Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (15 page)

The highlight of this eminently inexpensive exercise is the preposterous
fifties Martian Girl costuming employed to outfit the outerspace invaders.
Complete with flapping antennae and bodices that resemble Jantzen swimsuits, they’re irresistible getups, especially when Peter ends up in one. His
is composed of a sequined, V-shaped top that looks like two gaudy beauty-contest sashes meeting in the middle. It’s paired with a short black skirt.
At one point Peter runs onto the makeshift sci-fi set in a little cardboard
spaceship powered, like Fred Flintstone’s car, with his feet. The rest of the
film is of no interest. Even at Peter Sellers’s bottom-rung position in British
cinema, the material was beneath him.

• • •

Peter’s omnidextrous voice was still his best asset, and one day it reached
the ears of the European production head of Columbia Pictures. Mike
Frankovich was in his car on the way to the airport and, to kill time, he
tuned into the BBC. At the end of the radio play that happened to be on,
Frankovich was stunned to hear the announcer say, “All the characters were
played by Peter Sellers.”

“We were doing
Fire Over Africa
with Maureen O’Hara at the time,”
Frankovich told the Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham some
years later. “I needed English and American voices of all classes. When I
returned to London, I called Peter and asked him to do the seven voices
and paid him £250 for the lot.” Disembodied movie voices were a fine
sideline. According to Peter, by the time he did the voices in
Fire Over
Africa
—and
he
always claimed that there were
seventeen
, not seven, and that
they were all individuated Spaniards—he’d performed four voices for the
sound track of John Huston’s
Beat the Devil
(1953), including that of the
film’s star, Humphrey Bogart, who’d suffered tooth damage in a car
accident and couldn’t provide some of his own dialogue. He also went on to
perform his chestnut Churchill in the opening moments of
The Man Who
Never Was
(1956), not to mention a drunk, a newsreel announcer, a taxi
driver, and a couple of crones later in the film.

Peter also performed a more bizarre audio cameo, uncredited, in a Joan
Collins South Seas epic called
Our Girl Friday
(1954). He’s the voice of a
shrieking cockatoo:

Sadie Patch (Collins) is on a ship somewhere in the Pacific. There’s a
shipwreck. Everybody piles into a lifeboat, but, in sight of shore, it sinks.
Sadie is washed onto the beach, and, with her back to the camera, she
removes her clothes to let them dry in the sun. She’s startled by a cockatoo
and turns around. In short, Joan Collins takes her shirt off and Peter Sellers
screams.

• • •

Just as he was assuming responsibility as the father of a newborn son, Peter’s
professional life was becoming a whirlwind.
The Goon Show
’s fifth series
began recording on the last Sunday in September and continued nearly
every week for the next twenty-five weeks. He did guest spots on the BBC
television show
And So to Bentley
(starring Dick Bentley). And on November 1, Peter performed for Elizabeth II. The
Royal Variety Show
was certainly
prestigious; it brought Peter into the company of the show’s headliners,
Noel Coward and Bob Hope.

Peter, Spike, and Harry continued to tour. Their acts couldn’t use the
words
Goon Show
in the title, since the BBC owned the copyright, but
audiences all over Britain knew precisely who they’d come to see and why.
Pleasing provincial audiences was even more of a strain, however, and not
only for Peter. In December 1954, Spike once again reached the end of his
rope, this time literally.

They were doing a mock-acrobatic act in Coventry. Billed as “Les Trois
Charleys,” Peter, Spike, and Harry wore gold headbands and flaming red
capes. The audience was already confused by the three comedians’ scattershot antics, but when Milligan appeared alone onstage and proceeded to
blow a series of off-key trumpet solos, the audience rebelled with catcalls.
Spike responded by clomping down to the edge of the stage and shouting,
“You hate me, don’t you?!” The audience roared back its unanimous affirmation. And with that they Coventrated him.

Spike ran to his dressing room and locked himself in. Harry and Peter,
knowing Spike well, understood that he might well be killing himself. They
broke down the door and found Spike putting the noose around his neck.

