Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (21 page)

At first, Shenson only considered Peter for the role of Tully Bascombe,
the bland and well-meaning gamekeeper who leads the Fenwick forces
against the United States—and wins. But another Columbia executive mentioned the idea of Peter playing two supporting roles as well, and despite
Peter’s later claim that he resisted the notion, he told Shenson at the time
that he knew he could play all three: Tully; Prime Minister Mountjoy, a
goateed aristocrat; and the Grand Duchess Gloriana XII, a full-figured regent. As it happened, Sellers was
least
comfortable playing Tully, the role
he’d originally been offered and the most lifelike of the three: “I don’t quite
have a handle on the leading guy,” he confessed, “but we’ll come up with
something.”

Whether because of the original benevolent augury or simple good will,
Peter caused no trouble during the production of
The Mouse That Roared
.
“He got along with everybody,” Walter Shenson said. “I think he liked the
idea of working for Americans.” Peter’s costar, Jean Seberg, later told a
reporter that “to work with him is to love him. He’s angelic.”

The film’s director, Jack Arnold, described him in somewhat more
detail: “Peter was a marvelous improvisational actor, brilliant if you got him
on the first take. The second take would be good, but after the third take
he could be really awful. If he had to repeat the same words too many times
they became meaningless. But it was such a joy to work with Peter because
he was such an inspired actor. Sometimes he would literally knock me off
my feet. I’d fall down convulsed with laughter.”

With Peter having to rush back to the Aldwych nearly every evening
to star in
Brouhaha
, filming of
The Mouse That Roared
began in mid-October with three weeks on location in Surrey and on the Channel coast.
The production moved on to Shepperton sound stages on November 10.
Despite the general goodwill on the set, Arnold described the first day of
shooting as being somewhat tense, owing to the seemingly countless takes
it took Jean Seberg to get her lines right. Seberg was used to being directed,
at times to the point of browbeating, by Otto Preminger, for whom she
had starred in two dramas,
Saint Joan
and
Bonjour Tristesse
(both 1957).
(Seberg was only seventeen when Preminger cast her in
Saint Joan
, her first
film.)
The Mouse That Roared
, however, was a comedy, the director wasn’t
a tyrant, and Seberg was consequently cut adrift from her method. According to Arnold, “By take twenty-five Peter didn’t know what he was saying
either. He was just spouting gibberish. I could see he was really getting
crazy.”

Seberg’s need for multiple takes aside, Peter’s schedule was purely grueling—especially after
The Goon Show
’s ninth series began recording in November—so much so that he actually hired an ambulance to whisk him
away from each day’s shooting of
The Mouse That Roared
to his evening’s
performance in
Brouhaha
. It was much better than a limousine or any of
his cars. He could lie down.

A bit simplistic but still very funny,
The Mouse That Roared
did well
enough at the box office in England, but it was much more widely popular
in the States, probably because its satire struck a more genial note with the
benefactors of American foreign relations largesse than it did with the recipients. And while Peter gives one great and two good performances in
the film, he hadn’t yet achieved the kind of direct, natural rapport with the
camera that eventually made him a superstar. Tully is the weakest of the
three for exactly that reason; agreeable blandness barely registers on celluloid
unless the actor is a technical genius. The two caricatures, Mountjoy and
Gloriana, required much less skill because they were built on excess.

Gloriana XII remains one of Peter Sellers’s greatest creations. With a
bust too large and a voice too deep, she’s Margaret Rutherford with testes.

Tully pleasantly introduces her to his American captives:

T
ULLY:
Your Grace, uh, this is General Snippet—he’s a rear general.

S
NIPPET:
I warn you, Madam, I know the Geneva Convention by heart!

G
LORIANA:
Oh, how nice! You must recite it to me some evening. I’ll
play the harpsichord!

