Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [58]
Sonny’s valet (Kenneth Griffith), tethered more tightly to reality, tells him that the scheme is doomed to failure—not because it’s immoral, but because Wee Sonny is a dreadful actor.
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Terry-Thomas recalled in his memoirs that Peter, whom he had known since the Grafton Arms days, had run into him one day early in his career and began complaining about a part he’d been asked to play (one Terry-Thomas doesn’t identify): “The trouble about my role,” Peter told him, “is that they wanted an actor with a Cockney accent. To me this is devastating because I’ve spent five years trying to lose my Cockney twang.” “He had lost it so successfully,” Terry-Thomas went on to write, that “by the time we made The Naked Truth he confided to me one day, ‘I’ve come to the part of the film which is scaring me to death. I’m supposed to use my own accent. And I haven’t got one.’ ”
But Peter never had a Cockney twang to begin with; not everyone in London grows up sounding like Michael Caine in Alfie (1966). And since adolescence he could imitate any accent at all, practically at will. Although Terry-Thomas had no reason to realize it, what Peter was actually confessing was his sense of self—one that was depleted on the one hand and mutantly reduplicating on the other, a multiple emptiness he was trying to fill by turning it into a point of conversation.
Terry-Thomas did sense another kind of trouble brewing. Peter was no longer the eager-to-please novice granted the chance to appear alongside Alec Guinness and grateful just to be there. Now that he was sharing top billing on The Naked Truth, Peter Sellers was getting a bit touchy.
He “made one of his ‘protests’ during shooting,” Terry-Thomas writes. “He turned to Mario Zampi and shouted, ‘The way you are making this film is ridiculous. You can’t direct! I know much more about the camera than you do. I’ll give you one more take and then I’m off.’ Mario didn’t reply. He stood there, shocked.”
Characteristically, others had an easier time of it. “I was pleased to meet him,” Kenneth Griffith says. “Didn’t know much about him, but he was very pleased to meet me. And from that day to this—with one exception—he was an unshiftable friend to me. And as he became very influential, he was a great help to me.”
However, even a friend as loyal and loving as Griffith adds, “He was notoriously treacherous. Of course, he was in a powerless mental and emotional state. He was a manic-depressive, and, well, yes—I have sympathy for people. I understood Sellers. Very complicated, you know. He was pretty well inarticulate as himself.”
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The loyalty of Peter Sellers’s closest friends remains seemingly boundless. They loved him. And they still do. “Anne was a very nice woman,” Griffith reflected recently. “Of course he had lovely women. Anne was a nice woman, and that’s what he was like to me.”
Peter could be friendly to total strangers. “One day I was at a cinema in Hampstead,” the director Joseph McGrath remembers, “and Peter Sellers was standing there as I came out. And I had just seen him in the film, so I went up to him and said, ‘You’re Peter Sellers, and I claim the reward.’ And he said, ‘Who are you?’ and I told him who I was. He said, ‘What do you do?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m an art student.’ He said, ‘Let’s go and have a cup of tea.’ ”
A few years went by, and McGrath became a television director. “I got his home phone number, and telephoned him, and he said, ‘Who are you?’ I said, ‘McGrath—Joe McGrath.’ He said,