When Powell Met Sellers

 One of the regular treats of my boyhood was going to see the latest Peter Sellers film as it came out. My father was a huge fan, and so was I, right from the get-go. I remember seeing a string of wonderful comedies – I'm All Right Jack, Two Way Stretch, The Wrong Arm of the Law, Heavens Above!, Dr Strangelove, the early Pink Panther movies – in big, packed, smoke-wreathed cinemas. Lolita (he was Clare Quilty) and Being There (perhaps his masterpiece) came later. I was fascinated by the staggeringly gifted Sellers, and have remained intrigued by what I knew of his strange, complex personality – and by the fact that, for all his talent, he made so few really good films, and some insufferable ones. For some while I've been meaning to read Roger Lewis's The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, which has a reputation as a masterpiece of is genre. I loved Lewis's biog of Charles Hawtrey, and whatever else of his I've come across – including his bracingly honest 'Books of the Year' – so what was I waiting for? I took the plunge and ordered The Life and Death online. 
   When it arrived, I was startled to discover that it is a 900-plus-page doorstop of a book. For a slow reader like me, such size is daunting. Would it be worth pursuing Sellers through so many pages? So far, the answer seems to be a definite yes. I'm learning a great deal about Sellers: I never knew he was Jewish (weirdly, his various wives and lovers disagree about whether he was circumcised – the kind of detail only Lewis would tease out), and I never knew he was, in a sense, a 'replacement' for a stillborn brother called Peter – the kind of start in life that, if accompanied by doting, smothering mother love (as it was with Sellers), can lead to greatness, or madness, or both. Lewis is digressive, sprightly, effortlessly allusive, a ferociously diligent reseacher, always readable, and often very funny. I think I might make it through all 900-plus pages, but I'll be taking it in digestible chunks. 
   Here is a story Lewis tells in the Introduction. The great director Michael Powell had acquired the film rights to Michael Frayn's The Russian Interpreter, and Sellers had expressed an interest, so Powell and Frayn went to see him at his mock-Tudor Surrey mansion. Powell turned up dressed in Edwardian motoring gear, complete with goggles, driving a Rolls Bentley and poop-pooping like Mr Toad. He drove straight into Sellers's personal garage, and inquired imperiously of what he took to be a ten-year-old girl, 'Is this Sellers'?' The girl was Britt Ekland. Sellers took an instant loathing to Powell, a man as 'very horribly full of himself' as he was, and began to plot his revenge. He became taciturn and withdrawn, barely joining in the discussion, and acting vague and bewildered when the matter of a contract was raised. By this point, 'it was slowly dawning in a corner of [Powell's] mind just what degree of deliberate objectionableness he might be up against'. 
   A little later, they all met up again in a suite at the Dorchester. Sellers had set the stage perfectly. He had installed his own piped music system, which he refused to turn off. He had surrounded himself with a small army of lawyers and agents, while Britt, reclining on a sofa, had an animated conversation with various Swedish relatives throughout. 'Was a food-checker there, too,' wonders Lewis, 'to check Sellers' grub for poison? Nubians waving ostrich plume fans? People practising Elizabethan dance steps to a viola da gamba?' After Powell had gone on a bit about how he envisaged his film, Sellers said, 'How about John Schlesinger to direct? Clive Donner?' A stunned silence fell. 'Powell was startled,' writes Lewis. 'Wasn't the famous director of The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death there before his eyes? "Rather than bringing in a new voice at this stage," said Powell, trying to pretend Sellers was making light, "I propose to direct the film myself." 
  "No, no, Michael, I wouldn't agree to that... I wouldn't approve that. It's not your subject."
  Powell went home and recorded one word, 'Peterloo', in his diary – he had been massacred, in full public view.'