Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  The doctors told him that he’d suffered no discernable mental deterioration despite the lack of oxygen to the brain when his heart kept stopping. Peter himself wasn’t so sure.

  “He told me that he wasn’t afraid of dying after that,” David Lodge declares. “Obviously it did have something to do with his way of life, with his attitude. It did affect him. I’m not saying he was mental, but it mentally affected him.”

  Harry Secombe agreed: “Perhaps he realized his own mortality then and decided to make the most of life before it happened again. That could have been some of the reason behind his behavior afterward.”

  The Goons, of course, took a jocular approach to Peter’s health crisis. Secombe claimed that “when he was getting better, Spike and I sent him a wire saying ‘You swine! We had you heavily insured.’ ”

  Peter and Britt necessarily had to cancel their appearance at the Oscars party Harold Mirisch planned to throw in their honor on April 13. In fact, Peter remained at Cedars of Lebanon for a solid month, only making his exit, in a wheelchair, on May 7. The crowd of reporters and photographers swarming around outside the hospital noted that he was wearing a yellow T-shirt, jeans, and a blue-denim jacket. He was also chewing gum. Peter said very little on his way to the waiting ambulance that took him back to the rented mansion, but he did toss off one good line: “When you come out of the hospital, you want to look as nonchalant as possible.”

  His recovery was quiet and uneventful over the next four weeks, and on June 3, he was ready for his first public appearance. With Britt at his side, he stuck his hands and shoes in wet cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. Privately, he also ventured out to a Santa Monica apartment to pay a visit to an aging star he had long admired. He signed Stan Laurel’s guest book “To Dear Stan—with my greatest admiration. Peter Sellers, June 1964.”

  On June 7, Peter and Britt ended their catastrophic trip to Hollywood and flew back to London; they were accompanied by a British physician who had flown to California specifically to be at Peter’s side for the duration of his flight home.

  • • •

  A week and a half later, from the apparently safe distance of 5,500 miles, Peter casually mentioned to Alexander Walker of the Evening Standard that, in his opinion, the Hollywood studios “give you every creature comfort except the satisfaction of being able to get the best work out of yourself.” He didn’t like all the hangers-on who had crowded around the Kiss Me, Stupid soundstages, he said. He hadn’t had a good time in L.A.

  It was a mild interview, but it hit a nerve back in Hollywood. Billy Wilder, Dean Martin, Kim Novak, and Felicia Farr sent him a terse and testy wire: “Talk about unprofessional rat finks.”

  The following day, Peter announced that he had officially dropped out of Wilder’s proposed Sherlock Holmes film. “I’m surprised they should be so sensitive,” he commented. “I made my criticisms in public and in America and I only told the truth.” He also defined the expression rat fink for the British: “someone who says something you don’t like.”

  He issued a statement in Variety the following week—a full-page ad titled “Open Letter from Peter Sellers”: “There appears to be a feeling getting around in Hollywood that I am an ungrateful limey or rat fink or whatever, who has been abusing everything Hollywood behind its back. I must take this opportunity to correct this impression categorically.” Peter proceeded to thank the doctors and staff of Cedars of Lebanon, the Mirisch brothers, his friends at the Goldwyn Studios, and all the fans who sent him cards and letters. “I didn’t go to Hollywood to be ill,” he continued. “I went there to work, and found regrettably that the creative side in me couldn’t accept the sort of conditions under which work had to be carried out. . . . The atmosphere is wrong for me.”

  Billy Wilder wasn’t sympathetic. “Heart attack?” he once remarked about Peter. “You have to have a heart before you can have an attack.”

  • • •

  Peter’s convalescence in England was relatively serene. Mostly he and Britt stayed at Brookfield, but one weekend they were among the guests at Testbourne, the home of Jocelyn Stevens, the editor of Queen magazine. Others included Evelyn de Rothschild and Peter’s increasingly good friends Princess Margaret and her husband, Lord Snowdon.

  Their friendship had been sparked by Alec Guinness. “I was the one who . . . ” Guinness said before changing his mind about the direction his sentence should take. “I spent the day with Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon’s sister and her husband, with whom Margaret was staying. I said, ‘You know, Mum, there’s someone who you ought to meet—Peter Sellers.’ She hadn’t met him yet. I read in the papers about a month later that they had become very friendly. [Later] I went to call at Kensington Palace. I was returning some photographs to Lord Snowdon; Peter turned up after dinner.”

  In February, during the brief period of his engagement to Britt, Peter had managed to find time to introduce his fiancée to the princess and her husband, who himself had found time that week to conduct a photo shoot at Kensington Palace with Peter’s braless bride-to-be. Now they could spend more than a few hours together, and, sociably, Peter organized a comedy routine and filmed it. Peter began the act by doing impersonations and, as Stevens later described them, “getting them deliberately wrong, so that we all groaned. Then, of course, he produced this perfect version of Margaret.”

  Footage of the escapade also reveals Margaret playing along with another of Peter’s stunts—a tasteful version of something he, Spike, and Richard Lester might have thought up for Idiot’s Weekly, Price 2d. Standing in front of a makeshift theatrical curtain, Peter announces that for his next trick he is going to do an impression of Princess Margaret. He darts behind the curtain, and, after a pause, Margaret herself comes out and takes a bow. It was a relatively intimate goof between friends, one of whom happened to be royal—a good-natured amusement on a weekend afternoon.

  In another bit, Snowdon, in trenchcoat and hat, played what turned out to be a cross-dressing gangster sidekick to a gun-wielding, eventually-mincing Peter. But it’s “Riding Along on the Crest of a Wave” that best captures the spirit of Peter’s royal friendships. There’s the queen’s sister in a stylish black dress, gamely hopping up and down and waving her arms over her head in a line of mock WWII soldier-chorines.

  There’s something poignant about this footage. As the British writer Alan Franks has observed, Peter’s intense need to photograph, film, and tape record the day-to-day events of his life was essentially a tragic enterprise, “a device for fixing into place the otherwise transient moment. It was as though he was trying to inject some permanence into a life which he knew was condemned to flit from role to role, home to home, wife to wife.” That this particular home movie starred Princess Margaret meant only that Peter had risen higher than he had ever dreamed. What hadn’t changed was that Peter still tried, with his latest technological toys, to keep his evanescent soul from evaporating completely.

  • • •

  By that point, Britt was pregnant.

  Not only had they started having sex while still in Los Angeles. They began immediately after his return from the hospital. An especially dogmatic home-care nurse had insisted on following doctor’s orders by remaining at Peter’s side constantly. Peter and Britt couldn’t even go to bed together without Peter’s nurse remaining in the room with them, so the only place the couple could have a bit of sexual privacy was under a blast of running water in the shower. They begged the doctor to tell the nurse to back off, and soon after she moved to a nearby bedroom at night, Britt found herself in what passed for a family way.

  They told very few people. But near the end of the summer, during a brief trip to Costa Brava, Britt took an unexpected call from a British gossip columnist, who asked her to confirm the rumor that she was carrying Peter’s baby.

  Britt’s marriage with Peter was, like Anne’s with Peter—and everyone’s, for that matter—punctuated by moments of tension and argument. But despite
witnessing her husband’s irrational jealousy during their first weeks of matrimony, Britt once claimed not to have noticed anything truly out of the ordinary about his behavior until later that summer: “The first time I felt it was not normal was when Hugh Hefner called and said ‘We have nude photographs of Britt, but we feel that you are such a wonderful photographer, so why don’t you take some photographs of her?’ I said, ‘But Peter, I have never, ever posed for nude photographs.’ Peter said, ‘If Hugh Hefner says you have, you have.’ There was nothing I could say or do.”

  Ekland was even more shocked and hurt when Peter suggested during one of their escalating fights that she abort the fetus. Britt sought the help of Bryan Forbes and Nanette Newman, who talked him out of it. With his quicksilver mood swings, he soon stopped mentioning abortion as a solution and began referring to an idea he claimed to have learned from Stanley Kubrick. There was an African tribe, Kubrick supposedly told Peter, a tribe that blended ancient ritual with modern Western medical practices and believed that the best and healthiest babies were produced only when a pregnant woman was strapped into a chair and placed in an oxygen tent. He suggested that Britt try it. According to Britt, only an increasing stream of calls from his agents and managers distracted him enough that he never forced her to go through with it.

  • • •

  Before his ill-fated trip to Los Angeles, Peter had formed a new production company with a filmmaker of great experience. John Bryan was a former art director (Anthony Asquith’s Pygmalion, 1938, among others), and production designer (including David Lean’s Great Expectations, 1946, for which he won an Oscar, and Becket, 1964, with Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton, for which he won a BAFTA award). Bryan was also a producer, two of whose better known films starred Alec Guinness: The Card (1952) and The Horse’s Mouth (1958).

  Calling their company Brookfield, Sellers and Bryan were quite active in terms of planning. Between March and October 1964, Brookfield announced five film projects that were in various stages of preproduction. First was The Borrowers, which was to be written by the screenwriter Jay Presson based on May Norton’s children’s book about a family of minuscule people who lived under the floorboards of somebody’s country home. They announced this one in March, before Peter’s heart attacks. In April, with Peter still in his hospital bed, Brookfield pledged to do a film version of Oliver!, Lionel Bart’s hit musical based on Oliver Twist, with Peter as Fagin. Then came My Favorite Comrade, written by Maurice Richlin; that, too, was announced with Peter still recuperating at Cedars of Lebanon. Next came Don Quixote, with Peter (both ironically and not) in the title role. In October Maggie May was added to the roster; it was based on a West End play.

  With characteristic enthusiasm and verve for work, Peter explained why he wanted to become a producer. “I love this medium so much,” he said, “I thought it might be ideal if and when I begin to slip in popularity as an actor. And there’s such a dearth of really good acting material—so much bad stuff. My hospitalization was a time of reflection for me.”

  As far as playing Fagin was concerned, Peter was acutely conscious of the material’s inherent racism. What had been acceptable to Dickens and his readers in the late 1830s was no longer so in the mid-1960s, especially not to Jews. There had been some uproar when Alec Guinness played the role in David Lean’s 1948 drama, the first production since the Holocaust; this time, the New York Times reported, it would be different: “From the start, [Sellers] said he would play Fagin simply as an old rogue. After all, he argued, he was part-Jewish himself and would not be a party to any hint of anti-Semitism.”

  But the question of how Peter would play Fagin in Oliver! was permanently tabled because Sellers and Bryan weren’t allowed to make the film. A legal dispute with a rival production company ended badly for Brookfield. As it turned out, Ron Moody played Fagin in Oliver! (1968), The Borrowers was eventually produced as a made-for-television movie in 1973, and My Favorite Comrade, Don Quixote, and Maggie May were never made at all.

  In late October, Peter went before the cameras for the first time since his last day on the set of Kiss Me, Stupid. It was charity work. He agreed to spend four days in New York shooting a United Nations–sponsored plea for world peace called Carol for Another Christmas (1965). The project did boast a prestige director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who made the brilliant comedy of theater ill-manners, All About Eve (1950), among other fine films. But Peter agreed to appear in Carol for Another Christmas, he told the press, because Adlai Stevenson had asked him personally. Also, he said, “After an illness like this, you wonder if you can work again.” The possibility of brain damage nagged at him. He worried about whether he could even remember dialogue any more, so he thought he’d start back to work with something small.

  They paid him $350, total, and chauffeured him each of the four days of filming from his suite at the Regency to the studio, which was actually a converted hangar at Long Island’s Roosevelt Field. Peter’s American fans were anxious to see him, and a number of them showed up clamoring at the gate. Newsweek rather cruelly reported the excitement at the old airport: “ ‘We want Pete! We want Pete!,’ shrieked the gaggle of middle-aged, fruit-hatted females outside the studio fence. ‘Come on out, Pete!,’ they shouted, clutching at the wire like frenzied monkeys.”

