Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  David Lodge and Graham Stark were Peter’s best men for the brief ceremony. There were only a handful of guests, but fifteen hundred fans reportedly cramped themselves around the front of the building as an icy wind blew snow in their faces. The newspapers were ecstatic: “They outdid the Beatles fans in their shrieks. . . . Babies were abandoned in their prams on the lawns!”

  It was an unusual day for Michael and Sarah Sellers. “I was at boarding school,” says Michael. “I was told to get my stuff together because I was going out for the day. But nobody told me [for] what. The driver picked me up and said it was because Father was getting married.” Sarah adds, “We didn’t actually get to go to the wedding ceremony, which I remember I would have liked to have done.”

  At least they made it to the reception at Brookfield.

  • • •

  Peter insisted that Maurice Woodruff had predicted the whole thing. Someone with the initials B.E. would have a great influence in his life, Peter repeated. He had told Elke Sommer the news during the production of A Shot in the Dark. That B.E. also stood for Blake Edwards was of no concern. . . . Peter had no idea that his psychic was in collusion with his agent.

  Peter was smitten as only Peter could be, and Britt gave him very good reason to be so. Charming, young, fresh, and willing, she also happened to be mind-bogglingly beautiful. “Darling,” he said to her at one point early on, “you’re so unspoiled, so pristine, and so very dishy.” Bert Mortimer, who saw Peter in his blackest moments, later said that he “had never seen him so happy. . . . It made life a lot easier for everybody around him.” Peter’s mother, on the other hand, wasn’t impressed. Peg showed up at her son’s wedding this time, but behind Britt’s back she tended to call Peter’s sweet young bride “the bleeding Nazi.”

  Four days after the wedding Peter flew to Los Angeles and checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel and Bungalows. He was there to film Kiss Me, Stupid, Billy Wilder’s feel-bad comedy about a nebbish Nevada husband and the fantastic jealousy he sports over his pretty blond wife. Sinatra was out, Dean Martin was in. Monroe was out, Kim Novak in. Shirley MacLaine was out, Felicia Farr (who was married to Jack Lemmon) was in.

  Britt stayed in London to begin filming Guns at Batasi with Richard Attenborough and John Leyton. David Lodge and Graham Stark both had roles in the film, so naturally Peter asked them to spy on Britt and report back to him any suspicious behavior.

  Capucine threw a party for him on February 25. Blake Edwards was there; so were Jack Lemmon and Felicia Farr, Billy and Audrey Wilder, the director William Wyler, and Swifty Lazar.

  Peter taped The Steve Allen Show on March 20 and brought the house down. “It was a very interesting period in my life,” Peter said in response to Allen’s question about The Goon Show. “I worked with a very brilliant colleague called Spike Milligan, who wrote the show. Who unfortunately is in a mental home at the moment. [Laughter.] No. He gets a bit under the weather. [Laughter.] But anyway. . . .”

  Allen asked him what he called his mother-in-law: “Well, I think the English have quite a good way out of it. They just say ‘Hallo!’ [Laughter.] But Britt’s mother is called Mai-Britt, and I call Britt my Britt, you see, because she belongs to me.”

  After keeping Allen unusually entertained and playing drums with the band on “Honeysuckle Rose” (complete with a show-stopping solo), Peter finished off his appearance with an extended improvisation in which he placed a prank call to Scotland Yard. (This was not Peter’s invention. Random phone calls were a standard routine on The Steve Allen Show; Jerry Lewis, Mel Brooks, Johnny Carson, and Jack Lemmon had each placed one during their guest appearances on the show.)

  Given the American premiere of The Pink Panther, the L.A. papers were also full of Peter:

  “I don’t enjoy playing multiple parts at all. I know Alec Guinness doesn’t either. But they do have a sort of showcase value.”

  “I feel I’m the only one who really knows basically that I’m a phony and eventually it will all be found out.”

  “Only my children have given me any real happiness. What is wrong with me? What am I looking for?”

  Meanwhile, Peter’s spies not having anything to report, he proceeded to grill Britt over the phone. What scenes did she film that day? Who with? Did she have to kiss him? “Britt, just tell me.”

  He sent telegrams. On March 10, he sent five. “Ying,” read the first. “Tong,” read the second.

