Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (22 page)

• • •

I’m All Right, Jack
was not Peter’s first picture with the Boultings. In 1958,
he’d filmed a supporting role—Terry-Thomas was the lead—in a weak
foreign-policy satire called
Carlton-Browne of the F.O.
(1959), though that
film had not yet been released when
I’m All Right, Jack
began shooting in
January. Terry-Thomas plays the title character, the bungling head of an
obscure subsection of the Foreign Office. He’s sent to the remote and
ridiculous island nation of Gaillardia, a former colony granted the privileges
of self-government fifty years before, but nobody in either Britain or Gaillardia has yet been informed of the decision. Peter plays the slimy Amphibulos, who sounds disconcertingly like a Greek waiter.

Gaillardia is a mix of burro-driven carts, unbearable heat, assassinations,
and a Baroque palace enjoyed by its handsome, young, British-educated,
British-looking king (fine-featured Ian Bannen under brownish makeup).
The rest of Gaillardia is treated to fairly harsh satire, though the conquering
Britons are scarcely more competent. Peter, clad in a rumpled, ever-damp,
and ill-fitting white cotton suit, and wearing boot-black hair and a matching
droopy mustache, provides a precise blend of obsequiousness and contamination as the king’s greasy-palmed minister. His best moment in the film
is a simple one: Conferring on the Gaillardian crisis on a beach with
Carlton-Browne while being fanned and rubbed by two nubile native girls,
Amphibulos, who has been lying on his back, rolls himself over (with some
labor) and says, gesturing toward a nipple, “Over heeere, dar-leeng.”

According to Roy Boulting,
I’m All Right, Jack
’s Fred Kite was based
on the Electricians Trades Union shop steward at another studio: “He was
a very funny little man—unintentionally funny, but he was funny.” Peter,
who took the Boultings’ word for it that his role would certainly pull laughs
if performed realistically, received confirmation when the Shepperton Studios Works Committee, which represented the various filmmaking trade
unions, showed up on the set to watch the filming of one of Peter’s earliest
scenes. They recognized Fred Kite’s type immediately and, according to
Roy Boulting, reacted all too well during a red-light-flashing, camera-rolling
take: “They burst into laughter, which they couldn’t contain. I saw the
change in Peter’s face. He hadn’t thought it was funny himself, but now
he knew. It
was
funny.” Thanks to Peter’s skill, Fred Kite was also poignant.
As the critic Raymond Durgnat has noted, “There is something sadly sympathetic about his pig-headed notions.” Maxine Ventham, who chairs the
lively Peter Sellers Appreciation Society (Spike Milligan, patron; David
Lodge, president; HRH the Prince of Wales, honorary member) notes that
this “sadly sympathetic” effect derives mainly from Peter’s sensitive, vulnerable eyes: “Fred Kite is betrayed by them,” Ventham rightly declares.

Spike Milligan, of course, took a contrarian view of the film’s politics:
“He was heavily pressurized by the Boultings, through the writing, to become this character, because the Boultings were violently against trade unions. And they used this as the spearhead of their attack: Peter Sellers
representing something that they hated. He ended up making a very great
film for them.”

The sarcastic title
I’m All Right, Jack
refers to the Boultings’ original
satirical target, the money-grubbing, every-class-for-itself attitude the filmmakers ascribe to all of England in the 1950s. (As David Tomlinson’s
Lieutenant Fairweather explains to the admiral in
Up the Creek
, “To put it
in the Queen’s English, ‘You scratch my back, and we’ll scratch yours,
Jack.’ ”) The film begins with a pre-credits sequence. Sir John Kennaway,
an old white-haired man, sleeps peacefully in a deserted clubroom. The
camera tracks slowly forward. A servant appears and informs Sir John that
the Germans have surrendered—that World War II is over at last. Crowds
are shouting in triumph outside the window; Sir John barely registers the
news. “Look hard,” a bland voice over intones, “for this is the last we shall
see of Sir John,” who rises from his club chair and totters out of the room—“a solid block in an edifice of what seems to be an ordered and stable society.
There he goes, on his way out.” There is another reason to look hard at Sir
John. He’s Peter, all but hidden under bleached hair and a prosthetic nose.

