Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (16 page)

When casting calls began in the spring, Dennis Selinger arranged for
Peter to meet with Mackendrick and the film’s associate producer, Seth
Holt—but not for the role of Harry. They wanted Peter to read One-Round. It wasn’t a particularly successful audition. As Mackendrick told
Selinger, “Frankly, we can’t see him with a broken nose and a cauliflower
ear.”

Holt, however, had the inspiration of casting Peter instead as Harry—the role for which Mackendrick had originally considered Richard Attenborough. Peter may have ended up playing another role or two in
The
Ladykillers
as well; both Guinness’s and Mackendrick’s biographers insist
that Peter provided the voices of Mrs. Wilberforce’s two parrots.

Birds aside, Peter could certainly produce a flawless working-class
Teddy Boy voice, but his casting in
The Ladykillers
caused him great anxiety
nonetheless. This strange, morbid satire might bomb; his film career might
be scuttled; he was terrified of failure. Michael Balcon later described him
as being “desperately anxious” while shooting his scenes: “He kept asking:
‘Is it all right? Am I any good?’ ”

Mackendrick’s painstaking directing style, combined with the sheer
length of time it took to shoot in three-strip Technicolor, resulted in multiple takes of almost every scene. Peter was used to cheaper productions, of
which the one-take, two-week
Penny Points to Paradise
was only the most
extreme example. And he was quite unnerved by the careful and methodical
Mackendrick’s demand that he—and Guinness, and Katie Johnson, and
everybody else—play the same scene over and over again in front of fully
loaded, softly humming cameras. Mackendrick simply wanted to use the
best of a variety of takes; Peter kept assuming that something had gone
wrong each time, but he never could tell what it was.

From Peter’s perspective, Alec Guinness was a soothing influence as
well as a generous performer with whom he could share a scene. During
the production of
The Ladykillers
, Guinness offered Peter a piece of advice:
“Don’t ever let the press know anything about your private life.” Peter told
the press later that Guinness had been “patient enough to listen to me for
hours as I spoke about my problems and aspirations.”

Peter also claimed that Guinness was so impressed with his performance
that he sent a note to a prominent English film critic, Cecil Wilson: “If
you want a hot tip for the future,” Guinness is said to have written, “put
your money on Peter Sellers.”

But in private, Guinness grew concerned about Sellers’s influence on
him. According to the critic Kenneth Tynan, during the production of
The
Ladykillers
, and for a long time thereafter, Peter “sought Guinness’s advice
at every opportunity, so assiduously that Guinness began to be worried,
and even to suspect that his own personality was being absorbed by some
process of osmosis into that of Sellers.”

A dogged apprentice and a paranoid master: Sellers’s relationship with
Guinness played perfectly into the film. Like so many of his performances,
Guinness’s rendition of Professor Marcus is one of exquisite gestures and
exacting timing: an insinuating tilt of the head, a jaunty hip jiggle to the
tune of the string quintet, all with an air of suspicion toward everyone
around him. Sellers’s Harry is much less flamboyant. Peter lets his face and
body go absolutely slack when Harry listens to Professor Marcus’s instructions. Enthralled to the point of stupefaction, Harry is a stylish Teddy Boy,
but not a particularly smart or hammy one.

Mrs. Wilberforce inadvertently ruins the criminals’ scheme from the
start, but the old bat’s suspicions are aroused only after she closes the front
door too soon on One-Round, who, with the strap of his cello case stuck
in the door, gives a hard yank and money flies out, all over the street. She
has got to be killed:

M
ARCUS:
It ought to look like an accident.

H
ARRY:
(with a dawning inspiration) How about suicide?! (The other
crooks gaze in amazement at his stupidity while Harry eagerly moistens his lips.) Get her to write a note, you know? “I just couldn’t
stand it no more, signed Mrs. Wilberforce,” and then somebody
goes down and hangs her! (He jerks enthusiastically on his own black
Teddy Boy tie.)

