by Ed Sikov
Filmed in the fall of 1969 in seven weeks at Elstree Studios, with one additional week on location (Wimbledon Common, the Thames Embankment), Hoffman is the story of a middle-aged man who blackmails a pretty young woman into letting him dominate her, potentially sexually, for a one-week period after he discovers that her boyfriend, his employee, has been cheating him at work. The comedy-drama—of which there is substantially more unnerving drama than comedy of any sort—introduced the twenty-one-year-old Irish actress Sinead Cusack, the daughter of the actor Cyril Cusack, to the screen.
Rakoff had directed an earlier, shorter version of Hoffman for television, but as the project headed for the big screen, he found himself in some trouble. Donald Pleasance had played the role on TV, but he wasn’t considered big enough for the silver screen. So Peter was hired, thanks to Bryan Forbes, who had become head of production at Elstree Studios, then controlled by EMI. But after a meeting at Peter’s apartment on Clarges Street, Mayfair, Peter decided, as Rakoff describes it, that “he and I would never get on with each other, and I should leave the picture. I left the meeting.
“But Bryan Forbes said to Peter, ‘I’m not paying him off. If you want him to go, you pay him off.’ And the next thing I know, there’s a call from Peter, saying ‘I’m sure we can get on with each other—shall we try?’ So there I was—fired from the picture by the leading man and reluctantly taken back. But then we got on like a house on fire—a very warm friendship.”
“I auditioned Sinead with Peter, and Peter liked her,” Rakoff reports. “It was essential that there be some sort of chemistry between the two of them.” That there was. As Rakoff describes it, they got along “too well.”
“Peter said, ‘Let’s have dinner tonight,’ and she said yes, so he said, ‘I’ll pick you up.’ About 8:00 o’clock I heard the helicopter Peter had ordered. He took her to Paris for dinner. ‘Let’s have dinner’ became not ‘dinner’ but a love dinner at a very good Parisian restaurant. I would defy any beautiful girl not to fall in love with such a man. He was a very lovable guy when he wanted to be.”
The affair was intense, rather brief, and sequentially joyous and harsh. “Oh, they had terrible riles, those two, but again, who wasn’t riled with Peter Sellers?” says Rakoff.
Miranda Quarry didn’t go entirely missing while Peter was romancing Sinead. According to Rakoff, Miranda “was around all the time. She was around the night Peter said, ‘I don’t think you and I are going to get on.’ She was around then, and I knew it was fairly disastrous then. I told him—‘There’s nothing to this love, Peter.’ He hadn’t had his eye opened. He had certain questions about other women, so it didn’t appear that he was overwhelmingly, passionately single-minded about Miranda Quarry.”
• • •
“Please make yourself look as if you want to be fertilized.”
That’s Benjamin Hoffman (Sellers), leaning up against the bathroom door with a lascivious grin. Miss Smith (Cusack) has locked herself inside in terror. The film is full of such unpleasant lines, but that is its nature; it’s about a mean, lonely, middle-aged man and a mousy, trod-upon young woman. “What you’re doing to me is atrocious,” she spits. “It’s the filthiest thing I’ve ever heard of.” “Yes, I am filthy, yes,” he replies with a smirk, “but there’s no escaping one’s fate.”
“Miss Smith, you are here to be two arms, two legs, a face, and what fits in the middle.”
“There are two people in all of us—the child in the snapshot and the monster the child grows into.”
“Women are always hungry for something—fallopian tubes with teeth.”
He shows her the new flat he’s building for himself:
MISS SMITH: What’s wrong with the old place?
HOFFMAN: Oh, well, you know—treacheries, miseries, failure, despair.
At times, Peter inhabits Benjamin Hoffman so wholly that he appears to be speaking from his own heart:
“You were afraid to go out with me because of my maniac face,” he mentions. “Yes, girls all over the world are afraid of men with my expression—plain, sad-faced men. You look at us, all of you, and you’re right.” (In fact, of course, Peter Sellers rarely experienced this phenomenon in his life. Even before he glamorized himself for Sophia Loren, the actual sad-faced man generally got the beautiful women he sought, and their fear, if any, came later.) As he concludes his speech, he walks past the picture of Daniel Mendoza that happens to be hanging on Hoffman’s wall, glances up at it, and declares, speaking of the millions of melancholy men in the world, “Their day is coming. . . . Hope never dies in a man with a good, dirty mind.”
According to Alvin Rakoff, this was all scripted: “He was certainly capable of any sort of improvising he wanted. All you had to do was tell him to improvise. But the text of the script was there, and that’s the script we did.”
It is an astute, actorly performance on Sellers’s part. He plays Hoffman differently when Hoffman is not in Miss Smith’s presence; when she’s not around he becomes mutedly fidgety and insecure. When he knows she can see or hear him, he acts the cool lothario, spinning each line with insinuating inflection (or infection as the case may be). But even from her perspective it’s a failed performance. She sees through it and falls in love with him.
• • •
Hoffman may be a miniature, but it does contain one striking technical feat. There is a single shot that lasts for about eight minutes. Rakoff explains: “Peter said, ‘Can’t we . . . ?’ He was always asking, ‘Can’t we . . . ?’ ”
The shot—which begins when Hoffman escorts Miss Smith back into the bedroom after she attempts to flee—was complicated to design and treacherous to execute. According to Rakoff, there were 118 camera positions for the cameraman and tracking crew. But they only had to do several takes, and Rakoff believes they used the first or second; Peter’s fears of brain damage from the heart attack were certainly given the lie by his ability to remember all the lines, gestures, and movement cues. Rakoff remains impressed by the social aspect of it as well. “Peter wanted to do a long take, so he put his teeth into it. It helped pull the unit together because they thought it was a remarkable achievement that, as a film crew, they could do this. Everyone kept saying it was impossible. But Peter liked the idea; he liked going for broke. I kept saying, ‘Okay, we’ll stop there,’ and he’d say, ‘No, let’s keep going.’ Sinead was in awe of him, of course, so she, too, was motivated.”
He wasn’t always in such control in front of the camera, the worst problem being a certain unreliability. “He was an actor who giggled a lot—that’s an endearing quality,” says Rakoff. “Once, right after lunch, he got a fit of the giggles, as actors can do. Anything we tried doing, he couldn’t stop giggling, and he had to leave the set—and the studio. That’s another thing—I’d never know if he’d ever come back. I said, ‘Okay, Peter, we’d better call it a day,’ and he was just giggling, and said, ‘I’ll try to come back tomorrow. I can’t be sure.’ ”
Rakoff recalls that Peter “arrived on the last day of shooting with gifts for everybody. He gave the camera operator a color television set—that was pretty rare in 1969. He gave Leica cameras, tape recorders, small portable radios. . . . His factotum, Bert, distributed them. When he came to Ben [Arbeid, the film’s producer] and me, he put his arm around both of us and said, ‘You two guys—I didn’t know what to get you, so what I want you to do is to take your wives, go on a trip to anywhere that you’ve wanted to go—anywhere in the world! And send me the bill.’ I looked at Ben, and Ben said, ‘Oh, that’s lovely—that’s a terrific gift!’ And I said, ‘Please, Peter, can I have a color television set?’
“He just laughed and went away. Ben said, ‘Why did you say that?’ I said, ‘Because it will never happen.’ He was like a bouncing ball. You know things are going to go wrong. Sure enough, Ben did go on a trip and sent Peter the bill. Peter ignored it.
“He meant it,” Rakoff is convinced. “At the time he absolutely meant it. He wanted us to go—that
day.”
• • •
Rakoff always thought Hoffman’s pace was too slow: “It does have faults. I am to blame for some of them because I couldn’t cajole, applaud, whip Peter to play it faster. I couldn’t get it out of him, and that, I think, is the principle felony. But character-wise, it works. Sellers-wise it works.”
Actually, the film’s chief fault lies not with its pace but with its sound track, where an easy-listening 1970-vintage score belies both the cruelty and the poignancy of the drama. Hoffman treats Miss Smith abominably, and yet the musical score is that of a light romantic comedy. Even when their emotional tenors begin to shift, the slight and forgettable music sets the wrong tone.
Commercially, the film was a failure that never had the chance to be a critical flop. According to Bryan Forbes, Peter “entered into one of his manic depressive periods” during the production and demanded, upon completion, “to buy back the negative and remake it. . . . I had to take the blame.” According to Rakoff, Forbes’s own disputes within Elstree led to the film’s exceedingly poor distribution—so poor, in fact, that Hoffman waited until 1982 to be screened in a New York repertory house.
