Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  Still, according to Michael, his mother spent many of the ensuing nights in one of the guest rooms rather than the bedroom she once shared with her husband. She had good reason to keep a distance. As Michael describes his father at the time, “At home he became a crazed, manic figure.” One night was extra-special: “He hauled me from my bed at 3 A.M. ‘Do you think I should divorce your mummy?’ ”

  • • •

  If The Millionairess were a comic masterpiece, all the sordid behind-the-scenes turmoil might have served some lofty aesthetic purpose. But as it turned out, Peter’s agony of love was largely for naught. Sophia did not end up leaving Carlo Ponti for him, nor was The Millionairess one of Peter’s better films. It’s an extravagant but dull (for lack of a better word) affair. Sophia’s costumes are dazzling, her unnatural beauty even more so, her performance hammy. Shaw’s wit can be brittle, which may not be a bad thing, but in this case—or at least in Wolf Mankowitz’s adaptation—it’s impossible to accept without the lingering odor of smut. Why would a pious Muslim doctor who has devoted his life to the poor consent, even at the end, to spend the rest of his life with the world’s most spoiled and cutthroat heiress, other than to finally get his hands on her gigantic breasts? There’s just something fundamentally filthy about it. The closing scene, in which the heiress and the doctor finally declare their love and share a moonlit dance on a terrace, is lush but inane. The Millionairess did only so-so at the box office.

  And yet Peter’s performance is extraordinary. His earlier Indian routines on The Goon Show and on comedy records were funny because they were so broad; Dr. Kabir is funny— when he is funny, that is—because of Peter’s technical restraint. At times, in fact, there’s no comedy to speak of in the performance. In a pivotal scene, Sophia’s character, Epiphania, shows up at Dr. Kabir’s clinic having bought it and all the surrounding land in a gesture of spoiled meanness and callous intimidation. She then strips down to an eye-popping black corset, stockings, and garters. Dr. Kabir loses his temper.

  The idea of Peter Sellers as an enraged Indian doctor seems, of course, to be inherently hilarious, but in point of fact Dr. Kabir’s breakdown isn’t comical at all, nor is it meant to be, at least from the perspective of the performer. Dr. Kabir is genuinely appalled at her arrogance, and for good reason. There’s also a touch of defensiveness, owing to his awareness of her attractiveness to him. His pitch rises slightly; he gesticulates, but only to a point; and suddenly he begins speaking rapidly in his own language. Dr. Kabir is not a caricature, and whatever authentic emotion The Millionairess projects is due to what the camera’s cool lens recorded, as it often did, as Peter Sellers’s innate humanity.

  • • •

  The end of shooting The Millionairess scarcely dampened Peter’s ardor. Sophia left for Rome.

  He followed.

  “After the film was finished he’d phone her all over the place and go off to Italy to try to see her,” says Anne. Michael recalls Peter’s telephone conversations with Sophia occurring no matter whether his wife or children were in earshot. “I love you, darling,” Peter would say, and say, and say again, his children overhearing all of it.

  Sophia returned to London for a few days to record a song with Peter, “Goodness Gracious Me,” as publicity for the film: A patient (Sophia) describes to her Indian doctor (Peter) her heart’s peculiar response to a certain man. His chief response, initially placid but increasingly excited, is the song’s title. With its bouncy, jingly tune and spoken lyrics, it’s basically a novelty record. But although The Millionairess itself wasn’t a hit, the song—which was deemed too frivolous for inclusion as title music in a George Bernard Shaw film—appeared on the best-selling charts in November 1960, and stayed there for fourteen weeks, peaking at number four.

  Carlo Ponti accompanied his wife to London on the “Goodness Gracious Me” trip, but Mr. Loren’s presence didn’t seem to affect Peter one way or the other. As he saw it, she would leave Carlo, he would leave Anne, and then he and Sophia would be free.

  Implausibly, the whole thing didn’t blow up in anyone’s face—at least not at the time. Peter, Sophia, and Carlo all remained friendly, and in fact Peter was a guest in their home for many years. As further publicity for The Millionairess, Peter and Sophia recorded three other songs for inclusion on an entire album, Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren, released late in 1960 by EMI. “Bangers and Mash,” like “Goodness Gracious Me,” was a novelty hit—it’s a mostly spoken menu battle between an English WWII veteran and his Neapolitan war bride. He craves the eponymous sausages; she insists on tagliatelle, all to the tune of a jaunty military fife-and-trumpet background. The song reached number twenty-two on the pop charts in January 1961.

