Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  For his part, JFK told Sellers that he’d loved several of his films, though Sellers didn’t want to bring up the subject of Lolita’s looming release, apparently for fear of offending Kennedy by mentioning a sex story.

  • • •

  Three days later Peter Sellers was in Hollywood, lunching with an MGM executive on the Culver City lot in the afternoon and dining with the director Billy Wilder in Beverly Hills at Chasens that night.

  Offers were already pouring in. For example, they wanted him for Peter Pan. George Cukor would direct.

  If it hadn’t been for his body, about which he could only do so much, Peter Sellers would not have made a bad Peter Pan. But in this proposed production the role of Peter was to go to Audrey Hepburn, with Peter as Captain Hook. Hayley Mills would be Wendy.

  As with most business in Hollywood, there was a lot of buzz and very little action, and Peter found it frustrating. “I know it’s exciting to have an idea,” he told a reporter some months later, “but it’s more exciting to have a screenplay. Take Peter Pan. All I’ve ever done is to say I like the idea of playing Captain Hook, but I’ve never even seen a script, and everybody seems to think it’s all set up. And it isn’t.”

  It turned out to be the fault of the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in disharmonious concert with the Walt Disney Company. Peter Pan’s creator, the playwright James Barrie, had left the rights to the play to the hospital. Disney wished to make the film on its own terms. Thus did Sick Children wage war against the mouse, and by the fall of 1962 the project was in full collapse.

  • • •

  Billy Wilder had more luck than George Cukor. At first.

  Producers were practically dumping scripts on Peter’s doorstep during his stay in Hollywood, but very few of them caught his attention. Wilder’s idea did, however, as did Wilder himself. It was to be an adultery comedy, and it would be directed by the acerbic and blazingly funny writer-director of such films as Double Indemnity (1944), The Lost Weekend (1945), Sunset Boulevard (1950), and Some Like It Hot (1959). The costars Wilder managed to mention were also enticing. If he accepted the role, Peter was told, he might be playing opposite Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Shirley MacLaine.

  Wilder’s films generally bore a bitter edge with raunchy undertones, but by the early 1960s, with the Production Code seemingly in full retreat, Wilder was itching to push things a little further. In the new film he was thinking about making, Peter would play an insanely jealous husband. Sinatra would be a Sinatra-like star who gets headaches if he doesn’t get laid once a day. MacLaine would be Peter’s long-suffering wife. Marilyn would be the local hooker. Irresistible.

  The movie wouldn’t be filmed right away, however; the as yet untitled comedy wouldn’t go before the cameras for at least another year.

  Other directors, writers, and producers could scarcely compete with the package of Wilder, Monroe, Sinatra, and MacLaine. Peter turned down twenty-seven other film roles in the first week he spent in Hollywood.

  But there was one other idea that interested him: Ulysses.

  This was neither a joke nor a fabrication: Peter Sellers wanted to play Leopold Bloom. Jerry Wald would produce the picture, Jack Cardiff would direct it. “Bloom could be the ultimate in characterization,” Peter told Hedda Hopper. “I have great faith in Jack Cardiff’s intuition and good taste, and he can do it if anyone can.” Unfortunately, Jerry Wald died of a heart attack two months later.

  Peter was upbeat about his trip, but there was a dark foreshadowing. “I shall enjoy working in Hollywood,” he told the British scribes upon his return to London, “but I could never live there.”

  • • •

  Even in the context of Peter Sellers’s previously frenetic work schedule and tension-filled private life, 1962 was ridiculous. The year his marriage collapsed and he was jettisoned out on his own for virtually the first time in his life (David Lodge and others shepherded him through the war), six of his films played in the United States: Only Two Can Play (which opened in March), Mr. Topaze (May), Lolita (June), Road to Hong Kong (June), Waltz of the Toreadors (August), and Trial and Error (November). These were accompanied by the personal interlude of Peter and Anne officially announcing their separation in July.

  He had an overly spacious den-like penthouse in Hampstead and an office on Panton Street in Soho. He had Bert, Hattie, and two children he saw less and less. He had his cars, the charlatan psychic Maurice Woodruff, a lot of publicity, and an enormous amount of money. He became so depressed that Bert Mortimer, fearing for his boss’s life, moved into the penthouse to be at his side all the time. As Bert recalls it, Bryan Forbes and Nanette Newman used to come over and “hold his hands as he went to sleep.”

  Forbes is succinct: “In many cases, Peter was, uh, slightly mad, shall we say?”

  • • •

  Peter was back in New York at the end of September and continued to be starstruck. “Peter Sellers, who claimed to have always ‘dreamed’ of knowing me, finally arranged a meeting,” Myrna Loy wrote in her autobiography. “He took me to Peter Duchin’s opening at the Maisonette [at the St. Regis hotel], where he was rather shy and as full of wonder about my career as any fan. He even asked for an autographed picture.”

  But Peter was himself a star trying to navigate a course toward international superstardom, and the split between shyness and celebrity was becoming nearly impossible for him to sustain. The fault lines scraped more noticeably.

  He was getting tired of being hammered by British journalists, who, then as now, enjoyed the moist sensation of blood on their fangs. “The more success you have,” he complained, “the more people want to have a go at you in the press. And I just haven’t got the confidence to shrug off what is said about me.” He was making £150,000 a year, but money itself didn’t seem to help.

  To be more precise, Peter’s wealth didn’t help his emotional state. It did, however, aid Harold Pinter. In December, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Noel Coward, Leslie Caron, and Peter Sellers announced that they were among the unlikely financiers of Pinter’s The Caretaker (1962).

  Peter spent money on less flashy causes as well. According to Bert Mortimer, he liked to prowl London’s parks at night looking for homeless people. When he found an appropriate one, he’d stuff a £5 note in his pocket. Bert witnessed these transactions: “You’d see the man flinch back, thinking he was going to be hit, then fish out the note and stare in utter disbelief at it.”

  Nothing was simple. For Peter, this type of generosity came at a price. As Kenneth Tynan reported, “Sellers is a self-accusing man who incessantly ponders ethical questions. Once, driving home from the studio, he saw a ragged old woman standing on a street corner, and ordered his car to stop. ‘I got out and gave her some money, without telling her who I was. And then, just as I was getting back into the car, I heard myself thinking, “This’ll do me good later. This’ll make God like me.”

  “ ‘ “That’s wrecked it,” I said to myself. “That’s absolutely wrecked it.” ’ ”

  There was some degree of paranoia involved in Peter’s erratic behavior. Peter himself labeled it “intuition.”

  Roy Boulting remembers that Peter “would keep you up half the night on the telephone, then when you yawned out of sheer fatigue, it would be interpreted as an unfriendly attitude. It got to be a killer, his ‘intuition.’ ”

  Maurice Woodruff played right into it, and so, surprisingly, did Dennis Selinger—in secret collaboration with the quack Woodruff. As Selinger later told it, “Maurice used to phone me and say, ‘Peter’s coming. Is there anything you want me to tell him? Should I say ‘yes’ or ‘no’?” Selinger was only too happy to oblige. This way, everyone was happy: Woodruff’s bogus predictions turned out to be sound, Peter made responsible career choices, and Selinger got his cut.

  • • •

  Bill Sellers died in October. He was sixty-two.

  “My father died following three coronary attacks,” Peter later said,
“but it was trouble with his prostate that killed him.”

  Echoing just about everyone else who knew him, two of Bill’s nephews describe their uncle as a shadow man who “wouldn’t say boo to a goose.” What gives Dick Ray and Ray Marks’s observations about their uncle their bite is their follow-up contention: that this was Peter’s essential nature as well—half of it, anyway.

  According to Dick Ray, Peter took after both of his parents—the aggressive, performing mother and the quiet and aloof father. But then, says Ray, “the minute the camera stopped he’d go back to himself again—”

  Ray Marks finishes the sentence: “. . . to Bill Sellers.”

  • • •

  Peter Sellers was asked that year what he saw when he looked into a mirror. His answer: “Someone who has never grown up, a wild sentimentalist, capable of great heights and black, black depths—a person who has no real voice of his own. I’m like a mike—I have no set sound of my own. I pick it up from my surroundings.”

