Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [97]
The director Robert Parrish and his wife, Kathleen, stopped in to visit Peter shortly after Anne left him. He had, says Kathleen Parrish, “lots of toys,” one of which was a new electric organ, which he began to play. Taking their cue, the Parrishes began to make a big fuss over it, at which point Peter abruptly stopped playing. “Isn’t this bullshit?” he said.
Michael Sellers saw a more intimate despair. He remembers his father muttering. “Who would want me? Who would want me?”
Well, Laurence Olivier, for one.
“Larry asked me to play Lear at the Chichester Festival,” said Peter to the journalist Roderick Mann. “It’s one of the great parts,” he explained. “And Larry said, ‘You’d be good, Peter. You must do it. The best Lears have nearly always been new to Shakespeare.’
“But I turned it down. It was too big a risk. In my heart I hadn’t the confidence, and that’s the place you’ve got to have it. I’m always seeking perfection, and that makes me difficult to live with. I’m sure it’s a nagging thing.”
• • •
A less risky choice, and so a less exciting one, The Dock Brief (1962) is a sad comedy, a courtroom drama that is played out almost entirely in the minds of a pathetic defendant (Richard Attenborough) and his inept lawyer (Peter). Based on John Mortimer’s play, the film takes place in a prison holding cell, with several flashbacks and flash-forwards breaking up the deliberate claustrophobia. Wilfrid Morgenhall, the barrister assigned to the hopeless case of Herbert Fowle, uses his creative intellect to imagine ways of getting his client off the hook; the client, meanwhile, is a pitiful sap who did, indeed, kill his indefatigably laughing wife (Beryl Reid, in flashback). David Lodge plays, of all things, a lodger; the twist is that Fowle kills his wife not because she launched an affair with the lodger but because she didn’t.
As always, Peter required a vocal hook into his character. Mortimer dined with him just before shooting began and found Peter to be “desperately uncertain” about his performance of Morgenhall. Then a plate of cockles arrived at their table. Memories flowed; the little mollusks cast Peter into a disastrous lost-time reverie of a youthful visit to Morecambe on the Lancashire coast. The cockles, Mortimer was horrified to witness, “brought a faded north-country accent and the suggestion of a scrappy mustache. He felt he had been thrown the lifeline of a voice and work could begin.”
Mortimer was appalled because the character he’d written was not from the North, did not speak with a Lancashire twang, and bore no scrappy mustache. “It took a great deal of patience and tact by the director, James Hill, to undo the effect of the cockles.” (There is a mustache on Morgenhall’s lip, but it’s a trim, linear number tinged with gray.)
Mortimer also claims that Peter told him that he feared for his safety. The Mafia was after him. Sophia.
• • •
Work might have provided some steadiness, but it did not. It was merely constant.
In The Wrong Arm of the Law (1962), Peter played opposite Nanette Newman, the glamorous, almond-eyed wife of Peter’s war buddy, Bryan Forbes. “I want to marry Nanette,” Peter confided to Forbes one day. Taking Forbes aside, he admitted to his old friend that he hadn’t broached the subject with Nanette herself, but his attitude on this point was one of forthright honesty. He wanted to clear it with Bryan first; it was a matter of fair play.
“The scene had taken on the characteristics of a Pinter play,” Forbes later wrote. “But I knew it would be a mistake to appear outraged or to mock him: that was not the way to handle Peter.” So Forbes simply proceeded with the conversation, adopting the same patient, solicitous tone that Peter was employing. Bryan Forbes was one of those who sympathized with Peter’s nature: “He was so patently sincere and desperate to do the right thing