For Peter, this incident was the last straw in an ugly pile that had been
growing in size since he was three, and so he decided to quit doing music
hall shows. It wasn’t just Spike’s suicidal state that convinced him. These
tours were simply too grueling, too awful and demeaning. But he still had
a contractual obligation in Coventry to fulfill, and thus he had a chance to
effect vengeance.

The morning after Spike’s episode—they saved him, he continued writing and acting, somebody finally invented Lithium, and decades later he
took it—Peter bought one of the
Goon Show
conductor’s records (
Wally
Stott’s Christmas Melodies
) along with a record player, and that afternoon,
at a reduced-price matinee for an elderly crowd, he appeared onstage clad
in an oversized leopardskin leotard. He put the record on the record player,
stood there, and played three songs straight through, not saying a word. At
the end of each song, he led the audience in a round of hearty applause
and then he left the stage.

Strangely, the audience appreciated the joke and applauded happily
when Peter’s essentially Dadaist routine concluded. The theater management was not nearly as entertained, however, and a furious manager challenged Peter on the basis of the “as known” clause. He had “performed”—no one disputed that—but not “as known.”

“I’m going into films,” the fed up comedian told his agent. “Not as a
sideline, but all the way. This life is too bloody impossible. It’ll kill me if
I don’t get out now.”

P
eter Sellers was safely back in London in late December 1954, appearing
at the Palladium in a stylish riff on Mother Goose. Written by Phil
Park and Eric Sykes, the comedy was a top-notch production—the antithesis of “Les Trois Charleys,” with its headbands and capes and trumpets.
The director was Val Parnell, a fixture of West End theater, and in fact,
the production was officially billed as
Val Parnell’s Seventh Magnificent
Christmas Pantomime, “Mother Goose.”
Erté codesigned the costumes.
There was a Goose, a Vulture, a Bailiff, and a Policeman. There was a
Sammy, a Donald, and the Pauline Grant Ballet. There was an evil Squire,
too; that was Peter.

The actor-comedian Max Bygraves, who played Sammy, reports that
Sellers couldn’t help but depart from the script and improvise throughout
the show’s run. On one particular night, Bygraves well recalls, the evil
Squire departed from the family-safe script, slipped without warning into
Groucho Marx, and blurted, “Lady Dicker, that’s ridoculous!”

Mother Goose—grumpy Richard Hearne in drag—was not amused by
Peter’s filthy joke, and immediately after the curtain fell she gave the management a piece of her fairy-tale mind. When the sympathetic Bygraves
showed up at Peter’s dressing room the next day, he found Peter in tears.
Val Parnell himself had scolded the errant Peter, telling him that if he
continued veering so luridly off script he’d never work again.

This was a relatively empty threat, since Parnell didn’t control British
radio, television, or film. But Peter seems thereafter to have stuck to the
dialogue he’d originally been given—only for the duration of
Mother Goose
,
of course, for by the end of March 1955, when the show closed (after 156
performances, usually two a day), he was once again free to exercise his
dazzling improvisational skills.

But there was yet another new constraint. In late December 1954,
toward the end of the
Goon Show
episode called “Ye Bandit of Sherwood
Forest,” Maid Marian (Charlotte Mitchell, one of the rare female guests)
suddenly squealed, “Oh! There’s someone crawling under the table! What
are you doing under there, sir?”

“I’m looking for a telegram,” a familiar politician’s voice intoned. The
studio audience thundered its approval, and from that moment forward
Peter Sellers was officially forbidden to impersonate Winston Churchill on
the British Broadcasting Corporation’s airwaves.

• • •

In February 1955, Peter and Anne bought their first house, a mock-Tudor
in Muswell Hill, a neighborhood just north of Highgate. North London
was still his orbit, though he was moving progressively farther away from
the center of town. But the more significant turning point that year occurred on film. After appearing in the small role of a police constable in
John and Julie
(1955; two cheeping children make their way to London to
see the coronation of Elizabeth II), Peter made his first great movie,
The
Ladykillers
(1955), for his first great director, Alexander Mackendrick, who
cast him in support of the first great star Peter was able to study at close
range.

“I first worked with him on
The Ladykillers
,” Sir Alec Guinness recalled
in one of his last interviews. “He was not difficult at all—certainly not in
those days. He was cast by Sandy Mackendrick, who knew him already.
He was always very courteous to me; we got on very well. I mostly remember him having some kind of recording machine into which he would do
imitations of people.”

