Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  “Birdie num-num,” Hrundi V. Bakshi announces, gazing at the feathered thing. “Birdie num-num. Birdie num-num!”

  Seed by seed, he feeds the parrot for a few moments and then pitches in a fistful. “I give you a lot,” he explains before wandering away. He spies an elaborate electronic contraption built into the wall and flips a switch. “Num-num. Num-num! Birdie num-num!” Hrundi V. Bakshi proclaims to all the guests through the whole-house intercom. Then he makes an impromptu series of chicken noises.

  This is quintessential Peter Sellers—silly, insane, brilliant. “Birdie num-num” is funny for reasons that remain entirely obscure: a phrase verging on meaninglessness, an accent both accurate and farcical, a bland and indefinable comportment that manages somehow to register as purely hilarious. For no apparent reason, the bit coalesces into something precise and emblematic. It is impossible to imagine anyone other than Peter Sellers achieving glory with “birdie num-num.” He remains to this day the master of playing men who have no idea how ridiculous they are.

  • • •

  When The Party opened in April 1968, Time was snide: “This party, in short, is strictly for those who don’t get around much.” The New York Times was offended: “When, eventually, Sellers is reduced to mugging the poor Indian’s pain at not being able to empty his bladder, the picture hits a low point from which it never recovers.” When the British royal family watched The Party together at Balmoral Castle, however, Elizabeth II laughed so hard that tears rolled down her face. The queen got it right.

  SEVENTEEN

  Let me see—how is it to be managed?

  I suppose I ought to eat or drink something or other; but the great question is, what?

  It was 1967. The Beatles had their maharishi, Peter had his yoga, and the counterculture, regardless of its income level, turned to the jangling rhythms of southern Asia for druggy inspiration.

  Peter became friendly with Ravi Shankar, the world’s most famous sitar master. When Peter was in Los Angeles that year, he invited Shankar to his rented house to perform a private concert. Paul Mazursky, one of the guests, reports that Peter imitated Ravi’s accented voice directly to Ravi’s face—much to Ravi’s amusement. And in fact it was Shankar who demonstrated the elements of sitar technique for Peter on the set of The Party, when Hrundi, early in the film, sits alone and plays.

  Sellers’s friendship with Shankar led to an even closer friendship with George Harrison. “I got to re-know him through Ravi Shankar,” Harrison says. “He liked Ravi a lot and became close friends with him, and at that time, you know, I was with Ravi all the time learning the sitar. We hung out together, the three of us, which was quite an unusual combination.”

  Harrison also reports that Peter was quite immersed in his spiritual quest: “He was doing a lot of yoga and trying to hone in on ‘Who am I?’ ‘What is it all about?’ ” He hadn’t discovered any lasting answers.

  • • •

  Peter could be social and outgoing if the mood suited him. He, Britt, Edwards, Edwards’s new and as-yet unannounced girlfriend, Julie Andrews, and other key Party people did, in fact, party in a grandiose, Hollywood sort of way—when Edwards and Peter were speaking, at least. As filming neared completion, Peter threw a fifty-guest cocktail do, after which everyone climbed onto the busses he had chartered and headed to the Greek Theater in Los Feliz, where Henry Mancini was opening that night. There was also a three-hundred-person wrap party thrown by the producers on the Party set, with music provided by the onscreen band (The Party Four). On a more sober note, Peter returned to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital to address a group of cardiologists about his experiences as a heart-attack survivor.

  Peter made new friends, too. The closest by far was Roman Polanski. They met in an Italian restaurant near the Paramount lot, where Polanski was filming Rosemary’s Baby (1968) with Mia Farrow. “My first impression of him was of a sad, shy man who hid his essential melancholy behind a fixed smile that revealed his rather prominent teeth,” Polanski writes in his autobiography. “His manner conveyed profound depression.”

