Sellers Strikes Again

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

A man of many masks, he is a master of comedy--but who is he?

The star is discovered, between acts, in his dressing room. He is wearing a Viking's helmet, complete with horns, over a wig of lank brown hair, a corset over a lace shirt. On his right hand there is a boxing glove. He claims, in the rich, ripe tones of yesteryear's provincial matinee idol, that he was about to do his imitation of Queen Victoria, but that he has forgotten what she looks like. The program's ever harassed star and manager, who just happens to be a very green, very agreeable frog, tells his guest that though he loves the many wild characters the performer is capable of impersonating, on this show it is quite all right to "just relax and be yourself."

No, replies the nervous thespian, that would be altogether impossible. "I could never be myself."

"Never yourself?"

"No, you see, there is no me. I do I not exist." "I beg your pardon?" The actor draws conspiratorially close to the anthropomorphic amphibian and, with many a wary glance over both shoulders, whispers: "There used to be a me. But I had it surgically removed."

Good joke. Much laughter--and no time to think about any confessional implications this line may carry, since the performer immediately launches into a rendition of Richard III's soliloquy, accompanying himself on a pair of "tuned chickens." But the fact is that what Peter Sellers told Kermit the Frog on The Muppet Show may be as frank a public statement as he can make about himself. It reveals his profound fear that the real Peter Sellers, at 54, is virtually a cipher, that he has no personality and that he will either not be able to find or will at the last minute lose whatever fictive creation he has chosen to wrap around himself.

Nor does the badinage with Kermit seem to be entirely fortuitous in its timing. Sellers taped his Muppet appearance not long before he went to work on Being There, the film version of Jerzy Kosinski's novel about how a totally blank, isolated man, whose only knowledge of the world comes from television, emerges from the Edenic walled garden he has tended all his life to become a presidential adviser, media pundit and, finally, presidential timber himself. Sellers has indicated that in this character of Chance the gardener (Chauncey Gardiner, as his fancy new friends later take to calling him), he has metaphorically projected more of himself than he ever did in any of his previous 50-odd screen appearances. It was, for him, a painful process--"the part that required the most care of any I ever played"--but it has turned out to be worth it. He has collected perhaps his most enthusiastic reviews, notices of his career that finally acknowledge not just his comedic gifts but his stature as one of the finest film actors of his era. The film itself is drawing the kind of intense audiences that may mean it will turn into a cult object. Young people, themselves shaped by their early, total immersion in television, seem to respond powerfully to Chance, admiring the way worldly power simply seems to flow to him despite his passivity and his defects--he is both simple-minded and illiterate.

Sellers read Kosinski's book shortly after it was published in 1972. He decided he was the only actor who could play Chance. Sellers saw in the role an opportunity to bring his career to its culmination. This ambition may seem odd to those for whom Sellers is best beloved as an ingenious portrayer of multicharacter--or, anyway, multivoiced--roles, in a staggering array of makeups. Indeed, the parts that have established him as an international figure to be reckoned with are of that nature. Who can forget the decadent playwright, Clare Quilty, in Lolita, obsessively trying to take the nymphet away from Humbert Humbert, with his voice flat as a Midwestern plain, his drunken acrobatics during the gloriously spiflicated Ping Pong game? Or the disguises Sellers adopted to work his nefarious scheme--a thick-voiced, menacingly ingratiating cop (with just a line or two of a perfect Brando parody dropped in), a German-accented school psychologist brilliantly exemplifying the irrationality of rationality. The psychologist, of course, is a close cousin of the title character in Dr. Strangelove, with his tinted glasses, his accent borrowed from Henry Kissinger, his rebellious arm that keeps trying to fly into the Nazi salute. In that film Sellers played two additional roles: the liberalish U.S. President trying to convince the Soviet Premier that the dispatch of nuclear bombers was an accident and parodying a lovers' quarrel over the hot line ("I'm just as capable of being sorry as you are, Dimitri"), and an R.A.F. group captain trying to stave off doomsday with a cricketeer's manners and a nanny's voice. As Stanley Kubrick, the director of Lolita and Strangelove, says, "The quality that distinguishes him from other great comic actors is his ability to transform the horrifying and grotesque into unforgettable comic invention."

