Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  Later, Peter periodically told people he carried some of Peg’s ashes around with him on his travels. Joe McGrath finds it hard to believe. “He would make up a lot of it, you know. I mean, if he thought that somebody would believe he was carrying his mother’s ashes around, it would be very funny. I know he told people stories about his death experiences—when he had his heart attacks and stuff like that—but he never told me any of that, and I know he never told Spike Milligan. Spike said, ‘No—he’d never tell us any of that because we’re gonna say, “You’re putting me on—don’t give me any of that shit.” ’ ”

  • • •

  Peter Sellers was in such terrible emotional shape during the production of The Bobo that even his close friend Kenneth Griffith felt the sting. At Peter’s insistence, Griffith played the role of Pepe, one of Olimpia’s discarded lovers. “I came on the set one day and Robert Parrish was sitting like Little Jack Horner in the corner of the studio. Peter was directing.

  “The scene I had was with Britt Ekland. I thought, ‘Geez, somebody could have warned me. Well, perhaps they forgot.’ So I did the scene, which was quite difficult, with Miss Ekland. She always showed goodwill and tried very hard, but she was having problems. I think we were into forty-odd takes—which was quite difficult for me because if she got it right it would be printed and that’s it. But we went on. At the end of the day I got my makeup off and got changed and sought Robert Parrish—nice man, lovely man. He was sitting alone. I said, ‘Robert, you didn’t tell me what was going to happen this afternoon.’ He said, ‘I’m sorry, Kenneth.’ I said, ‘Is it all with your agreement?’ I thought maybe Peter had said, ‘Look, I can handle it.’ But Robert very quietly said, ‘No. He just announced that he was taking over, and I felt that I had a duty to sit quietly and be a servant to the film. You know, the number-one job is to get this film finished.’

  “When the film was finished, the big man in film publicity here [in London] asked if he could come and see me. He said, ‘You know Peter wants everyone on the film in a significant capacity to write a piece about what they think of him as a director’ [for use as publicity]. I said, ‘I can’t do that, because it would imply that I supported what happened. And I don’t.’ And he got up—because he’d had orders from Peter—and said, ‘Well, Kenneth, you know everybody on the film has done it. You are the only one who has said no.’ I said, ‘Look, I love Peter dearly, but I can’t be a party to this.’ After that Peter cut me dead for six months.”

  Actually, Robert Parrish never left the picture entirely in Peter’s hands. In late November, with the production still grinding on—Peter was by that point insisting on reshooting scenes without even seeing the rushes—Parrish told his London-based agent that he was getting along “as good as ever” with Peter and with Elliott Kastner as well. “Peter leans on me when he needs to and flails out on his own when he doesn’t. Elliott holds his stomach and says, ‘Bob, what am I going to do?’ ”

  Then Harvey Orkin showed up in Rome and helpfully told Peter that he, Orkin, didn’t like Peter’s interpretation of his role.

  Orkin’s asinine remark—had he never met his client?—sent Peter into a tailspin so predictable that one wonders if there was malicious intent on Orkin’s part. Like most artists, Peter needed a constant, smooth flow of reassurances, not a sudden stab of criticism, which human beings generally take badly and actors and writers take even worse. Unfortunately, Peter’s response to Orkin’s insensitivity was not to question his relationship with Orkin but rather to insist on reshooting even more scenes in a desperate attempt to develop an entirely new character.

  They were all still at it in late January when Peter demanded a codirecting credit. First he fought with Kastner about it—Kastner told Peter he was “full of shit”—and then he approached Parrish, who patiently reminded him that he had told Parrish earlier that he’d only wanted credit as the film’s star. According to Parrish at the time, “Peter accepted this and said he would never bring it up again.”

  “Dear Bob,” Peter cabled on January 31. “Since I have directed The Bobo I also want to cut it, but alone with [the editor] Johnny Jympson. Just Johnny Jympson and I, in other words. I hope you will agree to this as I must tell you I intend to go all the way.”

  “Dear Bob,” Peter wrote on February 14. “Thank you for your letter in which you state that you do not agree that I directed The Bobo. I wonder if you would now be good enough to let me know upon what facts you base this statement.” There were other less-than-pleasant exchanges with Parrish and others over the musical score, which Peter insisted on reworking as well. In the end, though, Robert Parrish received sole credit for directing The Bobo.

