Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  Waltz of the Toreadors was widely critiqued for being a kind of pratfall-ridden bowdlerization of Anouilh’s play. Guillermin himself agrees. “The film was fucked up by the producers,” he declares. “They wanted to make a slapstick comedy. And they ruined a wonderful scene that Anouilh wrote for his play and I shot. It was a long take—a whole reel, ten minutes—of Peter and Maggie Leighton in their quarters, and they tear each other apart.”

  But Guillermin did not have the right of final cut. “I was thrown off the editing of the film,” he says, still bitter. “They brought in a yes man, and they intercut it with a light comedy scene of Dany Robin and John Fraser larking about in the fields. There were doves fluttering about! They intercut Peter and Maggie’s scene three or four or five times, and it totally took the heart out of the film.”

  Because Peter had such high expectations of his own talent, gripped by idealized goals that were thus impossible to achieve, he was increasingly struck by deep depression after seeing his films. “The whole thing looks terrible, amateurish, bad,” he told a British reporter after seeing Waltz of the Toreadors. “And you want to pack it all in and look round quickly for a means of employment. Suicide? No, not that. But who can you talk to? Who’d understand your problem?”

  But of course there were multiple Peters. He was elated when he won the Best Actor award at the San Sebastian Film Festival for Waltz of the Toreadors. His press agent, Theo Cowan, found him to be “like a ten-year-old, going about with four cameras slung around his neck, taking thousands of snaps. . . . His great joy was to mingle with the crowds outside the hotel where the stars were staying and do what he called ‘seeing myself go in.’ ”

  • • •

  During the filming of Waltz of the Toreadors, the distance between Paris and London hardly mattered as far as Peter’s marriage was concerned, since fighting and begging could continue by long-distance telephone. David Lodge tells of Peter sitting in his trailer one day stewing over his most recent argument with Anne. “Everyone cooled their heels outside, including the cavalry horses needed for the scene.” With his marriage in tatters, the mercurial star was being even more so; the film’s producer, Julian Wintle, “went out of his mind as the costs climbed hourly.” Eventually Peter handed Lodge a vast pile of pennies and told him to call Anne on his behalf and apologize.

  Lodge did so. Anne refused to accept remorse by proxy.

  As Lodge reports, “I couldn’t tell Peter that in his state of mind. So I reported back, ‘She says she’ll talk to you tonight, so get on with your work now.’ ”

  Graham and Audrey Stark joined him for a weekend at the Raphael hotel, where Peter was staying during the production, and the three of them spent some time with Dany Robin. By that point, Peter’s heart had taken the predictable turn: “I’m in love with her, and she’s in love with me,” he confided to Graham. The fact of Dany Robin’s marriage was no deterrence. After dinner one evening, they all adjourned to one of the suites for coffee and conversation. Peter had to take a phone call, at which point Robin whispered to the Starks (in Graham’s rendition of her charmingly broken English), “Please, I beg you, do not leave me alone wiz Petair. ’E is so sweet, but such a leetle boy. ’E think ’e love me. ’E think I love im. Merde!”

  It was only after Peter returned from Paris that Anne told him that she planned to move out. This was Peter’s cue to announce that he’d slept with Anne’s best friend.

  • • •

  He acted out.

  “Peter used Mike as a punching bag,” says Anne Sellers Levy in retrospect, adding that she “drank more than I’ve ever done in my life,” alcohol in her case being a material form of denial, a way for a mother to cope with the regularized abuse of her children.

  When she told him that she was leaving him, Peter “wrecked the entire living room. I was sitting in a big chair trying to protect my head with my hands. Have you ever seen a child lose its temper and go berserk and pick up things and throw them? Imagine that on a grown-up scale in a very beautiful living room.”

  Threats were employed. One night he proposed to jump off the terrace. Dangerous acts occurred. At one point he tried to strangle her. But Anne had had enough of the melodrama and knew precisely what to do to stop it. With his fingers clenched around her neck, she calmly told him just to go ahead and do it, so of course he stopped.

