Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  In London, however, the film was a smash. I’m All Right, Jack ran for seventeen weeks at Studio One, and it was an art-house hit in New York as well, breaking all house records at the Guild Theater, where it ran for over four months. The Observer’s film critic declared in her end-of-year wrap-up that “Peter Sellers’s performance in I’m All Right, Jack is the best piece of acting in any British picture.” The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (which was then called the Society of Film and Television Arts) agreed. When it named its nominees for Best British Actor, among them were Laurence Olivier (for The Devil’s Disciple) and Richard Burton (for Look Back in Anger).

  Peter won.

  NINE

  A grayed, haunted Peter wanders toward the camera in the opening sequence of The Battle of the Sexes (1959). “Every war produces its hero”—the narrator announces—“the man with that little extra something that other men haven’t got. The superman.”

  When Peter learned that the writer-producer Monja Danischewsky had adapted James Thurber’s satirical short story “The Catbird Seat,” transposing the action across the Atlantic to Scotland, he told Danischewsky that he wanted to play the lead—the mild-mannered clerk- turned- would- be- killer. The Battle of the Sexes was written, cast, and filmed before I’m All Right, Jack’s blockbuster release made Peter a bona-fide movie star, and as a consequence Sellers’s casting wasn’t as easy as one might assume in retrospect. According to Danischewsky, “it was a fight at that time to get the finance people to agree that he was a big enough name for the budget.” Peter’s financial connections helped; Danischewsky credited Sellers for being “a tower of practical help to me as a producer, for he found for me two ‘angels’ for the end money.” (Danischewsky doesn’t specify the angelic capitalists’ identities.)

  Danischewsky found Peter to be a dependable actor, qualifying his praise with a few sympathetic, sensible observations: “He’s really an absolute sweetie to work with. Terribly sensitive. An easily hurt man—but desperately. Once he knows you’re on his side he’ll do anything on earth for you.”

  Filmed on location in Edinburgh and at the Beaconsfield studios in London, The Battle of the Sexes concerns the intrusion of heartless modernity and grotesque feminism into the staid House of Macpherson, makers of fine Scottish woolens. Peter is Mr. Martin, a teetotaling, nonsmoking clerk of indeterminate age. Sellers plays him purposefully vaguely. With his air of resilient beatenness, Mr. Martin could be anywhere from forty to seventy-five. Upon the death of Old Macpherson, the company falls into the inept hands of the son—Robert Morley in a Lane Bryant kilt. The British-educated (and therefore, as his dying father says, “soft”) heir, true to form, swiftly hires a lady efficiency expert, a brassy American divorcee (Constance Cummings), who wreaks havoc with new time clocks, metal filing cabinets, and a confident insistence that the House of Macpherson forgo sheep for synthetics. Mrs. Barrows speaks in italics: “And as for those weavers, well, I mean they can just draw their pensions and take to their caves, that’s how much you need them.” Mr. Martin concludes that he must murder her.

  It’s a remarkable performance on Peter’s part, because he lets his audience notice, but only barely, Mr. Martin’s transformation from obedient functionary to noble killer: A well-timed dart of the eyes when Mrs. Barrows speaks. A touch of sarcasm, mild almost to the point of imperceptibility. (Mrs. Barrows demands a time and motion survey; Mr. Martin responds: “We’ve plenty of time here, Mrs. Barrows, but there’s not a great deal of motion.”) The film would play better today if it weren’t for the gleaming, distracting misogyny of the late 1950s, of which poor Constance Cummings is the shrill vehicle.

  Mr. Martin’s abortive murder of Mrs. Barrows in her kitchen, said to be mainly improvised while shooting, is one of Peter Sellers’s classic comedy sequences: the hand on the butcher knife, the knife hesitatingly put back in the drawer, the decisive reaching into the drawer when Mrs. Barrows turns her back, the ensuing attempt to stab her to death with a wire whisk. But in comparison to the rest of the film, the key sequence comes off as strangely canned. Because it’s the climactic set piece, the laughs depend not only on Sellers’s having prepared the ground in all of his previous scenes but also on the director’s sense of timing. Peter’s performance is superb throughout; Charles Crichton’s direction isn’t quite up to the task in the key sequence. Still, Peter’s plunging the knife into Mrs. Barrows’s wooden door strikes a rivetingly autobiographical note. Luckily for Peter, contemporary audiences had no way of knowing it.