  The other two songs they recorded together were “I Fell in Love with an Englishman” and “Fare Thee Well.”

  • • •

  Early in 1960, before their collaboration on The Millionairess, Peter and Wolf Mankowitz decided to form their own production company, Sellers-Mankowitz Productions, Ltd. In March, before their own deal with each other had been signed, they announced a distribution deal with Continental to produce, in Britain, two out of three of the following projects: Memoirs of a Cross-Eyed Man, My Old Man’s a Dustman, and The Man Who Corrupted America. (Continental was already set to distribute Battle of the Sexes in the United States.) Memoirs of a Cross-Eyed Man seems to have been the most likely of the projects to be produced; it was the story of an everyday kind of fellow who falls in love with a movie star. They considered Shirley MacLaine for the role.

  The writer Peter Evans once described the producer-screenwriter with whom Peter tried to form a business: “Mankowitz is a phlegmatic, cultivated East End Jew whose bulk lends his look of supine disdain a threatening authority. His face, even in repose, seems a network of subtle sneers.” “I have found in Wolf a person who really understands me,” Peter said. A portrait of Daniel Mendoza was to be their logo.

  By summer, however, Mankowitz was becoming annoyed with the slow pace of his negotiations with Peter, or, better, the slow pace with which Peter conducted his side of the negotiations. “I can’t understand why Peter’s and my contracts with one another are taking so long to draw up,” he wrote to Bill Wills.

  Mankowitz scheduled a meeting on August 30 with some financiers who were almost ready to back the company to the tune of £124,000. That morning, Peter sent him a letter, delivered by hand, in which he told Mankowitz that the deal was off; Peter had decided to keep his focus on acting. Mankowitz was thus forced to show up at the meeting and tell the financiers, “I think you should put your money back in your pockets.” Peter had closed his letter by calling Mankowitz “muzzel,” a Yiddish term of endearment. Mankowitz didn’t feel especially endearing in return.

  Peter then proceeded to shoot his now-former friend in the back. Mankowitz, Sellers told the press, “is a very strange person with so many things on his mind. He should concentrate more on one thing, like screenwriting, and leave the impresario business alone.”

  As for himself, Peter had a different employment option in mind that year, or so he said. Beyond the constant onslaught of cars, Peter also purchased a life-size mechanical elephant. One could ride atop it on its howdah. Peter was captivated. To him, the peculiar contraption represented a sort of safety net for his career: “I was thinking of things I could fall back on—it was a security if I ever failed,” he told the Observer. Apparently he believed that advertisers would flock to it for use in product promotion.

  “Peter’s not a genius,” Spike Milligan declared in 1960. “He’s something more. He’s a freak.”

  • • •

  The movie star took a reporter on a tour of Chipperfield, which the star had filled with antiques. He proudly pointed out the remarkable early Victorian (as he put it) “commode”: “You must admit they disguised them well.” With the “Emperor Waltz” playing on the high-end hi-fi, the Sellerses’ butler silently walked in and poured tea while Peter told the reporter that he ha
d owned fifty-two cars in the last six years. Presents for friends, toys for the kids, clothes, cameras, pets, collectibles, cars, more cars, all the result of deepening despair.

  Stardom demanded upkeep. Peter enjoyed some of it. There were film premieres at which to show his face, charity events, theater openings, parties. At the Royal Film Show at London’s Empire Cinema in 1959, he and Anne celebrated in the company of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, Maurice Chevalier, Alec Guinness, and Lauren Bacall. At the Lord Taverners’ Ball the following year, he mingled with Prince Philip, if a prince can be said to mingle. He nabbed the Film Actor of 1960 award at the Variety Club. At the 1961 Evening Standard Drama awards (held in January 1962), he presented the award for Best Musical to the antic masterminds of Beyond the Fringe—Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and Jonathan Miller. The Queen herself showed up at the Odeon, Leicester Square, in March 1962, along with Princess Margaret, Claudia Cardinale, Yul Brynner, Pat Boone, Leslie Caron and her husband Peter Hall, Peter Finch, and Melina Mercouri. Peter enjoyed a few moments of conversation with the queen in the theater’s foyer.

