Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  The feeling was mutual; Peter grew equally disenchanted with De Sica. “He thinks in Italian, I think in English,” Peter complained to Bert Mortimer. According to Hattie Stevenson, there was an even more intimate and painful problem: Peter “wasn’t happy with Britt’s performance at all, and so therefore that made home life very difficult.”

  At first, Peter took his frustrations out only on the film’s unit publicist; in a typically roundabout way, Peter had him fired. But to spare Peter his characteristic spasm of remorse, he was told that the publicist had simply gone away on his own accord.

  It was then that the color purple became not just a problem but one of the biggest and most long-lasting terrors of Peter’s life. A script girl showed up one day in a purple outfit. Naturally she had no idea that this fashion decision would send Vittorio De Sica into an uncontrollable arm-waving frenzy. “It’s the color of death!” De Sica revealed to Peter, who, suggestible and superstitious as ever, was haunted by purple for the rest of his life.

  On at least one occasion Peter attributed the superstition to Sophia Loren, though he credited De Sica much more often. But no matter who planted the notion that purple could kill, Peter latched onto the belief fiercely. The mere hint of purple became a consistent trigger to Peter’s easily erupting temper. In later years, publicists would scour Peter’s proposed hotel rooms in search of the color of death; if they found it, the room would be changed. For Peter Sellers, the color ruined everything it touched. Purple was to life itself as Fred had been to Rembrandt.

  • • •

  Filming in Rome one day in early September, Britt was playing a scene with Victor Mature. Peter had stayed home that morning, but he just couldn’t help himself but appear at Cinecittà later that day and, with the camera rolling and De Sica miming the expression he wanted from his leading actress, Peter came creeping up to his wife’s side, so close that he was barely out of camera range, and whispered, “Play it as though you were dreaming of being beautiful!” De Sica took this usurpation in stride. To placate his star, who was also his boss, De Sica asked him to serve as Mature’s stand-in for some close-ups of Britt that were taken later that day. But Sellers was growing even more irritated by De Sica—his English was too bad, his obvious distaste for the material too debilitating, and De Sica was simply the most obvious target for Peter’s ire.

  So he told John Bryan to get rid of him. Bryan resisted on financial as well as artistic grounds. Then, bizarrely, Peter demanded that British sausages be flown in for the cast and crew, De Sica objected, and Peter responded by telephoning his friend Joseph McGrath in England and asking him to take over the direction of the film. McGrath refused. De Sica appears to have completed the shooting—barely—though Peter himself took on the task of orchestrating postproduction work on the film.

  Fed up, John Bryan terminated his relationship with Peter. After the Fox was Brookfield’s first, last, and only production; the company dissolved.

  At the beginning of filming After the Fox, Victor Mature was quoted as saying that “if Sellers plays his cards right, I may let him steal the picture.” By July, Mature was disenchanted. “I just saw my rushes,” the aging star told Sheilah Graham, “and I suggest you sell your United Artists stock.”

  When the film was released, the New York Times agreed with Mature: “Mr. Sellers acts on the level of Mr. [Jerry] Lewis, which is to say broadly, bluntly, and hoggishly.” Time was also scathing: “a garlicky farce that could barely make the late late show on Sicilian TV.”

  Still, Peter’s time in Italy was scarcely in vain. He bought a new Hasselblad camera, which he used to take a number of photos that ran in Italian newspapers as well as in London’s Daily Express and Daily Mirror.

  And he got his Ferrari Superfast at last.

  Only five of the cars were made that year, but Peter managed to snag one—a sand-colored number with matching butter-leather seats. It was capable of revving up to 180 miles per hour, he was proud to say, though he was also forced to acknowledge that there was no place in England where he could actually drive that fast.

  • • •

  In public, Peter was buoyant, his marriage to Britt a visible success as long as it was outsiders who were watching. Once again, he had married an actress. Each member of the couple knew how to play a scene in front of an audience. They played things differently at home.

  Neil Simon and his wife were staying virtually across the street from the Sellerses on the Appian Way during the production of After the Fox. They were awakened one night when Britt, after a particularly nasty fight with Peter—he threw a chair at her—climbed through a window in her nightgown and sought refuge at the neighbors’. The Simons were aghast, having had no idea Peter and Britt were anything less than fully content with each other.

