Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [72]
Peter had bought the place on impulse. “We saw this advert in the Sunday Times for this manor house in Chipperfield,” Anne remembers. “So we went out to have a look at it, and Peter decided, there and then, he had to have it.”
It was at Chipperfield, says Anne, that the marriage “really turned sour.”
It didn’t start off that way, according to Michael, who has described his life as being “comparatively happy at this time. I think Sarah and I had both learned how to fade into the landscape.” By the expression “at this time,” Michael seems to be referring to a period of several months.
At both St. Fred’s and Chipperfield, Peter tended to bring pets home. Hamsters. Goldfish. Kittens. Puppies (two Labradors, a cocker spaniel, a pair of white Maltese terriers). Guinea pigs. Rabbits. The trouble was, he almost always gave them away at the first provocation. Except for the terriers, who stayed for a while, a single poorly timed bark or puddle and out the animal went.
There was a parrot, too. Peg, cleverly, taught it to say “Bollocks.” Peter, reactively, became enraged the first time “Henry” swore at him and immediately forced Anne to call Peg and insist that his mother keep and care for the bird herself. That Anne had to place the call is itself notable, since Peter called his mother at least once a day and usually more often. But despite the fact that it was phrased as Anne’s demand and not Peter’s, Peg complied. She took Henry and fed it nothing but the best seed until Henry swooped down on her one day as she lay naked in her bathtub and began pecking. At that point Peg dispatched Henry on a hastily arranged, one-way trip to its birthplace.
• • •
In 1960, after all the receipts were totaled, I’m All Right, Jack turned out to be the biggest box office hit in Britain. British Lion hadn’t given the film a larger-than-usual advertising budget, but word of mouth had made it an initial success, and its sheer longevity did the rest. The only region in the United Kingdom in which this industrial satire didn’t work was the working-class mining districts of Wales; the characterization of the union steward may be blamed.
In London, however, the film was a smash. I’m All Right, Jack ran for seventeen weeks at Studio One, and it was an art-house hit in New York as well, breaking all house records at the Guild Theater, where it ran for over four months. The Observer’s film critic declared in her end-of-year wrap-up that “Peter Sellers’s performance in I’m All Right, Jack is the best piece of acting in any British picture.” The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (which was then called the Society of Film and Television Arts) agreed. When it named its nominees for Best British Actor, among them were Laurence Olivier (for The Devil’s Disciple) and Richard Burton (for Look Back in Anger).
Peter won.
NINE
A grayed, haunted Peter wanders toward the camera in the opening sequence of The Battle of the Sexes (1959). “Every war produces its hero”—the narrator announces—“the man with that little extra something that other men haven’t got. The superman.”
When Peter learned that the writer-producer Monja Danischewsky had adapted James Thurber’s satirical short story “The Catbird Seat,” transposing the action across the Atlantic to Scotland, he told Danischewsky that he wanted to play the lead—the mild-mannered clerk- turned- would- be- killer. The Battle of the Sexes was written, cast, and filmed before I’m All Right, Jack’s blockbuster release made Peter a bona-fide movie star, and as a consequence Sellers’s casting wasn’t as easy as one might assume in retrospect. According to Danischewsky, “it was a fight at that time to get the finance people to agree that he was a big enough name for the budget.” Peter’s financial connections helped; Danischewsky credited Sellers for being “a tower of practical help to me as a producer, for he found for me two ‘angels