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Peter Sellers and the ‘Stark’ truth about his pervy sidekick
05.07.2014
09:25 am
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You may not know the name Graham Stark, but you will certainly recognize this stony-faced comic actor from the dozens of British movies in which he appeared, such as the second Inspector Clouseau film A Shot in the Dark, Alfie, Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, The Magic Christian, and Revenge of the Pink Panther. Stark also provided voices for The Goon Show, and regularly featured in TV comedies like The Benny Hill Show and Sykes. When he died last year, at the age of 91, Stark was described as an actor who was frequently cast in supporting roles, but never quite achieved stardom:

“Stark moved on the periphery, appearing in nearly 80 films, often as the fall-guy or put-upon sidekick.”

He was also described as “a close friend of Peter Sellers,” his confidante, who had been best man at all four of Sellers’ weddings.

Stark was regarded in the film world as Sellers’ sycophantic sidekick, who would do anything to brown nose his famous friend. The character actor John Le Mesurier once said of their relationship:

“Graham Stark is the only man in London with a flat up Peter Sellers’s arse.”

Some of the strange things Graham Stark did to appease his friend Sellers have been well documented in various biographies, most assiduously by Roger Lewis in his superb The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (the UK edition not the anemic US version). In this massive volume, Lewis detailed how Stark “had fetched and carried for his pal,” and:

had been so devoted to him, indeed, he’d even allowed Sellers to lock him in the boot of his car, on the pretext of getting him to locate the source of an annoying squeak.

An article Lewis wrote, ten years after Sellers’ death in The Daily Telegraph, he joked about their odd relationship, explaining how:

As a reward for his services, Stark used to be given Sellers’s discarded cameras or hi-fi equipment. He had parts in the Pink Panther films. He was best man at various Sellers weddings, and was taken on holiday to Paris and New York. Stark was the one constant element in Sellers’s zig-zag life, and he didn’t object when Sellers dressed him up as Hitler and had him parade along the Hong Kong waterfront, where he ran into a party of Jewish tourists.

 
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Instead of “laughing along with this,” Stark had his lawyers send a letter threatening legal action:

...three days after the article was published, I received a ferocious letter from Carter-Ruck. Well, not a letter exactly. A declaration of war. “It is untrue that Peter Sellers and/or Blake Edwards talked to our client excitedly of a new penis-enlarging ointment and went to enormous trouble organising a mail-order address in Copenhagen, whence a confederate sent our client a tub of rancid garlic butter.”

Carter-Ruck continued: “Due to the gravity of the allegations our client will require a Statement in Open Court and accordingly proceedings for libel will immediately be issued.” The name and address of my solicitors was demanded, who could accept service of a writ. As, only the previous year, Carter-Ruck had checked a manuscript of one of my own books for defamation, and had charged me £2,415 for the privilege, I suggested that they serve the writ on themselves. (Not my exact wording by any means.)

Lewis “couldn’t take any of it seriously – the paranoid overreaction; the disappearance of common sense and smug pomposity of the legal profession; the sanctimony; the Kafkaesque nincompoopery.” The legal process dragged on for several years, even going to the Court of Appeal. But these actions revealed a far more troubling, and horrific side to Graham Stark.

In August 1990, Lewis and the paper’s lawyers received a letter from a Mrs Shirley Cheevers:

Mrs Cheevers said that “Graham Stark had to creep away pretty smartish with his tail between his legs” when her friend’s niece, then a minor, had visited the actor in a television studio, where she’d gone in a group to watch a recording. Stark “picked her up and showed her a good time”. When she went back to boarding school, her widowed mother “was horrified to discover a pile of letters from Stark, giving in great and obscene and graphic detail descriptions of what he was going to do to her next holiday and what he had done to her already.”