  “I tried so hard to understand Sellers,” Ekland says in retrospect. “I related his dark moods to the pressures and ambiguities of his genius. Where was the warmth, humor, and humanity he generated on the screen? There were interludes when he was truly a loving, gentle, and generous human being, but these moments were like flashes of sunshine.”

  A few months earlier, Peter had penned a reflective piece for, believe it or not, Seventeen magazine. “Peter Sellers Talks to Teens” proved that on some skewed but fundamental level he knew himself better than anyone else did: “If I can’t really find a way to live with myself, I can’t expect anyone else to live with me,” he wrote.

  A more Goonish (but no less honest) bit of self-knowledge came out on The Ed Sullivan Show in the fall of 1966, when Peter appeared in the guise of his After the Fox character Federico Fabrizi. (For the purposes of historical placement, Sullivan’s other guests that night were Judy Garland, Sophie Tucker, Tom Jones, Topo Gigio, and the Marquis Chimps.) Asked by Sullivan to explain the symbolic meaning of his film No More Pasta, in which a beautiful woman drowns in a vat of minestrone, Fabrizi waxed poetic: “We are all in a thick soup, swimming around in our own vegetables! With our arms outstretched, calling for human compassion! And—come formaggi?—a little cheese.”

  • • •

  Habitually, many of the films Peter wanted to make were either made by other actors or not made at all. In April 1965, the Mirisch Brothers—who evidently bore no grudge over the Kiss Me, Stupid debacle—bought the rights to Kingsley Amis’s new novel The Egyptologists; Bryan Forbes was to develop the film with Peter. Soon there was a deal for Peter as well: $600,000 for a ten-week shoot; living expenses of $1,000 per week; and 10 percent of the gross after the break-even point. Peter was no longer concerned about putting in long days; the contract specified studio days lasting nine hours and location days of ten hours. Peter would get top billing, script approval, and the right to make changes in the film after it was shot. Shooting was to start on or around October 1. But October passed, and by the end of the month Peter was still holding off on The Egyptologists pending another rewrite. It never got made.

  In August, he mentioned to the Hollywood columnist Army Archerd another project in which he was most interested in participating. Charles Chaplin would direct the picture; Sophia Loren would costar. He hadn’t seen a screenplay yet, he said, but he was confident that it would be there when the time came. One month later, Chaplin began filming A Countess from Hong Kong (1967) with Sophia and Marlon Brando.

  Then came Waterloo. “Is there any truth in Mike Connelly’s report that you want me to play Napoleon?” Peter cabled John Huston from the Hotel Maurice in Paris in late October. “If so, very interested.”

  The next day Peter returned to Brookfield, where he received Huston’s unpunctuated reply a few days later: “Information is news to me but nevertheless a fine idea we have however already contacted Richard Burton regarding the role stop in case anything should go wrong may I please get in touch with you?”

  Disappointed, Peter responded kindly but with a touch of self-protection: “Agree Burton would be marvelous casting and on second thoughts am not sure I would be right stop.” He tagged on a mar
velously absurd philosophical conclusion: “However what is to be will be even if it never happens.”

  • • •

  To the handsome tune of $25,000 a day, Bryan Forbes convinced Peter to appear for three days’ work on The Wrong Box, Forbes’s adaptation of a novel by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne. Sellers’s role was, as the Financial Times described it, that of the “befuddled, cat-ridden abortionist.”

  Dr. Pratt (coughing): “Yes, I’m . . . I’m . . . I’m all right. It’s just a fur ball, it’s nothing. Strange, I haven’t had fur for a fortnight.”

  Forbes had asked Spike Milligan to appear in a small role as well for only a token fee, but Spike would have none of it. “Suddenly last year I woke up to the fact that everybody else was driving a Rolls Royce while I was driving a Mini Minor,” Spike told Forbes, “so I decided to put an end to it and go into this business strictly for money like everybody else. When I have got a Rolls Royce and money in the bank I will start doing it for kicks again, but not till then.”

