Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (18 page)

About this time, Peter took a brief trip to North America, his first. His
journey to Toronto owed to his appearance on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s
Chrysler Show
. He was booked to do his
Richard III
bit; Graham
Stark accompanied him as the Duke of Clarence. For whatever reason, the
show itself terrified Peter.

As Stark describes the scene in his memoirs, “large, well-dressed,
cigar-toting Chrysler executives nervously prowled behind the cameras” all day
during rehearsals, and Peter became increasingly upset. Moments before
filming the scene, he looked at himself, all wigged and behumped, in his
dressing room mirror and said in the voice of Laurence Olivier, “Now is
the winter of an absolute bleeding disaster.” But as usual, when he actually
performed the scene before a laughing audience he was fine.

• • •

Peter continued to appear in film comedy shorts in the twenty-minute to
half-hour range. Even more than
Mukkinese Battle Horn
, these were steps
backward in terms of artistic adventure, but they provided exposure, they
occupied his mind, and they paid.

Dearth of a Salesman
, from A.B.-Pathé, was released in early summer.
Hector Dimwittie (Sellers) attempts to become the best salesman in Britain,
tries vainly to sell toilet supplies and moves quickly on to washing machines
and tape recorders, suffering all the while the gross indignity of a too-successful brother-in-law. “Peter Sellers works hard,”
Today’s Cinema
opined; “handy footage appeal”—in other words, there was enough
celluloid to keep the audience awake before the feature began.
Insomnia Is
Good for You
, running roughly the same length, was released shortly
thereafter. Typically for the businessman culture of the fifties, it featured
salesman Hector again, now unable to sleep. “A normal, lazy, married man,”
is how the film describes the newly successful Hector. His boss has demanded a meeting on Monday morning for reasons Hector can’t fathom.
Unable to stop spinning fantasies of his boss’s fierce temper, Hector fails
to sleep for sixty-two hours. Unlike the avant-garde comedy Peter did with
Spike or Michael Bentine, the material practically writes itself, to its detriment. Hector tries to remember cherished verse; he can’t. He worries
about his job; that he can do. And, in the end, the reason for the meeting?
His boss wants him to take a client out for a night on the town. “Falls very
flat,”
Monthly Film Bulletin
scoffed.

And there was
Cold Comfort
, from C. M. George Film Productions.
Today’s Cinema
’s review, in toto: “Gentle thumbnail lecture on how to catch
a cold and keep it. Radio star Peter Sellars (
sic
) illustrates it, mainly in
pajamas, and the homely domestic touches will strike a responsive chord
anywhere.”

This was all very well as far as it went, but it hadn’t gone nearly far
enough for Peter. Nightclubs, cabarets, radio, stage, television, big roles in
short films, short roles in big films, and one sizable role in a masterpiece.
Peter Sellers saw himself as stuck.

He had his toys, his cars, his friends, his wife, his son. He had his
mother.

What he felt was lack.

“ ‘Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice,”
as she finds herself growing to enormous proportions
after having simply followed the directions given to her.

She eats the cake, grows larger and larger,
and discovers that she is unhappier than ever.

Soon she is swimming in a pool of her own tears.

P
eter Sellers’s cinematic stock rose again in 1957, paradoxically in a film
called
The Smallest Show on Earth
(1957), in which he plays a loyal if
drunken film projectionist. The film’s director, Basil Dearden, had been
one of Ealing’s most prolific—twenty-one films in fifteen years, the most
commercially successful of which was the 1950 drama
The Blue Lamp
,
which caused a great stir thanks to its radical portrayal of British law enforcement. (For once the copper
wasn’t
a bungling boob.) But like Alexander Mackendrick, Dearden had had enough of Michael Balcon’s
regimentation at Ealing, and by 1957 he’d left the studio. He made
The
Smallest Show on Earth
, a surprisingly bitter comedy, for British Lion.

