Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (14 page)

A gun battle ensues—in the top drawer of the desk. Smoke comes
pouring out to the sound of bullets.

A rock comes crashing through the window. There’s a note attached:

S
TARK:
What does it say?

S
ELLERS:
Fred Smith, window repairer.

S
TARK:
I wonder what he charges?

[Second rock]

S
ELLERS:
Three shillings and fifty pence.

Enter Miss Jones. It’s Anne, coming out of Peter’s enforced retirement long
enough to put on a big black beard:

P
ETER
What are you trying to hide?

A
NNE:
This! (She pulls off the beard to reveal a goatee.)

And suddenly, for no reason, the comedy grinds to a halt in order to
give the Ray Ellington Quartet a chance to perform a jazzy version of
“Teddy Bears Picnic.”

• • •

Thanks to Peter’s extended family, Highgate, where Peter and Anne were
living, was turning into a neighborhood version of the Grafton Arms, a
place where Goons and their friends could spend even more time together
when they weren’t actually working as a team. “We became friends early,”
Max Geldray says, “because we lived rather close. Peter had a cousin who
was a real estate man, and he heard of a bunch of new apartments being
built in Highgate. Peter called me and said, ‘My cousin tells me there are
several apartments available there. Are you interested?’ That’s how we all
came to live in Highgate—all meaning Spike Milligan and Ray Ellington
[and Geldray and Sellers]. Actually Ray and I lived in the same apartment
building. Peter lived around the corner.”

He was sticking to the familiar neighborhoods of his youth but enjoying
them with money. He had good friends, a beautiful wife, and his mother
was nearby. He might even have felt a wave of contentment once in a while.

But one day he called Peg on the telephone: “I’m at Bedford at the
railway station. I’m feeling so low I’m going to end it all. I’m going to
jump in front of a train.” Rushing to save him, just as she’d always done,
Mother found him sitting alone on a bench, staring into an abyss only he
could see.

• • •

Happy families may all be alike—since there are so few of them it’s difficult
to tell—but as countless dysfunctional family memoirs so repetitively prove,
unhappy families are similar, too. Marital tantrums sound the same. So do
crying children. Peter Sellers’s family was no exception.

Wally Stott took a benign view of Peter’s marriage to Anne, a perspective made possible by the relative distance from which he viewed it:
“Sometimes I’d be at parties at Peter’s house. They were always very enjoyable
affairs. There’d always be music we both liked. His wife, Anne, was a very
lovely lady, and a great hostess.” (Years after his professional association
with Peter ended, Wally Stott became Angela Morley. Spike Milligan commented with a mean sort of affection for his old friend: “He has now had
a sex change. I don’t know why. When he undresses he still looks like Wally
Stott. I think when Secombe undressed at night he looked like Wally Stott.
Peter didn’t. When he undressed at night he looked like Diana Dors.”
When I spoke with Angela Morley, I asked her how she wished to be
identified in this book, and she replied, “It’s a judgment you’ll have to make
and I’ll have to accept.” My judgment is to attribute her quotes to Wally
Stott, since he was the person with whom Peter Sellers worked on
The Goon
Show
, and to thank Angela Morley for them in the acknowledgments.)

Anne was putting up a good front. In private, it was she who bore the
brunt of Peter’s mercurial moods, the bleak stretches of silence as well as
the hot rages, his tendency to grow bored with their living arrangements
and insist that they go someplace else. “We did move a lot,” she notes. “I’m
not quite sure why. I guess he got sick of wherever we were. I guess we
lived in about [long pause] oh, I can’t think how many. . . . About eight
different houses, I guess.” Her mother-in-law barely spoke to her, which,
come to think of it, was probably for the best.

Anne understood Peter. She knew that he was erratic in predictable
ways. He would buy a car on a whim—a used Jaguar here, a used Rolls
there—and sell it equally whimsically, usually at a loss, and buy another.
He piled up more and more photographic equipment and turned the
kitchen into a darkroom, where his chemicals took precedence over her
milk and eggs, thereby rendering the sink unusable. He was making more
money than he’d ever seen, but so drastically had he always overspent his
income that his accountant, Bill Wills, once attempted to put him on a
severe allowance—£12 per week. Peter inevitably exceeded it, and rather
than raise the rate, Wills gave up, leaving Peter to spend as freely as he
wished.

