Comedian who did not know himself

Press, 18 April 1981, Page 17

Comedian who did not know himself

Peter Sellers: The Mask behind the Mask. By Peter Evans. New English Library/Times Mirror, 1980. 256 pp. $5.75.

(Reviewed by

A. K. Grant)

The clown with the broken heart is a stereotype. But just as a cliche becomes a cliche because it expresses a common truth, so a stereotype character becomes a stereotype character because a lot of people behave that way. It is arguable, and an argument fairly easily defended ,at that, that the three greatest British comic performers since the war have been Peter Sellers, Tony Hancock and Spike Milligan. In England, in 1966, 1 went to a concert at the Festival Hall, which was intended as a boost for the declining career of Tony Hancock. It was a potentially disastrous evening, because the first half, featuring the excellent singer Marian Montgomery, went on far too long, and by the time Hancock finally came on stage,- the audience, who had come to see him, not to listen to Marian, were decidedly mutinous. But within five minutes, thanks to Hancock’s genius, he was doing with them what he willed. However this success did not arrest his own decline into alcoholism ' and despair, nor avert his suicide, not too many years later, in Australia. In'the same year as I saw the Hancock concert, I saw on the 8.8. C. an interview with Spike • Milligan. Milligan was appearing at the time in . a production at the Mermaid Theatre of his play “The Bed-Sitting Room.” After the convential questions had been asked, Milligan asked the interviewer, if there was film left in the camera. Receiving the nod from the cameraman, he then went on to speak most movingly of his problems with depression, .of . the . necessity, to .check himself into, mental hospitals from time to time to be treated for this illness, and of the awful feeling of having to go on stage when you are feeling; like Death so as to enhance .the lives of a, lot. of people who r have;paid to come and seer-'you. i '

From Peter Evans’ book we learn that Sellers, as he became more successful, became increasingly unhappy, spent much of his time yearning for the innocence of the days when he was still on the way up, and spent-most of the last 15 or so years of his life being impossibly nasty to almost everybody. So the stereotype of the doomed, depressed clown, certainly applies to Hancock, Milligan and Sellers. This is not to say that you have to have a certificatefrom a mental hospital proving that you have been treated for depression before you are; 1 allowed tobecome a funny man. But there does appear to be suitable material’ for study by an appropriatelyqualified psychologist on the relationship between the inner despair of the great comic and the laughter of the public, the comic paying for the public’s laughter with his own misery. < Sellers was a particularly extreme example of the breed, because as well as being very unhappy, he also became very unpleasant This is where Mr Evans has some difficulty with his subject He obviously knew Sellers very well, and has enormous admiration for him. But he fails to keep a sufficiently objective attitude towards the excesses of some of Sellers’ behaviour, and he also goes in for some gossip-mongering which is really rather shameful. -•

He devotes several pages to speculation by Sellers’ friends about the truth or otherwise of Sellers’ own assertion that he had had an affair with Princess Margaret. There does not appear from the book to be a shred of evidence to support this speculation, apart from the fact of Sellers’ friendship with the Princess and his own boastings. Anybody can claim to have had an affair with Princess Margaret, and no doubt many people do. But such claims should not be taken seriously in a work of biography unless there is more to them than speculation piled on speculation. Mr Evans’ style can become a bit tiresome: perhaps best described as “portentous Fleet Street.” At the book’s conclusion, for example, he talks of Sellers as having left “a national gallery of portraits that would remain his country’s heritage.” No comedian deserves to have his work crushed under the concrete blocks of that sort of appreciation. But Mr Evans is by no means unperceptive, and the most significant anecdote in the book is of the record album of Bible readings that Sellers was asked to contribute to by an Anglican priest whom he had known for many years. Sellers was initially in favour of the project, but eventually declined for the following reasons: “Just to read something, even a passage from the Bible,” Sellers explained, “is beyond me.” Speaking, Father Hester recalls, with a crisp economy of words, ... Sellers told him how he had always “hidden behind a voice, a make-up, a characterisation. To read something in my own voice, as Peter Sellers ... I can’t do it,” he said. “I don’t know myself well enough.” That anecdote gets to-the core of the problem of Peter Sellers, and Mr Evans has had the wit to dig it out and include it. But there are better books than this one to be written about the man who could not read a piece from the Bible as Peter Sellers because he, Peter Sellers, did not know who Peter Sellers was.