After a rock-and-roll credits sequence featuring the title song, we meet
the protagonist of
I’m All Right, Jack
—Stanley Windrush (Ian Carmichael),
Sir John’s well-named symbolic heir, a man whose class would have entitled
him to the same clubby, do-nothing life had a catastrophic world war not
provided the working class with some political muscle. Stanley’s father has
blithely withdrawn to a nudist camp. Stanley, though, feels the need to
earn a living. Too bad he’s incompetent at everything but reading the
Times
.
Interviews and training programs at a variety of industries (soap, candy,
corsets) having failed miserably, Stanley lands at Missiles, Ltd. It’s a setup:
Stanley’s aristocratic Uncle Bertie (Dennis Price), in collusion with the
equally corrupt but bourgeois-born Sidney De Vere Cox (Richard Attenborough), knowingly sends the idiotic Stanley into Bertie’s munitions factory in order to muck everything up. The reason: so that Missiles, Ltd.,
won’t be able to fulfill its new Arab-contracted munitions order, thereby
forcing the contract to go—at a higher price, naturally—to Cox’s own
company, of which Bertie, of course, is a hidden partner.

With his sparkling smile and utter ineptitude, Stanley is perfect for the
job. He instantly arouses the workers’ suspicions, and they call in Fred Kite,
the shop steward. Kite marches into the office of Major Hitchcock
(Terry-Thomas), the personnel manager, and in a complicated, dead-on accent
Peter hadn’t employed before—a Cockney base overlaid with semieducated
pretension and its carry-along insecurity—Kite demands that Stanley be
sacked: “In permi’in’ him to drive one of them trucks, I would say the
management is willfully je-ro-podizing the safety of its employees!” Hitchcock quickly agrees, but when he mentions that Stanley has been sent into
the factory by the Labor Exchange, Kite, who sees himself as the embodiment of labor, instantly demands that Stanley
not
be sacked: “We do not—
and cannot!—accept the principle that incompetence justifies dismissal.
That is victim-I-zation!”

Kite takes Stanley in as his lodger and suggests that he read some Lenin.
“I see from your particulars,” he tells his perplexed guest, “you was at college
in Oxford. I was up there meself. I was at the Baliol summer school in
1946. Very good toast and preserves they give you at tea time, as you
probably know.” Kite’s English-heimish wife (the marvelous Irene Handl),
and his voluptuous daughter, Cynthia (Liz Fraser), welcome him with open
arms—particularly Cynthia. She quickly whisks poor Stanley away to a
necking session in a garbage dump.

By the end, Stanley has succeeded in driving all of British industry to
its knees by causing a national labor strike. He becomes a national hero,
briefly, and eventually exposes the various scam artists on a televised debate
led by Malcolm Muggeridge (playing himself), only to find that the keystones of British power are not so easily dislodged. Told by a judge to
acknowledge his own mental illness, Stanley withdraws to the nudist camp.

The film’s editor, Anthony Harvey, believes that Peter’s performance
in
I’m All Right, Jack
is due in large measure to his trust in John Boulting,
who “had the most wonderful rapport with Peter, I think, of all the directors” for whom Harvey witnessed Peter performing. (This is quite a claim,
for Harvey went on to edit
Lolita
and
Dr. Strangelove
, among other films.)

Ian Carmichael, who plays Stanley, found Peter both easy to work with
and companionable in their off-hours. “During
I’m All Right, Jack
he
seemed to get on terribly well with everybody. He was a very amusing man.
He could be amusing sitting in his chair in the studio waiting for takes. He
was
always
amusing. I like peace and quiet when I’m working; I don’t like
to be distracted by a lot of loose gossip. But Peter was very light and frothy
with everybody all the time. Of course it all changed later.

“He was a zany sort of chap in many ways. He would have great fun
with a tape recorder, and he had great fun in sort of recording things and
conversations with you. Also, he played the ukulele, singing songs into his
microphone and then playing them back at different speeds. That gave him
enormous pleasure.

“He had a cinema in the attic in his house, where he had a 16mm
projector,” Carmichael recalls. “And a couple of times he said, ‘Come and
have a meal on Saturday night and see a film. What would you like to see?’ ”

(Anne has a rather different memory of St. Fred’s: “a house with
cameras, lights, and lots and lots of cable all over the place. And drawers and
cupboards full of cable, and plugs and lamps, and everything.”)