  Peter was in New York when Anne moved out. “It was a very cowardly way of doing it,” she confesses, “but I’d never have got out otherwise.” With the two kids being cared for by Frieda Heinlein, she paused long enough in the garden to tell Michael that she was going to stay with her mother for a while, and “please look after Sarah for me, won’t you?” and with that she departed.

  • • •

  There were threats to assassinate Ted.

  “Ted Levy has destroyed my life!” Peter yelled to the children. “He has taken your mother away from me! I’ll kill him! I’ll kill him!”

  When Peter showed up at Ted’s place at two in the morning and began banging on the door, Ted considered the possibility that he might actually follow through. According to Levy, “He wore an expression of hate, anger, and frustration, the like of which I’d never seen on the face of any human being before. . . . Suddenly he looked up and offered me a cigarette.”

  • • •

  One day while Anne was staying at her parents’ house, Peter appeared, behaving, as Anne describes him, “very peculiarly.” He acted as though he’d never met her mother; he seemed not to know who she was. Believing him to be either drunk or deranged, she decided she’d better drive him home, but when they got back to the penthouse, Peter announced, “You’re not leaving” and locked her in. When it became clear to her that pleading wasn’t going to help, she telephoned the family doctor and asked to be saved. The physician showed up, sedatives in hand, and put Peter to bed. Anne left again.

  For a while she returned on weekends to spend time with Michael and Sarah, who remained briefly under what passed for Peter’s care. Later she took the kids during the week and Peter had them on Saturdays and Sundays. Eventually she got full custody. “In a way I was lucky,” Anne says, “because he did spend a lot of time in America, so as the children got older they were hardly with him at all. He wasn’t really interested in their schooling or how they thought or their welfare.” His moving Michael from school to school was a form of abusive whimsy rather than a concerned attempt to rectify an ongoing problem with the boy’s education or behavior.

  After a period of fully justifiable bitterness, Sarah Sellers tries to see the best in her father: “I think he had an idea of how he’d like family life to be, but he couldn’t really live up to it. So we’d come along and be with him—but once we were there he didn’t really know what to do with us.”

  • • •

  Alone and miserable, Peter brooded. The dependable Bert Mortimer grew fearful. “He was so isolated and lonely that I got scared for his safety. He would sit in the penthouse—‘my bloody palace,’ he’d call it—and threaten to tear ‘Ted Levy’s Teutonic look’ apart. ‘Overmasculine—it’s just not me,’ he’d say.”

  The director Robert Parrish and his wife, Kathleen, stopped in to visit Peter shortly after Anne left him. He had, says Kathleen Parrish, “lots of toys,” one of which was a new electric organ, which he began to play. Taking their cue, the Parrishes began to make a big fuss over it, at which point Peter abruptly stopped playing. “Isn’t this bullshit?” he said.

  Michael Sellers saw a more intimate despair. He remembers his father muttering. “Who would want me? Who would want me?”

  Well, Laurence Olivier, for one.

  “Larry asked me to play Lear at the Chichester Festival,” said Peter to the journalist Roderick Mann. “It’s one of the great parts,” he explained. “And Larry said, ‘You’d be good, Peter. You must do it. The best Lears have nearly always been new to Shakespeare.’

  “But I turned it down. It was too big a risk. In my heart I hadn’t the con
fidence, and that’s the place you’ve got to have it. I’m always seeking perfection, and that makes me difficult to live with. I’m sure it’s a nagging thing.”

  • • •

  A less risky choice, and so a less exciting one, The Dock Brief (1962) is a sad comedy, a courtroom drama that is played out almost entirely in the minds of a pathetic defendant (Richard Attenborough) and his inept lawyer (Peter). Based on John Mortimer’s play, the film takes place in a prison holding cell, with several flashbacks and flash-forwards breaking up the deliberate claustrophobia. Wilfrid Morgenhall, the barrister assigned to the hopeless case of Herbert Fowle, uses his creative intellect to imagine ways of getting his client off the hook; the client, meanwhile, is a pitiful sap who did, indeed, kill his indefatigably laughing wife (Beryl Reid, in flashback). David Lodge plays, of all things, a lodger; the twist is that Fowle kills his wife not because she launched an affair with the lodger but because she didn’t.