  Peter was in Rome when he got the script on June 10, but he didn’t go before the cameras until mid-November, when, as planned, he worked for three full days, sharing the doctor’s cramped attic office set with twenty-five hired cats. He plays his two all-too-brief scenes with Peter Cook, whose character, Morris Finsbury, turns to the decrepit and disreputable Dr. Pratt for a blank death certificate, which Finsbury intends to fill in later with the pertinent details. “All I want is the death certificate, Doctor,” Finsbury stresses impatiently. “Don’t we all,” Pratt replies while pouring himself another drink. Under a bulbous makeup nose and hideously pallid complexion stare two weary, vacant eyes. “I was not always as you see me now,” Pratt explains.

  When Finsbury returns later that night, he has to rouse the doctor once again from his habitual slumbers. “I tell you the woman was already dead when I came in!” Pratt frantically cries, flustered at the brutal exposure of his own consciousness. Immediately after signing the death certificate to Finsbury’s great relief, Dr. Pratt uses a squeaking kitten as his inkblotter. “Particularly delirious are two passages with Peter Sellers,” Dilys Powell raved in the Sunday Times; “Peter Sellers is a positive gem, the finest thing in the film,” wrote Michael Thornton in the Sunday Express.

  • • •

  Near the end of the year, Peter filmed a segment of a Granada television special, The Music of Lennon and McCartney, for the producer George Martin. After Lulu sang “I Saw Him Standing There,” Marianne Faithfull sang “Yesterday,” and Henry Mancini played “If I Fell” on the piano—not to mention the Beatles themselves performing (actually lip-synching) “Day Tripper” and “We Can Work It Out”—another familiar British face appeared.

  PAUL: What’s all this, John?

  JOHN: It’s Peter Sellers!

  Cut to a stark Shakespearean set with incidental madrigal music on the sound track. Peter, dressed as Richard III, sits on an Elizabethan chair and, in the voice of Laurence Olivier, begins reciting the lyrics of “A Hard Day’s Night.” It is indescribably hilarious.

  Peter had done the routine for release as a record earlier in the year, with Martin acting as producer, but it’s the televised visuals that push the bit onto the level of Olympian comedy. The combination of Sellers’s petulant, mad Olivier imitation with his near-instinctive talent for striking wildly funny facial expressions, made Peter’s brief TV appearance in November not only the highlight of the program but also the best nugget of work he did that year.

  During the taping, he had had some difficulty with his lines and called, rather saltily, for cue cards. No one seems to have minded, however, since Peter lightened the mood by abruptly launching into “A Hard Day’s Night” as recited by Spike Milligan’s goofy Eccles. Then he did it as Fred Kite.

  The final, taped product, however, was pure, leering Olivier. With a declamatory and nasal delivery, Sellers barks certain words and bites others, glances out of the corners of his slitty eyes, and brings out in full force the song’s underlying filth. The Beatles themselves couldn’t get away with it; Peter could—and did:

  A grumpy dog and log. A sly, insinuating do. A most self-satisfied everything. And, with a final smirk, alright.

  Then Richard stands and delivers his outraged plea: “Can I do all this, yet cannot get a hit?”

  The wish was granted within a month. Peter Sellers’s recording of “A Hard Day’s Night” reached number fourteen on the British pop charts in December.

  • • •

  “He could write his own ticket with me if he’d write and direct Casino Royale.”

  This was Charles K. Feldman talking to Variety in June 1965. Feldman had a dream—to produce a big, splashy James Bond spoof in Technicolor and Panavision, with lots of gaudy sets and costumes and mid-sixties psychedelic wackiness and gorgeous babes and multiple 007s and a roster of glamorous international movie stars. Peter would be perfect for it, he thought.

  They had been talking since late April. First it was on, then it was off, then it was maybe—Peter kept changing his mind—and by June, Feldman had taken to wooing his star in the press as well as through cajoling telephone calls and flattering letters. Peter wasn’t the only one to respond to Feldman’s entreaties by hesitating. Bryan Forbes had been very close to agreeing to be the film’s director, but he backed out before signing anything.

