Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  Still, the unparalleled viciousness of his character in Never Let Go gave Peter Sellers an excuse, however unconscious, to vent even more wrath than usual at home with his family. One evening, for example, he came home from the studio, made some phone calls, turned on Anne, screamed “What the bloody hell is the matter with you,” and threw a vase at her, after which he destroyed a bathroom towel bar and some pictures in the dressing room. On another evening he tried to bean her with a bottle of milk. She called David Lodge and begged him to drive over quickly and help calm Peter down. Lodge, a staunch friend to both of them, obliged.

  • • •

  Peter was big in New York in late April 1960, when he made his second trip across the Atlantic. The Mouse That Roared had just closed after its phenomenal twenty-six-week run at the Guild. (“Wow!” “Smash!” Variety applauded.) The Battle of the Sexes was opening; I’m All Right, Jack took Mouse’s place at the Guild. American newspapers were full of lavish profiles of Peter, not to mention helpful observations about the United Kingdom—clarifications meant to explain quaint customs. For example, in regard to The Battle of the Sexes, the New York Times declared that “the scene has been moved to Scotland because kilts are comical.”

  Peter traveled first class on Air France, with dining service courtesy of Maxim’s, and he took along his trustworthy companion Graham Stark. They were greeted at Kennedy Airport (then called Idlewild) by a fleet of Cadillac limousines and whisked to the Hampshire House on Central Park South, where Peter nabbed the penthouse. A bevy of blue-suited film executives occupied the other cars, and when the entourage arrived at the hotel, Peter overheard one of them place a phone call with a one-line message: “The property has arrived.”

  Fame could be demeaning. “The property has arrived” was a line he never forgot.

  When Peter wasn’t being hustled to and from interviews and parties, the actor Jules Munshin was taking him out on the town. Munshin, who had appeared with Peter in Brouhaha, was blown away when they arrived at Sardi’s and were presented with an A-list table. “Pete, you bastard,” Munshin blurted, “I never got this table before.” Munshin pointed to a man in the outer-Yukon-like back corner. Peter recognized the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz (1939). “Yeah, Ray Bolger,” Munshin said. “He ain’t got what you got. He ain’t got four pictures playin’ on Broadway. Come to think of it, he ain’t got no picture playin’ anywhere.” Peter had bested the Scarecrow. Gossip columnists were swarming around him. Having imitated Americans since childhood, he was now a star among them. The evening was a complete success.

  The next morning, one of the many public relations people hovering around Peter shrieked with joy when she picked up one of the New York papers: “Leonard Lyons gave you four inches!”

  • • •

  Peter’s nightlife was glittering. Peter appeared with Jack Paar on his popular late-night talk show. Kenneth Tynan interviewed him and introduced him to Mike Nichols and Elaine May, who in turn introduced him to Kay Thompson. (Tynan later noted that the meeting between Nichols and Sellers had been more or less a disaster; neither understood the other’s sense of humor.) The film brass introduced him to Walter Reade, the immensely wealthy owner of a film distribution and exhibition company, who hosted Peter and Graham at a drunken bash at his Long Island estate. Peter also met James Thurber at a party thrown in celebration of the New York premiere of The Battle of the Sexes. Thurber told Monja Danischewsky a few days later that they’d “had a fine time together,” but that Peter was “being driven crazy by the New York pressure.” This was a feeling Peter never really overcame. Despite his subsequent global travels over the next two decades, Sellers spent little time in New York.

  The two Englishmen returned to London in first-class cabins on the Queen Elizabeth.

  • • •

  Two-Way Stretch (1960) is a light and unpretentious diversion, a sympathetic critic’s way of saying it isn’t very good. Three con-artist convicts (Peter Sellers, David Lodge, and Bernard Cribbins) plot a diamond heist from their prison cell with the help of a visiting fake vicar (Wilfrid Hyde-White), their old partner in crime. A comic neo-Nazi guard named Crout (Lionel Jeffries) tries to foil the scheme. Everybody loses.

