The Shy Man

The phone rings. The man who answers is lower middle-aged with a lower middle paunch. He looks something like a nearsighted kipper.

"Ell-ow," he says in pure cockney.

"Is Peter Sellers there?"

" 'E aynt eer. Ooze callin'?"

Peter Sellers is there, of course, at his flat in London, and he is on the line. Contentedly he clicks down the phone. Shy men like Sellers hate to talk to friends, let alone strangers. Sellers is the world's best mimic, equipped with an enormous range of accents, inflections and dialects--including five kinds of cockney, Mayfair pukka, stiff upper BBC, Oxford, Cambridge, Yorkshire, Lancashire, West Country, Highland Scots, Edinburgh Scots, Glaswegian Scots, Tyneside Geordie, Northern Ireland, Southern Ireland, French, Mitteleuropa, American Twang, American Drawl, American Snob, Canadian, Australian and three kinds of Indian. He fools everybody. Everybody but his friends, that is; they are wise to him. When they call him up and a sweet old German nanny answers, they say, "Come off it, you old bastard." The trouble is that there really is a sweet old German nanny at Sellers' place, and she often gets an earful when she answers: "Voss diss?" Now that Alec Guinness has opted for serious roles, Peter Sellers is the best light actor in the English-speaking cinema.

Young Britons appreciate the subtle subterfuge of his anti-establishment manner.

Like Guinness, he often pops up in various roles within a single film (The Mouse That Roared, The Naked Truth). As the finkish Clare Quilty, he tries out several disguises in Hollywood's new and breathily awaited Lolita, which brought him to the U.S. last week for a promotion tour. New Sellers films open, it seems, about as frequently as cuckoo clocks; he has made more than two dozen in the last twelve years. Only Two Can Play is playing to sellout audiences in London and New York. He is Jean Anouilh's lecherous old general in Waltz of the Toreadors, which won superlative reviews when it opened fortnight ago in London.

No Face of His Own. Sellers is the son of vaudeville troupers. He has been a performer since the age of two, and he spent his youth acquiring every sort of face but one of his own. He became a brilliant actor by painful necessity, since he is by nature diffident, introspective and not particularly articulate unless he is pretending to be someone else. "I've got so many inhibitions that I sometimes wonder if I exist at all," he says. "I have no desire to play Peter Sellers. I don't know who Peter Sellers is, except that he's the one who gets paid. Gary Grant is Gary Grant--that's his stock in trade. If I tried to sell myself as Peter Sellers, I'd be penniless. Write any character you have in mind and I'll shape myself to what you have written. But don't write a part for me." Sellers won his early popularity doing impersonations on the radio. He soon formed the celebrated Goon Show with two others and proved that even the BBC had room for the humor of the imagination gone mad. For example, the three climbed Mount Everest from the inside.

Eventually they made a film short called The Running, Jumping, and Standing Still Film. It featured an agile fellow who held a phonograph needle and ran around a record. Another chap scrubbed a field with soap and water. It was shot in two days in what Sellers describes as "daguer-reo-type pigment made from condensed yak's breath." It had absolutely no meaning--and audiences laughed until they were carted away.

Nowadays, Sellers builds characters out of people he knows or seeks out, getting ready for new roles by fastening himself to the real article--union leaders, neurotic Americans, old generals--and absorbing their personalities down to the last tic.

The result is always funny, sometimes merciless. But when he reads a new script, Sellers usually panics. "Better ring up and say I can't do it," he tells his wife.

He paces frantically for hours. "Then," she says, "Peter buys a new car and he's all right." Since 1948 he has owned 62 automobiles. One was a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, but it made him uncomfortable. He put a classified ad in the Sunday Times: "Titled motor car wishes to dispose of owner." Butler Problems. The Sellers' family flat, near Hampstead Heath, has five bedrooms and costs $840 a month. Until recently the family--Wife Anne, Son Michael, 8. Daughter Sarah, 4--had a stately home in Hertfordshire, but they were overwhelmed by servant problems. "Robbie was a great butler," reminisces Sellers, singling out one example. "All he could see was straight ahead. He couldn't see sideways, and he kept bumping into things. He wouldn't listen to you. You'd say. 'Robbie, there's a wall there.' He'd snarl, 'I know there's a wall there.' Crash! We were losing all our china." Like Jackie Gleason, Sellers has frequent meetings with a spiritualist. He is vice president of the London Judo Society. He loves jazz. In Who's Who he lists his most exclusive club as "Royal Automobile." He drinks little, but he once got totally potted celebrating the knighting of Alec Guinness. Going on stage afterward--he was appearing in a West End comedy called Brouhaha--he smiled dreamily at the audience and said: "I'm sloshed." He offered to call on his understudy, but the idea was shouted down.

Ten sober genii could not equal one drunk Sellers.

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