Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (19 page)

Peter could be friendly to total strangers. “One day I was at a cinema
in Hampstead,” the director Joseph McGrath remembers, “and Peter Sellers
was standing there as I came out. And I had just seen him in the film, so
I went up to him and said, ‘You’re Peter Sellers, and I claim the reward.’
And he said, ‘Who are you?’ and I told him who I was. He said, ‘What do
you do?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m an art student.’ He said, ‘Let’s go and have a
cup of tea.’ ”

A few years went by, and McGrath became a television director. “I got
his home phone number, and telephoned him, and he said, ‘Who are you?’
I said, ‘McGrath—Joe McGrath.’ He said, ‘I remember you. You’ve made
it, and without my help.” They remained extremely friendly—again, with
one notable exception—for the rest of Peter’s life.

“I had had surgery on my leg,” Max Geldray reports. (
The Goon Show
,
of course, was still running to national acclaim and amusement.) “Harry
Secombe started calling everybody and telling them I was in the hospital.
Harry sent me flowers and fruit—typical of him—and I had telegrams from
people. When Peter heard about it, he immediately came over and saw all
the flowers and said ‘My God, I’m so
stupid
.’ He was very angry that he
hadn’t sent things first.

“I’m sitting there not able to walk. He said, ‘What do you want?’ I
said, ‘Peter, I can’t go anywhere.
I can’t walk
.’ He said, ‘I have a new car!’

“That meant absolutely nothing to me, since he had a new car once a
week. ‘It’s a new Rover, and you’ve got to see it! I have to take you for a
ride!’ So he carried me, physically, bodily, into the car. We drove away. We
went for a five-minute drive and stopped. He said, ‘Just sit there. I’ll be
back.’

“After a
long
time sitting there, I see him coming down the street with
another guy who was carrying a lot of packages. He said, ‘That’s yours.’
What it was I had no idea. We drove back home, he carried me inside, and
there was a whole new sound system.

“I said, ‘Peter, I
have
a sound system. I don’t
need
one.’ He said, ‘Yes,
you do. This is a
newer
system.’ ”

Things
were always important to Peter Sellers. What he missed by lacking a stable or even single self he tried to make up with possessions. Like
Charles Foster Kane, he collected himself by collecting buyable objects—cars, cameras, stereo systems, toys, radios, recorders, expensive suits—things
that proved to himself something so fleeting that he inevitably had to buy
something else as soon as possible. Buying and giving was Peter’s way of
expressing love. Empty and needy, he bestowed what he wanted—to himself as well as to his friends and family.

“He was impatient if he wanted something,” Geldray says. “He was
definitely an ‘I want it
now
’ kind of person. There used to be a saying—we all said it: ‘
You’ve got to have it
.’ The whole cast of
The Goon Show
said
it, but it came from him: ‘
You’ve got to have it!
’

“There was a Ford Zephyr, an English car, that had won the Monte
Carlo rally. I got a call from him: ‘Did you hear? The Ford Zephyr won
the Monte Carlo rally!’ ” Geldray told Peter that he’d already ordered one
from a dealer they both knew. “I had ordered the car, and it was going to
take a long time because it was a very popular car. Peter said, ‘
I’ve got to
have it
.’ To make a long story short, he had it two or three months before
I got mine, because
he
went crazy.
He had to have it!

“He said ‘Let’s go to the car show.’ So he, and Anne, and I went. All
of a sudden, Anne and I see him talking to the Bentley people. Anne said,
‘Uh-oh.’ I saw it from afar, this Bentley, and to me it looked like it sagged
in the middle. It obviously didn’t, but it appeared to. I said to Anne, ‘You
know, I don’t think I like that car. It looks like it’s sagging in the middle.’
So she goes over to him and says, ‘Peter, Max thinks it sags in the middle.’
He said, ‘What? Oh. Okay.’ He said to the salesman, ‘Never mind,’ and
he walked away. All I had to do was say something negative, and he would
immediately act upon it.

“However, several weeks later he had a Rolls-Royce.”

But as Wally Stott kindly reflects, “He
was
fond of all those things, but
there was no harm in that. I hate to believe that there was any harm in
Peter. He was a very likeable person.”

