by Ed Sikov
During a location shoot on East 64th Street, the cameras and klieg lights drew a crowd. A New York City cop grew so weary of the many bystanders asking him what they were filming that he told one, “Guadalcanal Diary, lady.”
For the most part, Peter remained serenely above the fray in his trailer drinking vodka and tonics and waiting to be called. He took the opportunity to show off his wardrobe for a reporter: the bright red lining of Orient’s houndstooth jacket, his gold karate pants, his opera cape, his blue, custom-made Tillinger shirts with the initials HO embroidered on the cuffs. “This role will do great things for my image,” Peter remarked.
Although Sellers brings star power to The World of Henry Orient, his role is surprisingly small. The Johnsons’ script originally contained a strange coda: Henry ends up playing the piano in a whorehouse. It had been written, in Nunnally Johnson’s words, in case “more exposure was needed to keep Sellers happy.” But George Roy Hill excised it from the script before filming even began. But even with the coda the film would still have belonged to the two girls; the primary story would have remained theirs. Henry himself provides only a subplot.
Still, perhaps as part of the predictable backlash against a prolific star, many reviewers made a point of claiming that Merrie Spaeth and Tippy Walker “steal” the film away from Peter, who, owing to the script itself, had already ceded it to them. What with his accent and disagreeable character, it’s a strange, high stakes–gambling performance on Peter’s part, a fact the director didn’t seem to respect enough. George Roy Hill told the press when the film was released in February 1964, that “Sellers, for all his experience, actually comes off second best now and then due to these two kids,” an attitude that scarcely endeared him to Peter, who flatly refused to work with him ever again.
• • •
Peter’s offscreen life during the production of The World of Henry Orient featured its own sad little comedy or two. Shortly after arriving in New York, Peter received a fan letter. It was from a blond girl. She enclosed a close-up of herself along with her note, and Peter quickly contacted her and invited her to join him.
Peter accompanied Bert and Hattie to the airport to pick her up, but just before she stepped off the plane he made sure to hide himself behind a pillar so he could give the thumbs-up (or -down) signal to his factotums. The fat girl emerged and was instantly vetoed.
He couldn’t very well send her back on the next plane, could he? So Bert and Hattie took her to a hotel in midtown Manhattan—though emphatically not the Plaza, which was where he was staying. They kept her sequestered there for a few days before telling her that, really, she might think about shedding a few pounds before meeting Mr. Sellers. Then Peter telephoned her himself and advised her of what he considered to be an acceptable weight, all this while attempting—and failing—to romance his happily married costar, Angela Lansbury, who plays the mother of one of the girls.
For three weeks he kept the girl waiting and dieting. Supposedly she lost thirty pounds, at which point Peter presented her with an engagement ring—in absentia, of course. Eventually he grew bored with the situation and sent the girl home, richer and thinner, never having met her face to face.
Of much more interest were the contestants in the Miss Universe pageant held in Miami Beach, where Peter served as one of the judges. Indeed, the playboy Sellers appeared to be turning the judging of beauty contests into something of a sustained hobby; a few months later he worked the Miss World pageant at the Lyceum Ballroom in London.
• • •
He bought another estate—Brookfield, located in Elstead, Surrey. (Surrey is just southwest of London.) It was his first adult home south of London; even with the out-there Chipperfield, Peter kept his geographical bearings secure. Apart from the fact that the Hampstead penthouse obviously had been contaminated by Ted Levy, Peter simply felt the familiar urge for newness. This time, it took the form of a fifteenth-century redbrick house with stone floors, lead-latticed windows, and thick-beamed ceilings. In place of Hampstead’s rosewood walls and leather-paneled window treatments came inglenooks. There was a lake, some paddocks, and a walled garden. There were several barns, one of which Peter turned into a gymnasium in one part and a movie theater with a retractable screen in the other. In the yard he kept a donkey. Its name was Fred.
Peter was thirty-eight. He weighed less than ever, smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, and popped a variety of prescription drugs to combat frequent insomnia and depression. “I was getting into the pill area in a big way,” he later admitted. At the time, the movie star described his experience of life starkly: “ghostly and unreal” were the words he used.