  And this: “I don’t know who Peter Sellers is, except that he’s the one who gets paid.”

  By the end of 1962, Peter had successfully created for himself a public persona based on blank peculiarity. The automobile fixation had become a journalistic cliché, but once in a while Peter would touch on something authentic when discussing his lists of cars. There were two factors behind his obsessive buying and selling of automobiles, he announced: “One is a search for perfection in a machine; the other stems from a great sense of depression at being unable to supply what I know I should be able to deliver.” He was himself the best sports car, the finest Rolls, the silkiest limousine, endlessly nicked by a siege of pebbles. Beyond, or behind, or in some way circling around the escalating nuttiness, Peter Sellers did know himself. Sometimes.

  But, he immediately declared, everything had just changed.

  “Now I’ve finally got what I want,” he swore. It was a Bristol 407.

  “It’s perfect! I didn’t know such a car existed! The Bentley Continental wasn’t bad for room, for speed. But the 407 combines everything.”

  TWELVE

  Meanwhile, in Hollywood, the screenwriter Maurice Richlin was shopping for a collaborator. He approached Blake Edwards. “I have an idea about a detective who is trying to catch a jewel thief who is having an affair with his wife,” Richlin announced to the director of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and Days of Wine and Roses (1962). Together they carved out a script that featured a variety of gimmicks: two glamorous women, an urbane leading man, a piece of early sixties vealcake, fashionable European locales, and a wondrous gem with a tiny flaw. If one looked at it closely, the jewel would seem to have embedded deep within it the distinct image of an animal. The director knew one thing for certain: The Pink Panther (1964) would be a perfect vehicle for David Niven.

  By late October 1962, casting was completed, financing had been secured from the Mirisch Company, the independent production company that made such critical and commercial hits as Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960)—both by Billy Wilder—and shooting was ready to commence at the Cinecittà soundstages in Rome. Niven would be the sophisticated thief, Robert Wagner his handsome playboy nephew. Claudia Cardinale would be Princess Darla, the owner of the jewel, a curvaceous but nevertheless deposed ruler of a necessarily vague Eastern sovereignty. The detective’s wife, who would be having the affair with the thief, would be the striking, one-named Capucine. The detective would be Peter Ustinov. (Brigitte Bardot once claimed to have been offered one of the two babe roles but turned it down. Ava Gardner may also have been sought, hired, and swiftly replaced because of her excessive demands.)

  Edwards and his team flew to Rome, and Ustinov changed his mind. He didn’t want to be Inspector Clouseau after all. That he waited until three days before principal photography began wasn’t very nice. Blake Edwards was “ready to kill.”

  “At the very last minute—we were in Rome, we were set to shoot the following Monday, it was Friday—Ustinov said, ‘I can’t do the movie.’ We all said, ‘Is there somebody we can recast?’ I couldn’t think of anybody at that time who could do that sort of thing. [The agent] Freddie Fields said, ‘I’ve got an actor who has a window. You’ve got to do him in four weeks.’ ” (Dennis Selinger was not Peter’s only agent; he had several working in tandem.) “All I could think of was I’m All Right, Jack. In desperation, I said, ‘Let’s go. We’ve got to do something.’ He got off the plane in Rome, we got in the car, drove back from the airport, [and] by the time we got to the hotel Clouseau was born.”

  Peter himself later claimed to have turned down The Pink Panther originally because he hadn’t liked the part—“I didn’t want anything to do with it”—after which Edwards offered the role to Ustinov. But this account is doubtful. Graham Stark recounts Peter’s glee upon landing the part of Clouseau at the eleventh hour: “When he got the first Panther, he rang me up like a child—‘I’ve got five weeks in Rome . . . and I’m getting £90,000!’ ”

  • • •

  Panther lore abounds. Jacques Clouseau’s name is said to have been inspired by the director Henri Georges Clouzot, his demeanor by the maladroit M. Hulot in Jacques Tati’s comedies. But there’s also the story of Peter, on the airplane to Rome, fishing a book of matches out of his pocket and instantly basing the comportment of his new character on the hero depicted thereon—the mustachioed Capt. Matthew Webb, who, in 1875, had become the first man to swim the English Channel. It makes a good anecdote, but it’s not especially convincing, since Peter had been a sucker for a fake mustache since he was a teenager in Ilfracombe.