  “Iddle.”

  “I.”

  “Po. Love, Bluebottle.”

  He also wrote letters. In one, he described having just attended a screening of The Great Escape (1963): “I was getting deeply engrossed when somebody said, ‘Who’s that fellow?’ Someone else said, ‘That’s John Leyton.’ I thought, ‘John Leyton? He’s in the film that my Britt’s doing. She kissed him. Oh, but that’s nothing, that’s just acting.’ Then I thought of something an actor once said to me, that he always had to become involved with the women he worked with, otherwise it didn’t look real enough. The thought of this made me break out into a cold sweat and want to be sick.

  “I’ve depressed myself getting into a state like this. I really am an idiot. They say all comedians are sad. I wonder if that’s true? Still, I’m not really a comedian. I don’t know what I am.”

  Under the barrage of Peter’s phone calls, Britt took a break from filming. She left London for Los Angeles on March 24. Peter was overjoyed to see her. They lunched in his dressing room and dined at hotspots like La Scala or the Bistro. She met Peter’s friends—Cary Grant, Steve McQueen, Shirley MacLaine, Capucine, “R. J.” Wagner, Goldie Hawn.

  Peter had rented a marbled mansion in Beverly Hills for the duration of Kiss Me, Stupid. Home movie footage of the house, which was located just off Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills, reveals, along with the obligatory swimming pool, a monochromatic, showy, haute-L.A. style: white front doors, white marble walls, white marble floors, white dining table, white chairs. . . . By the time Britt arrived Peter had already outfitted it with a closet’s worth of clothes for her. Michael and Sarah appeared soon thereafter for another trip to Disneyland.

  The trouble was, Britt had not even come close to completing her scenes in Guns at Batasi, and on March 31, Fox filed a $4.5 million suit against her for breach of contract. The studio named Peter as well. By a strange coincidence, the house he had rented in Beverly Hills was owned by Spyros Skouras, the head of Twentieth Century-Fox, though the landlord decided not to intervene in Peter’s domestic life. A little later, Peter Sellers countersued for $4 million, but his case was dismissed, and he ended up paying Fox $60,200 to compensate the studio for the celluloid containing images of Britt.

  John Guillermin was Guns at Batasi’s under-the-gun director. “Peter was desperately unhappy, you know, and was talking to Britt all the time on the phone. She left the picture after two weeks. She was inexperienced. She hadn’t done much, and I don’t think if she’d had more experience she’d have left. We got Mia Farrow to do the role and had to reshoot a couple of weeks of it. Dickie Attenborough was not pleased. I saw Peter after that—it didn’t leave any scars.” Britt herself was later embarrassed by the episode: “I knew in my heart I was doing the wrong thing. I just knew it. But I wasn’t my own woman in those days. So I went.”

  She was captivated by him—his magnetism, his fame, and his potent love for her were a dazzling combination. To say that he was controlling is obvious; more to the point is that Britt loved him.

  Peter, of course, was resolute that she had every right to leave the picture. “The only thing my wife ever signed was Darryl F. Zanuck’s autograph book,” he declared.

  • • •

  Kiss Me, Stupid, for which Peter was to be paid $250,000 plus a percentage of the profits, was only the first picture Wilder planned to make with Peter; Sherlock Holmes was the second. Obviously the director had high hopes for him. But the actual, day-to-day experience of shooting a film together revealed that these two brilliant filmmakers had radically
different work habits and personal styles. Wilder liked to share meals with his stars; he enjoyed the camaraderie of collaborative filmmaking, as long as no actor dared alter a single word of the scripts he so carefully crafted with his writing partner, I. A. L. Diamond. Peter had lunch in his dressing room, and improvisation was his stock in trade. The hyper and gregarious Wilder enjoyed commanding a wildly open set. His friends; his chic wife, Audrey; his chic wife’s friends; visitors from out of town. . . . The doors of Kiss Me, Stupid’s soundstage at the Goldwyn studio were thrown wide. Peter preferred to film in relative privacy. Audrey Wilder, a quick-witted pistol and former big-band singer who, by this point, had become one of Hollywood’s foremost social leaders, characteristically has something to say about Peter, too: “He queered his pitch with me when he didn’t show up for a dinner we were giving for him at the apartment. I was real mad.”

