Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (24 page)

“There have been rumors (unsubstantiated) that he wants to do an Alec
Guinness.”

“He may even be crowding his idol, Sir Alec Guinness, with his mixed
bag of characterizations and multiple roles.”

“There’s no doubt about it—Alec Guinness stands in clear peril of
losing his eminent position as Britain’s most distinguished film comedian.”

Peter himself played it up: “I work from the voice inward—probably
from being in radio—instead of going for the physical characteristics first.
Then I figure out what they’re going to look like. Guinness, who of course
is wonderful, works from the body outward and plans every movement in
advance. I play a scene the way I feel it.” And: “Alec likes to use technique
to work out just what he will do before he starts. I use technique too but
I have to get into the part—feel it from the inside, you know. I think that’s
why his characters sometimes seem cool, if not cold.”

It was in this context that Peter ignored the advice of his close friends
and made the decision to appear as a ruthless criminal mastermind in John
Guillermin’s Brit noir,
Never Let Go
(1960). Like Guinness, he’d already
played multiple characters in the same film, and he could do practically any
voice he wished, but he was remaining, after all, just a comedy star, albeit
the greatest in the United Kingdom. As such he considered his art “puny.”
Heavy drama beckoned.
Never Let Go
was not going to be funny on any
level, and Peter’s character—the car-thieving, girlfriend-slapping, murderous Lionel Meadows—appealed to his sense of challenge. He would actually
be
doing
the Guinness if the now-retired Major Bloodnok and Bluebottle
turned himself into an unremittingly vicious thug.

Shooting began at Beaconsfield in late November 1959. The story is
bleak and simple: A failing salesman (Richard Todd) leaves his office one
day to find that his car is stolen. His life unravels, and his obsession with
finding the car consumes him. He traces the theft first to the young punk
who actually pinched it (the heartthrob Adam Faith), and then to Lionel
Meadows (Peter) and his chippie girlfriend, Jackie, played by the nubile
Carol White.

According to White, Peter started out as an avuncular figure: “When I
stepped in front of the cameras at Beaconsfield, my self-confidence deserted
me. Peter Sellers saw me wobbling like a jelly and quickly came to the
rescue. He cracked jokes and went into his ‘Ying tong iddle I po’ routine,
my moment of anxiety passed, and we were soon whistling through the
takes.” White also reports that her mother and Peter quickly developed a
friendship. Their discussion centering on dieting techniques, Peter was soon
wearing pink plastic sweat bags under his clothes, convinced that pounds
of fat were melting away every day.

His attitude toward Carol White shifted as shooting progressed. It remained warmly protective, but the tone darkened. Everyone involved with
Never Let Go
knew that the two hottest youths in the cast, White and Faith,
were privately conducting themselves in the manner expected of hot youths,
and Peter grew jealous—so much so that when he had to slap White’s face
in one scene he really whapped her hard with his palm. For whatever reason,
the director, John Guillermin, ordered about a dozen takes of the action.

Characteristically, Peter soon appeared, contrite and amorous, at the
door of White’s dressing room. Yes, he confessed, he had indeed become
insanely jealous of Adam Faith. “I was sleeping with Adam,” White observes
in her memoirs, “and there was superstar Peter Sellers telling me that I filled
his every dream.” White decided, as she puts it, to play “one man off against
the other.”

The two of them were rehearsing one day in Peter’s dressing room—a noirishly threatening bedroom scene, as it happened. But in the dressing
room it was romantic comedy, Sellers-style: Peter began his conquest by
doing a series of Goon voices and followed through by delivering all of his
gangster lines in the voice of an Italian gigolo. The method worked, though
there was some assistance from two factors beyond Peter’s control: “He had
helped me through my brief spell of insecurity and I felt I owed him something.” Also, Carol White adds, “I liked the fact that most men wanted to
make love to me and I had gotten over being raped.”

By the time they filmed their scene, in which Meadows menaces Jackie
into bed, they’d had each other offscreen as well, and they continued to do
so over the next few weeks of shooting.