  • • •

  His increasing fame brought him into stellar company—and a small controversy. In early January, the British Film Institute set up a lecture series to be held at the National Film Theatre. The proposed guest speakers were an unusual trio: Ivor Montagu, the filmmaker, theorist, associate of both Sergei Eisenstein and Alfred Hitchcock, and winner of the Lenin Peace Prize of 1959; Peter Sellers, the movie star; and Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s in-house director, the cinema’s most talented fascist.

  Montagu, who hadn’t won the Lenin Prize for nothing, fired off a letter denouncing Riefenstahl. Sellers fired off one of his own denouncing Montagu for denouncing Riefenstahl. The BFI tacitly denounced Riefenstahl by rescinding its own invitation to her, though it used parts of Sellers’s letter to Montagu in its press release announcing the denouncing: “Miss Riefenstahl has presumably been invited to lecture because of her outstanding talents as a filmmaker,” Peter had written. “Alongside her contributions to the art of filmmaking, our efforts, if I may say so, Mr. Montagu, appear very puny indeed.”

  At the end of the month was a more notable milestone. On Thursday, January 28, 1960, nine years’ and ten series’ worth of Goon Shows drew to a close. The series was still immensely popular, but it had played itself out, and, for the time being, at least, it was time for the threesome to say farewell to one another. In “The Last Smoking Seagoon,” the worn and torn but still farcical Milligan, Secombe, and Sellers gamely worked their way through one of Spike’s lesser works, the tale of Nicotine Neddie’s attempt to quit smoking. Milligan and Secombe were famous, but Sellers was now a flashy star, a fact acknowledged in the final show:

  (Sound of screeching limousine)

  SECOMBE: Heavens! A ninety-five-foot-long motor car covered in mink! It must be Peter Sellers!

  SELLERS: No, he hasn’t heard of this one yet.

  Crun and Min, Grytpype-Thynne and Moriarty, Bloodnok—Peter’s key antiheroic characters all turned up for the last hurrah, along with an unnamed Hindu man who carries on an incomprehensible shipboard conversation with Eccles. The saga ends with Ned blowing himself up while smoking a ninety-foot-long cigarette, landing in the hospital, and running off screaming amid the unscripted laughter of his fellow Goons. “Yes, that was the last Goon Show,” the particularly weary-sounding announcer Wallace Greenslade says in the final seconds of the program. “Bye, now.”

  • • •

  Life at Chipperfield, as with Peter’s life as a whole, was alternately social and amusing, isolated and strange. Given the immensity of the place, Peter was now able to vanish completely into his photographic and filmmaking hideout, Peter’s answer to a Cold War bomb shelter. According to Anne, he “actually had a whole wing with a darkroom and a little cinema.” Michael was carted off daily to whatever private school Peter had installed him in—he himself attributes the decisions to his father—and nannies took care of Sarah. Peter was often in London filming, or recording, or broadcasting. Anne was increasingly secluded.

  At the same time, Peter loved having his friends come for an afternoon, or evening, or two, or three. He was at heart much more comfortable being a friend than a husband and father. David Lodge was such a frequent guest that he kept a stash of supplies at Chipperfield: “There was a toothbrush and pajamas there all the time, and a razor. I was unmarried and spent most of my time there when I wasn’t working.” Max Geldray was also a regular: “He used to call me a lot—very often in my voice. He would ask me t
o come over and play. This was one of the phrases that he used—‘Will you come over and play?’ Like two kids—‘come and play.’ It meant he had gotten two tape recorders. He would borrow them from stores, or he would buy them, and he would give them back, and he would buy something different. It meant photography, different cameras, not liking this camera and going to get another one. It meant a three- or four-day weekend.”