Her family took the documents to a firm of solicitors, Tatton, Gaskell & Tatton, who were ready to take Stark fully to task, but “her mother felt she could not cope with it all and drag her daughter into it anymore”. Stark got away with just a warning and an injunction to keep clear of the schoolgirl. Mrs Cheevers concluded: “None of them has ever forgotten this incident. It has coloured their lives in one way and another ever since.” (It says a lot about the Sixties that no one thought to go to the police.)

Richard Sykes decided to investigate. “I do not have any great hopes,” he said, “but it is worth a try.” By October 1990, however, he had located the child’s surviving family in Hove, East Sussex. Her aunt wrote: “I confirm that my niece was made a Ward of Court in 1967 following our discovery of very explicit correspondence from Graham Stark, including one called The Lesson … The whole episode was a dreadful shock and affected all our lives for a very long time. My niece was corrupted both physically and mentally by this awful man.”

Lewis was incredulous that this was the same man who was attempting to punish both himself and the newspaper for presenting him as:

“contemptible, sycophantic and self-debasing parasite who had willingly allowed himself to be humiliated and treated as a stooge by Peter Sellers, in return for the latter’s patronage and largesse”

Which was surprising considering the number of defense witnesses, including Spike Milligan, film producer Roy Boulting, writer Wolf Mankowitz, presenter David Jacobs and scriptwriter Frank Muir, who all agreed that Stark was “a creepy, humourless sleazeball and hanger-on.”

As Lewis goes onto explain, the child’s aunt had discovered an incriminating stash of letters sent by Stark to her niece, which detailed the actor’s obscene desires for the child:

From the set of a film he was making at Shepperton called Salt and Pepper, starring Sammy Davis Jr and Peter Lawford, in which he portrayed a police sergeant, Stark wrote: “You will be taken to the bedroom where you will strip in front of me … You will put on the black nylon stockings and the very high-heeled shoes … Needless to say under no circumstances will panties ever be worn and I will be able to see your adorable——whenever I wish … I shall arrange to have a car bring you down to the studios for the day.”

Other (much more explicit) material pertains to sado-masochistic scenarios involving corsets, instructions for the child to “parade in front of Bobby “without your panties on” – who was Bobby? – and practical arrangements about dates and phone numbers. Then there’s the contract that Stark wished her to sign: “I hereby sincerely swear that from this day forward I intend to give my body willingly to my lover GRAHAM STARK to do with as he pleases … Should at any time he wish other people to be present to look at me I will not protest.” And so on and so forth.

As Lewis points out, it has taken until the recent exposure of the horrific child and sex abuse scandals involving BBC presenter Jimmy Savile, which was only investigated after his death, for the police to take an interest and action over the long list of allegations from the 1960s and 1970s against celebrity sex abusers. So far, these have included another BBC presenter, the convicted Stuart Hall and most recently the PR guru Max Clifford, who was sentenced to eight years in prison for his indecent assaults on women and girls.

As is becoming apparent celebrity abuse of women and children is far more common than ever supposed. It was only after his death that comic actor Arthur Mullard was revealed to have raped his daughter when she was thirteen, and groomed her as his “sex slave.” The past may be a “another country” but there still appears to have been a willfully perverse and utterly unacceptable attitude towards sexual abuse amongst generations of men during the sixties and seventies, and no doubt beyond.

Read Roger Lewis’s full article “The stark truth about Peter Sellers’ sidekick” here.

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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05.07.2014
09:25 am
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Anthony Burgess and the Top Secret Code in ‘A Clockwork Orange’

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Death often inspires the most remarkable hyperbole. At the memorial service for Anthony Burgess in 1994, novelist William Boyd eulogized the author of A Clockwork Orange as “a genius,” “a prodigy, a daunting and awesome one,” who “would compose a string quartet in the ten minutes he allowed himself between finishing a novel and writing a monograph on James Joyce,” whose “polymorphous abilities are genuinely amazing.”

High praise indeed. Yet, Mr. Boyd wasn’t finished, Mr. Burgess, he said, was “one of our great comic novelists.” Boyd gave, by way of example, that off-used line from one of the Enderby novels. This was the line with which Burgess proved (allegedly for a bet) he could write a sentence where the word “onions” appears three times.