The unusually active Carol then proceeded to launch an affair with the
other
leading man, Richard Todd. Never having given up Adam Faith during her affair with Peter, she was quite the star of the offscreen show:
“During the last two weeks of shooting
Never Let Go
I enjoyed my triangle
of lovers. When filming was over, Peter Sellers returned to his wife and our
secret adventure was over.”

“The fact that her mother was on the set a lot I always found very
suspicious,” John Guillermin observes. “When the mother’s there it doesn’t
mean that the daughter’s innocent. It means the opposite.”

• • •

“He was very loyal to his friends from the radio days,” says John Guillermin.
That’s how David Lodge ended up playing Lionel Meadows’s henchman
in
Never Let Go
. “Peter introduced me to David, and we cast him.” (Lodge
went on to marry Guillermin’s sister, Lyn.) “We had a very funny scene on
that film,” Guillermin declares unexpectedly, given
Never Let Go
’s utter
lack of comedy. “Peter and David had a history of inside jokes, mostly on
Peter’s side. He had an absolutely manic sense of humor—a wonderful,
crazy humor that suddenly exploded, and he’d be helpless with laughter.
So there was a line of David’s—it was a very dramatic moment, they’re in
the garage, and David runs in and says, ‘The police are outside!’ For some
reason, this line absolutely dissolved Peter.
Every time
, David ran in, full of
terror, and said it, and Peter exploded with laughter. We got
one
take in—the laughter started about a second after the last mod [audio signal], and
we managed to print it.”

There was mirth during the shooting, but none during the accounting
after the film’s release. Despite Sellers’s enormous popularity at the time,
Never Let Go
was neither a commercial nor critical success. “Now that this
so unnecessary film has been made,” wrote the reviewer for the
New York
Times
, “will Mr. Sellers please go and do something precisely the opposite?”
Says Guillermin, “Box-office-wise it didn’t do anything like his comedies,
so for him it wasn’t lucrative.” Peter never played a thoroughly unsympathetic character again.

Peter’s rendition of a gangster is rather successful nevertheless. Lionel
Meadows gave him a chance to channel some real rage, especially during
the scene in which he slams Adam Faith’s hand in a desk drawer. Perhaps
it’s the knowledge of Peter’s more famous roles that gets in the way, but
one gets the slightest sense that he’s impersonating a movie thug rather than
being
the thug in the movie, a tendency the camera can’t help but register.
Drawing his lips back in an intimidating, mirthless grin, and speaking in a
nasal twang derived from old Jimmy Cagney movies, Peter seems just a
little bit adrift as he tries to be despicable. It’s as though he simply didn’t
have it in him to be so unbendingly cruel onscreen.

According to Michael Sellers, however, Peter immersed himself in
Never Let Go
so thoroughly during the production that he returned to
Chipperfield every night as Lionel Meadows, savagery and all. Peter acknowledged that his inability to shake his adoptive thug persona was hard
on Anne: “I was sort of edgy with her while we made that film.” Michael
goes a few steps further: “He was abusive and violent and we became terrified of him.”

One can hardly fail to note that bringing Lionel Meadows home with
him was not wholly a Method-acting technique on Peter’s part, since he’d
clearly been able to break character whenever he and Carol White were
alone together in one of their dressing rooms. According to Guillermin,
Peter’s Method didn’t even extend to the set, where it belonged. The director does add, however, that “he was unto himself quite a bit. Peter wasn’t
that relaxed, as it were.”

Still, the unparalleled viciousness of his character in
Never Let Go
gave
Peter Sellers an excuse, however unconscious, to vent even more wrath than
usual at home with his family. One evening, for example, he came home
from the studio, made some phone calls, turned on Anne, screamed “What
the bloody hell is the matter with you,” and threw a vase at her, after which
he destroyed a bathroom towel bar and some pictures in the dressing room.
On another evening he tried to bean her with a bottle of milk. She called
David Lodge and begged him to drive over quickly and help calm Peter
down. Lodge, a staunch friend to both of them, obliged.