• • •
Peter Sellers was always going to be the star of A Shot in the Dark (1964), but Clouseau, surprisingly, was something of an afterthought. The Mirisch brothers—Harold, Walter, and Marvin—owned the rights to Harry Kurnitz’s one-set, dialogue-heavy stage play, which was itself an adaptation of a French play by Marcel Achard. With The Pink Panther safely in the can after a smooth production, they signed Peter to play the lead—a French magistrate leading a pretrial murder investigation. Anatole Litvak would direct.
But Peter found Litvak to be uninspiring, as have many film critics over the years, and he threatened to quit. (To be fair to Litvak, he did direct some good pictures in his long and commercially successful career, among them Sorry, Wrong Number and The Snake Pit, both released in 1948.) So to keep their star happy, the Mirisches fired Litvak and brought in Blake Edwards, who already had a multifilm contract with their company. Edwards then hired a new writer, William Peter Blatty, and together they turned A Shot in the Dark into a Clouseau comedy. In the process, two actors dropped out—Walter Matthau and, of all people, Sophia Loren.
And yet, despite all the preproduction commotion, A Shot in the Dark turned out to be a much finer film than The Pink Panther. On the narrative level, the stakes are higher. People die. And they die just as Clouseau’s level of competence sinks even lower. From the fluid, carefully orchestrated pre-credits sequence to the equally calibrated interrogation scene at the end, A Shot in the Dark is one of the richest, most fully realized films of Peter’s career.
Elke Sommer is Maria Gambrelli, the maid accused of shooting the chauffeur. George Sanders is Maria’s employer, Benjamin Ballon. For the role of Chief Inspector Dreyfus, whom Clouseau’s incompetence drives insane, Edwards chose Herbert Lom. And as was often the case, Peter suggested his best friends for two of the smaller roles: Graham Stark would be Clouseau’s laconic assistant, Hercule, and David Lodge would show up briefly as a gardener. Shooting took place between November 1963 and January 1964 at Shepperton, and once again, Peter got the best suite at the Dorchester for the duration of the production as part of his lucrative deal.
A Shot in the Dark presents the first roll-out of Clouseau’s many signature disguises, none of which works for the purpose of disguising him; he’s the easily identifiable balloon seller standing outside the jail when Maria Gambrelli is released from custody. When she’s released a second time, there’s Toulouse-Lautrec kneeling on the sidewalk. In similar fashion, A Shot in the Dark’s broad physical comedy only barely disguises the fact that, like The Goon Show, the movie is an essentially philosophical enterprise. The film historians Peter Lehman and William Luhr get it right when they point out that “reason is likely to be not a guiding light but a Judas goat” in the Pink Panther films. Clouseau, they write, “exudes logical disconnectedness,” a paradox that calls into question the basic assumptions of civilization. For these clever critics, Clouseau is a ceaselessly disintegrating protagonist, a character much more in synch with the absurdity of late twentieth-century life than anyone else. That’s how he’s able to continue functioning in the face of an unending series of calamities.
As an example of what Lehman and Luhr call Clouseau’s merely “vestigial” rationality, they cite the sequence from A Shot in the Dark in which “instead of walking through a doorway, he walks behind the
door into a wall [and] attempts to regain the dignity he never had by declaring that the architect should be investigated.”
The servant Maurice, responding to Maria Gambrelli’s claim of innocence, utters the word “ridiculous.” This sets Clouseau off. It is he who is necessarily the arbiter of postmodern incoherence:
“I will decide what is ridiculous! I believe everything. I believe nothing. I suspect everyone, and I suspect no one. I gather the facts”—he is examining a jar of cold cream at close range and places it to his nose—“I examine the clues”—his nose emerges with a white tip, and—“Before you know it, the case is seulved.”
Told by Maria Gambrelli that he should get out of his wet clothes because he’ll catch his death of pneumonia—he has made his entrance by falling into a fountain—Clouseau responds with resignation: “Yes, I probably will. But it’s all part of life’s rich pageant, you know.” (Many years later, this line inspired the title of an R.E.M. album.)
