Panthers and Monkeys and Sharks, Oh My!

EDWARDS, YOU FOOL!
The Pink Panther Series

It was while entertaining the thought of writing a book about another comic personality that I came across the perfect description of the one I had obliged myself to tackle first.

 After W.C. Fields’ death in 1947, J.B. Priestley wrote, “All truly great clowns…have the same transient look. They are not men of this world being funny. They are serious personages…who have, through some blunder on the part of a celestial Thomas Cook, landed from the other side of Arcturus on the wrong planet. They make the best of a bad business, but what is easy for us—merely picking up a bag of golf clubs or moving a chair—is horribly difficult for them. Things that give us no trouble offer them obstacles and traps, for nothing here is on their side.”

That’s the soon-to-be 150-year-old Fields. I might use that quote again if I ever pen that celebration of his upcoming sesquicentennial (or “souse-quicentennial”). But it’s just as much the creation of another prodigious talent, one tragically unable to convert the living legacy of his dysfunctional pedigree into the kind of self-inflation that had permitted Fields to negotiate life. Peter Sellers held the opposite capacity. As one of the few people he permitted to get close enough to him once said, his true talent was making his life complicated.

The character in question, so coincidentally described by Priestley, was Sellers’ most famous: Inspector Jacques Clouseau. As law-enforcing operatives of the ‘60s and ‘70s go, Clouseau was the anti-Bond. Bond was English, elegant, and capable; Clouseau was French, clumsy, and lucky. Both emerged and developed over the same timeline. One showed how cool, colorful, and dangerous those times were, the other how tricky, frustrating, and defeatist. Society enjoyed major points of pride during that period—the Civil Rights Act, the moon landing, the women’s movement—but also major bungles: the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Watergate. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. For every tuxedo-clad man of action ordering a vodka martini “shaken but not stirred,” there’s a trench coat-wearing incompetent who, thanks to misshapen pool cues and timed doors, gets shaken and stirred himself.