• • •

Peter was big in New York in late April 1960, when he made his second
trip across the Atlantic.
The Mouse That Roared
had just closed after its
phenomenal twenty-six-week run at the Guild. (“Wow!” “Smash!”
Variety
applauded.)
The Battle of the Sexes
was opening;
I’m All Right, Jack
took
Mouse
’s place at the Guild. American newspapers were full of lavish profiles
of Peter, not to mention helpful observations about the United Kingdom—clarifications meant to explain quaint customs. For example, in regard to
The Battle of the Sexes
, the
New York Times
declared that “the scene has
been moved to Scotland because kilts are comical.”

Peter traveled first class on Air France, with dining service courtesy of
Maxim’s, and he took along his trustworthy companion Graham Stark.
They were greeted at Kennedy Airport (then called Idlewild) by a fleet of
Cadillac limousines and whisked to the Hampshire House on Central Park
South, where Peter nabbed the penthouse. A bevy of blue-suited film executives occupied the other cars, and when the entourage arrived at the
hotel, Peter overheard one of them place a phone call with a one-line message: “The property has arrived.”

Fame could be demeaning. “The property has arrived” was a line he
never forgot.

When Peter wasn’t being hustled to and from interviews and parties,
the actor Jules Munshin was taking him out on the town. Munshin, who
had appeared with Peter in
Brouhaha
, was blown away when they arrived
at Sardi’s and were presented with an A-list table. “Pete, you bastard,”
Munshin blurted, “
I
never got this table before.” Munshin pointed to a
man in the outer-Yukon-like back corner. Peter recognized the Scarecrow
from
The Wizard of Oz
(1939). “Yeah, Ray Bolger,” Munshin said. “He
ain’t got what you got. He ain’t got four pictures playin’ on Broadway.
Come to think of it, he ain’t got no picture playin’ anywhere.” Peter had
bested the Scarecrow. Gossip columnists were swarming around him. Having imitated Americans since childhood, he was now a star among them.
The evening was a complete success.

The next morning, one of the many public relations people hovering
around Peter shrieked with joy when she picked up one of the New York
papers: “Leonard Lyons gave you four inches!”

• • •

Peter’s nightlife was glittering. Peter appeared with Jack Paar on his popular
late-night talk show. Kenneth Tynan interviewed him and introduced him
to Mike Nichols and Elaine May, who in turn introduced him to Kay
Thompson. (Tynan later noted that the meeting between Nichols and Sellers had been more or less a disaster; neither understood the other’s sense of
humor.) The film brass introduced him to Walter Reade, the immensely
wealthy owner of a film distribution and exhibition company, who hosted
Peter and Graham at a drunken bash at his Long Island estate. Peter also
met James Thurber at a party thrown in celebration of the New York
premiere of
The Battle of the Sexes
. Thurber told Monja Danischewsky a
few days later that they’d “had a fine time together,” but that Peter was
“being driven crazy by the New York pressure.” This was a feeling Peter
never really overcame. Despite his subsequent global travels over the next
two decades, Sellers spent little time in New York.

The two Englishmen returned to London in first-class cabins on the
Queen Elizabeth
.

• • •

Two-Way Stretch
(1960) is a light and unpretentious diversion, a sympathetic critic’s way of saying it isn’t very good. Three con-artist convicts
(Peter Sellers, David Lodge, and Bernard Cribbins) plot a diamond heist
from their prison cell with the help of a visiting fake vicar (Wilfrid Hyde-White), their old partner in crime. A comic neo-Nazi guard named Crout
(Lionel Jeffries) tries to foil the scheme. Everybody loses.

The comedienne (and associate Goon from the Grafton Arms) Beryl
Reid, who plays a small role in the film, later said that because Peter “was
so inventive himself, he probably couldn’t understand that a director
couldn’t keep up with his mind. That’s the thing—that his mind went at
such a rate when he was inventing characters that a director had to be talked
into it.” While Reid’s remarks are undoubtedly true, their context is peculiar
because Peter employs such restraint with Dodger Lane, his character in
Two-Way Stretch
, that the director Robert Day probably didn’t have to be
talked into very much. Reid went on to note, though, that Peter’s inventions
in
Two-Way Stretch
didn’t stop at his own character: “He used to give me
rather dirty lines to say, because I always looked as though I didn’t know
what they meant.”