Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (13 page)

Filmed in two abrupt weeks in April in a small studio in the northwest
London neighborhood of Maida Vale, and faring poorly at the box office
upon its release,
Down Among the Z Men
takes the four Goons and, in an
apparent effort to broaden their appeal, strips them of most of their Goonishness and replaces it with a low-conventional story, a pretty girl (Carole
Carr) who sings two songs, and a dozen tap-dancing chorines. Spike’s Eccles
and Bentine’s Pureheart emerge most clearly from the murk, but Peter’s
Bloodnok (promoted here from major to colonel) is so anemic a rendition
that it takes a few moments to recognize in Bloodnok’s introductory scene
that the dull-looking gray-haired man sitting behind a military desk is actually supposed to be Sellers’s familiar and colorful radio character.

Then again, this was never meant to be art. On the first day of shooting,
Peter cornered the director, Maclean Rogers. “I feel,” he began, “that the
character I am playing has certain undercurrents of repression, which I
might best express by having a noticeable twitch.” Maclean was blunt: “I’ve
got eight minutes of screen time a day to shoot. Do it quickly.”

It’s a caper. Spies try to steal a secret nuclear formula. They fail.

Harry Secombe cuts the back off a woman’s skirt with a pair of scissors.
Michael Bentine pulls Harry’s apron down. The best comedy bit is taken
by Spike and Harry: “Guerrilla warfare? I know that!,” at which point they
both begin doing a chimp routine. There’s a laughing-gas/crying-gas sketch
that would have made even Shemp blush.

The chorus girls, corralled into an earlier Army-camp-workout-turned-dance-number, reappear toward the end of the movie in an ENSA-like
evening’s entertainment for the camp. Backstage, Carole Carr turns to Spike
and Harry. “I’m on next!” she tells them. “As soon as I’m through I’m
going over to get the formula back before my second number!”

Inanely—and not in a good way—Colonel Bloodnok takes the stage
after Carr’s song and proceeds to amuse the audience with an impersonation
of an American army officer from a Hollywood movie he saw the week
before. It’s Peter, not Bloodnok, and it makes no sense, especially since the
whole point of the beloved Bloodnok is that he has little talent for anything
but intestinal distress. Forced by circumstance, however—the circumstance
being that the producer, E. J. Fancey, needed to pull this bit of cheap taffy
into a feature-length thread—the bumbling Bloodnok reveals himself to be
a cabaret star of exquisite skill. The routine is just an excuse to let Peter
shoehorn in an impression routine: a Midwestern American army man and
his fast-talking, Brooklynesque subordinate.

Osric Pureheart comes on next with an equally misplaced nightclub
schtick. It’s Bentine and his old chairback routine.

More disturbing, and consequently a lot funnier, is the fact that
Down
Among the Z Men
provides a rare chance to
see
Bentine’s Pureheart as well
as hear his voice. In addition to Bentine’s ridiculous hairiness and drastic
British underbite, he gives Pureheart a truly wacky bandy-legged walk, the
ghastly gait of a madman with testicular issues.

• • •

The Goons’ main focus (for good reason) remained the BBC radio, where
The Goon Show
was evolving artistically from its initial run. It wasn’t necessarily better yet, as the Goonographer Roger Wilmut notes. It was increasingly popular with audiences, but it remained relatively unrefined.

Musical numbers by Max Geldray and the Ray Ellington Quartet continued to break each program up into discrete episodes, even as the plots
(or what passed for them) became more or less coherent. These interruptions became a standard part of the show for the duration of its long run.
They served to regularize the chaos, and they did so in a familiar sort of
music hall way that the absurdist
Goon Show
’s rather less-than-intellectual
listeners could hook into whenever the senseless noises and bizarre jokes
got to be too much. Ying tong iddle I po, and here’s Max Geldray with
“I’m Just Wild About Harry.”

