Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [93]
Mr. Topaze isn’t bad; it just isn’t good. Despite its bitter tone, it’s dull. “Judgment on his directing powers must be reserved until he can handle a subject without the extra headache of acting,” was Variety’s critique, and because Peter was directing himself, “His personal performance has suffered some.” The critic was also troubled by the cruelty of the subject matter; the “quiet comedy” of a shy schoolteacher erupted into “an uncomfortably brittle, snide drama.” That Mr. Topaze is not a feel-good comedy is inherent to the material. What’s notable is that Sellers didn’t play up this intrinsic acerbity more; the problem with Mr. Topaze is its blandness.
The film’s tepid reception was a very personal disappointment to Peter—so much so that he barely talked again about Mr. Topaze. Soon thereafter he called Spike Milligan and suggested they bring back The Goon Show. In his later years he actually insisted that he’d never directed a movie in his life.
He was growing bitter. “Criticism should be done by critics,” Peter declared in September 1961, “and a critic should have some training and some love for the medium he is discussing. But these days, gossip-columnist training seems to be enough qualification. I suppose an ability to stand on your feet through interminable cocktail parties and swig interminable gins in between devouring masses of fried prawns may just possibly help you to understand and appreciate what a director is getting at, but for the life of me I can’t see how.”
ELEVEN
Peter didn’t bother to ask his wife when he put Chipperfield up for sale near the end of 1961. He didn’t even tell his mother. A Daily Mail reporter called Peg for confirmation after hearing the rumor. “I’m sure it can’t be right,” Mother stated with authority. “Peter rings me up nearly every night for a mother-and-son heart-to-heart. And he hasn’t mentioned anything about moving.”
According to Sigmund Freud, the key to a healthy personality is the tolerance of contradiction, but Peter’s ability to sustain drastic paradox offers a twist to the theory. At times, at least, he seemed to tolerate his radical contradictions rather well; it was those around him who couldn’t handle the strain. More and more, Peter’s mind functioned like two geological fault lines grinding inexorably against each other, all part of nature. It was nearby residents who felt the rumblings and lived in fear.
A case in point: With the sale of Chipperfield, Peter believed, or wanted to believe, that by leading his wife and two children out of one more house and into still another, he was acting in their interests. For him, changing addresses again would engender a sense of stability. “One tries to create roots,” he explained. “It’s vital for the children.” It’s incidents like this that lead the great Sellers fan Dimitris Verionis to offer an astonishingly acute observation: “Peter was never a double-dealer. He was straight in his reactions—instinctive and sometimes brutally innocent.”
So with the cruel guilelessness of the spoiled child he always was, Peter Sellers impulsively bought a seven-year, £31,000 lease on a vast penthouse apartment overlooking Hampstead Heath. As Graham Stark puts it, “He couldn’t have done anything worse.”
While the apartment was being renovated, the Sellerses moved into a fourteenth-floor suite at the Carlton Tower hotel in Belgravia. Stark recalls the bitter litter of Christmas 1961. Covering the floor of the suite were scads of unopened holiday presents that had been given, nominally, to Michael and Sarah. Many of them had been trod into a trampled mess. It was not the result of a lightning-like Peter tantrum. These children’s gifts were British film producers