Soon afterward, he sets his trenchcoat on fire. “Your coat!” Maria cries. “Yes,” says Clouseau, “it is my coat.”
He trails her to a rustic summer camp. Despite the fact that everyone he sees is completely undressed, Clouseau cannot comprehend what he sees and must be specifically instructed by a guitar-strumming naked man, “This is a nudist colony!” (The naked man is played by Peter’s friend Bryan Forbes, credited pseudonymously as “Turk Thrust.”) Clouseau jumps backward in shock and alarm. “A nudist colony?!” he cries, appalled. He emerges a few moments later stark naked, holding the guitar as his fig leaf, and immediately encounters an absurd nudist orchestra absurdly playing “Theme from A Shot in the Dark” by Henry Mancini.
Moments later, language itself loses its logical foundation and devolves into a series of Goon-like sounds when Clouseau comes upon what he sees as a slumbering nudist. Maria calls to him from the bushes:
“That’s Dudu!”
“Dudu?”
“She’s dead!”
“Dead? Dudu?”
Then he faints.
• • •
To say that Clouseau illustrates the modern human condition is also to say that he is a jackass, an imbecile beyond either hope or contempt. Chief Inspector Dreyfus proceeds to lose his mind under the threat to rationality that Clouseau’s brainless anarchy represents. Dreyfus is correct in his response:
DREYFUS (agitated): Are you saying that this man—the man Maria Gambrelli is protecting, her former lover—killed eight people because he was jealous?!
CLOUSEAU (calm): Insanely jealous.
DREYFUS: So jealous he made it look like Maria Gambrelli was the murderer?!
CLOUSEAU: He’s a madman. A psychotic.
DREYFUS: (increasingly agitated) What about the maid? Was he jealous of her, too? He strangled her!
CLOUSEAU: (calm) It’s possible that his intended victim was a man and he made a mistake.
DREYFUS: A mistake?! In a nudist camp?! Idiot! Nincompoop! Lunatic!
By the end of the film Dreyfus is on the ground, dementedly biting Clouseau’s ankles. It is the “lunatic” Clouseau who survives unscathed.
Clouseau’s improbable durability also reveals itself when, in the dim light of Clouseau’s apartment, the door handle turns. An Asian man enters, dressed all in black. He sneaks into Clouseau’s bedroom and, with a piercing shriek, leaps upon the supine detective and begins to strangle him. A desperate fight ensues until the phone rings. The intruder answers it: “Inspector Clouseau’s residence.”
The job of Clouseau’s valet, Cato, includes karate attacks sprung on his boss without warning, the nominal goal being to keep Clouseau’s barely functioning physical coordination from collapsing entirely. Burt Kwouk was the nimble young actor Edwards cast in the role. “Cato is a physically very agile human being,” Kwouk says today. “In those days, so was Burt Kwouk.” Asked about the development of what was to become a recurring character, Kwouk cuts right through it: “Cato did what Clouseau told him. And Burt Kwouk did what Blake Edwards told him.”
Kwouk takes a similarly clear-eyed perspective toward Peter: “Complex people are very difficult to understand. That’s about the size of it, really.” He continues: “Hardly anybody has the same perception of Peter Sellers; hardly any of us saw every facet of him. Possibly only his mother ever saw that. I mean, there’s the view that there was no Peter Sellers—there was just all those characters—[but] that’s just a facile way of putting it.” Kwouk is onto something. Some sociologists consider the self to be relatively stable; postmodernists see it not as it at all, but them—provisional, relational selves dependent on circumstance and changeable over time. Sellers was ahead of the curve on this; postmodern theory is a late twentieth-century construct. As Kwouk puts it, “Like everybody, we present different faces to different people. People in different areas see different angles, different sides of us, and therefore have different perceptions of us. In Peter’s case it was exaggerated.
“He was very complex— more complex than most people,” Kwouk concludes. “This is part of the fascination with the man—twenty years after his death. Very few actors are still interesting twenty years after they die. Most of them aren’t interesting while they’re alive.”