  The comedienne (and associate Goon from the Grafton Arms) Beryl Reid, who plays a small role in the film, later said that because Peter “was so inventive himself, he probably couldn’t understand that a director couldn’t keep up with his mind. That’s the thing—that his mind went at such a rate when he was inventing characters that a director had to be talked into it.” While Reid’s remarks are undoubtedly true, their context is peculiar because Peter employs such restraint with Dodger Lane, his character in Two-Way Stretch, that the director Robert Day probably didn’t have to be talked into very much. Reid went on to note, though, that Peter’s inventions in Two-Way Stretch didn’t stop at his own character: “He used to give me rather dirty lines to say, because I always looked as though I didn’t know what they meant.”

  Dodger Lane speaks in a most muted Cockney. It’s one of Peter’s least showy and therefore most generous performances, since he consistently throws attention away from himself in order to showcase Lodge and Cribbins. It’s lanky Lionel Jeffries who produces the only outrageous voice in Two-Way Stretch—a barking squeak, evidently the result of the figurative crowbar that Crout harbors up his fascistic rear. Perhaps it’s this funny voice that Peter resented when he began bickering with Jeffries during the production. Settling into the exasperated groove that would define much of the rest of his career, Peter was annoyed at Jeffries’s insistence on long rehearsals, while Jeffries, who responded precisely as many of Peter’s fellow actors would over the next twenty years, was irritated at Peter’s distaste for any rehearsals at all. It wasn’t a particularly happy shoot, but it wasn’t a disaster, either. And it was scarcely the last time that the dull ache of filming a Peter Sellers comedy wasn’t justified by the final result.

  • • •

  Lena Horne was playing at the Savoy, an excellent occasion for Anne and Peter and some friends to spend a luxe night on the town. Anne wore a beautiful hand-embroidered dress. Their friends thought she looked smashing, so much so that by the time they got home Peter was in such a white rage of jealousy that he physically ripped it off of her and shredded it.

  After almost ten years of marriage, the word divorce began to be used with some frequency in the halls and rooms of Chipperfield, even as he began earnestly to confine Anne to the house. Shopping trips were cause for the third degree. From whatever studio at which he happened to be filming, Peter would place two, three, four telephone calls to Anne every day, just to check her whereabouts. When she mentioned to him one evening that she’d like to get out of the house a bit more, Peter destroyed everything in sight—porcelains, a Chippendale chair, bookcases. He also threatened to kill her, but he didn’t follow through. He beat her up instead. Today, the intake desks of women’s shelters accept wives and girlfriends with fewer bruises than Anne sustained.

  Another day, a small flock of doves nested under one of Chipperfield’s many gables. They cooed. So Peter brought out his double-barreled shotgun and massacred them.

  • • •

  When Peter was first approached to appear as an Indian doctor in an adaptation of a George Bernard Shaw satire, he was decidedly underwhelmed despite the potential acquisition of a literary pedigree. The Millionairess (1960) simply didn’t interest him. Then they told him who his costar would be: Sophia Loren, the most unearthly beauty in all cinema. He accepted the role.

  A high fee helped as well. Carried away by Peter Sellers’s exponentially increasing popularity, the agent Leonard Urry (representing the producer, Dimitri de Grunwald) is said by Terry-Thomas to have made Sellers an offer of £85,000. Terry, who was a friend of Urry’s, asked Urry why on earth he’d offered so much. Urry answered, “I only offered what I thought was a fair price.” Terry then told Urry that he could probably have gotten Peter for £50,000, since he, Terry, knew
“exactly what Peter had been earning up to then. After that his price soared.” It certainly did, though Alexander Walker reports that Sellers actually was paid a flat fee of £50,000, “of which £17,000 went to Wolf Mankowitz” as part of the formation of the production company he and Mankowitz were trying to put together at the time. (As a point of comparison and a measure of their relative statures at the time, Sophia got $200,000 and a percentage of the profits.)