  Sellers later described the atmosphere of Kiss Me, Stupid: “I used to go down to the set with Billy Wilder, and find a Cooks Tour of hangers-on and sightseers standing off the set in my line of vision. Friends and relatives of people in the front office come to kibitz. When I told Billy I couldn’t work with that crowd there, he said, ‘Be like Jack Lemmon. Whenever he starts a scene he shuts his eyes and says to himself, “It’s magic time” and then forgets everything else.’ ” Peter found it difficult to forget everything else. The idea of completing the picture began to gnaw at him.

  Then came the sty.

  According to Jack Lemmon, Sellers was plagued that week by “a massive sty” on his right eye. Sheilah Graham reported that he’d missed at least one day of filming because of it. Lemmon also noticed that Peter “looked as if he were approaching nervous exhaustion.” He was tired, anxious, irritated. He could do bits of physical business that pleased his writer-director, but he couldn’t change a single word of the dialogue. The sty was a clinically hysterical reaction—a bodily manifestation of what Peter felt inside.

  On Friday, April 3, Wilder and Sellers filmed the scene in which Orville gives a piano lesson to a child while growing increasingly convinced that his wife, played by Felicia Farr, is (as Wilder put it) “doing it” with the milkman. Standing on the sidelines along with Peter’s costars Dean Martin, Kim Novak, Felicia Farr, and Cliff Osmond, Britt watched her husband perform for the first time. She was amazed by his extraordinary talent and spark. So were the others, including Wilder himself, who, despite his experience as a director, couldn’t help but break out into unrestrained laughter during Peter’s takes.

  “And then he did not show up on Monday,” Billy Wilder declared from a distance of thirty-five years. “He had borrowed some money from me because he wanted to take his kids to Disneyland. He was at Disneyland! That’s the last I saw of him, giving him the money. It was two or three hundred dollars.”

  • • •

  There is a funny but foreboding exchange in The World of Henry Orient between the difficult Henry and his earnest manager, Sidney (John Fiedler). “Henry!” Sidney pleads. “You’ve got to remember you’re not Van Cliburn! Now if Van Cliburn misses a rehearsal, he’s still Van Cliburn, and nobody says, ‘Throw the bum out!’ ” But Henry is having his hair done at the moment and is too busy admiring his own head in a handheld mirror to concern himself with the warning. “I tried ’a phone ’em,” he mumbles.

  In 1964, Peter’s profound misfortune was that he was Van Cliburn. On that incontrovertible basis, he believed he could do as he pleased. In fact, if comparisons are to be drawn, Peter Sellers was better than Van Cliburn. He was more famous. And he made more money. And ironically, despite years of outrageous behavior and eccentricity and periodically debilitating despair, Peter Sellers ended up remaining far longer on the klieg-lit world stage than Van Cliburn.

  • • •

  He was worried about his body. As Britt describes it, Peter “believed that the essence of his masculinity relied on his ardor as a lover. He was always searching for what he liked to term as the ‘ultimate’ orgasm, and when he discovered that amyl nitrate assisted his physical endurance the tiny capsules of chemical became almost a routine component of our nightly love-making pattern.” So on Monday, April 6, after forgoing the tension-provoking sound stages of Kiss Me, Stupid for VIP treatment at the Magic Kingdom, Peter and Britt put the kids to sleep and went to bed, inhaled some poppers, made love with their hearts racing, and afterward opened a bottle of champagne, which spilled all over the sheets. They were changing them when Peter reached for his chest. “Get me some brandy—quickly,” he said.

  When Britt returned to the bedroom she found Peter lying in the damp bed.

  “I know what it is. I’ve had a heart attack. Phone the doctor.”

  Dr. Rex Kennamer, physician to the stars, arrived very shortly, gave Peter a sedative, and told Britt to take him to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in the morning. Kennamer wasn’t alarmed enough to call an ambulance on the spot, but he did decide to cancel his trip to New York, where he was to join his other patients Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton for the opening of Hamlet.

  In the morning they did as they were told. Peter checked into Cedars of Lebanon. Britt told the kids he just had “a bit of a cold.” A hospital spokesman told the press it was a myocardial infarction. Peter rested comfortably in his private room.