Sellers has also nourished his comic imagination with examples of Victorian stuffiness, especially in his comedy records of the '50s and '60s that are now collectors' items. His parody of a peer's boyhood reminiscences on a BBC talk is a sly sendup of a socially blinkered Establishment in which his lordship genially recalls cheering up the tenantry by passing among them nourishing table scraps and tracts of an uplifting nature. The remnants of empire inspired him to construct an imaginary interview with the producer of an Indian version of My Fair Lady who is adapting the show to fit the needs of an emerging nation but mostly accomplishing bad puns. Sellers has in fact always been a covert social commentator.

There is another line to his career: his interest in the implacably impervious. It was this quality that first brought him fame--as Fred Kite, the stupefyingly literal-minded and selfish union shop steward in I'm All Right, Jack (1960). It also the source of hilarity in that small masterpiece, The Party, in which Sellers plays a beturbanned Indian, somehow-invited to a grand affair, and wandering through it, friendless and almost silent, but wreaking havoc wherever he turns. Finally, this impermeability is the mark of his great Inspector Clouseau. In countless scenes such as the one from A Shot in the Dark when Clouseau stumbled through a roomful of guests in evening dress, out through an open French window and sailed through the air to land in a pond below, the inspector's uncanny Sang-froid has never faltered. Whether failing to pole vault a castle's moat or skimming across the Paris rooftops in a disguise that has somehow inflated like a balloon, or setting his nemesis, Chief Inspector Dreyfus, into paroxysmal eye twitchings. Inspector Clouseau has never wavered in his conviction that he is the world's greatest detective. It is this blithe, impenetrable side of Sellers, pared down and exhibited with art old master's exquisitely crafted minimalism, that is perfectly stated in the character of poor, Effectless Chance. Sellers has created a figure subtly different from, perhaps more generally appealing than, Kosinski's original.

"He is the creation of my concern, not my sympathy or empathy," says Kosinski, 46. "He is the enemy of everything I stand for, a point zero from which all my other characters depart." As Kosinski sees him, Chance is a victim, innocent and nonverbal, of a corporate state that, through the instrument of television, "has rendered him unaware, passive, with no notion of himself, his life, or of others." He is, in short, the ultimate voyeur, the sum not of his actions but of his reactions to a world of which he has been permitted only a partial and distorted view. Success comes to him because he has no choice but to reflect back at everyone he meets whatever qualities they have projected on him. The woman (Shirley MacLaine) who takes him in after he has been injured in an encounter with her limousine sees him as a highly charged sexual being, although he is in fact a virgin. Her husband (Melvyn Douglas), a mighty captain of industry, believes him to be a Baruch-like financial wizard, since his few childlike responses to questions on these matters can be interpreted as metaphorical profundities. The President (Jack Warden) is similarly buffaloed by Chance's vague imagery, all of it drawn from the only subject he knows anything about, gardening.

It is this ability to reflect back to the world whatever it projects onto them that links actor and role. There is no one among his friends and ex-friends, his wife and ex-wives, happy or unhappy business associates who claims to know the real Peter Sellers or to offer a coherent explication of his unpredictable personality. Like Chance, there seems to be no core, no center to the man, except what he picks up from others. Says his longtime friend and publicist, David Steinberg: "Peter is the accumulation of all the roles he's played and all the people he's met. He's directing traffic inside all that." And his current and fourth wife, Actress Lynne Frederick, 25, adds: "His mind is in a constant state of turmoil about what his purpose is on this planet and whether it's all worthwhile."

In short, Sellers is, and appears always to have been, the world's most impressionable impressionist, a masterly quick-change artist, who picks up people, ideas, wives, gadgets, even identities as they flash across his consciousness, then absorbs them into himself for a time. He creates the belief among bystanders that they are in the presence of a permanent reality, whereupon he abandons each animating fancy for the next. And the next. "My whole life," Kosinski remembers Sellers telling him, "has been devoted to imitating others. It has been devoted to the portrayal of those who appear to be different from what they are. If I were to tell you that Chauncey Gardiner was the ultimate Peter Sellers, then I would be telling you what my whole life was about. If I don't portray him, he will ultimately portray me."