  Personality profiles were appearing at a furious pace. “In relaxed moments he has a slightly bewildered look, like an awakening owl,” was one truly great observation.

  And to Peter Sellers’s eventual peril, he repeatedly ignored the advice Alec Guinness had given him during the production of The Ladykillers: “Don’t ever let the press know anything about your private life.” Indeed, Peter came up with a strategy to solve the problem. Killing two birds with a single stone, he began to tell the world he had no personality at all: “In myself I have nothing to offer as a personality. But as soon as I can get into some character I’m away. I use the characters to protect myself, as a shield—like getting into a hut and saying ‘nobody can see me.’ ” And, “As far as I’m aware, I have no personality of my own whatsoever. That is, I have no personality to offer the public. I have nothing to project.”

  The press took the bait. Peter Sellers, wrote one of the many critics to follow Peter’s lead over the years, “possesses one rare distinction—that of total anonymity.”

  • • •

  Around this time, Peter’s friend Herbert Kretzmer described him more closely, more sympathetically, and consequently more tragically:

  “He is the most successful actor since Olivier and Guinness. He enjoys a riotous acclaim clear across the world. He has more money than he can spend in his lifetime—and the endless promise of more. . . . Yet Peter Sellers is one of the saddest, most self-tortured men I have ever known. Here is a man almost devoid of any capacity to sit back and enjoy the riches his genius has produced. There is certainly no more complex personality in the whole spectrum of British show business.”

  TEN

  “I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.”

  In January 1961, Peter found himself in need of a new driver. Bert Mortimer had been Cary Grant’s chauffeur when Grant was in England, but Cary was spending more time in Hollywood and Bert was looking for work. First Peter tried him out on Peg. When that worked out, he took Bert for himself.

  “I was a bit concerned because I’d heard that staff came and went like turning on the tap and running water,” Bert later observed. “But we prevailed. And everything turned out fine.” Until the end.

  Bert Mortimer became Peter’s primary caregiver. Driving, fetching, emotional-crisis management, delivering messages Peter wanted to avoid delivering himself, cleaning up dog shit deposited in the back seat of a Rolls Royce. Mortimer performed many tasks. Says Bryan Forbes, “Peter built him up into a legend. He became known as ‘The Great Bert.’ ”

  Peter also hired a new secretary. Naturally, Peter believed that every fan letter required a personal reply. Hattie Stevenson wrote them. She, too, came to clean up messes.

  • • •

  Only Two Can Play (1962) might have served as the title of a memoir devoted to the waning years of Peter’s marriage, but in fact it’s fictional. Based on Kingsley Amis’s novel That Uncertain Feeling, it concerns a dapper Welsh librarian, a lady’s man with a wife and two kids who can’t help but have an affair with a gorgeous, wealthy, foreign-born woman, herself a serial adulterer. The British novelist Thomas Wiseman once wrote perceptively about Peter’s ongoing tendency to play out the blunt facts of his own interiority in the roles he chose to play for the public. Only Two Can Play, Wiseman declared, was yet another “ingenious form of psychological buck-passing.”

  Scripted by Bryan Forbes and directed by Sidney Gilliat for the Boultings, Only Two Can Play is one of Peter’s lowest-key films, a muted look at a conventional marriage and its vicissitudes. It’s Sellers at his most understated. The performance seems effortless, and the film is fascinating.

  Only Two Can Play’s production team knew what they were getting with Peter Sellers. Forbes had known Sellers since the war, when they’d appeared together in Stars in Battledress along with Sgts. Harry Secombe and Terry-Thomas and Lt. Roger Moore. Forbes had always enjoyed Sellers’s company, and as they rose in the world of British entertainment they became even closer friends. Sidney Gilliat had cowritten Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938)—the other two screenwriters were Frank Launder and Alma Reville, Hitchcock’s wife; Gilliat went on to produce many films with Launder, among them The Smallest Show on Earth, with Peter as the drunken projectionist. In short, Forbes, Gilliat, and the Boultings were all seasoned to Peter Sellers—a funny if mercurial friend, an exceptionally skilled actor with star power and a prickly nature.