  The film was to be directed by the respected Anthony Asquith, produced by de Grunwald and distributed, they all hoped, by Twentieth Century-Fox, though Fox executives tried to talk de Grunwald out of Sophia Loren in favor of Ava Gardner. De Grunwald had been friendly with Peter for several years already. Some time earlier, in fact, he’d taken Peter to a Russian nightclub in Paris. The émigré producer was dazzled by Peter’s disarming nature as a changeling: “We’d only been there two minutes when Peter became one hundred times more Russian than I am—and I’m very Russian. He went absolutely wild—nostalgic, sentimental, gay, tragic, romantic—everything a Russian is. The gypsies came over to our table, and Peter sang with them and cried during all the sad songs, and in half an hour he was dancing madly all over the place and smashing empty vodka glasses against the wall.”

  Now they wanted him to be the love interest in a lavish Sophia Loren comedy. And so he did it. In Technicolor.

  • • •

  Sophia’s arrival in London, on a boat train from Paris, was heralded long in advance; the press was primed. On the day of the event, the producers threw a party for the express purpose of recording the meeting of Europe’s most voluptuous star with Britain’s funniest comic, both set to star in a gown-filled but artistically respectable top-of-the-line motion picture.

  Sophia was on one side of the ballroom, glorious; Peter, armed with flowers and champagne, was on the other, a nervous wreck. “I don’t normally act with a romantic glamorous woman,” he told a fellow guest. “You’d be scared, too. She’s a lot different from Harry Secombe.”

  The moment had to happen, though—the press were getting itchy—and when it did it was forced and stilted. Only after the photographers demanded it did Peter provide Sophia with a kiss on the cheek. Later that evening, when he got home, Anne asked him what she was like; “Ugly, with spots,” he said.

  • • •

  Filming began. In an early scene in The Millionairess, Peter’s character, the selfless Dr. Kabir, minister to the wretched of the earth, rubs lotion on the naked back of the world’s richest and most beautiful woman. By the time Anthony Asquith called “cut,” Peter was wildly in love.

  Starring with Sophia Loren in a romantic comedy appealed so greatly to Peter because by 1960 he wanted to be someone he never imagined he could be: a romantic lead. The Millionairess provided the flip side of Lionel Meadows in Never Let Go. “I was there at the time,” his friend Bryan Forbes declares. “It stemmed from the moment he opened a paper and it said, ‘Mastroianni—Peter Sellers with Sex Appeal.’ And that plunged him into a deep sorrow and angst and he immediately went on a crash diet and changed his whole personality. He was a fat boy struggling to get out.” Richard Lester puts it even more bluntly: “Once he was on the yogurt, things began to alter.”

  Peter himself once remarked on his own metamorphosis: “I fell in love with Sophia, and when I took a look at myself in the mirror I felt sick.”

  Having had enough of the pink plastic wrap, Peter went on a diet of hard-boiled eggs and oranges. He’d already had his teeth capped.

  As private affairs go, this one was public. Observing him on the set, Anthony Asquith said, “He looks like a boy with a pinup in his bedroom.” Peter took Sophia out to the elegant Fu Tong restaurant in Kensington, where he taught her the intricacies of Cockney rhyming slang. His friends began to hear stories of a rather more intimate nature. Graham Stark recalls the would-be private incidents Peter excitedly related to him: “I was given details of furtive meetings, of passion in the dressing room and even awkward (I would have thought totally impossible) gymnastics in the back seats of parked cars. I got it all. It was, to say the least, embarrassing.”

  Peter’s family heard about it, too, since he would come home from the day’s shooting and report on Sophia’s every move in infatuated detail. One day she’d treat him badly, the next day she’d be charming, and Anne, Michael, and baby Sarah would be treated to it all over dinner. Oblivious to the role his family ought to have played in his life—that of his family—he shared with them his unbridled enthusiasm for his costar, the stupefying bombshell from Rome. Anne offers a simple explanation for her husband’s behavior: “He treated me as his mother: I should allow him to do whatever he wanted to do.”

  He brought Sophia to Chipperfield, first for a large catered party in her honor, then for smaller gatherings. At one of them she played Ping-Pong with Michael, who didn’t like her very much. After all, even a child could plainly see what she was doing to his father and what he was doing to himself and his family.

