Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (10 page)

The inevitable denouement: Upon their return to the Golders Green
garage late in the day, Peter informed the now-apoplectic car dealer that he
wouldn’t be taking the Jaguar after all. “Like many people,” Spike concluded, “he ended up on the Peter Sellers scrapheap.”

Spike could be cruel when discussing his old friend, but it was cruelty
born of love. The bond between Sellers and Milligan was forged as solidly
as it was because the two men understood each other’s hearts as well as
their minds. For each of them, nonsensical comedy wasn’t simply diverting.
It was as restorative as fresh blood, and if it brought with it a bit of cruelty,
selfishness, and antisocial behavior, well, that was the price others must pay.
For Spike and Peter, comedy wasn’t just comic—it was cosmic. That so
few other people knew this spiritual fact only made the two depressives
more convinced of its essential truth. Spike’s sense of humor, deeply rooted
in anguish, found its most appreciative audience in Peter, a childlike, superstitious English half-Jew with too many voices in his head. At first, Peter
Sellers was just about the only person who truly got the joke that was Spike
Milligan. It was an insane joke, sick and absurd, and it resonated in Peter,
who, for his part, showed his appreciation by facilitating its resonance to
the rest of the world.

Jimmy Grafton writes in his understated memoir that “all the Goons,
like most compulsive comedians, were manic depressives to some degree,”
with Milligan taking a sizable lead in that particular race. But, Grafton
continues, “If Spike was the most manic depressive, Peter was perhaps the
next, though not to the same involuntary degree. His periods of elation
after a successful performance or when sharing moments of fun with his
friends were monitored by a shrewder, more pragmatic mind, as were his
darker feelings of frustration.”

Because of the Goons’ subsequent professional triumphs, Goon minutiae abounds, trailing along with it a number of finer-points debates. It
has been universally resolved that Jimmy Grafton, muse, drinkmeister, and
friend, took on the Cold War espionage-sounding nickname KOGVOS.
But that is where the agreement stops. For what did the acronym stand?
King of Goons and Voice of Sanity? Keeper of Goons and Voice of Sanity?
King of Goon Voices Society? Take your pick. Whatever his unmelodic
title stood for, Jimmy Grafton was a generous fellow who not only perceived
his eccentric friends’ largely untapped talent but who respected and empathized with them as men, never seizing undue credit and always wishing
them well. So good-natured is Jimmy Grafton that he even finds a positive
note to strike about someone who never earned the praise and love of Peter’s
other friends. “I came to like and admire her greatly,” Grafton writes of Peg.

• • •

Peter was romantically active as well. “I was introduced to Peter in 1949
by his agent, Dennis Selinger,” says Anne Hayes. They met at the BBC’s
offices on Great Portland Place. “It wasn’t instant attraction. That came
when I saw him onstage for the first time.” Anne was an Australian-born
theater student and actress, pretty, blond, charming, and very näıve. She
says, from a safe distance, “I suppose I was happy in the beginning. I don’t
know that I ever thought about it.”

It wasn’t just Peter’s offstage physical appearance that failed to appeal
to Anne at first, though he continued to cut a rather large figure. “He was
really very fat,” she affirms, “about fourteen-and-a-half stone. He had long,
wavy hair, and he used to wear these huge suits with great, wide shoulders.
He looked a bit like a spiv, really.” (In other words, he weighed two hundred
pounds and was a very snappy dresser.) Since Peter was given to great
displays, a multitude of phone calls ensued from their first meeting, beginning with one placed by Peter the morning after they met in which he
insisted that he was already deeply in love with her. Flowers flowed. Telegrams flew. Peter was in flaming pursuit.

His raging displays of affection were paralleled, of course, by an equally
intense possessiveness, but in Anne’s case Peter’s jealousy raged to the point
of despising his actress-girlfriend’s audiences. On one occasion he appeared
backstage before her show and announced that he had taken an overdose—of aspirin. (Peter would have had to have eaten at least 140 standard-issue
tablets to have even made himself
at risk
of death by aspirin.) Another
evening, when she was performing at the Lyric, Hammersmith, Peter found
a better solution to his passionate resentments: “He locked me in the bedroom to stop me going into the theater.”

