Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (23 page)

• • •

“I wanted a place I could walk around without crossing any streets. It is a
very civilized exile,” Peter said of his new £17,500 estate. Twenty-three
miles north-northwest of London on the border of Hertford and Buckingham, Chipperfield was magnificently excessive. “You’ve bought bleeding
Buckingham Palace!” Graham Stark exclaimed on his first visit. Peter also
paid for the staff to match. As Anne later described the array, “We had
three gardeners, two dailies, a nanny, a nanny for Peter—his dresser,
Harry—a cook, and a butler.”

Peter had bought the place on impulse. “We saw this advert in the
Sunday
Times
for this manor house in Chipperfield,” Anne remembers. “So
we went out to have a look at it, and Peter decided, there and then,
he had
to have it
.”

It was at Chipperfield, says Anne, that the marriage “really turned sour.”

It didn’t start off that way, according to Michael, who has described
his life as being “comparatively happy at this time. I think Sarah and I had
both learned how to fade into the landscape.” By the expression “at this
time,” Michael seems to be referring to a period of several months.

At both St. Fred’s and Chipperfield, Peter tended to bring pets home.
Hamsters. Goldfish. Kittens. Puppies (two Labradors, a cocker spaniel, a
pair of white Maltese terriers). Guinea pigs. Rabbits. The trouble was, he
almost always gave them away at the first provocation. Except for the terriers, who stayed for a while, a single poorly timed bark or puddle and out
the animal went.

There was a parrot, too. Peg, cleverly, taught it to say “Bollocks.” Peter,
reactively, became enraged the first time “Henry” swore at him and immediately forced Anne to call Peg and insist that his mother keep and care
for the bird herself. That Anne had to place the call is itself notable, since
Peter called his mother at least once a day and usually more often. But
despite the fact that it was phrased as Anne’s demand and not Peter’s, Peg
complied. She took Henry and fed it nothing but the best seed until Henry
swooped down on her one day as she lay naked in her bathtub and began
pecking. At that point Peg dispatched Henry on a hastily arranged, one-way trip to its birthplace.

• • •

In 1960, after all the receipts were totaled,
I’m All Right, Jack
turned out
to be the biggest box office hit in Britain. British Lion hadn’t given the
film a larger-than-usual advertising budget, but word of mouth had made
it an initial success, and its sheer longevity did the rest. The only region in
the United Kingdom in which this industrial satire didn’t work was the
working-class mining districts of Wales; the characterization of the union
steward may be blamed.

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.

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 Show
s 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
)

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

S
ELLERS:
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 to 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: