Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [142]
Miller couldn’t help but notice the change in Sellers, who was markedly troubled during the production of Alice in Wonderland. “He was a moody bugger, you know? He was very superstitious. If things had gone badly on the way to the location, if his stars hadn’t read right, he’d be sunk in a gloom and would be unwilling to film.” Still, Miller knew, “you could amuse him, and a sort of strange, mischievous smile would spread across his face.” The rest of the time, though, Peter “kept to himself and often sat apart in a deck chair in a starry gloom.”
Peter Eyre, who played the Knave of Hearts, retains no fond memories of working with Sellers in Alice in Wonderland. “I thought Peter Sellers was going to be like an actor. But he wasn’t, really. He absolutely didn’t relate to any of the other actors. He had to be slightly polite to the old actress who played the Queen of Hearts, Alison Leggatt, but otherwise he was completely closed off as a person. He only ever loosened up when Snowdon came to photograph. There were a lot of well-known actors in the production; I don’t remember him actually speaking to anybody. And those other famous actors, like Michael Redgrave and John Gielgud—they weren’t like that at all. Then again, they didn’t have cars with chauffeurs. Sellers was a movie star.”
As he had with Spike Milligan, Eyre attributes Peter’s distance to the fact that he was, at his core, a comedian: “They can’t bear the idea that somebody else is going to get a laugh. It’s like an illness.”
Without contradicting those who found Peter to be generous to them in front of a camera, Eyre is probably right about what might be called the comedian’s curse. Apart from his closest friends, Peter’s richest relationships were with his audiences, particularly the ones he never saw. It was with the disconnected listeners and spectators of radio, television, and film that he most securely bonded, and he did so instinctively and spontaneously in flashes of raw creation.
“He improvised very beautifully in the same tone as Carroll wrote,” Jonathan Miller explains. “I didn’t let anyone improvise unless they actually had the logic Carroll did.” Miller suggested that Peter play the King of Hearts as a familiar Goon Show routine: “I borrowed a character of his—that feeble old man, Henry Crun—very vague and unfocused. He improvised wonderfully at one moment—when the letter gets picked up, and the White Rabbit brandishes it and says, ‘This letter’s just been picked up,’ and the foreman of the jury says, ‘Who’s it written to?’ and he opens it up and says, ‘It seems to be a letter written by the prisoner to somebody.’ Sellers then said [in Henry Crun’s voice-of-the-shakes], ‘It must be that. I mean, it can’t just be written to nobody. You can’t just write to nobody. I mean, if you did that all the time, well, the post office would come to a standstill! I mean, you’ve got to have somebody, I mean, well—we-ee-ll—it’s not allowed!’ That was just the sort of thing that Carroll would have written.”
When the camera wasn’t rolling, Sellers’s strangeness could be less appealing. Miller goes on: “He was fascinated by wealth and his Rolls Royce and his various attendants who looked after him and the peculiar sort of Barbie-doll wife he had. He gave a party for my wife and me and a number of other people at his house, and I remember there was an enormous champagne bucket filled with caviar. It did seem rather immoderate.
“He was a difficult man—sort of show biz, sort of genius, but completely empty when he wasn’t playing anyone. He was a receptacle rather than a person. And whatever parts he played completely filled the receptacle, and then they were drained out. And the receptacle was left empty and featureless. Like a lot of people who can pretend to be other