But one by one the men kill each other instead. Mrs. Wilberforce
survives. Because the police know she’s batty, she gets to keep all the money
for herself. Peter’s Harry meets his end in a farcical chase during which he
emits pipsqueaky sounds of panic until his final line: “Where’s your sense
of humor, One-Round?” at which point One-Round clobbers him to death
with a plank.

• • •

“He struck me as a very charming, chirpy little spiv with a big car—a red
Bentley—prominently parked every morning,” Herbert Lom says, looking
back on his first film with Peter Sellers. “He was very nice. We struck up
a friendship.” Lom makes a particular point about working with Peter. As
an actor, Lom declares, Peter “was very generous,” meaning that he didn’t
find ways of upstaging his colleagues, stealing their thunder with distracting
tics and gestures of his own.

There were offscreen pranks. Lom, his fellow actors, and some members
of the crew couldn’t help but notice Peter’s ostentatious devotion to the
big red Bentley, so they thought they’d pull a little joke at his expense by
painting a long scratch on the side of the car. Peter reacted poorly. But the
fact that it turned out to be washable paint led him to wreak vengeance in
harmless, practical-joke kind. A few days later, Lom smelled something fishy
on the way home from a day of shooting. Peter “had pinned a kipper at the
bottom of my engine, which started frying every time the engine got hot.”

All the while, as Sir Alec remembered, Peter had been playing with his
recorder. As the production neared its end in late summer, he showed up
with his own limited-edition work of audio art—a spoof trailer for
The
Ladykillers
in which Peter played not only all the central characters’ roles
but also the voice of Sandy Mackendrick giving directions. He handed out
the recordings as gifts, and they were a hit. Danny Green was amused to
hear himself trying out important line readings (“I’m stayin’ with
Ma! I’m
stayin’ with Ma! I’m
stayin’
with Ma!”). Guinness, Lom, and Cecil Parker
were respectfully skewered as well. So was Katie Johnson. “It sounded exactly like all of us,” Herbert Lom declares, though other more critical
listeners felt that Peter’s rendition of Mrs. Wilberforce bore a discomfiting
similarity to Bluebottle.

It was then that Peter presented his critique of Mackendrick. Assuming
a neutral narrator voice, Peter announced that listeners would now be offered “a brief glimpse of the brilliant technique of Alexander Mackendrick,
director.” The clapper boy (Peter) barks, “Scene 5, take
73!
” whereupon
Peter, in blithering imitation of Peter, emits a string of rapid-fire gibberish,
to which Mackendrick (Peter) responds, “Er, Peter—Peter—that’s, er . . .
that’s very good. We’ll do another.”

• • •

Herbert Lom remembers of Peter that “at the end of the film he came to
me and said if I could help him get another film part. And he obviously
wasn’t putting it on. He meant it. And
I
meant it when I said, ‘You won’t
need my help.’ ”

The Ladykillers
was released in December to rave if rather less than
perceptive reviews: “The most stylish, inventive, and funniest British comedy of the year”; “captivating”; “accomplished and polished”; “lots of
laughs”; “wonderfully funny.”

Typically, it took years before British film scholars pointed out what
the reviewers had missed at the time. Neil Sinyard sees in
The Ladykillers
an “elderly, paralyzed, hallucinatory, hidebound England”; Roy Armes calls
it “a black and surreal masterpiece.” Charles Barr reads the film marvelously
as a political allegory: the gang of thieves as the postwar Labor government,
who mask their radical plan to redistribute wealth by a cover of familiar,
recorded classical music: “Their success is undermined by two factors, interacting: their own internecine quarrels, and the startling, paralyzing charisma of the ‘natural’ governing class.”

After
The Ladykillers
, Alexander Mackendrick left Ealing—and England—and moved to Hollywood, where he made the beautifully rancid
The Sweet Smell of Success
(1957) and was fired from his next two pictures.
He didn’t make another movie for six years.

Peter, meanwhile, found himself with no other film offers and turned
instead to television.

