Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  “Lolita!” Charlotte cries.

  “Lolita, that’s right! Diminutive of Dolores, the tears and the roses. . . .”

  Charlotte is thrilled. Overcome with excitement, she proclaims: “Wednesday she’s going to have a cavity filled by your Uncle Ivor!”

  Later, after Charlotte’s messy demise, Quilty accosts Humbert on the porch of an old hotel. At once insinuating, nervous, bold, tic-y, sly, and fast-talking, Peter’s Quilty threatens the paranoid Humbert by his ever-shifting and inexplicable demeanor, not to mention by his very presence, which is more or less an absence, since Humbert has no idea who this man is or what he wants.

  In another scene, Humbert arrives at home and turns on the light. There sits Peter: “Good eev’neeng, Doktor Humbardtz!”

  Peter/Quilty has now turned into Dr. Zemf, “ze Beardsley High school zychiatrist.” With hair greased back and yet another of Peter’s cherished paste-on mustaches gracing his upper lip, the horrifying doctor describes the troubled schoolgirl and her various neurotic symptoms: Lolita, he notes, “chews gum, vehemently! All ze time she is chewing zis gum!” And she “has private jokes of her own, vich no one understands so they can’t enjoy them mit her!”

  Backstage at Lolita’s play, The Hunted Enchanters (by Claire Quilty), Quilty is seen fingering his camera and asking for film. But the anonymous midnight caller in a still later scene is the one who really lets loose Humbert’s paranoia: “Uh, Professor, uh, tell me something—uh, with all this traveling around you do, uh, you don’t get much time to, uh, see a psychiatrist, uh, regularly, is that right?” It’s Quilty’s (ab)normal voice, but now it’s disembodied, and all the creepier for it.

  Near the end, Lolita, poor, worn, Quilty-free, and pregnant by the happy nobody to whom she is now married, writes to Humbert asking for money to bail her out of debt. Humbert, not having seen or heard from her since she took off with Quilty, tracks her down in her slummy house. After fending off his pathetic advances, Lolita explains her original attraction to Quilty. There’s an eerie ring to her words, and not only because she has screwed her own stepfather and he’s the stepfather in question:

  “He wasn’t like you and me,” she explains to Humbert. “He wasn’t a normal person. He was a genius. He had a kind of, um, beautiful Japanese-Oriental philosophy of life.” In her description of Quilty, one catches another fleeting glimpse of the comic cosmic.

  • • •

  With great fanfare and an excellent tagline—“How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?”—the film was released in the United States on June 13, 1962, a year and a half after Peter shot his scenes. Notices were mixed. “Whenever Sellers leaves, the life of the picture leaves with him,” Time opined. This was a most unfair assessment—Mason, Winters, and Lyon are all superb—but it gives some indication of the impression Peter was making at the time, not only on film screens, but in the buzzing press. Lolita’s reputation has grown considerably since then.

  In January 1963, the important pre-Oscar jockeying season began with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announcing Peter’s eligibility in the Best Actor category. For two reasons, James B. Harris tried to convince the Academy to shift Sellers into the Best Supporting Actor list. For one thing, Harris obviously wanted to avoid a head-to-head competition between Sellers and Mason. For another, Sellers had appeared in only thirty-four minutes of the 154-minute Lolita. But the Academy refused to budge. If Peter Sellers was to be nominated at all, it would be in the category of Best Actor. Harris was, in his own word, “flabbergasted.” Sellers was originally signed simply to do a cameo appearance, Harris told the press, but “then we decided to take advantage of his name.” This, he explained, was the reason Sellers received star billing.

  The nominations themselves rendered the matter moot, for neither Sellers nor Mason was tapped for Best Actor. Gregory Peck won for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). Lolita’s sole nomination was for its adapted screenplay—Vladimir Nabokov was honored for writing words he hadn’t written, but it didn’t matter, because he lost to Horton Foote for To Kill a Mockingbird.

  • • •

  On June 11, 1962, with Lolita on the brink of release, Peter Sellers addressed the University Indian Society at Cambridge. “I hope you did not all think I was going to be funny,” he announced, “because I am a uniquely unfunny person. I usually climb into a corner.” Bob Hope took a different point of view during the production of Peter’s next picture—Hope and Crosby’s The Road to Hong Kong (1962), in which Peter, uncredited, appeared in a five-minute cameo as a crank Indian neurologist. “Get rid of this man,” Hope had declared during the production. “He’s too funny.”