  Peter’s mood-driven sociability was genuine. He was intensely loyal to his friends, and he loved having them around, but his affability was becoming faintly spiced with a sense of lordliness that crept into his personality to go along with the real estate. He was telling the press that he wanted to maintain a certain distance from his new neighbors: “As a matter of fact, I’m trying to build a legend that I’m a mad actor who rides a black mare across the fields at night with a hook on my hand. Then maybe they’ll leave me alone.” But David Lodge describes a rather different Peter: “Being the squire of Chipperfield, he behaved like the squire of Chipperfield, certainly when he was in front of the people of the village.”

  Picture a piece of home movie footage of a snowball fight between Anne, Peter, David, and the two kids. It’s a domestic scene that could have been played out in any family’s backyard in wintertime. As recorded on celluloid, Chipperfield on that day looks like a landscape of fun, family, and friendship. The subjects, running and laughing, dodge icy cannonfire and pitch return volleys, all in good nature. Like snapshots, home movies catch a certain truth. But Anne, in a few words, hits at a deeper fact about life at the manor—something the amateur director wasn’t able to capture in his images: “I never knew what we were doing there. I’m not sure that Peter ever knew what we were doing there either.”

  • • •

  By 1960, the British and American press were industriously setting up a competition of the sort no one can possibly win:

  “There have been rumors (unsubstantiated) that he wants to do an Alec Guinness.”

  “He may even be crowding his idol, Sir Alec Guinness, with his mixed bag of characterizations and multiple roles.”

  “There’s no doubt about it—Alec Guinness stands in clear peril of losing his eminent position as Britain’s most distinguished film comedian.”

  Peter himself played it up: “I work from the voice inward—probably from being in radio—instead of going for the physical characteristics first. Then I figure out what they’re going to look like. Guinness, who of course is wonderful, works from the body outward and plans every movement in advance. I play a scene the way I feel it.” And: “Alec likes to use technique to work out just what he will do before he starts. I use technique too but I have to get into the part—feel it from the inside, you know. I think that’s why his characters sometimes seem cool, if not cold.”

  It was in this context that Peter ignored the advice of his close friends and made the decision to appear as a ruthless criminal mastermind in John Guillermin’s Brit noir, Never Let Go (1960). Like Guinness, he’d already played multiple characters in the same film, and he could do practically any voice he wished, but he was remaining, after all, just a comedy star, albeit the greatest in the United Kingdom. As such he considered his art “puny.” Heavy drama beckoned. Never Let Go was not going to be funny on any level, and Peter’s character—the car-thieving, girlfriend-slapping, murderous Lionel Meadows—appealed to his sense of challenge. He would actually be doing the Guinness if the now-retired Major Bloodnok and Bluebottle turned himself into an unremittingly vicious thug.

  Shooting began at Beaconsfield in late November 1959. The story is bleak and simple: A failing salesman (Richard Todd) leaves his office one day to find that his car is stolen. His life unravels, and his obsession with finding the car consumes him. He traces the theft first to the young punk who actually pinched it (the heartthrob Adam Faith), and then to Lionel Meadows (Peter) and his chippie girlfriend, Jackie, played by the nubile Carol White.

  According to White, Peter started out as an avuncular figure: “When I stepped in front of the cameras at Beaconsfield, my self-confidence deserted me. Peter Sellers saw me wobbling like a jelly and quickly came to the rescue. He cracked jokes and went into his ‘Ying tong iddle I po’ routine, my moment of anxiety passed, and we were soon whistling through the takes.” White also reports that her mother and Peter quickly developed a friendship. Their discussion centering on dieting techniques, Peter was soon wearing pink plastic sweat bags under his clothes, convinced that pounds of fat were melting away every day.

  His attitude toward Carol White shifted as shooting progressed. It remained warmly protective, but the tone darkened. Everyone involved with Never Let Go knew that the two hottest youths in the cast, White and Faith, were privately conducting themselves in the manner expected of hot youths, and Peter grew jealous—so much so that when he had to slap White’s face in one scene he really whapped her hard with his palm. For whatever reason, the director, John Guillermin, ordered about a dozen takes of the action.

  Characteristically, Peter soon appeared, contrite and amorous, at the door of White’s dressing room. Yes, he confessed, he had indeed become insanely jealous of Adam Faith. “I was sleeping with Adam,” White observes in her memoirs, “and there was superstar Peter Sellers telling me that I filled his every dream.” White decided, as she puts it, to play “one man off against the other.”