  By late August, Casino Royale was on again. Columbia Pictures was putting up the money, and Peter, in Rome, was finally agreeing to terms: $750,000 plus $10,000 expenses. This time, Feldman got the insurance he needed to cover Peter—$5 million worth—and Peter seemed happy. He insisted that his friend Joe McGrath be the film’s director, and Feldman approved. Peter had had an idea for a costar, too.

  Sophia.

  • • •

  Everybody liked Joe McGrath, Feldman told Peter in the fall, but McGrath wasn’t much help to Feldman in terms of convincing top-of-the-line performers like Sophia to sign onto the project since McGrath had never directed a feature film before. (McGrath had considerable television experience, but no movies.) If Feldman had been able to present McGrath to Sophia as an important director, then some of her reluctance might have been assuaged. But he couldn’t, he was sad to say, so Miss Loren had declined the chance to appear with Peter in Casino Royale.

  There were still script problems, too, Feldman told him. The first three drafts had been written by the veteran screenwriter Ben Hecht (Scarface, 1932; Notorious, 1946; and many others), who had died the year before. Feldman had acceded to Peter’s wishes when he’d hired Terry Southern to write new dialogue and bits of comedy business. (According to Southern’s son, Nile, Sellers specified in his contract that “he would have the exclusive services of Terry Southern to write his dialogue. And a white Bentley.”) Peter had asked Terry to meet with him in Rome, and at the time both men thought they understood each other’s minds about the direction of the script. But, it seemed to Feldman, they hadn’t really heard each other as much as they believed they had. Still, Feldman said, he was certain that they would have a great screenplay before shooting began.

  In early September, Feldman flew to Rome to meet with Peter and discuss casting. McGrath joined him. So did Peter’s Hollywood agent, Harvey Orkin. So did Casino Royale’s latest screenwriter—Wolf Mankowitz.

  One scarcely had to be as superstitious as Peter Sellers was to see that this was a distinctly bad omen, a human version of purple. Sellers and Mankowitz had tried and failed, furiously, to form a production company together in 1960, and Mankowitz distrusted Peter greatly. Still, their meetings appear to have gone smoothly enough—while they were actually happening, that is—and together the key members of the production team began to come up with a cast list. Casino Royale, they all agreed, should costar Shirley MacLaine and Trevor Howard.

  A few days later, Feldman was back in Los Angeles meeting with MacLaine over dinner at Trader Vic’s. They called Peter from their table and spoke for half an hour about the film’s story and
characters. The next day, Peter called Feldman. He didn’t like the way Mankowitz was developing the script, he said; he suggested that they bring Terry Southern back. Peter was also complicating matters by talking to Columbia about doing another picture called A Severed Head, which was scheduled to shoot in mid-February. Charlie Feldman knew that Casino Royale would take more than a month’s worth of Peter’s time, and he was worried that his star was overcommitting himself.

  In November, with a late-January start date having been scheduled at Shepperton, Feldman arranged for Dr. Rex Kennamer to check up on Peter, just to make sure. Kennamer found Peter to be in good health, and Casino Royale was on its way. Sort of.

  Casting was still in flux. MacLaine and Howard were out. Orson Welles, David Niven, and Ursula Andress were in. Eventually, of course, so were a few others, including William Holden, Charles Boyer, Woody Allen, Deborah Kerr, Joanna Pettet, Daliah Lavi, John Huston, Jacqueline Bissett, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and George Raft.

  Casino Royale is categorically chaotic, but that was its nature all along. David Niven plays Agent 007, but so does Peter Sellers. In fact, so does Ursula Andress, and Joanna Pettet, and Terence Cooper. Niven’s Bond reluctantly agrees to return to Her Majesty’s service after the death of agent M (John Huston), whose fake widow (Deborah Kerr) fails to seduce him and becomes a nun. The evil SMERSH has gone bankrupt, and the baccarat mastermind Le Chiffre (Orson Welles) tries to win back funding in the casino but loses to a man named Evelyn Tremble (Sellers), who has been hired to play James Bond; Le Chiffre responds to the loss by torturing Tremble/Bond, who meanwhile has been seduced by the voluptuous Vesper (Ursula Andress), and on and on, until the purest evil on earth is found to exist in the form of Woody Allen.