  However amusing Hope found Sellers, the scene itself is singly unpleasant. In this, the seventh and final Road to . . . comedy (Bob and Bing had already trekked to Singapore, Zanzibar, Morocco, Utopia, Rio, and Bali), Bob loses his memory in a freak flying contraption accident, so Bing hustles him to “the most highly respected neurologist in India.” It’s Peter replaying Dr. Kabir as ghastly parody.

  The dark-faced doctor examines Hope and groans repeatedly. “What is it, doctor?” Bing asks with alarm. “Terrible heartburn,” Peter replies. “Put too much curry in my cornflakes.”

  He then shines a light in Bob’s ear and tosses off his only good line in the now-trademarked Indian accent: “I’m looking in here—goodness gracious me!”

  • • •

  It was inevitable. He wanted to direct.

  And so, Mr. Topaze (1961). Of course he also had to star.

  Mr. Topaze came and went and never returned. The film currently exists in one print stored deep in the archives of the British Film Institute, its once-bright colors having faded to a nearly uniform shade of sick pink.

  Based on Marcel Pagnol’s play Topaze, the film, a satirical comedy, traces the rise of Auguste Topaze (Sellers) from shy schoolteacher to corrupt business magnate. At first, Auguste is a saintly figure, teaching his young charges by day and, after school, taking on the task of private tutor to a familiar-looking young boy (Michael Sellers). “Money does not buy happiness,” he tells his students; “money is the trial of friendship.” He is rewarded for his moralism by getting fired. A wealthy couple (Herbert Lom and Nadia Gray) hires him to run a dummy corporation for them, but he proves to be so proficient at corrupt business practices that he takes over the company, becomes a millionaire, and seizes the couple’s chateau. At the end, one of his old schoolteacher colleagues leads a group of boys past the magnificent residence. The self-satisfied Topaze tells his old friend that he’s come to accept the criminal nature of the business world; he’s had to accept it, he says, since everything he has done since he left teaching is punishable by law.

  “Has your money bought you happiness?” the friend asks.

  And Topaze replies: “Has it bought me happiness?” He smiles and gestures to the grand chateau behind him. “It’s buying it now.”

  The friend leaves Topaze standing alone on the terrace. Directing himself, Peter films this sardonic conclusion in extreme long shot, dwarfing himself on the vast CinemaScope screen.

  He seemed upbeat during the production. His fee was substantial, £75,000 for directing and starring. “What I am really hoping for is that I will be able to achieve sufficient success as a director to give up acting entirely,” he told a reporter. “I writhe when I see myself on the screen. I’m such a dreadful clumsy hulking image. I say to myself, ‘Why doesn’t he get off? Why doesn’t he get off?’ I mean I look like such an idiot. Some fat awkward thing dredged up from some third-rate drama company. I must stop thinking about it, otherwise I shan’t be able to go on working.”

  His friend Kenneth Tynan was writing a profile of him at the time, so Peter invited him to watch some dailies. Sellers’s response to himself was quite different then:

  “Observing himself in the rushes, Sellers seemed to be watching a total stranger. ‘Look at that idiot!’ he would cry when Topaze bumped into something; or ‘Poor bastard!’ dur
ing a scene of edgy flirtation. And he would laugh, merrily and musically, shaking his head like a man at once baffled and amused by the behavior of someone he had never met.”

  Billie Whitelaw, who played Topaze’s love interest early in the film, found Sellers very easy to work with, and in fact she stresses the point in her memoirs in a self-evident effort to correct Sellers’s postmortem reputation as nothing more than a buffoonish crank. Herbert Lom agrees: “We worked easily together. It was all charming and easy and natural.”

  Still, looking back on his single experience of being directed by Peter, Herbert Lom declares simply that “he was not a director. He wasn’t particularly interested in directing. Why he directed I wouldn’t know.”