Utterly unpsychological in his orientation, rootless in his manner of life (he maintains a home in Gstaad, Switzerland, for tax purposes), a consulter of mystics and gurus, Sellers is impulsively generous and equally quick to anger. As a result, he has few intimate or longstanding relationships. He is even sometimes uncertain just exactly what his own normal speaking voice is, so frequently does he drop into accents and imitations in conversation. "I think it's something like what you're hearing now," he told TIME Correspondent Sandra Burton, then quickly added, "Well, maybe I'm trying to sound a bit more posh." But it's close, really it is, he reassures. "This voice is not made up, because I cannot relax and talk openly in someone else's voice. I've heard myself on recordings in background conversation, and I think I talk like this." Then he reconsiders. "I hear myself at other times, though, and I'm talking like this"--and the lightest chiming of Bow bells is heard in his tones. Whereupon he gives up and admits, "It depends on who I'm with. Sometimes I start out in my own voice and no matter who I'm with, I take on their thing."

There is something lost about a man who has trouble finding his own voice and is only truly alive when he is working. It may be one reason he almost never rests. An air of befuddled sadness clings to Sellers, despite his achievements and despite the comfortable life they have brought him. The beginnings of the curse of self-abnegation and its palliative role playing are to be found in his childhood. He is, on his mother's side, third-generation show biz. His grandmother, Ma Ray, was a performer-manager in the music halls, a minor legend as the first to bring swimmers onstage in a glass tank. Peter's mother, Peg, worked for Ma most of her life, acquiring in the grimy backstages of the provinces an ambition for stardom, which, when it was frustrated, she focused on her son.

Sellers' father, Bill, was a mild, ineffectual man, a pianist whose love for Peg drew him into this demimonde, though he had once been a cathedral organist in his native Yorkshire. That he was Protestant and Peg Jewish may have contributed, some friends have speculated, to their child's confusion and detachment. Surely, Bill's shyness and Peg's aggressiveness helped to create the split in Sellers. The private man is anonymously dressed ("If you see me when I'm not making a film, you would never know I was in the business"), hiding behind a variety of tinted glasses. The professional man, the possessed performer, throws himself into roles that are often multiple. He has played more than one part in seven films, including The Mouse That Roared, Strangelove and his next, The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, not to mention pictures like Lolita and the Pink Panther series, where, in character, he adopts a variety of wild disguises.

In those early years, young Peter became a chronic watcher in the shadows backstage. He had slight choice in the matter. Given the rootless life of strolling players, there was little opportunity to develop friendships of a lasting sort. "I never had any real set mates," he told Biographer Peter Evans (Peter Sellers: The Mask Behind the Mask). "I'd make friends in one town for one week and then we'd move on. You'd hope, if you played that town again, maybe a year later, that the friend you'd made would still be around; perhaps if he was the landlady's son, you'd be lucky. Then you'd hope that he'd remember you." Out of this he forged resiliency, durability and "the humor, I suppose." Certainly it tempered his ability to endure loneliness. "I've had marriages fail, and I know that working just for the sake of working doesn't help. What really does help is the fact that I don't mind being alone. I really don't mind. I'm quite happy to sit here and look out the window."

In his boyhood it was mostly Peg who filled in the empty spaces by entertaining him and also by treating him like an adult. Moreover, she suggested a way out of the very loneliness her life had imposed on the boy. At one point, part of her routine consisted of standing before a white screen onto which slide pictures of different costumes and settings were projected, allowing her to become, in rapid succession, Britannia, Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale, Queen Victoria and so on. For Peter it was discomfiting and yet enthralling to watch his mother undergo these transitions. "She looked so beautiful," he has recalled. "To listen to audiences applauding my mother was one of the most memorable sounds of my childhood."