The story: Matt Spenser and his wife, Jean, inherit a movie theater in
the North. They’re a cute 1950s English couple—a pretty, sharp-chinned
blonde cheerfully married to a beefcake husband. She’s good-natured, a
great gal; he’s a little dim but not without a certain magnetism, a British
Tab Hunter with lovehandles and a slightly higher IQ. A screwball couple
updated to the 1950s, Matt and Jean are played by Bill Travers and Virginia
McKenna, who went on to star in the wildlife movie that inspired the
Oscar-winning song “Born Free” (1966).

They’re looped when they arrive at their destination, so when they see
the town’s theater, the Grand—a streamline-Moderne, quasi-fascist affair
with a uniformed doorman and a crowd of eager patrons—they naturally
assume it’s theirs. It’s not. Theirs is the decrepit Bijou, a Babylonian-Baroque-Revival heap under the train tracks.

Margaret Rutherford is the ticket seller, Mrs. Fazackalee, except that
she sells no tickets.

Peter Sellers, as the weary projectionist, Mr. Quill, drinks:

M
R.
Q
UILL:
(all but overcome with emotion) Well, uh, Mr. Spenser,
it’s like this ’ere. I would like you ’a know that I, well, I appreciate
what you said, and what you’re tryin’ ’a do. And believe me, I don’t
say this lightly—I am absolutely determined that I won’t take another drop! Not another drop I won’t touch, I won’t!

M
RS.
F
AZACKALEE;
I don’t think you may realize, Mr. Spenser, what a
big sacrifice this may mean for Mr. Quill.

Basil Dearden may enjoy a reputation in Britain for a certain liberalism
in his social problem dramas—after this comedy he made
Violent Playground
(juvenile delinquency, 1958),
Sapphire
(racism, 1959), and
Victim
(homosexuality, 1961)—but
The Smallest Show on Earth
bears a strikingly
antipopulist contempt for movie audiences. Patrons of the Bijou, after the
Spensers get it up and running, are comprised of a bunch of cruel rubes,
teenage makeout artists, and a whore. At the same time, Dearden isn’t above
sweetening his nasty streak with easy sentimentality when Sellers’s Mr. Quill
projects a silent melodrama to an audience of two—Mrs. Fazackalee and
Old Tom, the usher (Bernard Miles):

Mr. Quill (describing the movie to the Spensers): “Old film. Classic,
you might say. I’ve saved ’em for years, bits of ’em. We used to run ’em
like this in the old days, but, not for years we haven’t done it. Now it seems
like old times once more.”

But the look on Sellers’s face saves it, an expression of meditative
warmth. To his great credit as a dramatic actor-in-training, Peter learned
in
The Smallest Show on Earth
how to subvert maudlin dialogue by photogenically sustaining silence.

• • •

Peter cut and released his third single record, “Any Old Iron,” with “Boiled
Bananas and Carrots” on the flip side. A banjo-strumming, incomprehensibly fast-talking novelty song, “Any Old Iron,” made it onto the British
pop charts and stayed there for eleven weeks in the autumn. It even rose
briefly into the Top Twenty.

His reputation kept growing and, inexorably, he won his first costarring
role—as a faux-Scottish extortion victim in the black comedy
The Naked
Truth
(1957). Written by Michael Pertwee and directed by Mario Zampi
for the Rank Organization,
The Naked Truth
traces several prominent citizens’ attempts to avoid, stifle, and finally snuff the unctuous editor of a
Confidential
-like scandal sheet. Terry-Thomas, with whom Peter shared top
billing, is a philandering lord, about to be exposed. Peter is a thickly brogued
television star, beloved by his elderly audience and a slumlord on the side.

With a studio audience in place and the cameras rolling, an enthusiastic
announcer heralds his appearance: “The star of the show, the man who
made it all possible! The jack of all faces! The king of kindness! And the
ace of good hearts,
‘Wee Sonny’ MacGregor!
” Enter a dimple-grinning Peter,
literally jumping onstage in a roaring plaid kilt, a matching plaid banner
on his shoulder held in place by a pin, a pair of equally screaming kneesocks,
and an awfully frilly shirt. He’s the Liberace of Brigadoon:

W
EE
S
ONNY:
(Squeak of pleasure, gasp, grin and . . .) A great big welcome t’ all th’ old folk an’ the bonny young lad’s ’n lassi’s! I can’t
tell the difference, you know! (giggle).

