Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [42]
“I don’t know if that comes across to Americans,” he admits with a touch of scolding. “You Americans get very prudish about lavatory jokes. You think they’re infantile. I think it’s far more infantile when you don’t laugh at them.”
John Lennon, too, found it all precisely, gloriously English and expressed concern that others just wouldn’t get it: “I was twelve when the Goon Show first hit. Sixteen when they finished with me. Their humor was the only proof that the world was insane. . . . What it means to Americans I can’t imagine (apart from a rumored few fanatics). As they say in Tibet, ‘You had to be there.’ ”
• • •
The third series began recording in November 1952. Bentine’s departure and Eton’s arrival were not enough to dispel all the tension. Geldray tells of the time a young BBC underling rushed up to him and breathlessly reported the day’s gossip: He’d heard that Spike had just charged over to Peter’s house with a gun. “Yeah? So what else is new?” was Geldray’s response.
In late December, Spike actually suffered the nervous breakdown.
Always high strung, on the brink, too many thoughts in his head and many of them unhygienic, Spike crashed. The pressure of weekly creation—and the success it was bringing him—pushed him over the edge. He was hospitalized and ended up missing a total of twelve shows—nearly half the third series, though he began contributing scripts after only a few tentative weeks of recovery. Madness was the point, after all.
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In 1953, Peter made his phonographic recording debut under the production of George Martin, who went on to produce the Beatles. His first single, released by Parlophone, was a skit called “Jakka and the Flying Saucers”—a Chipmunk-voiced boy, Jakka, and his doughnut-shaped dog, Dunker, both from Venus, embark on a quest for the Golden Cheese.
Martin once called it “probably the worst-selling record that Parlophone ever made.”
But Peter was undaunted; “Jakka and the Flying Saucers” was followed by many more successful records in the 1950s alone, including the singles “Dipso Calypso” (1955), “Any Old Iron” (1957), and a rather sick rendition of the detested “My Old Dutch” (1959), the song Peg made him perform as an infant in white tie and tails. These 45s and 78s performed substantially better in the marketplace than “Jakka and the Flying Saucers.”
Around this time Peter suffered a disappointment of a more personal nature. Max Geldray reports that Sellers had gone to see the French comedian Jacques Tati’s most recent film, M. Hulot’s Holiday and was tremendously impressed—so much so that he wrote a fan letter to Tati, who replied with a casual invitation to Peter to visit him some time. Peter left immediately for France.
He returned deeply let down. Tati spent most of their time together lecturing Peter on the subject of comedy. As Sellers told Geldray, “All he did was talk to me about how great he is.” Years later, Tati wrote his own fan letter to Peter after seeing one his pictures. Peter didn’t bother to reply.
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The Super Secret Service (1953), released in late summer to little notice, works much better than either Penny Points to Paradise or Down Among the Z Men, perhaps because it’s too short to require much in the way of plot or structure. A 24-minute comedy scripted by Spike and Larry Stephens, the film begins with Sellers, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and a thin mustache gracing his lip, opening a door into a bleak film-noir office. He frantically reaches into his trenchcoat pocket for a gun. Unable to find it, he waves sheepishly at the camera and backs out of the room. The credits roll.
In the film, Milligan and Stephens’s music hall absurdism takes the place of Z Men’s misguided conventionality: