Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  Lots of things were better in Gstaad. Michael Sellers recalls the high-octane party he attended with his father at Polanski’s rented chalet; Michael was around twenty at the time, which places the event in the neighborhood of 1974. “Someone produced some grass,” Michael writes, “and Dad got me busy rolling joints—until someone arrived with cocaine. I was then equipped with a razor blade and asked to cut the cocaine on Roman’s marble table.”

  • • •

  Drugs aside, work went on.

  “Clouseau never died,” Blake Edwards said, in late 1974, of the idiot detective’s sudden reemergence in the public eye after ten years of moribundity. “Over the years Peter and I kept him alive. He would call me up with Clouseau’s voice on the phone at all times of the day and night, and we’d spend hours thinking up ideas, talking and laughing like idiots.”

  The film’s executive producer, the British impresario Sir Lew Grade, reported a rather different regeneration. It was he, Sir Lew wrote in his memoirs, who instigated The Return of the Pink Panther (1975) by approaching Blake with the idea of reviving Clouseau. Edwards was then living in London with his wife, Julie Andrews, having fled the States after their oddly melancholy and violently overpriced musical, Darling Lili (1970), tanked at the box office and effectively, albeit temporarily, wrecked their Hollywood careers. According to Grade, Edwards’s response was simple: He told Grade that he was under the impression that Peter Sellers would never make another Pink Panther comedy or work with him in any capacity on any project ever again.

  But Grade placed a call to Peter anyway, met with him for several hours, and got him to agree. On one point at least, it seems, Edwards and Sellers were absolutely in tune with each other, particularly in the downer period of 1974. Clouseau, Edwards once said, “is a man who eventually survives in spite of himself, which is, I guess, a human condition devoutly to be wished.”

  • • •

  It’s another jewel heist. The “Pink Panther” diamond goes missing. Sir Charles Litton, the gentleman thief from the original Pink Panther, is the prime suspect.

  Edwards asked David Niven to reprise his role as Litton, but he had already committed himself to film Paper Tiger (1975) in Malaysia. Then Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was announced and dropped before the role was taken by Christopher Plummer. Catherine Schell costarred.

  Peter was by all accounts astoundingly cooperative during the production of The Return of the Pink Panther, a fact Edwards later attributed to a certain penitence mixed with revived ambition: “If you caught Peter when he was on a downgrade, he’d be okay. He was manageable and rational. He wanted it to be successful so he could get back up on top again. I was able to negotiate almost for him. There was a certain amount of risk taking, but if it worked, the rewards would be enormous. Peter was extremely happy. He got quite wealthy from that project. We had a fun time—really enjoyable.”

  The Return of the Pink Panther begins with a magnificent credits sequence (by the British animator Richard Williams) in which the luridly coated panther’s ass swings back and forth in a gesture of jaunty pride. But Sellers’s Clouseau is even more cartoonish than the cartoon. For one thing, the accent has become extreme—a parody of Peter’s own parody.

  At the beginning, while Clouseau concerns himself with a street accordionist and his accompanying pet, thieves rob the bank next door. In the following scene, Chief Inspector Dreyfus (Herbert Lom) is outraged. Clouseau explains:

  CLOUSEAU: I did not kneau ze benk was being reubbed because I was en-gezhed in my sworn duty as a police officer. . . . Z’ere was some question as to whez’er ze beggar or his minkey was breuking the lew!

  DREYFUS: Minkey?

  CLOUSEAU: What?

  DREYFUS: You said “minkey”!

  CLOUSEAU: Yes, shimpanzee minkey! So I left them beuth off with a warning-ge.

  DREYFUS: The beggar was the lookout man for the gang.

  CLOUSEAU: Zat is impossible! He was blind! How can a blind man be a lookout?

  DREYFUS: How can an idiot be a policeman?! Answer me that!

  CLOUSEAU: It’s very simple, all he has to do is enlist.

  Dreyfus soon seeks the healing wisdom of a psychoanalyst.

  • • •

  Even more than A Shot in the Dark, the comedy is grisly. Clouseau’s loyal servant, Cato (Burt Kwouk), reappears—Clouseau calls him his “little yellow friend” with “little yellow skin”—only to get blown up by the insanely commonsensical Clouseau. The doorbell rings and Clouseau opens it, graciously accepts the burning bomb that a masked visitor hands him, calmly closes the door, comprehends, and tosses it away from himself—toward Cato, thereby blowing Cato into the next apartment, whereupon a little old lady bashes him on the head with her handbag.

  A cigarette lighter in the shape of a gun finds its way to Dreyfus. He then picks up the wrong “lighter” and shoots his nose off.

  On a more benign note, in one sequence Clouseau was shown to a terrible and tiny hotel room by an obnoxious concierge and manic bellhop. The three men could barely move, at which point the chambermaid walked in. Peter loved what he called “that strange, ‘wild peasant’ look” on Julie Andrews’s face when she made her entrance as the rustic servant, complete with chunks of apple stuck into her cheeks to create an air of Alpine plenitude. At the end of the scene, when the maid began softly humming “Edelweiss,” Peter was overcome by a fit of the giggles—the camera was still rolling—and had to run out of the room. Unfortunately, the scene was cut and the footage destroyed.

  With its larger, seventies-era budget came a certain lack of old-fashioned narrative coherence; set pieces took the place of a coherent narrative. A critical commonplace has it that the Clouseau films got worse as the money increased, but that’s not the case, though The Return of the Pink Panther does work best not as a tightly wrought comedy but rather as a series of exemplary, often morbid moments.

  Sellers and Edwards got along well enough that they were also planning to make Zwamm, to be written and directed by Blake. According to Variety, Zwamm was going to be about a “comic space odyssey excursion . . . in which Sellers would play a space creature who comes to Earth.” And as Variety frighteningly added, “Pair would like Mickey Rooney to join ’em.” Zwamm never got made.

  Prince Charles was in Montreal when he saw The Return of the Pink Panther. It was his favorite Sellers film to date, he wrote to his friend. In fact, Charles claimed, he’d laughed so hard that he wet the dress of the woman in the next seat.

  • • •

  Peter spent his birthday, September 8, in the Seychelles, where he was buying land for possible real-estate development. Miranda Quarry’s present to him, delivered the following day, was the initiation of divorce proceedings. Peter later joked that his epitaph should read: “Star of stage, screen, and alimony.”

  By the beginning of November, he was back in London, lodging in a suite at the Inn on the Park in Mayfair. The high rise in Victoria was history; he’d leased a house in Chelsea near King’s Road. (Miranda got the Wiltshire house as part of the divorce settlement.) He and some old friends—Spike, Michael Bentine, Prince Charles—got together the following week for a private dinner at the Dorchester to celebrate the publication of The Book of the Goons, a collection of Spike’s scripts and drawings, photographs of the Goons in various guises, and a series of private letters and telegrams among the Goons themselves. The book reveals, for example, that in 1952 Peter had had letterhead printed for the law firm of Whacklow, Futtle, and Crun just to write an absurd letter to Spike. Spike, meanwhile, was representing himself as the solicitors Wiggle and Fruit to supervise the public auction of Harry Secombe, who was to be sold in lots at the Sutcliffe Arms at Beaulieu. Also from Spike, the Messers Chew, Threats, and Lid (“Chemists and Abortionists by Appointment”) prescribed a remedy for Peter’s constipation. Harry, meanwhile, sent a single-word telegram to Milligan:

  “Fire.”

  • • •

  With The Return of the Pink Panther approac
hing its release, but not yet certain of the fortune it would earn him, Peter signed a deal with Trans-World Airlines to make a series of commercials. At first he was to play three characters—an aristocratic Brit named “Piggy” Peake-Tyme; an open-shirted Italian playboy, Vito D’Motione; and a parsimonious Scotsman named Thrifty McTravel. Stan Dragoti directed the series, to which was eventually added a fourth character—a genial American businessman. His deal included provisions for him to appear in a taped TWA trade show short as well.

  At the time, Peter himself was flying with Titi Wachtmeister. The daughter of Count Wilhelm Wachtmeister, who was the Swedish ambassador to the United States for a time, the perky blond countess was introduced to Peter two years earlier by Bengt Ekland, Britt’s brother, at which point he and Titi began their on-and-off affair.

  Titi was already well known in London. A top model in the late 1960s—“a blonde Jean Shrimpton” is how the London Times described her—Titi sparked some notoriety in 1970 when George Harrison tried to rename his nightclub, Sybilla’s, in her honor. For some reason, the Crown Estates office found a nightclub named Titi’s to be objectionable—their word was “vulgar”—and they insisted that Harrison drop the plan. He settled on renaming his nightclub in a much more wholesome but still-Swedish way—Flicka.

  On April 18, Peter was in New York attending—and performing at—a tributary dinner in honor of Sir Lew Grade at the Hilton. He was on television that night, too, on Julie Andrews’s prerecorded special, Julie—My Favorite Things, directed by Blake in London. “I must be the squarest person in the world,” the white–bell-bottomed Julie realizes, so she seeks the advice of a psychiatrist—Peter as Dr. Fritz Fassbender from What’s New Pussycat?, only now, in combination with his dark 1970s glasses, Peter’s wig makes him resemble less Prince Valiant than Yoko Ono.

  JULIE: Aren’t you the famous Fritz Fassbender?

  PETER: Yes, of course I am! Heidelberg, Class of ’39! Ph.D., LLD, SS. . .

  JULIE: SS?!

  PETER: No, no, it’s a lie! Liar liar, pents on fire! I vas only following orders!

  Dr. Fassbender demands that she prove that she’s really Julie Andrews. “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” Julie gamely responds, so Peter offers her a joint and says, “Have a dreg on zis and try saying zat again! Zupakelafragalidzniks. . . . Lizzen, Julie, you are getting hipper and hipper all ze time by ze minute! One more drag on this and you’ll be practically Cheech and Chong!”

  If Cheech and Chong served as the ideals of hipness in 1975, Peter himself was there. Here is an entry from Kenneth Tynan’s diaries that year:

  “The phrase to remember is: ‘The necessary tinge of wham.’ This is how Peter Sellers (I think it was) summed up, tonight, the salient quality of Terry Southern. . . . Peter taught us how to get the best out of pot by spreading tinfoil across the top of a wine glass, prodding holes in it (and a gash) with a needle, then crumbling the pot over the holes, igniting it, and sucking the fumes in through the gash.”

  Another entry dated a few days later: “More reminiscences of the pot-smoking night with P. Sellers. As one sucks the smoke through the gash in the tinfoil, the hash embers glow, and the close-up view is exactly like that of a burning city seen from the air. This led me into an improvisation, accompanied by Peter, of a Bomber Command navigator talking to the rest of the crew as they go in through the flak to prang Dresden.”

  • • •

  On May 5 Peter and Titi, accompanied by Michael Sellers, arrived at the La Costa resort in San Diego for three days of Return of the Pink Panther previews for select press and guests (including Fred MacMurray and Dick Martin). Sellers, Plummer, and Catherine Schell were each trotted before the horde of gorging reporters; what with the hotel rooms, cocktail parties, dinners, entertainment, limousines, and gift bags, the three-day junket cost United Artists over $125,000. On May 11, Peter was driven back to Los Angeles for several more days’ worth of publicity work, after which he flew to New York to appear on The Merv Griffin Show. Mervin devoted his entire ninety-minute program to The Return of the Pink Panther.

  While in New York, Peter, dressed and accented as Clouseau, was named an honorary detective by the New York Police Department. He and Titi hightailed it out of the city on May 22, bound for Heathrow.

  “All I’m trying to do is get through the day—that’s all,” he told a British journalist before flying back to Los Angeles in July to appear on The Tonight Show.

  • • •

  In August, there was a special premiere in Gstaad. Peter requested of United Artists that they provide a few round-trip tickets: one for Michael Sellers, one for Sarah Sellers, one for Victoria Sellers, one for Bert Mortimer, one for Peter Sellers, two for George Harrison, and one for Peter’s as-yet-unknown date—unknown because, by that point, Titi was history. During their acrimonious breakup in July, Peter demanded that Titi return the £2,000 Cartier watch he gave her while Titi frantically attempted to retrieve a stuffed dog.

  The Gstaad junket’s locus was the Palace Hotel. Peter flew in along with his family and George Harrison, Lew Grade, Catherine Schell, Christopher Plummer, Henry Mancini and his orchestra, and, for some reason, John Boorman. Liz and Dick turned up as surprise guests at the gala dinner for 250 journalists.

  Peter was seeing multiple women in August alone. One was the eighteen-year-old Tessa Dahl, the daughter of the novelist Roald Dahl and his wife, the actress Patricia Neal. Another was the model Lorraine Cootamundra, née MacKenzie. “In the past ten days,” a British tabloid gasped that month, “he has taken out Susan George three times and is also seeing Scandinavian beauty Liza Farringer, who is in her late 20s.” By the end of the month he was high in the Rockies—Vail, Colorado, to be exact—for a lunch with the First Lady of the United States, Betty Ford, and her eighteen-year-old daughter, Susan, whom he was photographing for Vogue.

  In September Peter hosted a party at his rented pad in Beverly Hills. Cary Grant showed up. So did Bill Wyman and Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones, Keith Moon, and David Bowie. The party turned into an impromptu jam session, with Peter doing his bit on drums. Bowie played the saxophone. Earlier that year, Moon had invited Peter and Graham Chapman to his Beverly Glen home, where the three Brits amused themselves with reenactments of old Goon Show sketches.

  September also had him in London, where he was a presenter at the glittering Society of Film and Television Awards. Princess Anne was the honored hostess. Peter handed Joanne Woodward her award; Hayley Mills gave one to John Gielgud; Jack Nicholson’s trophy was proffered by Twiggy. By early October Peter was back in Los Angeles, where he attended Groucho Marx’s birthday party along with Elliott Gould, Sally Kellerman, Milton Berle, Red Buttons, Carroll O’Connor, Sally Struthers, Jack Lemmon, Lynn Redgrave, Roddy McDowall, and Bob Hope. Peter was subdued. “Just to sit there and realize you are in the same room with Groucho Marx is a delightful experience,” he remarked.

  In October, Keith Moon took a short break from the beginning of his yearlong tour with The Who and booked a room at the Londonderry Hotel on Park Lane, in which he threw a rambunctious party for a group of select friends, including Peter, Ringo, and Harry Nilsson. The party got out of hand when a sizable chunk of plaster suddenly blasted into the adjacent room. According to Moon, he was just “trying to show Peter Sellers how to open a bottle of champagne without touching the cork. It involves banging it against the wall.”

  • • •

  With Peter back in the movie game, and with so much time having elapsed since the unpleasant closing of Brouhaha—and with few people having remembered the unproduced The Illusionist—the producer Bernard Miles tried to convince him, again, to return to the theater. Richard III. Peter turned it down in favor of more films.

  Clouseau was a cash cow, but not a perfect one. “God forbid that I should do a whole series,” Peter said in May, while Blake Edwards was industriously preparing the script of The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976). But money mattered to Peter, as it should have, given his previously
deteriorated fortune; by the time The Return of the Pink Panther opened in Europe in September, it had already taken in $36 million in the United States alone, second only to Jaws (1975). And so he soon agreed to another round of Clouseau. One early idea for the fourth Pink Panther was that Peter would take four roles: in addition to Clouseau, he’d play (or replay) James Bond as well as playing Dr. Phibes and the fiendish Fu Manchu.

  But before the Panther comedy had a chance to go before the cameras in early 1976, he made Neil Simon’s detective spoof, Murder by Death (1976). His role: Sidney Wang, a hideous parody of the already-appalling Charlie Chan. His costars were Maggie Smith and David Niven as the Thin Man-esque sleuths Dick and Dora Charleston; Elsa Lanchester, with a nod to Agatha Christie, as Jessica Marbles; Peter Falk as Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade; James Coco as Milo Perrier (another, more strained, Agatha Christie joke); Eileen Brennan as the flamboyant Tess Skeffington; the unnaturally hilarious Truman Capote as their host, Lionel Twain; Nancy Walker as the deaf maid; and Alec Guinness as the blind butler. (“It’s nice to hear guests again,” says the butler. “Thank you,” says Dora Charleston; “You are . . . ?” “Bensonmum.” “Thank you, Benson.” “No, no, Bensonmum. My name is Bensonmum.”)

  Peter prepared for his role by flying to Los Angeles—on TWA, of course—to see as many Charlie Chan pictures as Raystar, Ray Stark’s production company, could find for him. Murder By Death went into production in the fall of 1975 and concluded just before Christmas.

  “He behaved very peculiarly,” Alec Guinness said shortly before his death in 2000. “I think he was a little bit round the bend then. He had a ring with some sort of crystal in it that changed color with his mood,” said Guinness, who found such things baffling. “One day he didn’t turn up at all. Everyone sat around, sat around. . . . Then we all went home. David Niven went back to his hotel and saw Peter having lunch with someone. He was fine.”