Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  Peter’s doctors, meanwhile, were insisting that he not go beyond a five-hour working day. To ease Peter’s mind even further, Feldman had sent the film’s young director, Clive Donner (who had directed The Caretaker, among other films) to meet with Peter the day before he was to leave for New York to shoot Carol for Another Christmas. Donner reassured the justifiably worried Peter that he wouldn’t exceed Peter’s relatively light schedule and that the production itself would be as relaxed as possible.

  Shooting began on November 2. During the production, Peter and Britt stayed in a suite at the Plaza-Athenée. “I mustn’t get into any arguments while filming,” Peter told the columnist Roderick Mann. “It’ll make me too nervous. I just have to shut up and walk away.” But, he added, referring jocularly to his fellow filmmakers, “In six months’ time I can tell them all what I think of them, the swine!”

  He was still discussing matters of the spirit with Cannon John Hester and, at least from Hester’s perspective, preparing to convert to Christianity. They met once a week at the Plaza-Athenée and talked about God. Ursula Andress, clad in leopardskin or cheetah, sometimes joined in. According to Hester, Peter was especially intrigued by the story of Jesus walking on water.

  • • •

  Woody Allen remains a great admirer of Peter Sellers’s talent: “Sellers goes to the deep core of what’s funny,” he said fairly recently. “His funniness was the funniness of genius. What he had to offer was clearly gold.”

  But Peter’s genius came at price. Allen found the task of actually working with Peter to be strenuous. Peter O’Toole was no help, either. With What’s New, Pussycat?, the first-time actor and screenwriter found himself rudely belittled by the great Dr. Strangelove and his good friend Lawrence of Arabia.

  “Woody,” Siân Phillips sighs. “They upset Woody Allen on the set—they were not nice to him. They used to rewrite the script every day, and Sellers was very supercilious with him. ‘We are way beyond rehearsing, you know. I’ll be in my dressing room.’ There was a lot of pulling rank. Woody got so neurotic he wouldn’t even come out of his bedroom.”

  “Met the cast in person today,” Allen wrote in his diary, which he later published as publicity for the film. “Sellers and I eyed one another carefully. I think he senses in me a threat to his current position as cinema’s leading funnyman. I tried to make him feel at ease and I think I succeeded. He seemed more preoccupied with his wife than with my ideas.”

  Sellers and O’Toole indeed began to tinker with Allen’s script. Tinkering soon turned into wholesale reworking. “Scenes have been taken away from Woody and . . . reworked and repolished by Sellers and O’Toole,” Charles Feldman reported on December 2. “I spent the last three days with Woody getting a new Bateau Mouche scene, then I spent endless time with Sellers getting him to approve it.” In addition, Sellers thoroughly rewrote the scene in which Dr. Fassbender and Michael muse drunkenly in a lonely bar:

  MICHAEL: (drunk) I need help.

  FRITZ: (drunk) Don’t mention dat verd to me—“help.” Dat is vat I need—dat help, oh God, how I need dat ting! (Confidingly:) You know I am in love vit a patient? (Broadcasting:) I am in love vit a patient! (Casually:) Ya got a minute?

  Then Peter wrote—and Donner shot—three entirely new scenes that weren’t in Allen’s original script at all. This was no longer on the level of spontaneous improvisation.

  • • •

  “You’ll like zis group analyzis,” Dr. Fassbender tells Michael early in the film. “It’s a real frrreak show! If it gets dull ve sing songs!”

  Clive Donner, asked how Fassbender’s character was developed, responded that “it evolved a little from discussions we had, but that was Peter’s idea. He would keep coming up with ideas, and I’d say, ‘Are you sure, Peter?’ And he’d say, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be all right. . . .’ The character was trying to be young again—trying to be a mod to keep up with it all. It’s a search for youth.”