Anne was always the first to acknowledge her husband’s likability, but
for her, marriage to Peter Sellers “was like living on the edge of a volcano.”
On October 16, 1957, she got burned. That was the night she gave birth
to their daughter.

Sarah Jane Sellers always had her mother, but beginning in a literal way
at the instant of her birth and continuing metaphorically throughout her
life, Peter simply wasn’t there. On that particular night he simply
had
to
see Judy Garland open at the Palladium.

• • •

By 1958, Peter, Anne, Michael, Sarah and a horde of stuffed animals from
Harrods were living in a large white stucco house on Oakleigh Avenue in
the fashionable, even-further-north village of Whetstone. It featured a lovely
bay window overlooking a large terraced garden. Peter called it “St. Fred’s”
and had a sign painted for the front gate to announce it. As he’d explained,
“You can ruin
anything
with ‘Fred.’ ”

Michael, on the brink of four, was the titular owner of an electric car
set, a pair of walkie-talkies, a number of radios, and a vast army of toy
soldiers, but, as Michael later noted of his father’s playtime needs, “Only
when he grew tired of playing with them himself was I permitted to touch
them.” One evening, Peter spent several hours setting up opposing toy
battalions for combat. Michael made the mistake of staging the engagement
the following day when Peter was out of the house. It was a glorious battle
with lots of dead bodies, but it paled in comparison to the rather more
unequal clash that occurred when Peter returned home. Today we call it
child abuse.

The children’s first nanny was named Frieda Heinlein. The kids loved
her. Peter called her a “German swine” and fired her. Nanny Clarke arrived.
Peter became so enraged by something she said that he stormed out of the
house, drove to London, checked into a club, called Anne, shouted something about “that bloody nanny,” returned home, and picked up the nearest
carving knife. Awakening Nanny Clarke with shouts of “I’ll kill you, you
cow,” Peter plunged the knife into her bedroom door, which split. Quick-thinking but not as nimble as she might have been, Nanny Clarke hurled
herself out the window, crawled to the house next door, and ended up in
the hospital with a sprained ankle. Frieda Heinlein returned.

• • •

As abusive a parent as Peter could be at times, he wasn’t without affection
toward his children. He loved them to the extent that he was capable of
love. Blame Peg, of course. She made him what he was. But blame Peter,
too. A rotten mother doesn’t absolve her son’s rotten fathering.

Home movie footage shows Peter playing with a grinning Michael on
a swing set in the yard at St. Fred’s. Another has him helping toddler Sarah
learn to walk. Still another features Michael, resplendent in a plaid playsuit,
examining Peter’s newest car. This little vignette is clearly staged, although
the child star remains quite unaware of the fact. Peter, in voice over, plays
the role of a showroom car salesman: “Try the driving position!” he cries
as customer Michael climbs in—“I’m sure you’ll find it
Ab-So-Lute-Ly
First
Class!” Then: “I’m going inside now to see to the projector, so I’ll see you
in just a few moments. Jolly good luck!”

It’s cute to outsiders, but Sarah Sellers, in retrospect, finds this sort of
thing to be painful to watch. “There’s not really very much just ‘natural’
footage of us playing or anything,” she notes. “It’s all staged. It’s all telling
us exactly what to do, and when to laugh, and
‘Be happy!’
and
‘Enjoy
yourself ! Have a good time!’ ”

Peter liked to drive Michael and Sarah down to London for a stroll in
the zoo on Sunday mornings. Of course, being Peter, he followed up by
taking them to lunch at the Ritz or the Savoy. Like everything else, much
depended on his mood.

One particular Sunday, Peter was driving his brand-new red Bentley
Continental. Michael Sellers claims that Peter’s other luxury cars had been
previously owned, which helps explain how Peter afforded an unending
slew of top-of-the-line luxury automobiles before he was pulling in the
extraordinary income necessary to sustain such a habit. The Bentley Continental, however, was unblemished by other hands. It featured handmade
fittings, cost £9,000, and was the trophy of trophies. Peter adored it.

A barrage of pebbles hit the car during a family drive. Chips appeared
on the bright, shiny surface. Helpfully, Michael took it upon himself to fix
them. He found touch-up paint in the garage and, with a child’s logic,
painted a long stripe down the length of the car to make sure he’d covered
every nick.