Carmichael continues: “He had a set of drums there, too. [But] his
main fixation really was motor cars. He used to change his cars about as
often as he changed his socks.” Still, Peter liked to give others gifts as well
as himself. “He was very generous with his money,” Carmichael points out.
“His makeup man was Stuart Freeborn, and as the picture was coming to
an end, he bought him a real top-of-the-range tape recorder with huge
speakers and everything—the Rolls Royce of tape recorders.”

There was some tension involving Terry-Thomas, however: “Peter
hated a lot of takes. I mean, he would [want to] print the first and second
take if possible and not go on. He thought that by every take his performance diminished. He had a bit of a problem with Terry-Thomas because
Terry had a problem with lines. I’d been with Terry when he’d gone
through thirty and thirty-five takes.” With Carmichael’s comments in mind
one can’t help but notice that Anthony Harvey has edited Peter and Terry’s
first scene together in such a way that the two actors are mostly in separate
shots, and that when they do appear onscreen together, Terry is for the
most part sitting behind his desk listening to Peter rather than delivering
any lines himself. Those moments are handled in medium shot from a
different angle.

Liz Fraser, who played Kite’s daughter, had troubles of a different sort:
“I do remember some scenes—and I don’t mean film scenes—that he and
I had, and which I tried to extricate myself from. In retrospect he wasn’t
so much a nasty man as a childish one.”

• • •

At home during the holiday season each year, Peter and Anne set up a
classic Christmas negativity scene. At 1
P
.
M
. on Christmas Day, a full holiday luncheon was served to the kids and Anne’s parents, who, according
to Michael, “would have to vacate the house” by 5
P
.
M
., at which time Peg
and Bill arrived for an equally elaborate Christmas dinner. Peg, by this
point, was smoking two packs a day and drinking heavily, even to the point
of hiding fifths of gin under the mattress. Whenever she greeted Michael
and Sarah, she kissed and hugged them both. The trouble was, these fierce
displays of grandmotherly love often lasted for ten minutes at a time.

Anne and Peter had begun to argue. A lot. When they fought, Peter
tended to grab Anne’s left hand, pry her wedding ring off her finger, and
throw it in whatever direction was handiest. One flew out of a Paris window.

Then the Sellers family moved into a twenty-room Elizabethan estate
after Peter nearly torched St. Fred’s.

The move to Chipperfield had been planned, of course. One can
scarcely trade in a fire-damaged fake Tudor for a much larger real one—one of England’s legendary stately homes, a seven-acre park, a tennis court,
a swimming pool, paddocks, and two Tudor barns—without some advance
planning. In fact, Peter had sold St. Fred’s by early November 1959, though
he and Anne and the children were still living in it, when he decided to
throw a party on Guy Fawkes Day. (On November 5, 1605, thirteen profoundly aggrieved Roman Catholics attempted to blow up Parliament in
an attempt to launch a Helter Skelter–like uprising against King James I
and the Anglican church. The conspirators got as far as loading thirty-six
barrels of gunpowder into a cellar under the House of Lords, but at nearly
the last minute the plot was foiled. Guy Fawkes, one of the conspirators,
was in the cellar when the king’s soldiers burst in. He was tortured and
killed, of course, and ever since, Guy Fawkes Day has been celebrated each
year by British pyromaniacs, though it remains unclear whether they are
honoring Guy’s death or his urge to blow up the government.)

Wally Stott was one of the horrified guests: “I had nearly bought Peter’s
house! I paid a deposit on it, but after we were in escrow I decided I didn’t
want to buy it. It was a long way from the center of London—it was on
the outer fringe, and I’d always lived in town. So I backed out. After that
[Peter’s friend, the actor] Alfred Marks bought it. But Peter was still living
in it for a short time, because his new house wasn’t finished.

“During this time, November 5 came around. On Guy Fawkes Day
there are always a lot of fireworks and bonfires. Peter loved fireworks—this
was the very, very childish element in him, like the walkie-talkies and the
cars—and of course he had to have fireworks. He got some of his friends
around, and they were letting off rockets in the garden. Peter’s living room
had a big plate glass door that opened onto the garden, and on the inside
he had his Arriflex movie camera on a tripod, and he was taking movies of
the fireworks. There was a rogue firework, which instead of going up went
straight at the house, into the living room, and set fire to it. It caused
tremendous destruction. I thought, ‘My gosh, that could have been
my
house!’ ”