Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (20 page)

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 he 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.

“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.”

W
alter 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.