly screened it for Herbert Kretzmer, the London television reviewer and fan of the Freds, who told him “You’ve got to show this around,” a supportive but redundant piece of advice, since that was what Peter was already doing.

  They transferred their 16mm home movie to 35mm, had it sepia-toned (“daguerreotype pigment made from condensed yak’s breath,” according to Sellers), and got it into the Edinburgh Film Festival. A scout from the San Francisco Film Festival saw it, and the next thing anyone knew it was nominated for an Academy Award.

  The category was Short Subject (Live Action). And since Peter was credited as the film’s producer, if The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film won the Oscar, the little man, naked and golden, would be his.

  They were up against a French effort, The Golden Fish, produced by Jacques Cousteau: An Asian boy watches an old, big-nosed man wearing a long black coat and beard, win a beautiful goldfish. It swiftly hides from the evil old man under a rock. After breaking the boy’s milk bottle, the old man gives him a coin. The boy places a bet on the goldfish and wins. The Jew winds up with a crummy minnow. Obviously more heartwarming than The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film, The Golden Fish won.

  • • •

  In America, Frank Sinatra had had a hit album in 1955 called Songs for Swingin’ Lovers. In England in 1959, Peter Sellers recorded one of his own: Songs for Swingin’ Sellers. Sinatra’s album cover featured a dancing couple beaming into each other’s eyes. Peter’s featured a tree on the trunk of which hangs a wanted poster with Peter’s mug on it; from a high limb hangs a corpse wearing cowboy boots and spurs.

  The album begins with a pseudo-Sinatra, an impersonation that even Peter Sellers could not do. Speaking as Sinatra might have been possible; duplicating that literally inimitable singing voice was not, so a crooner named Matt Monro was hired for the equivalent of about $50. Monro is credited on the album as Fred Flange.

  The actress-comedienne Irene Handl recorded several of the cuts with Peter, including one that skewers BBC radio talk shows. But the highlights are Peter’s sniveling, ham-ridden rendition of “My Old Dutch,” the song his mother forced him to perform onstage in white tie and tails at age two, a fact that might explain why the contemporary version has a distinctly nasty edge. Then there’s a certain Mr. Banerjee’s production of My Fair Lady:

  MR. BANERJEE: I am walking through the marketplace one day at Maharacheekee, which
is near Bombay, and I am walking by there, and I am saying to my friend, who is with me, “Look! There! Over there is a beautiful and untouchable girl!” And I am saying to her, “Come with me, my dear—I will make you touchable!”

  Mr. Banerjee then sings a tabla and cymbals–filled version of Lerner and Loewe’s charming, already-a-chestnut song, “Would That Not Be Lovely” (“warm face, warm hands, warm foot”).

  Songs for Swingin’ Sellers ends with “Peter Sellers Sings George Gershwin.” It goes like this: (chord) “George Ge-ersh-win!”

  • • •

  In September 1959, the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan traveled to Balmoral to ask that Parliament be dissolved. Elizabeth II, always a gracious hostess, entertained her guest by showing a movie—I’m All Right, Jack (1959), starring Peter Sellers.

  A social satire that reveals the one characteristic common to all the classes in Britain—strident self-interest—I’m All Right, Jack brought Peter such acclaim that the force of his performance successfully distorted the satire. As conceived, written, and directed, the film is a bitter attack on postwar British industrial paralysis, the class-based antagonism, particular to the 1950s, that the historian Arthur Marwick calls Britain’s “industrial cold war.” But as performed by Peter, Fred Kite, the martinet chief shop steward at the armament factory Missiles, Ltd., is so commanding a figure of contempt and blame that all the other characters’ corruption or daftness fades away, leaving I’m All Right, Jack to seem like a scathing denunciation of lazy, overpaid, communist-sympathizing trade unions.