‘Then—instead of expensive mouthwash—he had breathed on Enderby—bafflingly—(for no banquet would serve, because of the redolence of onions, onions) onions.’

Hardly a knee-slapper, rather the kind of literary snobbishness that epitomizes Burgess, and by association Mr. Boyd.

Burgess was low comedy. He was for the cheap fart jokes, like Dudley Moore when competing against the loquacious comic invention of Peter Cook on Derek and Clive, or like the trademark raspberry (“Bronx Cheer”) used by Goon Harry Secombe when confronted with the manic genius of Spike Milligan.

Burgess’s idea of comedy was to have a dog called the n-word (The Doctor is Sick), or a “hero” poet (Enderby) writing his verse (blast) on the toilet; or where Shakespeare is cuckolded by his brother and catches the clap from his “Dark Lady” (Nothing Like the Sun)

Though I like Burgess, I would hardly call his work comic. Too often his books present an author more interested in flashing his learnedness to an audience, rather than his imagination—which is why his books lack emotional resonance, and his characters rarely have an interior life.

Burgess always wanted to be seen as smarter than everyone—when readers pointed out to the master the mistakes in his magnum opus Earthly Powers, Burgess claimed he had deliberately included these errors to see who would discover them, which is like ye olde Thelwell cartoon of the riding instructor who when thrown by his horse, asked his pupils, “Which one of you spotted my deliberate mistake?”

Perhaps aware of this lack, Burgess was usually quick to take offense—watch any interview and he types himself as the victim, the Catholic in a oppressive-Protestant society, a northerner in a London-centric world, a student from a red-brick university rather than the hallowed groves of Cambridge or Oxford. Burgess is Jimmy Porter, full of petty grievances against the world. Which all makes for an interesting character, and author, but not a great one.

Burgess’s best known novel is A Clockwork Orange, which became an international success once it had been filmed by Stanley Kubrick. Burgess came to hate it and told Playboy in 1971, of all his books it was the one he liked least. But without A Clockwork Orange would anyone have taken an interest in Burgess?
 

 
The secret code contained in Burgess’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’, after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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08.21.2013
07:00 pm
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Holmes as Hamlet: Billy Wilder’s ‘The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes’

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Billy Wilder spent seven years with his co-writer I. A. L. Diamond working on the script of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. The finished film originally lasted over three hours, but the studios panicked over the failure of such long form films (Doctor Doolittle with Rex Harrison, and Star! with Julie Andrews and Michael Craig) and demanded cuts. The film was hacked down to an acceptable 93 minutes. Diamond didn’t speak to Wilder for almost a year

It was a terrible act of vandalism that robbed cinema of one of its greater Holmes, as portrayed by Robert Stephens. It was also bizarre that Wilder, who believed in the primacy of the word, allowed his script to be so drastically altered, turning what was an original meditation on Holmes into a mildly distracting caper. In the process we lost Wilder and Diamond’s analysis of Holmes not as just a fictional creation, but in comparison to Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

The clues are all there to be found. Let’s start with the casting, Stephens, who was one of the most gifted and brilliant actors of his generation - who sadly only graced the screen in a handful of films: scene-stealing in A Taste of Honey, as the art teacher Teddy Lloyd in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,  and as the BFI states, “sublime” in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Stephens was a stage actor, the heir apparent to Laurence Olivier indeed, in some respects, a far better actor than Olivier, who depended for success by flirting with the audience - Olivier could never be bad as he needed, demanded, the love of his audience.

When Wilder cast Stephens, the actor asked the great director:

‘“How do you want me to play it for the movie,” I asked Billy. “You must play it like Hamlet. And you must not put on one pound of weight. I want you to look like a pencil.” So, that’s the way we did The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.’

 

 
The game’s afoot on ‘The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes’, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.29.2011
06:54 pm
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