Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [48]
Mother Goose—grumpy Richard Hearne in drag—was not amused by Peter’s filthy joke, and immediately after the curtain fell she gave the management a piece of her fairy-tale mind. When the sympathetic Bygraves showed up at Peter’s dressing room the next day, he found Peter in tears. Val Parnell himself had scolded the errant Peter, telling him that if he continued veering so luridly off script he’d never work again.
This was a relatively empty threat, since Parnell didn’t control British radio, television, or film. But Peter seems thereafter to have stuck to the dialogue he’d originally been given—only for the duration of Mother Goose, of course, for by the end of March 1955, when the show closed (after 156 performances, usually two a day), he was once again free to exercise his dazzling improvisational skills.
But there was yet another new constraint. In late December 1954, toward the end of the Goon Show episode called “Ye Bandit of Sherwood Forest,” Maid Marian (Charlotte Mitchell, one of the rare female guests) suddenly squealed, “Oh! There’s someone crawling under the table! What are you doing under there, sir?”
“I’m looking for a telegram,” a familiar politician’s voice intoned. The studio audience thundered its approval, and from that moment forward Peter Sellers was officially forbidden to impersonate Winston Churchill on the British Broadcasting Corporation’s airwaves.
• • •
In February 1955, Peter and Anne bought their first house, a mock-Tudor in Muswell Hill, a neighborhood just north of Highgate. North London was still his orbit, though he was moving progressively farther away from the center of town. But the more significant turning point that year occurred on film. After appearing in the small role of a police constable in John and Julie (1955; two cheeping children make their way to London to see the coronation of Elizabeth II), Peter made his first great movie, The Ladykillers (1955), for his first great director, Alexander Mackendrick, who cast him in support of the first great star Peter was able to study at close range.
“I first worked with him on The Ladykillers,” Sir Alec Guinness recalled in one of his last interviews. “He was not difficult at all—certainly not in those days. He was cast by Sandy Mackendrick, who knew him already. He was always very courteous to me; we got on very well. I mostly remember him having some kind of recording machine into which he would do imitations of people.”
Long before his stellar appearances in international blockbusters— The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), Star Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Return of the Jedi (1983), A Passage to India (1984)—Alec Guinness was a titan of British theater and cinema, and Peter admired him immensely. Guinness subsumed himself to an unparalleled degree into the roles he played. He was an apparently blank screen onto which he projected dazzlingly variegated characters. In the single year of 1951 Guinness did remarkable star turns in both Oliver Twist, as an especially vicious hook-nosed Fagin, and The Lavender Hill Mob, as the bland bank employee who casually steals £1 million. But it was in the great Ealing Studios comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) that Guinness gave his showiest chameleonic performance—that of all eight members of the titled d’Ascoyne family who are systematically bumped off by a distant relative, the ninth in line for the dukedom: Ascoyne d’Ascoyne, Henry d’Ascoyne, Canon d’Ascoyne, Admiral d’Ascoyne, General d’Ascoyne, Lady Agatha d’Ascoyne. . . .
The titan invited the nervous novice to lunch before The Ladykillers began filming in the summer of 1955. Sir Alec was not simply being kind when he spoke of the Peter Sellers he knew then. They did get