A Shot in the Dark builds to a crucial interrogation scene in which, in radical violation of detective genre convention, reason loses. Chaos reigns, and language slips away. Clouseau mentions to Ballon the fact that his fingerprints have been found inside a closet:
BALLON: Why not? It’s my house. I’ve often been in that closet.
CLOUSEAU: For what reason?
BALLON: The last time was moths.
CLOUSEAU: Meuths?
BALLON: Moths.
CLOUSEAU: Yes, meuths.
It’s infectious. Ballon can’t help but reply: “Maria was complaining of meuths,” after which he winces, perplexed.
Blake Edwards later recalled the difficulty of shooting that scene in particular: “One person would start laughing, then someone else. Sellers was the worst. Finally, I put some money in the center of the room and said, ‘I don’t care who it is that breaks up, they have to match the pot.’ I’ll always remember this because George Sanders was in the scene, and he’s someone who usually just did his role and went to sleep. He didn’t get actively involved. But when Sellers started using these words—a ‘meuth’ in the closet, a ‘beump’ on the head—Sanders fell down and wept like a cocker spaniel.”
But all was not mirth. By the end of the shoot, Edwards and Sellers had stopped speaking. Their communication consisted of little notes slipped underneath each other’s door. Each man was experienced; each knew comedy; each had precise ideas; each was neurotic and disturbed. After all, Edwards’s nickname is “Blackie”—not a diminutive of Blake, but a reference to one of his most frequent moods. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that because Sellers and Edwards shared a kind of communal personality, at a certain point they would necessarily cease to communicate.
• • •
Offscreen, Peter Sellers was earnestly repeating himself. “He asked me to marry him, believe it or not,” Elke Sommer says, “even though no physicality, nothing had passed between us.
“I think he was just desperate to marry. I said, ‘Peter, I like you very much as a person, but I don’t love you.’ He said, ‘But that’ll come.’
“I always got the feeling of a very lonely man who would do practically anything to have somebody who was his.”
Moving along to his next target, in early February 1964, Peter, still ensconced in his Dorchester suite, sent Bert around to a young starlet’s room to issue a dinner invitation by proxy. Perhaps the girl would consent to having some photographs taken as well, Bert asked. She would. Britt-Marie Eklund, a twenty-one-year-old pouty-lipped blond, had just arrived in London courtesy of Twentieth Century-Fox, which had cast her in a new action-adventure film, Guns at Batasi (1964), in the process forcing her to shorten her name to Britt Ekland. Thanks to the studio’s publicity machine, London’s
playboy elite was already in the know about her arrival. Michael Caine had issued an invitation but hadn’t called back yet as he’d promised to do, so Britt was free to join Peter, who by that point had started in on the room-service sweet and sour pork. He took some photos of Britt after dinner, after which they drove by limousine to see The Pink Panther, returning afterward to the Dorchester, where Peter and Britt capped their night with caviar, champagne, and Peter’s new toy, marijuana. Over the next few days he sent flowers, took her to Trader Vic’s, where they shared a drink with a floating gardenia; gave her a diamond and gold brooch from Asprey; and bought her a dachshund. Before the week was over, she flew to New York on Guns at Batasi business, but he called her often during her brief stay in America. In one call, he mentioned some news: “I’ve told everyone in London we’re going to marry. Is that all right by you?” Britt flew back to London. After her plane landed at Heathrow at 7:40 A.M., one of the many aggressive journalists who had congregated for the event shouted, “Where’s your engagement ring, Britt?” whereupon Peter pulled her into a nearby broom closet and presented her with a triple-banded Victorian ring (emeralds, diamonds, rubies) he’d picked up at Garrards. They emerged from the closet for a photo op and got married the following Wednesday.
The wedding took place in Surrey at the Guildford registry office, which Peter’s wedding planner had transfigured into what Britt later called “a chamber of spiritual beauty.” There were fifty burning candles and bowls and bowls of lilacs and roses, creamy white and pink. The bride wore a Norman Hartnell gown. Peter had chosen the designer; Hartnell also happened to make dresses for the queen. Draped across Britt’s shoulders was a $15,000 black mink coat, her wedding present from the groom. (A red Lotus sports car had served as an engagement gift.) Peter wore a simple blue suit and overcoat.