  As for the accent, despite Peter’s having done Frenchmen at least since 1945, Blake Edwards declares that it was really his invention: “I ran into a French concierge who talked liked this. And he did it for me. And I said, ‘We’ve gotta do it.’ ”

  A better genesis story comes from Max Geldray, who remains convinced that Peter, on the suggestion of Michael Bentine, based Inspector Jacques Clouseau on one of Princess Margaret’s hairdressers.

  Shooting on The Pink Panther commenced on Monday, November 12, 1962, and in a certain sense it continued sporadically for the next sixteen years. And of course it was Sellers rather than Niven who emerged upon the film’s release as the key to its charm and popularity. Peter used to claim, not without a certain accuracy, that Clouseau became such a hero because of the character’s bedrock dignity in the face of his own buffoonishness. He was specifically reminded of his own teenage years and the loss of his virginity:

  “When I was making The Pink Panther and playing the accident-prone Inspector Clouseau for the first time, I remembered the embarrassment I’d suffered struggling out of my nightwear so that I could get on with satisfying my barely containable passion. It made a good gag and consolidated the conviction I had about Clouseau that, in all circumstances, whatever boob he’d made, the man must keep his dignity—which gave him a certain pathetic charm that the girls found seductive. It all went back to the frustrations I suffered as a result of a lack of priorities in love-making.” Still, one must never forget that Clouseau is first and foremost a moron, and that audiences all over the globe love to laugh at anyone so fiercely idiotic.

  Peter took to the role, but then he usually took to the roles he played to an alarming extent. While filming a Pink Panther scene on location, an onlooker accosted him. “Aren’t you Peter Sellers?” the man asked, to which Peter replied, “Not today.”

  The Pink Panther’s plot, like those of The Goon Show, is more or less irrelevant. It concerns a gentleman thief (Niven), whose partner in love and crime (Capucine) happens to be the wife of a hapless Parisian detective (Sellers). A fine gem goes missing in Rome. It belongs to Princess Darla (Claudia Cardinale). She wants it back. The gentleman thief’s playboy nephew (Robert Wagner) romances the inspector’s wife as well. Everyone goes to Cortina.

  What makes The Pink Panther work is Edwards’s comic style and tone, which is given its most acute embodiment by Peter. Like
Spike Milligan, Edwards finds comedy to be profoundly painful, and Peter generally agreed. Edwards had worked with Leo McCarey early in his career, and he credits McCarey—the director of such comedies as Ruggles of Red Gap (1935) and The Awful Truth (1937)—for teaching him the essential truth that humor can hurt. McCarey had a knack for extending tension-provoking comedy routines way past the audience’s initial discomfort. “He called it ‘breaking the pain barrier,’ ” Edwards recalls. Peter Sellers’s Inspector Jacques Clouseau may be the pain barrier’s apotheosis.

  At the same time, Peter’s performance in The Pink Panther is remarkably restrained. His accent is pronounced but not asinine, his physical comedy likewise. That would come later.

  • • •

  The Mirisch Company, in association with United Artists, didn’t open The Pink Panther until February and March 1964 (in Britain and the United States, respectively), whereupon Time dismissed it, citing its “pervasive air of desperation,” as though Edwards and Sellers’s joint comedy style wasn’t consciously based on cold despair. “Some of Sellers’s sight gags are funny,” the critic wrote, “but not funny enough.” “A so-so comedy” sniffed the critic for Cue. But the Hollywood trade paper Variety pegged it correctly: “A vintage record of the farcical Sellers at his peak.”

  Looking back on it, Robert Wagner attributes Sellers’s performance to his disruptive interior life. Sellers was able to achieve so much variety in his art because, as Wagner puts it, he “had such a circus going on within his head.”