  Asked to elaborate on this observation in person, however, Polanski is quick to clarify: “He was at that time in such a mood, but it doesn’t mean that it prevailed throughout the years that we knew each other. He had a lot of reasons to be depressed, like everybody else. I don’t think that he was particularly stricken by depression throughout his life.” Obviously bored by all the one-dimensional “Mad Peter” lore, Roman Polanski defends him. Still, Polanski acknowledges, “Peter’s idiosyncrasies could be a drag.” For example, Sellers tended to walk out of restaurants mid-meal. “This often happened at The Luau,” Polanski writes. “I grew to dread the moment when, after ordering, Peter would whisper, ‘Ro, I can’t stand it—bad vibes in here—let’s go somewhere else.’ ”

  • • •

  Going somewhere else was Peter’s way of life. At the end of July, Peter and Britt flew to Paris, then to Marseilles, where they began a two-week cruise of the Mediterranean. “When the Sellerses discovered that they couldn’t get all their belongings they’d picked up during their Hollywood stay on their plane,” the columnist Dorothy Manners gasped, “they ordered a second freight plane just to transport the haul. The only thing they were forced to leave was Peter’s new car.”

  It was a Corvette Stingray. There hadn’t been one available in Los Angeles, so Peter—who once described himself as being “auto erotic”—got his press agent to call Detroit and have General Motors ship one to him immediately so he could drive it around Beverly Hills during the filming of The Party. He had to have it.

  “You tell them you want a car as soon as possible,” Peter said at the time, “and you’ll bloody well get it two weeks from now. You tell them you want it today and they know you mean business.” He got away with this sort of thing precisely because he could.

  • • •

  If it weren’t for the tremendous talent, the domestic horrors, and the periodic fits of public charm, Peter Sellers’s life could be described in the form of a warehouse inventory and an accompanying list of the stamps on his passport. He had commissioned a new yacht while on a side trip to Genoa during the production of The Bobo—a fifty-foot number, which he christened The Bobo—and in August 1967, he and Britt sailed to Sardinia to spend a little time with the Aga Khan. The couple, divorce postponed, were accompanied by Margaret and Tony Snowdon; the Aga was tossing the princess a birthday bash. Kirk and Anne Douglas were there, too; Peter had met them in Monte Carlo on the way. Margaret’s cousin, Princess Alexandra, and her husband, Angus Ogilvy, came along as well. So did Michael, Sarah, and Victoria Sellers, the youngest being cared for by her Swedish nanny, Inger.

  “It was the real jet set period,” Roman Polanski declares. “It was, like, one day in Rome, one day in L.A., then we’d suddenly be in London. Our jobs would take us to various places, and we would meet like that, you know.” Paris, Rome, London, Los Angeles, Monte Carlo; Peter, Margaret, Roman, Kirk, the Aga; films, income, houses, taxes, luggage. . . . It was rather like a progressive dinner, where guests go from house to house for each new course, only in 1967 they were jetting, not driving, and the food was better, and there was unlimited champagne and lots of drugs, and everybody was famous. Through Roman, Peter met Warren (Beatty). Warren introduced him to Julie (Christie). “You have to look back at what London was like in the ’60s,” says Peter’s friend Gene Gutowski, who had been Polanski’s producer on Repulsion (1965), Cul de Sac (1966), and The Fearless Vampire Killers, or: Pardon Me But Your Teeth Are In My Neck (1967). “We were young, we were successful, and everybody’s star was on the rise. It was limited to much more of a select group than today. Let’s put it this way: there were not as many celebrities around in those days.”

  With Roman, Peter enjoyed playing an odd game of their own invention: Sellers, assuming the personality of a cretin, would climb into the driver’s seat of his latest Rolls Corniche, and Roman would give a driving lesson as though to the mentally handicapp
ed. “Press the right-hand pedal, gently—no, too hard! . . .” And so on, through the busy streets of London. According to Polanski, it was especially amusing to play the game stoned on hashish.

  In the late fall of 1967, the Polanski circle got together to plan a communal Christmas holiday in Cortina. Roman and his magnificent girlfriend, Sharon Tate, took Peter out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant to talk about the trip and introduce him to some of the other guests. A physician named Tony Greenburgh—described by Gene Gutowski as “a society doctor”—was seated across the table from Peter. The talk turned to the question of whether doctors bore any moral responsibility to patients who seemed driven to self-destruction. Not knowing Peter at all, Greenburgh all-too-calmly stated his opinion: that doctors were unable to stop hell-bent patients from killing themselves, whether it was through drinking, drugging, smoking, or overwork, and therefore he bore absolutely no responsibility for his patients outside of the particulars of his practice.