  Reporters and entertainment columnists in Hollywood covered the story, of course—it’s always exciting when a thirty-eight-year-old international superstar suffers a mild heart attack—but British papers were quite a bit more breathless. The Daily Express rushed to report that Peter phoned “director William Wyler” from his hospital bed to say that he was sick.

  Then, at 4:32 A.M. on April 8, 1964, Peter Sellers’s heart stopped beating and stayed off. It had had enough.

  PART THREE

  THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

  1964–80

  FOURTEEN

  “That was a narrow escape!” said Alice, a good deal frightened at the sudden change, but very glad to find herself still in existence.

  Think of a whole area of blackness. Then imagine an arm—a bare arm, but a very strong arm, pulling you. And this arm says, in its own way, ‘I won’t let you go, I won’t let you go.’ I held on to this arm, and I knew that as long as I had that arm, I wouldn’t die.”

  A doctor pounded on Peter’s chest, and the heart began to beat.

  Some hours later, a boy recovering from open-heart surgery in the intensive care unit cried for his mother. Peter suggested that the child be wheeled next to him, whereupon he distracted the child with a Cockney song: “I was walking down the Strand with a banana in my hand . . .” The boy began to laugh, Britt began to cry, and Peter suddenly stopped breathing. In came the doctors, who revived him again.

  The heart stopped at least eight times during the next two days, only to be startled back to life each time. Up, down, starting, stopping, all to the tune of jolts from a defibrillator. It was a Goon Show routine. “You’ve deaded him,” Bluebottle used to say.

  In England, a national icon seemed about to die, and TV tributes were already in production. “It was uncanny,” Ian Carmichael reports. “He was on life support in the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, and a television station called. They were preparing an obituary program for that night. They said, ‘We’ve got Spike Milligan, we’ve got this, we’ve got that, we’ve got the others all standing by to come in if necessary, but we would like you to be link man, and we’ve got to rehearse you to get the links right, so will you come in this afternoon and run them with us?’ I said, ‘Yes, okay.’ So I went in and was handed this script, and it started off, ‘Today the _______’ —the date was left blank—‘at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in California, Peter Sellers died.’ It was terrifying to have to do this. I knew the man was still alive. As I left the corridors of power in that television station, I got the feeling that if he didn’t die, for the executives it would be the ruination of a bloody good show.”

  The doctors installed a pacemaker. Peter himself described it: �
�Two electrodes were sewn in the tissue on each side of my sternum. Doctors watching my heart graph on an oscilloscope knew exactly how it was functioning. If my heart stopped, a warning buzzer sounded, an oscilloscope flashed a report, and an electrical stimulus was sent through the wires directly to my heart to start it up again.” (This pacemaker was an earlier, rarer, and obviously more cumbersome version of the tiny, fully-implanted device in widespread use today.)

  By 7 A.M. on Thursday morning, the crisis was over. Alert, cheerful, and propped relatively upright with pillows, Peter told the hospital staff that he was worried about his appearance, so they gave him a shave and combed his hair. By Friday morning Peter was off the critical list, Rediffusion Television had lost their special, and Billy Wilder had replaced him with Ray Walston in Kiss Me, Stupid.

  Britt Ekland, who had kept a near-constant vigil at the hospital, found herself the object of morbid curiosity and fashion scrutiny. The press duly reported that Peter’s twenty-one-year-old bride of less than two months had arrived at Cedars of Lebanon on Friday morning cutting a “wistful figure” in a tailored blue-green suit. Forced by circumstances into a brief news conference that day, she thanked Dr. Kennamer; the chief of cardiology, Dr. Clarence Agress; and a senior resident physician, Dr. Robert Coblin, for saving her husband’s life. What she didn’t mention was that Peter, for whom work was life, was already insisting on talking to his agents and managers and accountants and had to be sedated.

  • • •

  Peter Sellers’s deaths in April 1964 were by far the most adult experiences he had ever had, with the possible exception of facing hostile audiences as a stand-up comedian. Involuntary though coronaries are, they evidence more maturity than did Peter’s two marriages, in which he often behaved like a child, or his forays into fatherhood, his love for his children being solipsistic and abstract. Dying changed him.