• • •

While watching TV one evening in December 1955, Peter found himself
unusually entertained, so the following day he placed a call to the show’s
director. As Richard Lester later reported the conversation, “A voice said,
‘You don’t know me, but I saw your show last night. Either that was the
worst show that British television has so far produced, or I think you’re
onto something.’ ” Sellers and Lester met, quickly hit it off, and decided to
make TV’s answer to
The Goon Show
. It would not be the radio Goons
televised. It would be Goonavision, a radical rethinking of visual comedy
in the video age.

Idiot Weekly, Price 2d
premiered on February 24, 1956. (
2d
is two
pence, or tuppence.) Notably,
Idiot Weekly
didn’t appear on the BBC; it
was produced independently by Associated-Rediffusion and broadcast on
the less hidebound ITV. Still, ITV had its limits.
Idiot Weekly
wasn’t broadcast outside of greater London, the obvious fear being that Peter’s nemeses—the no-brow miners up North—weren’t sophisticated enough to
handle the show’s avant-garde humor.

Peter was the star of the series, his most consistent character being the
editor of a sleazy Victorian tabloid, the headlines of which served as lead-ins to comedy skits featuring Sellers, Spike, and Eric Sykes, along with
Valentine Dyall, Graham Stark, Kenneth Connor, and Max Geldray. Spike
Milligan wrote the scripts, along with a stabilizing—and very large—backup team that included Sykes, John Antrobus, Brad Ashton, Dick Barry,
Dave Freeman, Ray Galton, John Junkin, Eric Merriman, Terry Nation,
Lew Schwarz, Alan Simpson, and Johnny Speight. The comedy wasn’t simply manic and self-reflexive like
The Goon Show
. It was
visually
so, with
purposely strange and ultramodern camerawork to match the vocal and
narrative jokes.

There was, in addition, a severe but vitalizing risk involved.
Idiot Weekly
was broadcast
live
.

“The one thing we tried to do,” Lester later explained, “was to push
the rather narrow bounds of television comedy. Spike and Peter were anxious not to fall into those traps.” What they wanted instead was “to produce
material which was as visually anarchic and stimulating as their verbal work
had been.” As with
The Goon Show
, Milligan was what Lester calls “the
creative force,” Peter “the performer.” “I think Peter envied—in the best
sense—Spike’s need to create. Peter was a wonderful adapter of other people’s ideas. He honed them and made them into something infinitely better
than what they could have been. But in terms of raw creation, certainly,
Spike was the creator of almost all the ideas that came up.”

Idiot Weekly, Price 2d
ran for its allotted six weeks, whereupon a
follow-up series,
A Show Called Fred
, blasted onscreen on five successive Wednesdays in May. It too, was recorded live from A-R’s studios at Wembley.
Peter’s name was now above the title: “Peter Sellers in
A Show Called Fred
.”
Spike, having made it through the creation of
Idiot Weekly
without going
unhinged, now retained full control of the writing; the backup team was
dropped. Still,
A Show Called Fred
’s broadcast range continued to be limited to Greater London.

Spike himself was productive; at this point it was only his writing that
was unquestionably deranged, but it was deranged in an especially novel
and exciting way. And it proved to be popular, striking a chord with the
urbane public lucky enough to have been granted access to it. (Michael
Balcon was right: England
is
a land of surface realism dotted with secretly
crazed eccentrics.) To say that
A Show Called Fred
embraced the still relatively new medium of television fully is too mild a claim. It was
Laugh-In
and
Monty Python
a decade ahead.

One show featured a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde routine: Peter appears
onscreen mixing potions in test tubes and declaring that he wishes to remove all his evil and leave only the good. He sloshes it down; the camera
swings wildly back and forth; the image goes drastically in and out of focus.
Peter reappears with ghastly makeup. “It went wrong! I’m evil!” He rushes
to Hyde Park, attacks a woman, drags her into the bushes, and flings a
rubber dummy around. The woman returns, delighted. “Oh you kinky
thing!” Back at the lab, Dr. Jekyll asks his assistant (Graham Stark) to drive
him home. Stark places a steering wheel against Peter’s forehead and steers
him out.