There was a hard side to this maternal closeness. She coached and counseled him endlessly: "I had no ambition of my own then. She was absolutely desperate for me to succeed." Peg lived to witness Peter's first cinema successes. She continued, or so Sellers believes, to stay in touch with him even after her death in 1967. Bert Mortimer, who was with Sellers for more than 16 years as chauffeur-valet-companion (or "friendly" as the type is known among English show folk), says Sellers "can open up his mind and receive messages from her. 'Peg says it would be better to do it this way,' or 'Peg advises,' " he recalls Sellers saying. "I think he acts on his mother's advice. I don't know if it is a figment of his imagination or whether he does get messages." Whatever. Another friend is convinced that the actor's multiple marriages and his in-between womanizing are another way of trying to regain what Peg once provided. "Peter has always been looking for someone who adored him as his mother did."

Peg finally instilled in Peter the will "to get on in the business. The middle of the road never would have been good enough for me. If I would have got to be [only] a supporting actor, I would have packed it in on the spot. I was either going to get to be a star actor or I was going to have nothing to do with it. That's what my mother always wanted me to be anyway, and she would push me and push me because I lacked drive, I guess."

That ambition was not easily satisfied. When he left school in 1939 at 14 he went on the road as a drummer (at one point in a gypsy band), then, during the war, he was posted to an R.A.F. entertainment unit, the Gang Show, where he perfected his skill as an impersonator. Too finely, perhaps: he fell into the habit of wearing officers' uniforms and ordering people around, usually in order to gain extra privileges for himself and the members of his troupe. After the war he put in a couple of dispiriting years as a stand-up comic at the dismal levels of variety into which he was born, ending up in London's famed burlesque house, the Windmill Theater. He was working there when he got his first break at 22, and it was of his own making.

In 1948 he heard that a BBC producer might need someone with many voices at his command. He called the man and did impressions of a pair of prominent BBC radio personalities recommending a promising young chap named Peter Sellers. At the end of the call he dropped into his own voice to confess the hoax. The man was at first angered, then impressed. The legendary Goon Show, in which he teamed principally with Comics Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe to bring England to a halt once a week, followed. "Our premise was taking serious ideas--or any idea at all--to their illogical conclusion," Sellers recalls. Some choice bits--most of them written by Milligan--that Sellers relished included the time the Goons climbed Mount Everest from the inside; a sequence about a mysterious criminal who stalked old ladies with warm puddings; a town council still discussing, three decades after it was first proposed in 1919, the erection of a concrete lamppost.

The anti-Establishment surrealism of the Goons has passed into the social history of their time in England. They helped set the tone of a generally cynical, satirical and angry decade in the arts. Surely the Goons stretched down a generation to the kids who grew up to become Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Sellers did hundreds of voice characterizations for the Goons, became famous and, just incidentally, established his working method as an actor. Ever since, he has always built his characters around a voice. "Once I had the voice, I suddenly found that I was doing what the character would do, so I did not have to think about it. The character did it for me. That is one reason I do not agree with Method acting, where you have to think constantly, 'How am I going to pick up this cup of tea?' "

These years, which came to an end in the early '60s, were surely the most stable for Sellers: "Oh, it was great. I think I had more fun doing that than I will ever have in my life." He was happily married to his first wife, a solid Australian actress named Anne Howe. He had plenty of work, much of it anonymous, in radio and in dubbing films (he once did 17 voices for a single movie). He began doing his brilliant comedy records, he was launching his film career with such notable bits as being part of Alec Guinness's gang in The Ladykillers, and, finally, he achieved his breakthrough as Fred Kite in I'm All Right, Jack. He was, he says, "jolly young Peter Sellers, doing well, happy young Peter Sellers buying and selling cars." (There is a side to him that has always sought solace in gadgetry, and he is a notable purchaser and trader of not just autos, but cameras, hi-fi equipment and videotaping stuff.)