Even Goonish senselessness hadn’t quite hit its stride yet. Spike, it
comes as little surprise to learn, was a more or less undisciplined writer.
And the Goons were all anarchic as performers. They did what they pleased,
and what pleased them included mumbling and stepping on each others’
lines. The producer, Dennis Main Wilson, was tolerant of their unpredictable behavior as well as their equally lawless comic thrust—possibly to a
fault. Only during the third series, after Wilson left and Peter Eton took
over as producer, did
The Goon Show
begin to achieve its lasting quality.

Peter Eton was scarcely humorless, but it wasn’t easy to make him
laugh. It took work and self-restraint. As a result, this new, tough audience
of one was therefore able to exercise some control over what Wilmut calls
the Goons’ “tendency toward self-indulgence.” It was not an easy task,
though the Goons themselves grew to appreciate the beneficial effect Eton
had on them. Harry Secombe credited Eton as being the program’s best
producer. Before he came on board, Secombe noted,
The Goon Show
had
little in the way of shape, and in Secombe’s description, the characters all
spoke so fast that “it was a gabble.” Eton, though, “was great. He used to
get quite choleric [and] go all red and shout, ‘You bastards sit down!’ Peter
Sellers would say, ‘I’m pissing off,’ and Eton would just say, ‘Well, go
then.’ ”

Still, Max Geldray declares, no matter who was producing the program,
“it was Spike who was the manic and inventive driving force behind every
detail of the production.” Spike, of course, could also be “one of the most
annoying people you could meet.” The BBC executives loved the show’s
success, but as the months went by they grew to despise Milligan, who, as
Peter once remarked, had a wonderful knack for explaining the simplest
things in such a way that nobody could possibly understand them.

• • •

The end of the second series signaled the departure of Michael Bentine.
Creative differences were cited. He and Spike were seeing eye-to-eye less
and less. According to Secombe, “Only when Michael Bentine left did
The
Goon Show
really begin—really take shape.” It was also becoming legendary,
not only with the average bright Briton, but with the next generation of
satirists, comics, and puckish intellectuals.

For instance, the physician- turned- comedian- turned- avante-garde- opera- and- theater-director Jonathan Miller remains a dedicated fan. “
The
Goon Show
really is the best thing Sellers ever did,” Miller declares. “He
did some films that are interesting, and of course
Dr. Strangelove
has some
nice jokes, but I think the characters that everyone in England remembers,
and will remember all their lives, were from
The Goon Show
. At its best it
was as good as Lewis Carroll.”

Does the director of such works as Leoš Janáček’s
Katya Kabanova
at
the Metropolitan Opera really think that
The Goon Show
is art? Dr. Miller
is insistent: “Unless it’s printed, people don’t think it’s literature, but actually, at its best,
The Goon Show
is on a par with
Alice in Wonderland
. I
don’t think people have registered the importance of Milligan’s imagination; Milligan is an important writer.

“It’s a series of pastiches of English boys’ literature of the ’20s and ’30s,
which they grew up on—
The Lives of the Bengal Lancers
and that sort of
thing. People in England of my age, people in their fifties, can still speak
to each other in very detailed
Goon Show
voices—particularly Bluebottle
and Bloodnok and Grytpype-Thynne.” Miller proceeds to prove the point.

“There’s a session between Bluebottle and that sort of Mortimer Snerd–like figure called Eccles. They’re soldiers in a trench, and Bluebottle says,
[in perfect imitation of Bluebottle’s nasal squeal] ‘What time is it, Eccles?’
Eccles says [again in impeccable imitation], ‘I don’ know, but I’ll tell you
sumthun’—last night a very kind gen’leman wrote down the time on a
piece of paper for me.’ And Bluebottle says, ‘Show me that. Hey! This piece
of paper is not working!’

“It’s such a brilliant,
logical
joke, that. Carroll would have given his
eyeteeth to have made a joke of that quality.

“These characters are a brilliant gallery of British social life. That wonderful character Sellers plays—Major Bloodnok, a sort of drunken, gin-shaken, shortly-to-be-cashiered English major living on the northwest
frontier and afflicted, obviously all the time, with catastrophic attacks of
Indian diarrhea.” Dr. Miller can’t help but launch into another routine
from memory: “ ‘Meanwhile, in the smallest and coldest room in the fort
on the northwest frontier, Major Bloodnok is experiencing difficulties.’ And
then you hear this wonderful
pppffoooosh
. [Bloodnok’s huffing voice:] ‘Oh,
it goes right through you, you know—I’ll never eat Bombay duck again!’