Because of his smothering mother, Peter was a man unable to tolerate
any separation from a woman he loved—that is, any separation that he had
not initiated himself. He found no difficulty in scheduling his own performances. It was Anne’s he found unsustainable. “Peter hated me being in
the business,” Anne explains, ascribing it not only to Sellers’s possessiveness
but also to the fact that he, too, wanted to do legitimate theater and couldn’t
seem to make it happen for himself. His ambition was boundless, but his
theatrical training was nonexistent. Besides, at the time he was known
strictly as an impressionist, not as an actor.

It was the performing Peter with whom Anne Hayes fell in love, the
Peter of infinite color and possibility. It was the everyday Peter she dated,
and yet she accepted his proposal of marriage in April 1950. The tantrums,
the jealousy, the vigilance, the resentment of her career . . . Anne says she
“got used to that in time. You’d think, oh, it was just Peter throwing a
tantrum—like a spoiled child, really. At its worst.”

“She only wants your body.” That was Peg on the subject of Anne.

She was “an old harridan.” This is Anne on the subject of Peg. “And
the way she kissed him goodbye! I’d think, ‘Ugh! Who’s engaged to him,
you or me?’ ”

That awful question became less of an idle musing when, all in a period
of a few days, Anne broke off the engagement during a spat and threw her
triple-diamond engagement ring back at Peter, who handed it over to Peg,
who quickly sold it.

• • •

Like everyone, with the notable exception of Jimmy Grafton, Anne blames
everything on the harridan. Peg “would allow him
anything
. However badly
he behaved as a child, he was allowed just to get away with it. That was
instinctive in him. He thought all women would be like his mother.” She
found his eating habits infantile: “I don’t think he knew the meaning of
etiquette. He never knew which knife and fork to use, and he was the kind
of boy who would immediately grab the first cake off the plate.”

Still, Peter was also funny and engaging. His appeal outweighed his
ability to enrage or appall, and the bright young couple soon patched things
up again despite Peter’s notable failure to replace the diamond ring. Not
to mention the hostile telephone call Peg placed to Anne’s mother: “Anne
is going to ruin his life—his whole career! Surely you can recognize this.
He is going to be a star. Keep your daughter away from my son!”

Peter Sellers married Anne Hayes in Caxton Hall, in London, on September 15, 1951. Peg made a point of staying home. Bill did, too.

Anne gave up her career. “I would think I probably laughed more with
him than with anybody I’ve known in my life—probably cried more, too,”
she says in retrospect. “He was amoral, dangerous, vindictive, totally selfish,
and yet had the charm of the devil.” After all, it could be most entertaining
to spend time with Peter and his multiple personalities, as long as his mood
allowed it. As Anne used to remark to their friends, “It’s like being married
to the United Nations.”

• • •

In January 1950, Peter and Harry, billed as “Goons,” performed a bit of
comedy business on the radio show
Variety Bandbox
, but their communal
ambitions were running much higher than a single appearance on radio’s
answer to vaudeville. From Peter’s perspective, this drive wasn’t for lack of
work. His solo career was prospering. In the two years after his initial
Show
Time
appearance, Peter Sellers was heard on over two hundred radio
broadcasts. He’d been on
Variety Bandbox
any number of times,
Stump the Storyteller
and
Speaking for the Stars
, too, not to mention the comedian Ted
Ray’s hit show
Ray’s a Laugh
. (Late in his life, Sellers credited Ray with
teaching him the crucial art of comic timing.) But group Goonishness held
a powerful appeal, one that his solo gigs failed to satisfy. Playing four or
five separate characters by himself was no longer enough; he needed to
multiply voices in collaboration with others—an artistic hunger as well as
an appetite to work with a team of good friends. Talk at the Grafton Arms
continued to revolve around ways to crack the BBC together.