But with international stardom came miseries that he trailed across more than one continent. Trouble began when he either did or did not have an affair with Sophia Loren, his co-star in the 1961 adaptation of Shaw's The Millionairess. He says he was so smitten that he confessed this indiscretion to his wife. It led ultimately to their breakup, which friends and family believe he continues to mourn. Loren claims they were just good pals who used to cook dinner for each other occasionally. Sellers is outraged by this dismissal of an event that he believes changed his life (he is barely mentioned in the bestselling, authorized book about Loren by A.E. Hotchner). In 1964 he met and married Starlet Britt Ekland; the courtship took eleven days. Though their off-again, on-again marriage lasted to the end of the decade, she is about to publish an autobiography in which Sellers is portrayed as a cold, distant husband. ("A professional girlfriend and an amateur actress," snaps Sellers in reply.)

Ekland did see him through his next trauma, the massive heart attack he suffered in Hollywood in 1964. Sellers has told people that a vision of Peg appeared to him and beckoned him back from the grave. He also says that he was clinically dead for 2 1/2 minutes and that this gives him a further point of identification with Chance. "They later told me that I did not suffer any brain damage, but I have reason to believe I did. My mind has deteriorated since then." Citing absentmindedness and a general vagueness, he says, "I think I'm probably going a little soft in the head, which is why I have something in common with Chance."

Be that as it may, there is no doubt that his fearsome reputation as a demonic troublemaker on the set gathered momentum during the years after his brush with death. (He has a pacemaker, and his anxiety about his health increased understandably last year after his latest heart attack.) What tends to happen on location with Sellers is that the star grows increasingly insecure as filming approaches and during the early days of the shoot. Then, if he does not find his character, or if he senses a lack of support--and he requires monumental amounts of ego boosting--writers, directors, even fellow players find themselves getting fired or, at the least, undergoing very heavy weather. One could fill pages with damaging quotes from people who fell out with Sellers on one picture or another.

There are others who will supply excuses for all this. His onetime agent, Producer Freddie Fields, describes Sellers the person as "gentle, sensitive and insecure," but says the actor is "too demanding. He creates an enormous amount of pain for himself, [so] the gentleman that he is sometimes has to fight the actor who creates so much pain." Sellers' wife agrees. "He's not good at taking criticism. He magnifies everything at least ten times. We dismiss things that he will take to his heart and then take to his bed over. It may be that he remembers he has a pacemaker or heart disease or that he is on his fourth marriage and has been unlucky in relationships. Or that someone he thought of as a friend may do something which convinces him he never should have trusted him." Sellers says it best: small matters plunge him "into a snake pit you wouldn't believe. A person can destroy me with two words. It can just be the way they say them, the inflection."

That is why he puts so much pressure on his work. It is the one place he is certain he will contribute something that others will appreciate and remember. He asserts himself, converting his stored observations into his brilliant imitations of and comments on life. But after the 1964 heart attack, with his best early work, including Lolita and Strangelove, behind him, he entered on what he calls his "bad patch." He kept looking for the old magic, but not finding it in either big pictures (Casino Royale) or little ones (The Bobo, in which he played an inept bullfighter). The depression lasted a decade that included another failed marriage (to London Socialite Miranda Quarry) and most of the spells of on-set temperament that sealed his reputation as "difficult."

With the Pink Panther sequels Sellers emerged from the briars in 1975. These films made him definitively rich (his share of the take is said to be as much as $4 million) and provided him with the bankability and the clout to do Being There. "The role is so reductive that only a truly professional actor could fill it with meaning without appearing boring," Sellers had told Kosinski when he was trying to get the property.

Not, however, without the usual pain. The day before shooting began he said to his wife, "I've had this thing for six years and, you know, I don't know how I'm going to play Chance. I thought I knew everything about him, how he spoke, how he walked, acted, thought, but I realize now that I have to go and do it tomorrow, and I really don't know." He talked the part through with her, trying to find the innocence of a ten-year-old. Then, too, he consciously "drained" his voice of all mannerism, virtually all inflection, giving it the perfect neutrality of tone that someone who has rarely heard natural speech, but only the carefully homogenized voices of TV, might use.