Anne wanted children. She thought they might stabilize the marriage.
And so it was in this rickety domestic context that in July 1953, Anne
Sellers announced that she was pregnant again. Peter responded joyously.
He went out and bought a £300 electric train set and began playing with
it in earnest.

• • •

As cherished radio stars with bills to pay, Peter, Spike, and Harry were
periodically obliged to leave London, head out to the various shires, and
adapt recorded Goon broadcast comedy into live music hall routines. The
more successful Peter became, the less willing he was to do it. Since he’d
been holding provincial audiences in contempt since his squalid vaudeville
infancy with his grandmother’s traveling water tank, his growing fame and
fortune in the mid-1950s carried with it a lingering, ever-souring wrath.
Late in his life, Peter described with unbridled contempt the Goons’ audiences outside London. They were Goonlike, he said, but in the worst
possible sense: “You’re usually telling jokes to a crowd of people with
two-thousandths of an inch of forehead.” In Peter’s increasingly lofty view, it
was one thing to act like a moron but quite another to perform for one.
When he looked out through the footlights at his audiences he saw a vision
of hell.

Still, apart from having to face the dreaded Cro-Magnons of the hinterlands, the regularized camaraderie of
The Goon Show
gave Peter immense
pleasure, as did the lasting comic art he was creating with his friends. That
several Goons and associates lived in more or less the same neighborhood
of North London wasn’t simply due to Peter’s family real estate connection;
having close friends close at hand was important to Peter. He enjoyed
fellowship.

When asked about his
Goon Show
years after they were long gone, his
answer was inevitably a variation on a simple declarative statement: “It was
the happiest time in my life professionally.” Beloved by its creators and its
fans alike, the program provided steady employment, national fame, and
bizarre comedy in equal measure. Peter craved all three.

Sellers wasn’t exactly the star of the show, but he was certainly the most
vocally gifted Goon, and as a result the United Kingdom experienced a
rising tide of impressionists of the impressionist. Listeners loved to do Peter’s many voices themselves—their flattery was sincere—and Sellers imitators began popping up all over the country. Wally Stott tells of his
experience in the mid-fifties when he learned, surreally, to fly a plane: “My
instructor used to give me my lessons in Peter Sellers’s voices. One lesson
he’d be Bloodnok, another lesson he’d be Bluebottle.”

Stott fondly remembers Peter’s upbeat mood in the recording studio
on Sundays: “Peter used to do a lot of clownish things. For instance, we
used to warm up the audience before the show started. Harry would sing,
and we would play. And Peter would go around the back of the studio and
play the timpani, and put on a real show doing it. You know how timpanists, years ago, used to turn handles to tune them? Peter used to give a
terrific impression of one of the old-time timpani players—playing it, listening to it, and darting his hand over it tightening the taps. And then one
of the sound effects men would fire a blank—it was really crazy.” Peter may
not have succeeded entirely in finding himself by clowning for an ever-growing public, but he was trying.

“There were quarrels from time to time,” Wally Stott admits. “I don’t
think Harry was ever involved in those things. They were between Peter
and Spike. I never knew what they were about, but there would be certain
weeks when I’d realize that all was not well.” But the Sunday recording
sessions were generally merry—at least when Spike wasn’t suffering one of
his spells—so much so that rumors of on-air drunkenness began to surface.
Max Geldray dismisses these reports as absolutely false, though he does
acknowledge that the Goons sometimes seized the opportunity afforded by
Geldray’s harmonica interlude to swig a little brandy out of milk bottles.
It was a smuggler’s trick. Wouldn’t you know it? The BBC banned alcohol
on the premises.

• • •

Goon art was evolving. Under Peter Eton’s supervision, the show’s structure
really began to cohere in the fourth series (1953–54), though Spike and
Larry Stephens still weren’t developing single story lines for the duration
of each half hour. But by the fifth series (1954–55), with scripts by Milligan
and Eric Sykes, each episode began to feature a self-contained plot, albeit
in a Milliganesque way. These plots, such as they were, might be steered as
much by the sound of the words as by character motivation or narrative
drive—hence the subsequent comparisons to Carroll and James Joyce.