A few years later, Shenson asked Peter if he’d be interested in starring
in the sequel,
Mouse on the Moon
(1963). Sellers was by that point an
international star, so he rather loftily turned Shenson down. In fact, by that
point Peter had stated in public that he never liked
The Mouse That Roared
to begin with. Shenson ended up replacing him with two other actors—Ron Moody and, yes, Margaret Rutherford. (Moody played Mountjoy;
there was no Tully.)

But Peter did suggest a director for the picture: Richard Lester. “Who’s
he?” Shenson asked. “He’s another American—you met him at my house
at my Christmas party.” Lester did end up directing
Mouse on the Moon
for
Shenson, after which the producer-director team went on to make
A Hard
Day’s Night
(1964).

• • •

One summer day Peter took his new Paillard Bolex 16mm movie camera
into an open field at the end of Totteridge Lane in North London and shot
some footage of Spike acting up. Dick Lester added some stuff, and the
film ended up getting nominated for an Oscar.

The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film
(1959) was a game played
by buddies—a way of having fun for about £70. Graham Stark pitched in,
along with his girlfriend, Audrey (who later became his wife). Joe McGrath
did the titles. Bruce Lacey, a props manager at Granada Television, managed to come up with some props. Johnny Vyvyan and David Lodge appeared, as did the comic Mario Fabrizi.

Milligan missed the second day of shooting, which occurred some time
after the initial shoot. Bitterness resulted.

Spike: “Most of the jokes in it are mine. I wrote the jokes, and I directed
part of it. Then I had to go to Australia, and I left the film with Peter, and
Peter gave it to Dick Lester to edit. And he did something I would never
do. He put music on it in the background—what for I don’t know. Some
kind of saxophone player. . . .”

Lester insists on the other hand that “it was written in equal parts by
Peter, Spike, and myself.”

“We shot only one take for any gag,” Lester explains. “When we got
the rushes, we took them to Peter’s house the next Sunday to edit in his
study. The editing, which was really just topping and tailing, took two
hours,” a process that occurred on a minimal editing machine perched on
one of Peter’s drums in the attic of St. Fred’s. (“Topping and tailing” refers
to the process of removing the first and last frames of a piece of film footage
and leaving the usable center.) “Every gag we shot, every piece of film that
we shot, is in the finished film. We showed it to our wives by projecting it
onto the wall in the living room.

“We never had any plan to distribute it when we made it,” Lester claims.
“We were just friends who wanted to make a film to enjoy ourselves.” Nevertheless, the “just friends” were hungry, ambitious filmmakers. Peter quickly
screened it for Herbert Kretzmer, the London television reviewer and fan
of the
Fred
s, who told him “You’ve got to show this around,” a supportive
but redundant piece of advice, since that was what Peter was already doing.

They transferred their 16mm home movie to 35mm, had it sepia-toned
(“daguerreotype pigment made from condensed yak’s breath,” according to
Sellers), and got it into the Edinburgh Film Festival. A scout from the San
Francisco Film Festival saw it, and the next thing anyone knew it was
nominated for an Academy Award.

The category was Short Subject (Live Action). And since Peter was
credited as the film’s producer, if
The Running Jumping & Standing Still
Film
won the Oscar, the little man, naked and golden, would be his.

They were up against a French effort,
The Golden Fish
, produced by
Jacques Cousteau: An Asian boy watches an old, big-nosed man wearing a
long black coat and beard, win a beautiful goldfish. It swiftly hides from
the evil old man under a rock. After breaking the boy’s milk bottle, the old
man gives him a coin. The boy places a bet on the goldfish and wins. The
Jew winds up with a crummy minnow. Obviously more heartwarming than
The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film
,
The Golden Fish
won.

• • •

In America, Frank Sinatra had had a hit album in 1955 called
Songs for
Swingin’ Lovers
. In England in 1959, Peter Sellers recorded one of his own:
Songs for Swingin’ Sellers
. Sinatra’s album cover featured a dancing couple
beaming into each other’s eyes. Peter’s featured a tree on the trunk of which
hangs a wanted poster with Peter’s mug on it; from a high limb hangs a
corpse wearing cowboy boots and spurs.