  Peter became wildly enraged, his reaction so abrupt and extreme that the other guests naturally assumed it was one of his impromptu comedy routines. Their amused disbelief continued even after Peter got up from the table, marched around to Greenburgh’s side, shrieked “You’re wrong, Doctor—you’re wrong, you’re fucking wrong!” and grabbed the physician by the throat and began to choke him. Someone at the table giggled and casually told Peter to stop acting silly. Greenburgh, for his part, was turning blue.

  Polanski sprang to the doctor’s defense and pried Peter’s fingers loose from his throat. He then asked Peter to sit down, whereupon Peter, according to Polanski, “buried his face in his hands and began to sob.”

  • • •

  These were trying times for certain people with whom Peter Sellers came into contact; some had it easier than others. Many years after inspiring mutual unpleasantness during the production of I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! (1968) Peter and one of the film’s writers, Paul Mazursky, ran into each other at the Beverly Hills Hotel. They greeted each other warmly after their long estrangement. “I was wrong, Paul,” Sellers is said to have confessed. “Will you ever forgive me?” “There’s nothing to forgive,” Mazursky benevolently replied, only to chronicle the whole ugly thing later, lavishly and at Peter’s expense, in his autobiography.

  They met while Peter was filming The Party. Freddie Fields, Peter’s Hollywood agent, had read the script, which Mazursky wrote with his collaborator, Larry Tucker, and forwarded a copy to Peter, who agreed overnight to do the film. They were all taken aback by Peter’s first suggestion for director. “Hello, Freddie,” Peter said into the phone during one of his early meetings with Mazursky and Tucker. “I’m here with the boys, and we all agree that our first choice is Fellini.” If Fellini was too busy, Peter added, then they’d “move on to Bergman.” Fields is said to have told Tucker and Mazursky privately that he had no intention of approaching either the director of Juliet of the Spirits (1965) or the director of Persona (1966) with a film that centered on pot brownies.

  Somebody suggested George Roy Hill. Peter responded by saying that he refused to work with Hill again after The World of Henry Orient. Mike Nichols’s name came up and was shot down. Jonathan Miller was proposed. Miller actually flew to Los Angeles for a meeting, but when he brought up the subject of the film’s musical score, Peter went pale and terminated the conversation. In Mazursky’s account, Peter is said to have then suggested Mazursky.

  But Peter rejected him, too, supposedly after the writer gave Britt a kiss on the cheek and Peter accused him of having sex with her. Mazursky to Freddie Fields: “The only thing I did was tell Peter The Bobo stank!” Fields to Mazursky: “That’s almost as bad as telling Sellers you fucked his wife.”

  Peter eventually chose Hy Averback to direct I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! and barred Mazursky from the set until the day he asked him back.

  At one point during the production, which occurred in December 1967 and January 1968, Mazursky was summoned to Peter’s rented house in Beverly Hills, where he was greeted warmly by a smiling Peter, who then burst into tears. “The ship is sinking, Paul. Sinking, I tell you.” And on and on.

  Peter’s strange sociability—ebullient one moment, despondent the next—led him to launch an informal cinema club to keep him focused on the art he loved, with other pleasures on the side. The first film he chose to screen was Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955), to be screened with an accompanying dinner of lamb curry. And hash brownies. With Britt having left for New York to shoot William Friedkin’s The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968)—in which she plays an Amish burlesque dancer—Peter eagerly invited his pretty young costar, Leigh Taylor-Young, on whom he had developed the predictable crush.

  During the screening, “Peter sat in the back of the small screening room holding hands with the exquisite Leigh-Taylor,” Mazursky writes, referring to Taylor-Young.

  The club’s next film was to be Fellini’s I Vitelloni (1953), to be accompanied by Betsy Mazursky’s spaghetti Bolognese and more brownies, but when the guests showed up, there was no film. According to Mazursky, nobody remembered to order it. As Mazursky tells it, Peter’s response was something on the order of “I don’t want spaghetti, and I don’t want Vitelloni! I don’t ever want Vitelloni! Never, ever, never!” “Fuck you, Peter,” Mazursky said. “Fuck you,” said Peter. The projectionist saved the day by screening The Producers.