  Anne recalls that Peter “brought her to the house quite often, usually with her husband, Carlo Ponti, and she was absolutely stunning and extremely charming. I didn’t take much notice at first when he told me he was in love with her. But then he’d be lying in bed and say her spirit was coming into the room.”

  • • •

  One Saturday night during the production of The Millionairess £750,000 worth of Sophia’s jewels were stolen from the house in which she was staying in Hertfordshire. The police summoned Pierre Rouve, one of the producers of the film, to the studio on Sunday, and he stayed there dealing with the ensuing media turmoil and legal complications all the way through until Monday morning, at which point Sophia arrived on schedule in her Rolls Royce promptly at 7 A.M., ready for the day’s work. Everyone knew how upset she was—the jewelry was uninsured—but according to Rouve she was a complete professional and “carried on as though nothing had happened.” But, Rouve continues, “Later that morning somebody else’s nerves cracked—Peter Sellers’s. He fainted and had to be taken to the hospital.”

  Asquith and his team spent the rest of the day taking close-ups of Sophia, who, despite the trauma she had just suffered, never looks anything short of magnificent in the final cut. But Peter, when released from the hospital, didn’t go back to the studio, nor did he return home. He went to Asprey and bought his love a £750 bracelet with which to begin her new collection.

  • • •

  Sophia had a bodyguard named Basilio. Peter described him years later: “He was a sort of watchdog. . . . He said to me, ‘When the husband he finds out about this there will be trouble!’ ”

  But the question lingers unanswered to this day: What exactly did Carlo Ponti have to find out about? Some of Sellers’s friends, Spike Milligan among them, believed his stories at the time and swore that he and Sophia Loren enjoyed a torrid affair during the filming of The Millionairess. Others, like Graham Stark, think it was all in Peter’s head.

  Dimitri de Grunwald: “There is nothing that will convince me that Sophia returned his passion with anything more than the mutually narcissistic feelings such stars go in for when the limelight is on them, and the romantic content of the film may have helped. . . . The nice way of describing her attitude is to say that she was kind to him. The other way is to say that her attitude gave him greater hope than was warranted.”

  Someone else involved with The Millionairess has another theory: “I’ve always felt that Sophia is one of those actresses who need to feel that their leading men love them before they can give a good performance. Peter had no experience playing romantic roles. He misread the signals and developed a delusion.”

  Sophia herself said, some years later: “I was very close to him—as much as I could be. But love is something else. He is really a great, great friend. We have built up a fine relationship over the years and I think that is rare for a man and a woman, when the woman is married to someone else.”

  Anne: “I don’t know to this day whether he
had an affair with her. Nobody does.”

  • • •

  More important than the precise whereabouts of Peter’s penis during the production of The Millionairess was the effect that his emotional arousal had on his wife and children. According to Michael, he was already out of control when he confessed to Anne, who remembers the scene vividly: Peter “came in and straightened his shoulders like a politician about to make a major speech in the House of Commons and said, as though he had rehearsed the line all the way home from the studios, ‘Anne, I’ve got to tell you that I’ve fallen madly in love with Sophia Loren.’ ”

  Despite her comment that she “didn’t take much notice at first” when Peter told her that he was in love with someone else, according to Graham Stark Anne packed her bags and showed up that very night at the Starks’ door, asking if she could stay in their guest room. She wasn’t in tears. She was in a rage, one that was made all the more fiery by the characteristic restraint with which she expressed it. “The bastard only told me because he couldn’t be bothered to have a bad conscience,” she told Graham.

  “We had some terrible rows over it,” Anne does acknowledge. “One of them lasted fifteen hours.” But as Stark remembers it, Peter almost immediately began showing up at the Starks’ house asking for permission to take Anne out for the evening. He was all very proper and polite, so much so that the Starks felt as though they’d become Anne’s parents.

  Of course Peter was contrite. That Anne had left him was what mattered, and it mattered because it hurt. Hurting could make him sweet. After a week or so Anne moved back to Chipperfield.