  As always, Peter required a vocal hook into his character. Mortimer dined with him just before shooting began and found Peter to be “desperately uncertain” about his performance of Morgenhall. Then a plate of cockles arrived at their table. Memories flowed; the little mollusks cast Peter into a disastrous lost-time reverie of a youthful visit to Morecambe on the Lancashire coast. The cockles, Mortimer was horrified to witness, “brought a faded north-country accent and the suggestion of a scrappy mustache. He felt he had been thrown the lifeline of a voice and work could begin.”

  Mortimer was appalled because the character he’d written was not from the North, did not speak with a Lancashire twang, and bore no scrappy mustache. “It took a great deal of patience and tact by the director, James Hill, to undo the effect of the cockles.” (There is a mustache on Morgenhall’s lip, but it’s a trim, linear number tinged with gray.)

  Mortimer also claims that Peter told him that he feared for his safety. The Mafia was after him. Sophia.

  • • •

  Work might have provided some steadiness, but it did not. It was merely constant.

  In The Wrong Arm of the Law (1962), Peter played opposite Nanette Newman, the glamorous, almond-eyed wife of Peter’s war buddy, Bryan Forbes. “I want to marry Nanette,” Peter confided to Forbes one day. Taking Forbes aside, he admitted to his old friend that he hadn’t broached the subject with Nanette herself, but his attitude on this point was one of forthright honesty. He wanted to clear it with Bryan first; it was a matter of fair play.

  “The scene had taken on the characteristics of a Pinter play,” Forbes later wrote. “But I knew it would be a mistake to appear outraged or to mock him: that was not the way to handle Peter.” So Forbes simply proceeded with the conversation, adopting the same patient, solicitous tone that Peter was employing. Bryan Forbes was one of those who sympathized with Peter’s nature: “He was so patently sincere and desperate to do the right thing according to his unique code of ethics.”

  FORBES: Of course there’s the children to take into account.

  SELLERS: You’d always be able to see them. . . . You’re not angry, are you?

  When Nanette Newman learned of her imminent divorce and remarriage, she gently convinced Peter that any intimate relationship with him was impossible, let alone marriage. According to Forbes, “On two occasions he bought a gun and threatened suicide, and both times Nanette somehow calmed him and talked him out of it.”

  And remarkably, work continued. In The Wrong Arm of the Law, Peter greets us as a couturier wearing a smoking jacket collared in silver quilt; he’s also adorned with a precise, thin mustache and a pronounced French accent. “Exquiseet! Byeautiful!” Monsieur Jules cries as he flounces a bride-to-be’s poofy net veil. “I weesh you every ’appiness,” he purrs as he kisses the bride’s hand in a manner très Continental, “and my felicitations to the, uh [his eyebrows arch], greum.” Monsieur Jules swiftly devolves into lower-class London when the buyers leave. The fashion house is a front; he’s actually the criminal “Pearly” Gates.

  The cops are onto him. An officer played by Lionel Jeffries conveys the news in a scene of dueling accents:

  JEFFRIES: Well gor bilmey, it’s “Pearly” Gates!

  SELLERS: I’m delighted to meet you, but there mus’ be some meestek! My nem is Sharls Jewlz.

  JEFFRIES: Oh don’t gimme that. When I took you in in 1948 you was “Pearly” Gates, an’ “Pearly” Gates you’ll always be.

  SELLERS: Inspecteur, 1948 was a long time ageu. Theengs shenge.

  JEFFRIES: Look, mite, jus’ ’cause you sell a few women’s frocks in the West End it does not mean to say that things change.

  SELLERS: [Enraged, and thus reverting to Pearly-speak]: I do not sell “women’s frocks” in the West End. I sell gowns, mite.”

  The Wrong Arm of the Law opened in the United Kingdom in March 1963, and in New York the following month. What’s most curious about the film is not its gimmick (because a rival gang of Australian crooks dresses up as cops and steals from “Pearly,” “Pearly” teams up with the real cops), nor the fact that the film was cowritten by several of the writers of Idiot Weekly, Price 2d (Ray Galton, Alan Simpson, and John Antrobus), but this: At this point in his career, Peter was attracting directors of the stature of Stanley Kubrick, not to mention the Boultings and Anthony Asquith, and still he ended up taking on another role in another small-scale movie made by a competent but undistinguished director (Cliff Owen).