And they were often bleak. Modernist disaster abounded. In “The
Phantom Head-Shaver (of Brighton),” for instance, the charming seaside
resort is thrown into chaos by a goofy terror: a lightning-fast, hair-obsessed
criminal wielding a razorblade. The story makes no sense, but it’s a story,
and its governing principle is that no one is ever safe. The episode features
the shrieking Prunella Dirt (Sellers), whose husband is rendered bald by
the eponymous villain; the broadly Jewish Judge Schnorrer (Sellers); Major
Bloodnok (Sellers); Professor Crun (Sellers); and Willium, a dopey window
cleaner (Sellers).

And it was rude. British humor, even on the BBC, was even less culturally sensitive than American comedy was at the time. “The Phantom
Head-Shaver” episode features this breathtaking introductory remark:
“Tonight’s broadcast comes to you from an Arab Stench–Recuperating
Centre in Stoke Poges.”

“Hitler—
there
was a painter for you.” A Peter Sellers World War II
joke.

Spike’s longtime assistant and editor Norma Farnes has observed that
each of the Goons had suffered military service during World War II, and
it was this direct experience of the armed forces, not to mention their
experience of the war itself, that made them so skeptical of authority. They
were also morbid by nature. In an episode called “The Dreaded Batter
Pudding Hurler (of Bexhill-on-Sea),” Seagoon and Crun are standing on a
beach during a blackout. Crun insists that no Nazi could never see “a little
match being struck,” so Seagoon strikes one. They’re instantly hit by an
exploding shell. “Any questions?” Seagoon asks. “Yes,” Crun responds.
“Where are my legs?”

Wally Stott ties one of the Goons’ ruder, lewder jokes directly to the
war: “Sometimes there was material that the boys tried to get away with,
which the BBC wouldn’t allow. There was a lot of British-Army coarse
language that they tried to get through. I mean,
there was a character called
Hugh Jampton!
”

The American interviewer falls silent. “You don’t understand that?
Well, Hampton is a crude word for penis. So Hugh Jampton would be a
very big one, wouldn’t it? Of course anybody who’d been through the war
in Britain would know.”

• • •

On the home front, Michael Peter Anthony Sellers was born on April 2,
1954. He was a cute baby with his mother’s light complexion and twinkling
eyes. They called him Pooh.

Now Peter had a son to go with the train set, and Anne had a real
infant to go with her husband. Peg was overjoyed. She was Anne’s first
visitor at the hospital, the arrival of Pooh having reduced her to grandmotherliness.

• • •

Peter began filming another movie. Even after
Much Binding in the Marsh
and other postwar radio comedies had left the airwaves, British cinema still
produced war-inspired comedy-dramas and even outright farces, as did Hollywood. The Boulting brothers, Roy and John, featured Gene Kelly in
Crest
of the Wave
(1954); Billy Wilder had William Holden in
Stalag 17
(1953);
and John Ford showcased James Cagney in
What Price Glory?
(1952). Peter
Sellers’s next film,
Orders Are Orders
(1954), is part of the same cycle,
though it lands on the far side of
Francis Goes to West Point
(1952).

Filmed at Beaconsfield Studios (and no, there are no reports of Peter
having tried to impress the front gate by signing in as the Fifth Earl), and
released in the autumn,
Orders Are Orders
is a military farce in which an
American film company overruns a British army camp in an attempt to
film a B-grade, ray-gun–filled sci-fi movie on the grounds. Despite his increasing fame as a Goon, Peter is far from the top of the cast, a position
occupied jointly by Margot Grahame, Brian Reece, and Raymond Huntley.
Peter plays the subservient but graft-grabbing Private Goffin. Looking purposely dumpy, he’s stuck with an ill-fitting white valet jacket that pulls
severely at the bottom button. Corrupt but ineptly so, Goffin takes a conspiratorial attitude with the brash Hollywood director, who wants to pay
somebody off to get the camp’s cooperation. This is not high comedy. At
the vulgar moment when Goffin first encounters the glamour-puss starlet
tagging along with the production he actually licks his lips.