Wee Sonny is about as Scottish as Peter himself, a fact Sellers reveals
by pushing his brogue just a step too far. The blackmailing editor (Dennis
Price) pays him a slimy visit and lets Wee Sonny know that while he doesn’t
much care about the fake accent, he’s fascinated by the chance to reveal to
the TV star’s aged fans the famous owner of a dismal old people’s ghetto
in Eastditch. Soon thereafter, a guest on Sonny’s show mentions that he
hails from Eastditch and begins to describe the wretched place in detail.
Wee Sonny loses control. It makes the papers. (“Sonny Faded Out—Shouts
at Aged Contestant. Overcome by heat, says producer.”) Sonny responds
with nominally more control by planning to kill the blackmailer under one
of the many identities the “jack of all faces” believes he’s able to assume: “
I
couldn’t. But someone else might! Any one of a thousand characters that I
can create and then destroy,
just like that!
” Wee Sonny gets carried away:
“Murder by a figment of my imagination!”

Sonny’s valet (Kenneth Griffith), tethered more tightly to reality, tells
him that the scheme is doomed to failure—not because it’s immoral, but
because Wee Sonny is a dreadful actor.

• • •

Terry-Thomas recalled in his memoirs that Peter, whom he had known
since the Grafton Arms days, had run into him one day early in his career
and began complaining about a part he’d been asked to play (one Terry-Thomas doesn’t identify): “The trouble about my role,” Peter told him, “is
that they wanted an actor with a Cockney accent. To me this is devastating
because I’ve spent five years trying to lose my Cockney twang.” “He had
lost it so successfully,” Terry-Thomas went on to write, that “by the time
we made
The Naked Truth
he confided to me one day, ‘I’ve come to the
part of the film which is scaring me to death. I’m supposed to use my own
accent.
And I haven’t got one
.’ ”

But Peter never had a Cockney twang to begin with; not everyone in
London grows up sounding like Michael Caine in
Alfie
(1966). And since
adolescence he could imitate any accent at all, practically at will. Although
Terry-Thomas had no reason to realize it, what Peter was actually confessing
was his sense of self—one that was depleted on the one hand and mutantly
reduplicating on the other, a multiple emptiness he was trying to fill by
turning it into a point of conversation.

Terry-Thomas did sense another kind of trouble brewing. Peter was no
longer the eager-to-please novice granted the chance to appear alongside
Alec Guinness and grateful just to be there. Now that he was sharing top
billing on
The Naked Truth
, Peter Sellers was getting a bit touchy.

He “made one of his ‘protests’ during shooting,” Terry-Thomas writes.
“He turned to Mario Zampi and shouted, ‘The way you are making this
film is ridiculous. You can’t direct! I know much more about the camera
than you do. I’ll give you one more take and then I’m off.’ Mario didn’t
reply. He stood there, shocked.”

Characteristically, others had an easier time of it. “I was pleased to meet
him,” Kenneth Griffith says. “Didn’t know much about him, but he was
very pleased to meet me. And from that day to this—with one exception—he was an unshiftable friend to me. And as he became very influential, he
was a great help to me.”

However, even a friend as loyal and loving as Griffith adds, “He was
notoriously treacherous. Of course, he was in a powerless mental and emotional state. He was a manic-depressive, and, well, yes—I have sympathy
for people. I understood Sellers. Very complicated, you know. He was pretty
well inarticulate as himself.”

• • •

The loyalty of Peter Sellers’s closest friends remains seemingly boundless.
They loved him. And they still do. “Anne was a very nice woman,” Griffith
reflected recently. “
Of course
he had lovely women. Anne was a nice woman,
and that’s what he was like to me.”