  Carol for Another Christmas was a relatively low-budget, made-for-television, post–atomic holocaust parable with good intentions and a (mostly) reputable cast: Sterling Hayden, Eva Marie Saint, Ben Gazzara, Richard Harris, Peter Fonda, and Steve Lawrence (who played the Ghost of Christmas Past). The script was by The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling, who provided even more arch irony than usual—so much so that it verged on clairvoyance. Peter played the head of a band of fanatical individualists. “The Individual Me’s” have survived a devastating atomic bomb blast only to devote their lives to eliminating everyone else—except, of course, for the perfect Me, who would be allowed to live. Clad in a gaudy Wild West show outfit complete with a ten-gallon hat emblazoned with the word “Me” in sequins, Peter’s charismatic character addresses his cult: “If we let them seep in here from down yonder and cross river—if we let these do-gooders, these bleeding hearts, propagate their insidious doctrine of involvement among us—then my dear friends, my beloved Me’s” [dramatic pause] “we’s in trouble.” His eyes glistening with the thrill of control, the greatest Me continues: “We must carry our glorious philosophy through to its glorious culmination! So that in the end, with enterprise and determination, the world and everything in it will belong to one individual Me! And that will be the ultimate! The absolute ultimate!”

  The heart attack survivor then breezed out of New York and returned to London, where, on October 29, he and Britt accompanied Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon to the Variety Club of Great Britain’s Royal Gala performance, the beneficiary of which was the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The event was a circus, literally. As one of the highlights, a group of children had to lie very still on the ground while an elephant stepped over them. A few days later, Peter flew to Paris and began shooting his next feature film.

  • • •

  What’s New Pussycat?’s opening credits are historic. In lurid, squiggly cartoon script, the typographic equivalent of sixties’ paisley, they read: “Charles K. Feldman / presents / Peter Sellers / Peter O’Toole / Romy Schneider / Capucine / Paula Prentiss / and introducing Woody Allen.”

  What’s New Pussycat? was the former television writer and diffident stand-up comic Allen’s first appearance on film as well as being his first screenplay. Characteristically, it was all about sex and the mind. O’Toole plays Michael James, the disturbed editor of a fashion magazine. Michael considers himself to be sexually compulsive, so he seeks the aid of a Viennese psychiatrist, Dr. Fritz Fassbender—Peter Sellers in a Prince Valiant wig and maroon velvet suit. “My job is a lecher’s dream,” Michael confesses during their first session. Dr. Fassbender leans in very close, his interest more than piqued. Very s
oon he takes Michael’s place on the couch and confides with a rutting tone, “I like thighs. Do you like thighs?”

  Romy Schneider is Michael’s long-suffering girlfriend; Capucine, Prentiss, and Allen are ancillary neurotics.

  Sellers had been friendly with O’Toole for some years. “I introduced those two,” says the actor Kenneth Griffith. “O’Toole wanted to meet Sellers, and he wanted to meet him right away. Peter was going to see a play at the Duchess Theater, I think, so he said ‘Well, if it’s today, it will have to be when I come out of the theater.’ ” Then, says Griffith, “a strange thing happened. The play ended, and all the people came out, and there was no Sellers. As I recall it, he was virtually hiding inside. There was great unease about meeting O’Toole. We went to a restaurant in Chelsea, which had just shut because it was rather late at night. They said, ‘Oh, we just shut, Mr. Griffith.’ I said, ‘I’ve got a couple of friends outside—have a peek.’ They opened up quick. It was a great evening. I remember Sellers helping with the cooking.”

  “We were totally comfortable together,” O’Toole once said of Peter. “Not cozy—it was far from cozy. It was sometimes downright edgy, but it was the sharp edginess of stimulation and exploration. I found myself completely eaten up by Pete’s personality.”

  Siân Phillips, who was married to O’Toole at the time, recalls that Sellers’s casting in What’s New Pussycat? was problematic from a financial standpoint, since his heart attacks had rendered him uninsurable. “O’Toole, out of the kindness of his heart, said, ‘No, I must, must, must have Peter Sellers.’ ” The result was that Charlie Feldman, the film’s producer, essentially self-insured Peter by casting him without outside indemnification. Siân Phillips goes on: “Sellers insisted on top billing, and O’Toole said, ‘Oh, give it to him.’ I thought that was ungrateful, actually. I didn’t think it was very chic.” Feldman, on the other hand, told United Artists’ Arthur Krim that “O’Toole had insisted on flipping a coin to decide whether he or Sellers should get first billing, [and] Sellers won the toss-up.” Whatever the circumstances, Peter Sellers’s name did come first.