  When The Bobo was released, it was not widely slammed. On the contrary. The critic Richard Schickel wrote only one of a number of glowing reviews. Schickel captures the spirit not of that performance, particularly, but of Sellers’s best work nonetheless: “There is in his character a wonderful scramble of guile and innocence, humility and dignity, not to mention a certain wise, romantic rue. . . . What is so good about Sellers’ performance is that he never insists upon these emotional generalizations at the expense of specific characterization, is never excessively sweet or sour and never, never tries obviously to turn the Bobo into an Everyman, as so many lesser actors have when they have tried to work a vein that is so trickily laced with fool’s gold. . . . Peter Sellers may be the finest comic actor of his time, and it is a boon to be able to study him at length and at leisure instead of merely glimpsing his face in the crowd of those all-star productions where he has lately been lurking so much of the time.”

  • • •

  “A certain wise, romantic rue” was indeed what Peter Sellers radiated onscreen. But offscreen, there was little wisdom, and his romances inevitably turned sour—all that was left was rue. An “atrocious sham” is the way Britt Ekland describes her marriage to Peter at this point. Like Anne, she was the object of his increasingly incendiary rages and follow-up periods of deep remorse. One day, for instance, she returned home at the end of her day to find Peter in a white-hot jealous fury. Convinced that she was with another man, Peter grabbed her gold Cartier watch, stomped on it, threw the pieces in the toilet, and flushed. Soon awash in guilt, he bestowed more gifts.

  One of his favorite domestic games was the treasure hunt—“Treasure Trove,” he called it—in which he would hide valuables around the house or apartment and watch delightedly as Britt searched for them. On one of these hunts, which took place in their suite at the Dorchester, Britt found a scarf, a cigarette lighter and case, perfume, luxury soaps, and another gold watch. Yet they spent less and less time together.

  Despite the fact that the Sellerses’ time in England now had to be strictly limited for tax reasons—the jet set was largely a group of celebrity tax refugees—Peter bought another new apartment, a four-bedroom affair on Clarges Street in Mayfair. When the couple was together and not at Brookfield, or Mayfair, or Los Angeles, or sailing in the Mediterranean, they paused at Saint Moritz, where, in April, Britt and Peter threw a birthday party for Michael. Spike Milligan came with his wife and children, and everyone had a great time, except for Peter, who went to bed.

  His behavior was finally becoming too much for Britt, so one day she swallowed a fistful of sleeping pills. “It wasn’t a deliberate attempt to commit suicide, but I wanted to find oblivion.”

  • • •

  As with any big star, there were many blanks for every bullet. One of the projects Peter was involved in that year was The Russian Interpreter, to be directed by Michael Powell. They met at the Dorchester on March 4, 1967, at which time Peter told Powell, the director of such classics as The Red Shoes (1948) and Peeping Tom (1960), that he wasn’t the right director for his own project. Powell asked him who he would suggest. Peter replied, “I don’t know, but not you.” When Powell recorded the incident in his diary, the entry was a single word: “Peterloo.”

  The screenwriters Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker als
o proposed The Russian Interpreter as a Peter Sellers project later in 1967. In fact, the three men considered forming a production company called Peter, Paul, and Larry. But neither the film nor the company ever came into being.

  Peter wanted Graham Chapman and John Cleese to write a script called The Future Began Yesterday: a man uses a copying machine to duplicate his wife. Peter wanted one particular actress to play the wife.

  Sophia.

  Peter also wanted to do Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist Rhinoceros set in modern Hamburg; it was to be directed by The Ladykillers’ Alexander Mackendrick, but his agent, David Begelman, talked him out of it.