Because Peter was on the best professional footing at the time, Jimmy
Grafton wrote a spec script featuring Peter as the centerpiece, with the other
Goons in supporting roles. In fact, the program was called
Sellers’ Castle
,
and it focused on the stately but broke “twenty-second [a gunshot, a scream]
I beg your pardon, the twenty-
third
Lord Sellers” and his schemes to keep
his dilapidated residence from being taken from him. The four comedians
recorded what they considered the best moments—Bentine and his mad
scientist routine, Harry singing, and Spike filling in a bunch of outlandish
voices—and through Grafton’s agency they got their pilot-of-a-pilot to the
BBC producer Roy Speer, who liked what he heard and quickly gave the
go-ahead for a full-scale pilot to be recorded. But in a decision worthy of
the military, the BBC decided not to assign Speer himself to produce the
program but, instead, an inadvertent clown named Brown.

With wisdom born of instinct (comedians are born, not made) and
stand-up experience (comedians may be born, but they die repeatedly until
they learn what works), the Goons themselves knew that
Sellers’ Castle
required the zip of a live, laughing audience. But despite the group’s insistence, Jacques Brown felt that, no, a studio audience was not at all necessary
for this particular comedy recording, and so
Sellers’ Castle
was taped in
isolation and consequently fell flat. The BBC brass, whom Bentine later
described as “a moribund collection of interfering knighthood aspirants,”
was decidedly underwhelmed by the pilot of
Sellers’ Castle
. They found it
nutty and incomprehensible and scotched the program, thereby returning
the Goons to the morose state with which they were most familiar.

Secombe described their situation coolly: “There was this terrible sense
of humor that nobody else really understood.” Grafton likewise, though
with drier wit: “Spike was still searching for the right formula in between
bouts of depression and withdrawal, alternating with occasional music hall
appearances.”

Enter Larry Stephens, a coscriptwriter for Spike. Grafton, whose memoirs display a sparkling knack for nailing the spirit of things without showing off his insightfulness, describes Stephens as “an ex-commando captain
who had seen some tough service in the Far East. He had a natural flair for
comedy scriptwriting.” Having gone through the war, Stephens understood
the Goons. Sellers, Milligan, Secombe, and Bentine possessed the core anarchic attitude; what they lacked was anarchic structure, and Stephens supplied it. “When we first met up we had this thing inside us,” Sellers later
said. “We wanted to express ourselves in a sort of surrealistic form. We
thought in cartoons. We thought in blackouts. We thought in sketches.”
Stephens helped make this nascent style cohere—to a point.

• • •

In early 1951, the producer Pat Dixon pitched yet another new comedy
series to the BBC. It was to be a series of bizarre sketches broken up by
musical interludes. The comedians would do funny voices, make funny
noises, and generally act strange, and then a jazz band would come on.
Dixon was young and driven, and along with Larry Stephens he perceived
the coherent incoherence behind Goon humor, the inchoate sense behind
the nonsense. Perhaps more important than his appreciation for the Goons’
sense of humor, Dixon had earned himself enough of a reputation at the
BBC that he could make this pilot happen without Brown-ish interference.
A talented young producer named Dennis Main-Wilson assumed the reins.

A pilot was recorded before a live audience on February 4, 1951. Spike
recalled the experience: “The audience didn’t understand a word of it. God
bless the band. They saved it. They all dug the jokes.”

The pilot was successful enough that the knighthood aspirants approved the production of a full-fledged series of comedy programs featuring
Sellers, Milligan, Secombe, and Bentine, with scripts by Milligan and Stephens as edited by Jimmy Grafton. But with their fingers firmly on the
pulsebeat of the bureaucrat in the next office, the BBC executives drew the
line at the proposed title. The Goons, needless to say, desired that their
series be called
The Goon Show
. The BBC declined, insisting that nobody
would know what it meant. The first replacement title proposed was
The
Junior Crazy Gang
, but the Goons refused it, citing not only its demeaning
blandness but also its pointless reference to an already-existing comedy
troupe, the Palladium’s Crazy Gang.

The BBC’s second idea was revealing: They suggested
Crazy People
. In
their own dull way, these executives knew who they were dealing with. This
group’s comedy really
was
evidence of mental illness.