Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [84]
And to Peter Sellers’s eventual peril, he repeatedly ignored the advice Alec Guinness had given him during the production of The Ladykillers: “Don’t ever let the press know anything about your private life.” Indeed, Peter came up with a strategy to solve the problem. Killing two birds with a single stone, he began to tell the world he had no personality at all: “In myself I have nothing to offer as a personality. But as soon as I can get into some character I’m away. I use the characters to protect myself, as a shield—like getting into a hut and saying ‘nobody can see me.’ ” And, “As far as I’m aware, I have no personality of my own whatsoever. That is, I have no personality to offer the public. I have nothing to project.”
The press took the bait. Peter Sellers, wrote one of the many critics to follow Peter’s lead over the years, “possesses one rare distinction—that of total anonymity.”
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Around this time, Peter’s friend Herbert Kretzmer described him more closely, more sympathetically, and consequently more tragically:
“He is the most successful actor since Olivier and Guinness. He enjoys a riotous acclaim clear across the world. He has more money than he can spend in his lifetime—and the endless promise of more. . . . Yet Peter Sellers is one of the saddest, most self-tortured men I have ever known. Here is a man almost devoid of any capacity to sit back and enjoy the riches his genius has produced. There is certainly no more complex personality in the whole spectrum of British show business.”
TEN
“I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.”
In January 1961, Peter found himself in need of a new driver. Bert Mortimer had been Cary Grant’s chauffeur when Grant was in England, but Cary was spending more time in Hollywood and Bert was looking for work. First Peter tried him out on Peg. When that worked out, he took Bert for himself.
“I was a bit concerned because I’d heard that staff came and went like turning on the tap and running water,” Bert later observed. “But we prevailed. And everything turned out fine.” Until the end.
Bert Mortimer became Peter’s primary caregiver. Driving, fetching, emotional-crisis management, delivering messages Peter wanted to avoid delivering himself, cleaning up dog shit deposited in the back seat of a Rolls Royce. Mortimer performed many tasks. Says Bryan Forbes, “Peter built him up into a legend. He became known as ‘The Great Bert.’ ”
Peter also hired a new secretary. Naturally, Peter believed that every fan letter required a personal reply. Hattie Stevenson wrote them. She, too, came to clean up messes.
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Only Two Can Play (1962) might have served as the title of a memoir devoted to the waning years of Peter’s marriage, but in fact it’s fictional. Based on Kingsley Amis’s novel That Uncertain Feeling, it concerns a dapper Welsh librarian, a lady’s man with a wife and two kids who can’t help but have an affair with a gorgeous, wealthy, foreign-born woman, herself a serial adulterer. The British novelist Thomas Wiseman once wrote perceptively about Peter’s ongoing tendency to play out the blunt facts of his own interiority in the roles he chose to play for the public. Only Two Can Play, Wiseman declared, was yet another “ingenious form of psychological buck-passing.”
Scripted by Bryan Forbes and directed by Sidney Gilliat for the Boultings, Only Two Can Play is one of Peter’s lowest-key films, a muted look at a conventional marriage and its vicissitudes. It’s Sellers at his most understated. The performance seems effortless, and the film is fascinating.
Only Two Can Play’s production team knew what they were getting with Peter Sellers. Forbes had known Sellers since the war, when they’d appeared together in Stars in Battledress along with Sgts. Harry Secombe and Terry-Thomas and Lt. Roger Moore. Forbes had always enjoyed Sellers’s company, and as they rose in the world of British entertainment they became even