“I don’t know if that comes across to Americans,” he admits with a
touch of scolding. “You Americans get very prudish about lavatory jokes.
You think they’re infantile. I think it’s far more infantile when you
don’t
laugh at them.”

John Lennon, too, found it all precisely, gloriously English and expressed concern that others just wouldn’t get it: “I was twelve when the
Goon Show
first hit. Sixteen when they finished with me. Their humor was
the only proof that the
world
was insane. . . . What it means to Americans
I can’t imagine (apart from a rumored few fanatics). As they say in Tibet,
‘You had to be there.’ ”

• • •

The third series began recording in November 1952. Bentine’s departure
and Eton’s arrival were not enough to dispel all the tension. Geldray tells
of the time a young BBC underling rushed up to him and breathlessly
reported the day’s gossip: He’d heard that Spike had just charged over to
Peter’s house with a gun. “Yeah? So what else is new?” was Geldray’s response.

In late December, Spike actually suffered the nervous breakdown.

Always high strung, on the brink, too many thoughts in his head and
many of them unhygienic, Spike crashed. The pressure of weekly creation—and the success it was bringing him—pushed him over the edge. He was
hospitalized and ended up missing a total of twelve shows—nearly half the
third series, though he began contributing scripts after only a few tentative
weeks of recovery. Madness was the point, after all.

• • •

In 1953, Peter made his phonographic recording debut under the production of George Martin, who went on to produce the Beatles. His first single,
released by Parlophone, was a skit called “Jakka and the Flying Saucers”—a
Chipmunk-voiced boy, Jakka, and his doughnut-shaped dog, Dunker, both
from Venus, embark on a quest for the Golden Cheese.

Martin once called it “probably the worst-selling record that Parlophone ever made.”

But Peter was undaunted; “Jakka and the Flying Saucers” was followed
by many more successful records in the 1950s alone, including the singles
“Dipso Calypso” (1955), “Any Old Iron” (1957), and a rather sick rendition of the detested “My Old Dutch” (1959), the song Peg made him
perform as an infant in white tie and tails. These 45s and 78s performed
substantially better in the marketplace than “Jakka and the Flying Saucers.”

Around this time Peter suffered a disappointment of a more personal
nature. Max Geldray reports that Sellers had gone to see the French comedian Jacques Tati’s most recent film,
M. Hulot’s Holiday
and was tremendously impressed—so much so that he wrote a fan letter to Tati, who
replied with a casual invitation to Peter to visit him some time. Peter left
immediately for France.

He returned deeply let down. Tati spent most of their time together
lecturing Peter on the subject of comedy. As Sellers told Geldray, “All he
did was talk to me about how great he is.” Years later, Tati wrote his own
fan letter to Peter after seeing one his pictures. Peter didn’t bother to reply.

• • •

The Super Secret Service
(1953), released in late summer to little notice,
works much better than either
Penny Points to Paradise
or
Down Among the
Z Men
, perhaps because it’s too short to require much in the way of plot
or structure. A 24-minute comedy scripted by Spike and Larry Stephens,
the film begins with Sellers, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and a
thin mustache gracing his lip, opening a door into a bleak film-noir office.
He frantically reaches into his trenchcoat pocket for a gun. Unable to find
it, he waves sheepishly at the camera and backs out of the room. The credits
roll.

In the film, Milligan and Stephens’s music hall absurdism takes the
place of
Z Men
’s misguided conventionality:

G
RAHAM
S
TARK:
The phone is ringing.

P
ETER
S
ELLERS:
Then answer it!

S
TARK:
But we haven’t got a phone.

When the phone is located—it has been filed under
T
in the filing
cabinet—Sellers answers it, but only after putting on a wig to disguise
himself.