  Lom goes on to explain that Sellers wasn’t inattentive to his fellow actors, he just didn’t perform any of the many other responsibilities of a film director: “He certainly tried to help us in acting the parts. He was one of the actors—he never really figured as the director. He was a colleague who helped us plan the scenes. I have no particular memories of him as an inspiring or irritating director. He was just Peter Sellers.”

  Lom makes a point of the fact that there wasn’t anybody else taking on the tasks Peter wasn’t carrying out. Peter was the director in name only, but according to Lom there was no de facto supervisor to back him up: “Probably nobody directed us. That’s why the picture, if I remember, didn’t really turn out to be anything worth talking about—because we probably had no director.”

  Mr. Topaze isn’t bad; it just isn’t good. Despite its bitter tone, it’s dull. “Judgment on his directing powers must be reserved until he can handle a subject without the extra headache of acting,” was Variety’s critique, and because Peter was directing himself, “His personal performance has suffered some.” The critic was also troubled by the cruelty of the subject matter; the “quiet comedy” of a shy schoolteacher erupted into “an uncomfortably brittle, snide drama.” That Mr. Topaze is not a feel-good comedy is inherent to the material. What’s notable is that Sellers didn’t play up this intrinsic acerbity more; the problem with Mr. Topaze is its blandness.

  The film’s tepid reception was a very personal disappointment to Peter—so much so that he barely talked again about Mr. Topaze. Soon thereafter he called Spike Milligan and suggested they bring back The Goon Show. In his later years he actually insisted that he’d never directed a movie in his life.

  He was growing bitter. “Criticism should be done by critics,” Peter declared in September 1961, “and a critic should have some training and some love for the medium he is discussing. But these days, gossip-columnist training seems to be enough qualification. I suppose an ability to stand on your feet through interminable cocktail parties and swig interminable gins in between devouring masses of fried prawns may just possibly help you to understand and appreciate what a director is getting at, but for the life of me I can’t see how.”

  ELEVEN

  Peter didn’t bother to ask his wife when he put Chipperfield up for sale near the end of 1961. He didn’t even tell his mother. A Daily Mail reporter called Peg for confirmation after hearing the rumor. “I’m sure it can’t be right,” Mother stated with authority. “Peter rings me up nearly every night for a mother-and-son heart-to-heart. And he hasn’t mentioned anything about moving.”

  According to Sigmund Freud, the key to a healthy personality is the tolerance of contradiction, but Peter’s ability to sustain drastic paradox offers a twist to the theory. At times, at least, he seemed to tolerate his radical contradictions rather well; it was those around him who couldn’t handle the strain. More and more, Peter’s mind functioned like two geological fault lines grinding inexorably against each other, all part of nature. It was nearby residents who felt the rumblings and lived in fear.

  A case in point: With the sale of Chipperfield, Peter believed, or wanted to believe, that by leading his wife and two children out of one more house and into still another, he was acting in their interests. For him, changing addresses again would engender a sense of stability. “One tries to create roots,” he explained. “It’s vital for the children.” It’s incidents like this that lead the great Sellers fan Dimitris Verionis to offer an astonishingly acute observation: “Peter was never a double-dealer. He was straight in his reactions—instinctive and sometimes brutally innocent.”

  So with the cruel guilelessness of the spoiled child he always was, Peter Sellers impulsively bought a seven-year, £31,000 lease on a vast penthouse apartment overlooking Hampstead Heath. As Graham Stark puts it, “He couldn’t have done anything worse.”

  While the apartment was being renovated, the Sellerses moved into a fourteenth-floor suite at the Carlton Tower hotel in Belgravia. Stark recalls the bitter litter of Christmas 1961. Covering the floor of the suite were scads of unopened holiday presents that had been given, nominally, to Michael and Sarah. Many of them had been trod into a trampled mess. It was not the result of a lightning-like Peter tantrum. These children’s gifts were British film producers’ way of currying the movie star’s favor. And the kids, being kids, simply stopped unwrapping them out of sheer boredom with all the obsequious plenitude. After that they stomped the rest to death.

  • • •

  “At the moment I’ve got a South African architect working on my new flat in Hampstead,” Peter told Playboy. It was affecting his personality: “I tend to speak in a South African accent all the time.”