  As an afterthought, Mazursky mentions that Peter’s “work on the film was impeccable. He was prompt, fully prepared, and very generous to his fellow actors.”

  Peter’s own account is much less acrimonious than Mazursky’s:

  “One night we all wanted to see a Fellini film, see? We were all just nicely high, and all the girls had baked hash cookies. But the owner comes in and says, ‘I’m sorry to tell you guys, but they didn’t wanna give us the Fellini film.’ I said, ‘Oh shit, fuck it.’ But this guy says, ‘No, listen, I got a film by Mel Brooks. It’s called Springtime for Hitler (the original title). So we gave out a few more cookies, things were very heavily hashed up, and we got ripped out of our minds. We started watching this film and were hysterical. I actually had to crawl out of the room on my hands and knees and go to the lavatory because I was almost sick with laughing. When I went back in, I just saw white on the screen. We were all just looking at the white until someone knew enough to say, ‘Change the reel!’ ”

  Studio executives didn’t quite know what to make of Brooks’s stomach-hurting laughmaker, and The Producers was still looking for distribution support. Sellers thought he could help: “The following day I got hold of as many producers as I could, urging them to come and see this film. I got a good turnout. I took out full-page ads in the Hollywood Reporter and Variety. The movie is one of the greatest comedies that’s been made recently.” He had been unable to listen to Brooks’s lines because of the distractions of Bloomingdale’s, but once it was finished, he could see and hear it; even through his spiked-brownie haze, Peter saw what Hollywood executives were dismissing. His championing of The Producers gave it the industry attention that turned it into a smash hit.

  • • •

  I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! is a flower-power comedy, a classic of its genre thanks almost entirely to Peter’s performance. Harold Fine (Peter), a middle-aged, asthmatic, Lincoln-driving lawyer, undergoes a profound life transition after his hippie brother’s breathy girlfriend, Nancy (Leigh Taylor-Young), bakes him some “groovy” Pillsbury brownies—“groovy” owing to the pot she adds with a liberal hand. Harold himself becomes groovy. He leaves his fiancée, Joyce (Joyce Van Patten) at the altar, outfits himself in glorious hippie duds, grows his hair into a shaggy, John Lennon-ish cut (a moderately less ludicrous version of Dr. Fassbender’s Prince Valiant in What’s New, Pussycat?), and takes to reading The Psychedelic Experience naked with the free-spirited Nancy.

  While his histrionic mother (Jo Van Fleet)—her voice full of whining, her hair full of bluing—consoles Joyce with such splendidly grating comme
nts as “women are built for hurt,” Harold seeks the advice of a white-robed guru. It doesn’t quite work. They walk together on the beach. “But how can you know what a flower is, Harold, if you don’t know who you are?” the guru asks. “I’m trying, guru, I’m really trying!”

  “When you stop trying, then you’ll know who you are.”

  Harold, meanwhile, is gingerly stepping over seaweed and bits of shell. “Well, I’m trying to stop trying.” This is not coming easily to Harold.

  Harold cringes at the touch of cold ocean water on his Jewish feet as the guru goes on about flowers, energy, and life. Harold shivers and is pained. The words are amusing; Peter’s gestures and expressions are extraordinary.

  Harold’s transformation ends when a gang of freeloading hippies overrun his hippified apartment. He reunites with Joyce but walks out on their marriage ceremony a second time. His life as a hippie has taught him nothing if not how to be even more selfish than he was at the beginning, but in 1968 this appears to have been considered a happy ending, because as he escapes down the sidewalk, a hippie calls out, “Hey! Where ya goin’, man?” “I dunno,” Harold Fine replies, breaking into a run. “I don’t know. And I don’t care! I don’t care! There’s got to be something beautiful out there! There’s got to be! I know it!” Peter was still organizing his life through his films’ dialogue. He still believed he could find solace somewhere.

  • • •

  Paranoia about his wife, paranoia about his performance. . . . At one point in late December 1967, Peter demanded that the Alice B. Toklas set be closed. Apparently it was for a love scene with Leigh Taylor-Young; Peter may have worried about becoming overenthusiastic. But whatever the cause, two police officers stood guard at the outer door of the sound stage as nonrequired technicians were ushered away and screens were arranged tightly around the set.