It was a beginning, but not the end. "He was desperate to have this film work," his wife recalls. "He was like a string that would snap if it were pulled any tighter." Director Hal Ashby, knowing how much he needed assurances, tried to provide them, but in the midst of production could not always summon enough time or energy. Worse, Sellers found the principal location, the Biltmore mansion in Asheville, N.C., cold and depressing in the winter. As usual, he found it impossible to leave his role on the set and walked around inside Chance's deadly placid character all the time, offering responses as bleak as the weather to everyone. Says he now: "It was hell for my wife."

Yet the work was superb. There was none of the outrageous improvisation that marks Sellers' acting when he feels a project is going badly. "I was amazed at the discretion with which he handled the part," says Co-Star Melvyn Douglas. "Never was there a suggestion of having overblown any sense of it." Adds Richard Dysart, who played a doctor: "The texture of that man's work! He gave Hal Ashby two or three different characters--not that varied, but different. I began to see that there was a through line for each, that they were consistent." Ashby thus had not just alternate scene readings, but at least two complete, distinctly shaded characterizations.

The performance is the sum of all the subtle, wayward bits of life that Sellers invented, that keep audiences caring about this poor befogged man. In one scene, like the child he is, he carefully avoids stepping on cracks to keep bad luck at bay. The doctor tells him to keep his weight off his injured leg, and like some solemn, obedient stork, he then and there lifts it off the floor. Or, submitting to a telephone interview, after the President has quoted him in a speech, he catches sight of a TV exercise class and begins aping the movements of the instructor--movements he repeats later when MacLaine tries to seduce him and he does not know what to do. His literalism simply explodes the metaphorical cliches by which adults live and provides the energy by which a sometimes listless, pompous movie gains vitality.

Whether the rather approving note he has insinuated into the film is as wise as the details of his performance is more problematic. To be sure, it represents a kind of wish fulfillment on his part, the "triumph of a simple man," which is what Sellers takes himself to be. "People are always saying, 'What is this guy all about, anyway?' Why don't they leave you alone and just accept what you do? That's one of the things I like about Gardiner. Who the hell is he? Is he God? Is he sent by God? Is he a moron? Or what?" The point, for Sellers, is that Chance is one of the meek who are supposed to inherit the earth, and actually does just that by being his simple self. That is the trick Sellers has once again pulled off, keeping his own essential blankness intact behind his multitude of masks. This interpretation stands the intended meaning of Kosinski's fable on its ear. If Sellers' vision of the character becomes gospel for a new generation, a certain concern is justified. "They see themselves as innocent, nonverbal," Kosinski says of Chance's fan club. But "they are children of the middle class, don't forget that. They still want money, power, sex and visibility. They want the ultimate fantasy trip, and Chance is a man who gets it all but doesn't even want it."

One feels that perhaps Sellers, the once poor performer who is pleased with the money and the power to control his career, sees himself as a little like those unrealistic children. "My ambition in the cinema, since I came across it, was to play Chance the gardener in Being There. I have realized that ambition, and so I have no more." He adds: "The older I get, the less I like the film industry and the people in it. In fact, I'm at a stage where I almost loathe them. If all films were like Strangelove and I'm All Right, Jack and Being There, it would be a different thing."

These remarks, however, are delivered while he is working 15 hours a day on Fu Manchu, having just taken over the direction of the film. They are delivered in front of a wife who does not tire of saying that her husband "is only happy when he is working. To give up work would be fatal to Peter's mental state. A beach for him is an ideal which when realized is never as good as the anticipation."

It may be that as it is in performances, so it is in life -- that he can speak the truth about himself only when he is using a borrowed voice. He recently turned to his wife, dropped into a classic lower-class British accent and proceeded to level all his own pretensions:

" 'Ere 'e is, Mabel, wit' all 'is money an 'is big fancy cars an 'is wimmen cryin' about 'ow depressed 'e is. Gawd in 'eaven, am I supposed to feel sorry for 'im?" As always, Peter Sellers' power of observation and his ability to recount what he sees with satirical wit had saved him. But for one fleeting moment he had turned the mirror inward toward himself instead of outward toward a world of strangers. And suddenly he was himself as human and vulnerable, as comically real, as he makes them seem to be.

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