• • •
His faulty heart was necessarily on his mind, and together with his declining cinematic fortunes, Peter’s thoughts turned morbid. At the time, according to Rakoff, Peter talked about dying quite a bit. He told the director that he was planning to be cryogenically preserved. “He told me more than once. We’re talking about a man who had been pronounced dead and was brought back to life. He said he’d arranged to be frozen. You could either have just your head frozen or your whole body frozen. I think he said he had arranged for the whole body; maybe it was just the head; I don’t really know. I said, ‘Aren’t you worried? We know that everything deteriorates when frozen, so when you come to, you won’t be the same. If, a thousand years from now, they know how to revive a dead man, you won’t be the same dead man. You’ll be a freak!’ And he said, ‘I don’t care. At least I’ll be alive.’ ”
• • •
In October, with Hoffman still in production, Peter mentioned to the Evening Standard that he was set to return to the stage. It wasn’t going to be a splashy exercise like Brouhaha; Jane Arden’s The Illusionist would play at the Open-Space theater, which was located in a Tottenham Court basement. “The main character is a music-hall illusionist who does tricks,” he said. “It’s a very evil part. The play is a strange piece. It has an edge of great horror.” The Illusionist would have a ten-week run beginning in January.
Then it changed; The Illusionist would play at the Round House theater, and Peter’s costar would be Charlotte Rampling.
It changed once more—Peter never appeared in The Illusionist. It all ended in a little lawsuit and was forgotten.
• • •
“Very een-ter-est-ing,” Artie Johnson murmurs in a 1969 episode of Laugh-In. Peter pops up out of the bushes in matching German military gear. He stares intently at Johnson. “I sink zat you are very een-ter-esting, too!” says Peter, cracking up at the end of the line and descending back into the bushes together with a giggling Johnson.
Dan Rowan and Dick Martin’s Laugh-In was the hippest American comedy show of the period—Burbank’s answer to Monty Python. ( Laugh-In actually predated Monty Python’s Flying Circus by a year.) Guest stars turned up regularly to add a certain celebrity kick to the series’ regulars—Johnson, Judy Carne, Ruth Buzzi, Henry Gibson, Goldie Hawn, Alan Sues, and Joanne Worley. Richard Nixon once appeared, famously saying “Sock it to me?” On the program on which Peter turned up, the other special guests were Johnny Carson and Debbie Reynolds.
Some of Peter’s jokes were defiantly lame. “Thanks for the tea, Dan,” says Peter, “but it is awfully weak, I’m afraid.” “I’m sorry, Peter,” Rowan responds. “Say, how long should the tea be left in the water?” “Well, let me put it this way: the tea in the Boston Harbor is just about ready.” A better bit occurs with Artie Johnson, when Peter turns up as Artie’s friend in Johnson’s classic, black-coated Dirty Old Man routine. They molest Ruth Buzzi together on a park bench. She beats Peter back with her pocketbook. Peter (in Henry Crun voice): “You’ve just made an old man very happy!” whereupon he and Artie fall off the bench together and die.
“Hel-lo!” Peter sings out as he pulls open a window in the magnificent Joke Wall. “You really have done a remarkable job in your experiment with the democratic system here in America. Just think! It was only a hundred years ago when President Lincoln freed the black people. And already some of them are even going to school!”
• • •
Always generous to his friends, Peter lent his support to Graham Stark by agreeing to appear as himself in Stark’s thirty-minute silent comedy short, Simon Simon (1970), along with Michael Caine and David Hemmings. A pair of blokes of limited intelligence (Stark and John Junkin) involve themselves in a series of misadventures involving a truck and short underpass, a mock firing squad, a stranded cat and a cherry picker, an aerial dogfight between two cherry pickers, and so on. Peter’s scene lasts all of forty seconds. In the midst of a car chase—the car is chased by two cherry pickers—there occurs a minor crash. The driver of the chased car hits a sleek blue sports car. Peter is inside. It’s a hit and run accident, but Peter isn’t concerned about legal issues. With a troubled expression on his face, he gets out, inspects the dent, and gestures impatiently to someone offscreen. An assistant rushes into the image, gets into the car, and drives away. Peter gestures again to another offscreen factotum, his new red sports car pulls up, he gets in, and speeds away.