  There was Pardon Me, Sir, But Is My Eye Hurting Your Elbow?, a collection of skits that boasted an impressive lineup of talent: scripts by Allen Ginsberg, Peter Cook, Gregory Corso, Terry Southern, Philip Roth, and others; a score by Leonard Bernstein; direction by Arthur Hiller. At one point Peter was said to be ready to play nine different roles in the omnibus film, but the picture never came together. Several of the skits, later published in book form, would have been excellent vehicles for Peter. Southern’s entry, “Plums and Prunes,” is about a Westchester ad executive named Brad, his wife Donna, and their nubile sixteen-year-old daughter, Debbie, whose sexual attractiveness dawns all too disturbingly on Brad, who proceeds to punch, choke, and beat Debbie’s boyfriend to death. Ginsberg’s “Don’t Go Away Mad” is a surreal farce about a bearded middle-aged man who gets picked up by the cops in Central Park for not having an identity. To cure him, he’s given electroshock therapy, drugs, a lobotomy, and an exploding hydrogen bomb.

  Peter got as far as offering Kenneth Griffith a role in yet another picture. “Typical of Sellers,” Griffith declares, referring to their estrangement, “six months later the phone rang. ‘How are you, Kenny? Look I’m doing this film, and I’m playing two parts—brothers! Any other part in the film you want, you can play. My dad!’ (I wasn’t all that old.) ‘Anything! Whatever you want to play. Please be in it.’ So I went round and we read the whole script and then I chose my role—because it went right through the film and I would get more money. Suddenly I was told that Peter Sellers wouldn’t do it.” (Griffith no longer recalls the name of the film, but it could well be The Bed Sitting Room, 1969, directed by Richard Lester from a script by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus and starring Ralph Richardson, Rita Tushingham, Peter Cook, and Dudley Moore.)

  In addition, there was an adaptation of Graham Greene’s story “When Greek Meets Greek,” which Kenneth Geist optioned with an eye toward producing the film. Geist wanted to cast Peter, Alec Guinness, John Lennon, and Lynn Redgrave. “I want to do it,” Peter told Geist, who asked John Mortimer to write the script. “I’ll do it,” Mortimer told Geist. Then Peter referred Geist to his accountant, Bill Wills. “It was a Waiting for Godot situation,” says Geist, who calls Wills “a great dullard.” The film never got made.

  Mel Brooks approached Peter about starring in Brooks’s first film, a comedy about a failed theatrical producer and a nebbish accountant who put on a Broadway show, but Peter was too distracted to listen. Brooks describes his experience of trying to interest him in The Producers (1967): “I sent the script to Peter Sellers, and I told him about the project, and he had to go to Bloomingdale’s. So we walked around Bloomingdale’s—he was shopping, I was talking. I’d be in the middle of a very important moment—where Bialystock says to Bloom, ‘Do you want to live in a gray little world, do you want to be confined, don’t you want to fly?’—and he’d say ‘You like this buckle? What do you think of this buckle?’ ”

  As Brooks experienced the odd interaction, Peter didn’t mean to be rude, or dismissive, or regal: “It was just a series of different focuses. Foci. He’d focus on something and get lost in it.” It was Dennis Selinger who ultimately responded to Brooks on his client’s behalf, saying that he really didn’t know whether Peter had read The Producers or not, but the fact was (as Brooks tells it, quoting Selinger), “He’s so meshuggeneh—so crazy—he’s locked into so many things now. . . . This is not the right time to approach him with new material.”

  And there was God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: or, Pearls Before Swine, an adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1965 novel. The movie was to have been directed by Blake Edwards, but Edwards and Sellers made a different film in the meantime and had a few difficulties with each other. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, too, went by the boards.

  • • •

  In the spring of 1967, the Hollywood trade papers excitedly scattered details of Peter Sellers’s imminent return to Tinseltown. “I’ve wanted to come back here and make a film on happy circumstances,” Peter told Army Archerd. The circumstance was Blake Edwards’s The Party (1968).

  Sheilah Graham reported that Peter and Britt were scheduled to sail to New York on the Queen Elizabeth, then fly to Los Angeles. And once they arrived in Hollywood, Graham remarked, the couple wouldn’t “be living in separate houses as they have done recently in England.” (In addition to Brookfield and what appears to have been a standing reservation at the Dorchester, they’d taken yet another apartment—this one on Curzon Street in Mayfair. Who knows who stayed where?) Britt was supposedly packing twenty trunks of clothes along with one of the couple’s Yorkshire terriers.