The album begins with a pseudo-Sinatra, an impersonation that even
Peter Sellers could not do.
Speaking
as Sinatra might have been possible;
duplicating that literally inimitable singing voice was not, so a crooner
named Matt Monro was hired for the equivalent of about $50. Monro is
credited on the album as Fred Flange.

The actress-comedienne Irene Handl recorded several of the cuts with
Peter, including one that skewers BBC radio talk shows. But the highlights
are Peter’s sniveling, ham-ridden rendition of “My Old Dutch,” the song
his mother forced him to perform onstage in white tie and tails at age two,
a fact that might explain why the contemporary version has a distinctly
nasty edge. Then there’s a certain Mr. Banerjee’s production of
My Fair
Lady
:

M
R.
B
ANERJEE:
I am walking through the marketplace one day at Maharacheekee, which is near Bombay, and I am walking by there, and
I am saying to my friend, who is with me, “Look! There! Over there
is a beautiful and untouchable girl!” And I am saying to her, “Come
with me, my dear—I will make you touchable!”

Mr. Banerjee then sings a tabla and cymbals–filled version of Lerner
and Loewe’s charming, already-a-chestnut song, “Would That Not Be
Lovely” (“warm face, warm hands, warm foot”).

Songs for Swingin’ Sellers
ends with “Peter Sellers Sings George Gershwin.” It goes like this: (chord) “George Ge-ersh-win!”

• • •

In September 1959, the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan traveled
to Balmoral to ask that Parliament be dissolved. Elizabeth II, always a gracious hostess, entertained her guest by showing a movie—
I’m All Right,
Jack
(1959), starring Peter Sellers.

A social satire that reveals the one characteristic common to all the
classes in Britain—strident self-interest—
I’m All Right, Jack
brought Peter such acclaim that the force of his performance successfully distorted
the satire. As conceived, written, and directed, the film is a bitter attack
on postwar British industrial paralysis, the class-based antagonism, particular to the 1950s, that the historian Arthur Marwick calls Britain’s
“industrial cold war.” But as performed by Peter, Fred Kite, the martinet
chief shop steward at the armament factory Missiles, Ltd., is so commanding a figure of contempt and blame that all the other characters’
corruption or daftness fades away, leaving
I’m All Right, Jack
to seem like
a scathing denunciation of lazy, overpaid, communist-sympathizing trade
unions.

Peter himself didn’t find the Conservatives’ landslide victory in the fall
of 1959 a complete coincidence to his film’s extraordinary popularity: “I
heard the Tories liked it. It probably did more good to them than it did to
Labor.”

Ironically, Peter didn’t want to do the film at all. It wasn’t because he
didn’t approve of the film’s politics, which never seem to have crossed his
mind. (“I don’t vote,” he later said. “Never have. There are things about
the Tories I like, and things about the Socialists. I suppose the ideal would
be some kind of Communism, but not Soviet Communism, so what could
I vote for?”) It was because he didn’t think his part was funny.

He later claimed to have been offered the role after playing on the
director John Boulting’s cricket team in a charity match, but there was a
bit more struggle behind it. As Roy Boulting, the film’s producer, describes
Peter’s response to the offer: “He read it. And he didn’t want to do it. So
we asked him, ‘Why, Peter?’ He said, ‘Where are the laughs? Where does
one get a laugh?’ We had to explain to him as best we could that we didn’t
regard him as a Goon for this film—that he was going to be playing a real
character.”

Peter grew more interested in the role, but he was also attracted by the
complete package the Boultings were offering. In January 1959, Peter and
the Boultings announced their new five-picture nonexclusive deal. (A nonexclusive deal permits an actor to appear in other producers’ films.) “It’s
worth £100,000,” Peter declared; an American newspaper put the figure at
$280,000.
I’m All Right, Jack
would be the first made under the new terms.
“For an actor,” Peter explained, “a term contract is a bit like a marriage.
You’ve got to have confidence in your partner.”