  Forbes finished his script in April 1960, after which casting began. The beautiful Mai Zetterling was chosen for the bombshell role, Virginia Maskell for the plainer, warmer wife. Peter’s friend Kenneth Griffith took the role of the other librarian, the one with whom Peter vies for a promotion. (The bombshell, whose husband chairs the library board, uses this potential promotion as leverage to get Peter’s character into the sack.) Graham Stark came along, too; his was the small role of a dirty-minded library patron clad in an even filthier raincoat.

  Griffith had experienced Peter’s preparatory method before: “On a film job—always, I think—he’d agree to do it, he would sign the contract, and then inevitably he would say, ‘Kenny, I can’t do it, I can’t.’ On this occasion, he said to me about three weeks before we started filming, ‘Kenny, I can’t be a Welshman. I can’t do it. I’m sorry, because I would like to have done it with you.’ He was serious. So I said to him, ‘Look, Pete, why don’t we go down to Wales right away and I’ll introduce you to a number of Welshmen who, I think, could be like the character you’re playing.’

  “ ‘That’s a good idea.’ ”

  Bert whisked them to Wales in a Rolls. First Griffith introduced Peter to his friend the poet (and crony of Dylan Thomas) John Ormond, but Peter wasn’t especially inspired. “The next one on my list was John Pike, a close friend of mine who was a newsreel cameraman. The moment Sellers saw Pike all his problems were over. A brilliant impersonation of John Pike is what you’re seeing.” (Griffith digresses: “John was sent by the BBC to the war in Vietnam. The effect over there. . . . He had a nervous breakdown. Killed him. Drink.”)

  • • •

  A few weeks later, with shooting about to commence, Sellers and Griffith returned to Wales, this time along with the rest of the company. There was an immediate flap over the hotel.

  “He expected me to stay wherever he stayed, which I didn’t mind,” says Griffith. “Swansea was the town they got. They’ve got pretty substantial hotels there now—it’s changed. [Then] it was just tidied up from the wreckage after the war and that was about it. The best hotel was the hotel at the railway station. That’s where we were both going to stay. Suddenly I could hear some disagreement between Sellers and the manageress. He said, ‘Mr. Griffith and I can’t stay here.’ She said, ‘Why not?’ He said, ‘It’s claustrophobic.’ So he drags me in and he says, ‘Kenny we can’t stay her
e—I’m not going to let you stay here. We’ll go down and see Launder and Gilliat and tell them.’

  “I didn’t want to. He had money in the film—he was helping to finance it—so it was easy for him. But I, you know, I’m not fussy, and I remember trying to hide behind him. He said [to Launder and Gilliat], ‘Kenny and I—we can’t stay there,’ and I said, ‘Oh, shit.’ And indeed, we moved out to a seaside hotel at Porthcawl [about fifteen miles down the coast to the east]. It was a real old boardinghouse, but he liked it.”

  Kingsley Amis put it more curtly in his Memoirs: Peter “buggered off down the coast to Porthcawl and what proved to be a measurably worse hotel.”

  Then came the costar crisis. It occurred quite early in the shoot. Virginia Maskell had filmed but a single scene, when:

  Roy Boulting: “[Peter] was on vacation making Only Two Can Play, and he had as his wife in the film a young actress called Virginia Maskell. Her talent had already been noted by the critics, and I think she had a very promising future. Well, for whatever reason—and I have my own suspicion as to what the reason was—Peter Sellers took agin’ her.”

  Sidney Gilliat: “Peter rang me up at the hotel and said, ‘That girl is no good. She must go. She must go at once. And you must cast somebody else.’ Just like that. I said, ‘I won’t do anything of the kind.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Well, you’ve got to be fair to the girl to begin with. She’s only played one scene, and that consisted of taking a milk bottle out.’ ”

  Peter took the matter to the heads of the studio.

  Roy Boulting: “He phoned John and myself and said, ‘Look, this girl is worse than useless. She will ruin the film. Will you get on to Sidney Gilliat and tell him that he must recast another actress immediately!’ ” Boulting, who had worked with Maskell on another film (Happy Is the Bride, 1958), refused to do it. “We had to very gently tell Peter that he should get on with his acting and leave the judgment of performance to his director,” he later explained.