  Why wasn’t an actor of Peter’s caliber more discerning? For one thing, he liked money. He certainly wasn’t born to it, and he enjoyed his wealth. But financial desire (to the unsympathetic, the word would be greed) seems secondary to the emotional gratification he seized from the roles into which he threw himself. Work was essential, it was sport; work was a necessary distraction, it was simply what he did. Performing filled him in a way the rest of the world could not. Without constant filming and recording, Peter Sellers was simply unable to stand it.

  • • •

  Naturally, he found his way to Hollywood. After Waltz of the Toreadors opened in London in mid-April, Peter embarked on his first trip to Los Angeles, with a weeklong stopover in New York on the way. There was also a brief side trip to Washington.

  In New York, he received his many supplicant flacks and hacks in a Hampshire House suite. He had much to report. Larry had offered him the Shakespeare role, after all; his car collection made its prolix appearance; he had no personality of his own; he was quite boring, really; and so on. He was a heavy smoker, readers learned. His cigarettes were described as “oversized,” the normal length apparently not able to provide the necessary jolt. And he told the New York Times of his experiences in Burma during World War II: “As a corporal I had the completely unglamorous job of arming up fighter planes with shells and bombs.” A corporal? When Peter Sellers was in Burma—briefly—he was drumming and telling jokes.

  With Lolita about to open, Peter announced to the public that he wasn’t happy with it. And he was particularly nervous about how his American accent would come off to Americans.

  But he seemed giddy with the imminent prospect of Tinseltown: “I can’t wait to see Hollywood! It may sound a bit silly, but I almost feel I’d like to have an autograph book along.” He actually did take one.

  • • •

  On Friday, April 27, at the annual black-tie White House Press Dinner at Washington’s Sheraton-Park Hotel, Peter Sellers of North London and Ilfracombe met John F. Kennedy of the White House and Hyannisport as well as Harold Macmillan of 10 Downing Street. Kennedy and Sellers impressed each other; Macmillan’s response remains less clear.

  Benny Goodman, Elliott Reid, Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon (who performed bits from Damn Yankees), and Peter provided the evening’s entertainment. Among the fifteen hundred guests were Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Chief Justice Earl Warren, seven Cabinet members, the entire White House press corps, and enough British reporters to cover any little scandal that might helpfully occur. Elliott Reid did his impersonation of Kennedy. P
eter began by announcing that he never consciously tried to be funny, after which he did a hilarious impression of Macmillan.

  Responding with characteristic warmth and laughter, Kennedy, who had recently ripped into the American steel industry for raising prices, said of Sellers and Reid (whose impersonation consisted of Kennedy ripping into the steel industry), “I’ve arranged for them to appear next week on the U.S. Steel Hour.” Kennedy then clarified the issue for the crowd: “Actually, I didn’t do it. Bobby did it.”

  But with Peter’s Macmillan imitation, the British press got its scandal. It was not newsworthy for an American comedian to mimic his president’s distinctive Bostonian accent; everyone in America was doing it. And Kennedy, as his friend and aide Ted Sorensen recalls, “loved to laugh.” But a British half-Jew mocking his conservative prime minister’s patrician voice—to the prime minister’s face—was apparently unconscionable. Hungrily, British newspaper reporters forced Peter to justify himself.

  In the first place, he said, they had asked him. “The Office of the prime minister called me in London,” Peter explained under pressure, “and I told them they wanted Mort Sahl. I’m no stand-up comic. They insisted, and I finally agreed to do five minutes of mild political joking, on the condition I could have my picture taken with the leaders.

  “He was on home ground,” Peter said, referring to Elliott Reid. “And he knew already how much the President enjoyed his take-off.” Sellers went on to explain that he’d met Macmillan at the reception before the dinner and that Macmillan told him to go ahead and do it. “Don’t forget,” the prime minister told the comedian—“No holds barred.” “So I barred no holds,” said Peter. “And Mr. Macmillan took it as sportingly as President Kennedy took the Elliott Reid skit.” If only the British press had been as sporting.