  The designer, Ted Levy, was hauling his clients out of the Tudor era by way of a preciously masculine, Euro-Beverly Hills style—High Sixties early in the decade. The Hampstead apartment was large, polished, and very rich—five bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a fully equipped recording studio. Many of the rooms were fully paneled in opulent, garnet-dark rosewood. No hoi-polloi drapes here; Levy designed the windows to be covered by moveable leather panels.

  Anne worked closely with the architect. “They kind of overruled me, always around, the two of them buying wallpaper and wood and stuff,” Peter later complained. Michael Sellers reports that it was Peter who convinced Anne to take Ted along on the shopping trips, it was Peter who “encouraged Ted to take Mum out for lunch,” and it was Peter who suddenly turned on his interior designer one day and “ordered Ted to take my mother away.” “I don’t want her!” Peter shouted.

  What with Peter and Anne’s affectionate hand-holding and public solicitousness, all of Peter’s pecking of Anne’s cheek when the couple and Levy were together (two captivating performances by actors, after all), it was only when Peter broke down and shrieked at him that Ted Levy finally comprehended that his clients’ marriage was a sour charade.

  • • •

  Peter went off to Paris to film John Guillermin’s adaptation of Jean Anouilh’s play The Waltz of the Toreadors (1962). A period-piece costume comedy scripted by Wolf Mankowitz, it’s Millionairess-like in its grand oversizing of a small satirical idea. The beautiful French actress Dany Robin takes the Sophia role, with the requisite breathtaking costumes and hats. Peter, instead of playing a low-key Indian doctor, reverts to Bloodnok for his characterization of the aging general who pursues his old flame (Dany) in the face of his equally aging and shrewish wife (Margaret Leighton). Owing to the requirements of the script, however this Bloodnok is a satyr in a fat suit, and the effect is a little jarring.

  “Wolf Mankowitz was a friend of mine, and Wolf wrote the script in about two weeks, and we made the picture,” says John Guillermin. It wasn’t easy, and it didn’t turn out well, especially from Guillermin’s perspective. The director maintains his respect for Peter Sellers, however, as many directors continue to do despite the troubles they faced with him. “Based on the scores of people I’ve worked with over the years, I think Peter was an outstanding artist who worked in a very eccentric and curious way. It’s rare that you find people who come out of radio and adapt to the screen successfully. To me, he was unique in that sense.

  “Whether or not he was taking lessons from Stanislavsky, he had
an instinct that was totally Method. The very fact that he started with an actorly tangible, the voice, and then built from it—that’s a very sound way of going about it.”

  Kenneth Griffith provides another colorful description of Peter’s approach to performing. “Once we discussed acting,” Griffith says, “and we came to the agreement that what we were both trying to achieve was a mushroom in its prime—beautiful rounded top, stem, febrile roots. I always started from the febrile roots, built up, and finished, I hoped, with a polished clear top. He started with the top—because he saw it. But it would be very wrong to say that’s where he stopped. He wasn’t just a brilliant impersonator. He worked from the top down—to what made that top tick.”

  Guillermin continues: “In Toreadors he started with the voice—it was a neighbor of his, an old boy in his sixties, a retired Army man. Once he got the voice, his whole body followed. But when I said, ‘Okay, it’s terrific, Peter, but now we’ve got to talk about the makeup,’ he said, ‘I don’t want any makeup.’

  “ ‘Don’t worry about it, John,’ he said. He didn’t want to have to come to the studio two hours early and have a lot of stuff put on his face. He played the whole part with very, very little makeup—extraordinary, actually, because his skin is quite smooth, and yet he does convey very well the feeling of a man in his late sixties.”

  The strain of his disintegrating marriage took its toll during filming, but it’s difficult to pin down whether Peter’s shattered emotional state was due to his collapsing marriage or whether the marriage collapsed owing to Peter’s mental deterioration. “Peter was breaking down into tears now and again,” Guillermin recalls. “In fact, the scene when he’s about to commit suicide—he gets a revolver and he’s going to blow his brains out—was a very bad day for Peter. He said, ‘I can’t work.’ I finally persuaded him to just sit down at the desk. He was in tears, but it worked for the scene, which we shot. That was one of the tragic moments. He was tortured. A very complicated man.”