Peter screamed when he saw his disfigured Bentley Continental. Then
he grabbed his son and dragged him upstairs, whipped him with a belt and
sent him to bed hungry, took away all of his toys, and didn’t give them
back for several months. “I thought he was going to kill him,” Spike Milligan said.

As totalitarian as Peg could be, hers was a tyranny of baby’s-breath-sucking love. She is never said to have hit her son and, given what
has
been said, it’s impossible to imagine. Rather than striking, she
pampered. Peter’s rage toward Michael, uncontrollable and bordering on psychosis, was clearly of a different order, in one sense the flip side of Peg’s
indulgence. Peter had a violent streak even as a child, as the incident involving him shoving his auntie into the roaring fireplace well demonstrates.
And because Peg abhorred disciplining him for such outbursts of physical
fury, he grew into manhood without several of the key inhibitions that
sustain civilization, let alone a healthy family life. He excused himself anything. After all, he was Peter Sellers.

• • •

The Peter Sellers Show
, a comedy special written by Eric Sykes, aired on
ITV in early February.
The April 8th Show (Seven Days Early)
appeared two
months later on the BBC; Peter starred, with support from Graham Stark
and David Lodge. There was a record, too—“The Best of Sellers.”

The Goon Show
’s eighth series had been running since September 1957.
In March 1958, an episode called “Tiddlywinks” aired. It was based on the
real-life match that had occurred on March 2 between the Cambridge University tiddlywinks team on one side and the three Goons and Graham
Stark on the other. The college boys had originally thrown their challenge
to the Duke of Edinburgh, but the Duke, knowing of his son’s admiration
for Sellers, Milligan, and Secombe, gallantly nominated them as his stand-ins. Although they did have the last laugh with their broadcast, the Goons
lost the match itself by a lopsided score of 120 to 50.

But Peter Sellers had other winks to tiddle. He was making movies,
superindustriously—two completed in 1958, another two started in 1958
and finished in 1959, three started and finished in 1959, and two started
in 1959 and released in 1960.

He was working steadily (to say the least) and earning good money,
and he still believed—with Dennis Selinger assenting—that he needed as
much exposure as possible. Does it matter if some of these movies aren’t
masterpieces?

Returning Peter to the drab territory of
Orders Are Orders
,
Up the Creek
(1958), directed by Val Guest, is a comedy about the British Navy. It’s
both rum and bum. Having fired a homemade rocket through the bathroom
window of an admiral (Wilfrid Hyde-White)—it homed in on a sudden
rush of water—Lt. Fairweather (David Tomlinson) is exiled to a command
in “the mothball fleet,” specifically H.M.S.
Berkeley
. The ship is virtually
dry-docked in Suffolk, and in the absence of a commanding officer, the
Berkeley’s shady bo’s’n, Chief Petty Officer Doherty (Peter), has turned it
into a money-making operation for himself and the ship’s skeleton crew.
Sellers’ bo’s’n is an Anglicized Sgt. Bilko from
The Phil Silvers Show
(which
was then in its third hit season on American television). With Peter’s nasal,
fast-talking Doherty keeping the books, the sailors tend chickens on deck,
pigs in the cabins; they sell the eggs and bacon to the townspeople. They
wash laundry in the boiler and deliver it directly to customers’ doors.
There’s rum-running involved. And pork pies. Doherty has requisitioned
paint, presumably for the Berkeley, and none of it remains:

F
AIRWEATHER:
Do you mean to tell me that you sold that, too?

D
OHERTY:
Well, we couldn’t very well
give
government property away.

Peter declined to appear in Val Guest’s hastily filmed sequel,
Further
Up the Creek
(also 1958); they replaced him with Frankie Howerd. But he
did show up for
tom thumb
(1958), based on the tale by the Brothers
Grimm. A rustic and his wife, granted three wishes by the beautiful Queen
of the Forest, waste them on two meaningless requests involving a lengthy
sausage that grows on the rustic’s nose. After using up the third wish to
make the wiener disappear, they’re granted one extra: teenage Russ Tamblyn wearing an off-the-shoulder pea leaf. He shall be their son. Only he’s
two inches long. Tall. Whichever.