  In late April, Peter arrived in L.A. He alone had taken the Queen Elizabeth after all. Britt had gone to Sweden to be with her mother, who had just been diagnosed with cancer. He was accompanied by two-year-old Victoria, with whom he made the traditional trip to Disneyland in her mother’s absence.

  • • •

  An interviewer showed up one day at the Goldwyn Studios, where The Party was being filmed. “Why do you have all that dark stuff on your face?” he inquired of Peter. This was quite the wrong thing to say. “If you don’t know why I have this stuff on my face you have no right to interview me!’ Peter roared before ordering the unprepared hack off the set. “Go ahead—print all the dirty things you want to!” he shouted after him.

  Originally titled R.S.V.P., The Party is about a polite, inept Indian actor, Hrundi V. Bakshi, whose name is mistakenly added to the guest list of an exclusive Hollywood bash, which he inadvertently destroys. Peter plays the role in blackface, and it’s very funny as long as one isn’t terribly concerned about issues of race and representation. Clad in a pale lavender suit, bright red socks, and white shoes, Hrundi Bakshi is essentially a one-man subcontinental minstrel show, though a sympathetic one. It’s the smug white Hollywood types who are contemptible in The Party. Producers and bimbos, studio executives and their shallow wives—they bear the brunt of Edwards’s scorn, with Hrundi V. Bakshi being the object of both the director’s and the audience’s sympathetic identification. It’s more the pity that The Party’s Deluxe color registers Peter’s dark-brown makeup so poorly.

  Peter’s Indian accent features prominently, as it should, but The Party is largely about physical, cinematic sight-gag humor. Hrundi’s shoe floats away on a preposterous stream that runs through the ultramodern house. A drunken waiter (Steve Franken) wreaks havoc with the salad. Hrundi’s Rock Cornish hen flies off his plate in one shot and impales itself on a woman’s pronged tiara in the next, all in less than two seconds. The drunken waiter proceeds to retrieve it, along with the woman’s blond beehive wig, which he places on the dismayed Hrundi’s plate. The wracking tensions of dinner party etiquette are the scene’s main focus, and even under the blackface Peter expresses them charmingly, naturally. One would never guess that he and Blake Edwards were once again said to have stopped speaking to each other at some point during the production. Assistants relayed messages: “Ask Mr. Sellers if he’s comfortable crossing to the phone while he’s doing the dialogue.” “Tell Mr. Edwards I’m very comfortable . . .”

  In The Party, Edwards gives Leo McCarey’s comedic “pain barrier” theory a literal twist in a meticulously constructed ten-minute sequence in which Hrundi cannot find a proper place to urinate. The most accessible bathroom is occupied by several women. His hands clasped
in front of him, he finds another; it’s taken up by a group of men smoking pot. Still another is used by a waiter in red bikini briefs enthusiastically flexing in front of the mirror. All the while, Sellers is tensing his body, his gait becoming more and more warped and constricted. Hrundi wanders out to the lawn and sets off the sprinklers. Then a waif-like aspiring starlet (Claudine Longet) decides to sing a Henry Mancini song just as Hrundi rushes, dripping, through the living room.

  Politely, he waits for her to finish. With a wretched grin plastered on his face, he leans against the wall, crosses his legs, clenches his fists, torques from the waist, and looks to heaven for salvation. As the song concludes, he creeps away in baby steps.

  The sequence goes on for two more excruciating minutes. Hrundi tears frantically from room to room to no avail before he finally gets to pee, and, at the moment of relief, the look on Peter’s sweaty face is inimitable. In close-up, his head lolls around in coarse ecstasy while his facial expression suggests the more beatific joy of a martyred saint at the moment of ascension, and it’s still not the end of the sequence. An entire roll of toilet paper unspools by itself, Hrundi stuffs it all in the toilet, breaks the toilet’s lid, flushes, stops up the plumbing, and floods the bathroom before Sellers and Edwards’s tour-de-force of bladder agony concludes.

  • • •

  As fundamentally visual as this film is, it’s nevertheless in The Party that Peter Sellers, in his exquisite front-of-the-mouth Indian accent, utters one of the choicest lines of his career, the immortal “Birdie num-num.” The birdie is a parrot in a vast bamboo cage. The num-num is its seed.