  The two of them were rehearsing one day in Peter’s dressing room—a noirishly threatening bedroom scene, as it happened. But in the dressing room it was romantic comedy, Sellers-style: Peter began his conquest by doing a series of Goon voices and followed through by delivering all of his gangster lines in the voice of an Italian gigolo. The method worked, though there was some assistance from two factors beyond Peter’s control: “He had helped me through my brief spell of insecurity and I felt I owed him something.” Also, Carol White adds, “I liked the fact that most men wanted to make love to me and I had gotten over being raped.”

  By the time they filmed their scene, in which Meadows menaces Jackie into bed, they’d had each other offscreen as well, and they continued to do so over the next few weeks of shooting.

  The unusually active Carol then proceeded to launch an affair with the other leading man, Richard Todd. Never having given up Adam Faith during her affair with Peter, she was quite the star of the offscreen show: “During the last two weeks of shooting Never Let Go I enjoyed my triangle of lovers. When filming was over, Peter Sellers returned to his wife and our secret adventure was over.”

  “The fact that her mother was on the set a lot I always found very suspicious,” John Guillermin observes. “When the mother’s there it doesn’t mean that the daughter’s innocent. It means the opposite.”

  • • •

  “He was very loyal to his friends from the radio days,” says John Guillermin. That’s how David Lodge ended up playing Lionel Meadows’s henchman in Never Let Go. “Peter introduced me to David, and we cast him.” (Lodge went on to marry Guillermin’s sister, Lyn.) “We had a very funny scene on that film,” Guillermin declares unexpectedly, given Never Let Go’s utter lack of comedy. “Peter and David had a history of inside jokes, mostly on Peter’s side. He had an absolutely manic sense of humor—a wonderful, crazy humor that suddenly exploded, and he’d be helpless with laughter. So there was a line of David’s—it was a very dramatic moment, they’re in the garage, and David runs in and says, ‘The police are outside!’ For some reason, this line absolutely dissolved Peter. Every time, David ran in, full of terror, and said it, and Peter exploded with laughter. We got one take in—the laughter started about a second after the last mod [audio signal], and we managed to print it.”

  There was mirth during the shooting, but none during the accounting after the film’s release. Despite Sellers’s enormous popularity at the time, Never Let Go was neither a commercial nor critical success. “Now that this so unnecessary film has been made,” wrote the reviewer for the New York Times, “will Mr. Sellers please go and do something
precisely the opposite?” Says Guillermin, “Box-office-wise it didn’t do anything like his comedies, so for him it wasn’t lucrative.” Peter never played a thoroughly unsympathetic character again.

  Peter’s rendition of a gangster is rather successful nevertheless. Lionel Meadows gave him a chance to channel some real rage, especially during the scene in which he slams Adam Faith’s hand in a desk drawer. Perhaps it’s the knowledge of Peter’s more famous roles that gets in the way, but one gets the slightest sense that he’s impersonating a movie thug rather than being the thug in the movie, a tendency the camera can’t help but register. Drawing his lips back in an intimidating, mirthless grin, and speaking in a nasal twang derived from old Jimmy Cagney movies, Peter seems just a little bit adrift as he tries to be despicable. It’s as though he simply didn’t have it in him to be so unbendingly cruel onscreen.

  According to Michael Sellers, however, Peter immersed himself in Never Let Go so thoroughly during the production that he returned to Chipperfield every night as Lionel Meadows, savagery and all. Peter acknowledged that his inability to shake his adoptive thug persona was hard on Anne: “I was sort of edgy with her while we made that film.” Michael goes a few steps further: “He was abusive and violent and we became terrified of him.”

  One can hardly fail to note that bringing Lionel Meadows home with him was not wholly a Method-acting technique on Peter’s part, since he’d clearly been able to break character whenever he and Carol White were alone together in one of their dressing rooms. According to Guillermin, Peter’s Method didn’t even extend to the set, where it belonged. The director does add, however, that “he was unto himself quite a bit. Peter wasn’t that relaxed, as it were.”