Long before his stellar appearances in international blockbusters—
The
Bridge on the River Kwai
(1957),
Lawrence of Arabia
(1962),
Doctor Zhivago
(1965),
Star Wars
(1977),
The Empire Strikes Back
(1980),
Return of the
Jedi
(1983),
A Passage to India
(1984)—Alec Guinness was a titan of British
theater and cinema, and Peter admired him immensely. Guinness subsumed
himself to an unparalleled degree into the roles he played. He was an apparently blank screen onto which he projected dazzlingly variegated characters. In the single year of 1951 Guinness did remarkable star turns in
both
Oliver Twist
, as an especially vicious hook-nosed Fagin, and
The
Lavender Hill Mob
, as the bland bank employee who casually steals £1
million. But it was in the great Ealing Studios comedy
Kind Hearts and
Coronets
(1949) that Guinness gave his showiest chameleonic
performance—that of all eight members of the titled d’Ascoyne family who are
systematically bumped off by a distant relative, the ninth in line for the
dukedom: Ascoyne d’Ascoyne, Henry d’Ascoyne, Canon d’Ascoyne, Admiral d’Ascoyne, General d’Ascoyne, Lady Agatha d’Ascoyne. . . .

The titan invited the nervous novice to lunch before
The Ladykillers
began filming in the summer of 1955. Sir Alec was not simply being kind
when he spoke of the Peter Sellers he knew then. They
did
get along well
at the time. After all, they had something in common. As Peter told Max
Geldray afterward, “You cannot believe how quiet this man is. He’s shy!
He’s got a switch inside. He turns it on, and another person pops up.”

The Ladykillers
was the Ealing Studio’s last great comedy, a film both
of the studio and
against
the studio. Ealing’s longtime head, Michael Balcon, had envisioned and created a dogmatically British cinema—films that
were homegrown, popular, and inconceivable in any other national film
industry. Under Balcon’s supervision, the best Ealing directors—Mackendrick among them—developed a style so consistent that by the mid-1950s
it had become formulaic: An identifiably British setting (a city block in
London, an island in the Hebrides, a manor house in the country) turns
out to be populated by crazed eccentrics, or hurled into chaos by some
fantastic event, or both. Surface realism meets absurdity—a biting comment
on the kingdom.

But with
The Ladykillers
, Mackendrick set out to satirize not only British society but Ealing’s own internal culture as well. In
The Ladykillers
, the
familiar British setting represented the very studio in which Mackendrick
worked: Mackendrick himself was the chief eccentric, who, in this case, was
so defeated by Balcon’s enforced conventionality that he left Ealing after
finishing the film.

The Ladykillers
concerns an elderly, Victorian-throwback widow, Mrs.
Wilberforce (Katie Johnson). She seems sweet enough at first glance as she
walks down a residential London street, but at the steps of a police station
she looks into a baby carriage and causes the baby to shriek in terror. The
infant’s wail is predictive. In the course of the comedy Mrs. Wilberforce
reveals herself to be so profoundly irritating that garroting her, knifing her,
and shooting her become increasingly desirable outcomes in the minds of
both characters and audiences alike.

She takes in a lodger, Professor Marcus (Guinness, wearing hideous ratlike teeth), who uses his upstairs rooms to plan a heist with four henchmen:
a jovial, well-spoken major (Cecil Parker), a dopey, sentimental boxer called
One-Round (Danny Green), a frightening thug dressed all in black
(Herbert Lom), and a Teddy Boy named Harry (Peter). (The British historian
Arthur Marwick defines the Teddy Boy as “the first nationally recognized
figure representative of youth’s detachment from the rest of society and
representative of the fact that for the first time working-class youth could
take the initiative.” The name comes from the Edwardian-style suits the
boys wore as a kind of uniform; they got the idea from upper-class spivs of
the late 1940s.) The thieves tell Mrs. Wilberforce that they are members
of an amateur string quintet and incessantly play a single piece—Boccherini’s String Quintet in E Major—on a record player to disguise their criminal planning sessions.