• • •
“I really don’t know if he fell in love with me,” says Goldie Hawn, Peter’s costar in his next picture, There’s a Girl in My Soup (1970). “I only know that I gave him a surprise party in my home some time after the film. He spent all evening looking at my things and said, ‘This is the kind of house I’ve always dreamed of having, with all the warmth and stability that I feel here.’ Afterwards he sent me this absolutely gorgeous armoire, which I still have.”
The project carried with it certain ominous specters. There’s a Girl in My Soup was made by the Boulting brothers, John and Roy, who had had increasingly rough times with Peter on the four films they made together—Carlton-Browne of the F.O.; I’m All Right, Jack; Only Two Can Play; and Heaven’s Above!, the last having been made seven years earlier, even before the debacle of Casino Royale. There’s a Girl in My Soup was financed by Columbia Pictures, which made Casino Royale. And finally, There’s a Girl in My Soup was coproduced by Mike Frankovich, who declared after Casino Royale that Peter would never be permitted to make another picture for Columbia Pictures.
Despite its catchy title, the film is a pretty dreary exercise. In London, the amorous, patrician, middle-aged Robert Danvers (Sellers), the host of a televised gourmet show, picks up a promiscuous nineteen-year-old American girl (Hawn) who is in the process of breaking up with her handsome, oafish, more or less worthless boyfriend (Nicky Henson). A free spirit with a smart mouth and a hard, cruel edge, Marion is scarcely the kooky dumb blond Goldie Hawn played so triumphantly on Laugh-In. Marion is mean. And Danvers, for his part, is selfish and singular, consumed by his career, resistant to intrusions, obsessed with sex—in short, and despite his wealth, an ordinary middle-aged male.
The sexual revolution of the late 1960s, along with its concomitant dismissal of censorship regulations, gave free rein to the Boultings’ love of smut. At one point, Danvers makes love to a beautiful girl while watching himself on television talking about impaling a piece of meat, the video Danvers completing the joke with a matching finger gesture. Later, when a Frenchman employs the word “happiness,” he accents the second syllable. And so on.
Still, Sellers is quite accomplished at conveying the depressing trials of masculinity in middle age. He knew what he was doing. With his own hair thinning, he covered it with a toupee to go with his capped teeth, exercises, and constant dieting. Onscreen,
when he flexes, shirtless, in front of a triple mirror, he manages to look both virile and pathetic. It’s a shame that the character as written is so colorless; Terence Frisby’s script, based on his own stage play, lacks wit and verbal flair. What saves There’s a Girl in My Soup is Goldie Hawn, who lends her unpleasant character an air of relaxed prepossession. Aside from his short bit with Shirley MacLaine in Woman Times Seven, Peter Sellers had never before played opposite such a deft and naturalistic actress.
Roy Boulting later wrote of Peter that “during the making of There’s a Girl in My Soup, the relationship had been a very abrasive one. I emerged from it, worn, shaken, and swearing that I would never endure such an experience again.” According to Boulting, Peter was “nervy, irritable, and deeply unhappy,” during the production, characteristics that Boulting attributed to his relationship with Miranda.
Nineteen seventy does appear to have been a particularly strange, strained year for Peter. In the late spring, the time during which There’s a Girl in My Soup was shooting, Peter announced that he was in the market for a new house in a very particular location. A friend had told him, as Sellers put it, that “when the great nuclear blow-up occurs, and the Earth is shifted on its axis, there will be only two safe places in which to live.” It was between Stonehenge and the Ozarks. He chose Stonehenge.
He did not end up moving to Stonehenge, but he did marry Miranda.
• • •
London’s Evening Standard, August 24, 1970:
Peter Sellers and Lord Mancroft’s stepdaughter, Miranda Quarry, were married at Caxton Hall today. About 300 people waiting outside the register office cheered as the couple emerged. Miranda, 23, and Sellers, 44, have been close friends for about two years but had previously denied marriage plans. About three dozen guests were at the wedding. They included actor Spike Milligan, who wore a cream safari-style shirt and black corduroy peaked cap.