  At Michael’s first group session, Peter as Fassbender slaps his hands together and rubs them expectantly as the camera tracks back from a close-up. “And now, group! Whose e-mo-zhen’l problems shall we discuss today?” “Me! Me! Me! Mine! Me!” they all shriek. “I’ve been coming here ten months and we haven’t discussed my problem once yet,” one woman complains, but Dr. Fassbender offers no apologies. “Well,” he replies, bored and irritated, “perhaps if you’d be kind enough to tell us what your problem is then ve could all have a go at dis-gussing it or something.” A little later, a chubby patient acts out physically by attacking Michael for no apparent reason. Dr. Fassbender, outraged, calls him a “great fat Moby Dick” and, launching into song—“Ven it’s spring time in Vi-en-na”—begins whipping him across the back with a bouquet of flowers.

  Dr. Fassbender’s lust-object patient, Renée (Capucine), paces the room while rattling off a lengthy speech, which ends, “You see, I can’t help it. I’m a physical woman! I feel guilty about it, but I come from a family of acute nymphomaniacs. That includes my father and my two brothers.” Dr. Fassbender (visibly aroused): “Vhy don’t ve all take off our clothes, it’s so modern. . . .”

  But it is Liz (Paula Prentiss), the suicidal stripper, who takes it furthest. Profoundly unstable, she explains her “semi-virgin” status to Michael—“Here I’m a virgin, in America I’m not”—and suddenly announces, “I feel faint. Would you excuse me for a minute? I’m going into the bathroom to take an overdose of sleeping pills.”

  “I thought she was joking,” Michael tells the doctor summoned to revive her. “It was all poems and ‘Don’t touch me’. . . .”

  After her second suicide attempt (sparked by Michael’s having told her that no, he didn’t love her), the physician responding to the call presents her with a commemorative watch: “Mademoiselle, the boys of the Emergency Suicide Board voted you this gold watch for unusual devotion.”

  • • •

  With the strange and disturbing production of What’s New Pussycat? finally winding down just before Christmas and nobody having died, Charlie Feldman parceled out holiday gifts to the cast and principal crew—Hermes cigarette boxes all around. Peter had already received his own special present from Feldman two weeks earlier—a new red Rolls Royce Silver Cloud III.

  Feldman had been growing worried about two things in particular: Peter was far exceeding his contractual obligations on What’s New Pussycat? by working longer hours than required and by substantially rewriting the script without additional compensation. He was also showing signs of depression. Feldman, telling United Artists that he had been anticipating problems and thought he’d found a way to circumvent them, voluntarily offered Sellers a new car to keep him happy. “His enthusiasm thereafter was incredible and he has worked like a dog since,” Feldman reported.

  The Rolls was not Peter’s first choice. He had originally suggested a new Ferrari Superfast. But they couldn’t get one in time, so he settled on the cheaper Silver Cloud, which was available right away.

  He had to have it.

  • • •

  “She looks just like her father!” Britt wrote to Charlie Feldman, thanking him for the congratulatory flowers he had sent to the proud parents of a baby girl. “As you can imagine, Peter and I are just thrilled with her!”

  Victoria Sellers was born on January 20, 1965, at the Welbeck Street Clinic in London. Her parents had moved into the Dorchester after their return from Paris, specifically to be close to the clinic. “When my water went and I felt the first pangs,” Britt reports, “Sellers whisked me from the hotel to the clinic in a flash. My suitcase was already packed.”

  Then Peter made his exit: “Unceremoniously he dumped me on the steps of the clinic and promptly disappeared without so much as taking one step inside the door.” Whatever the cause of this, his second birthing abandonment—fear, revulsion, somebody’s opening night at an exclusive club?—Peter once again proved unable to support his wife emotionally, particularly when she expected it.

  But
in the morning, with his daughter safely born, Peter was “proud as punch.” After scooping the tiny girl up in his arms, he was overcome by joy. “Thank God she is safely here,” he said.

  • • •

  They were not destined to be a stay-at-home family, and swinging London in 1965 was not a stay-at-home kind of place. With Victoria only a few weeks old, Peter and Britt left her in the care of her nurse, where she was to remain through much of her childhood, and turned up at the Cool Elephant, a private nightclub, to hear a performance by Mel Torme. Princess Margaret joined them. The comedian Dudley Moore was there, too; he got up on stage at one point and played the piano for Mel. London being essentially a small town of hipsters, mods, models, international stars, and the Beatles, all of whom knew one another, it was not surprising that relationships were becoming notoriously intertwined. Also present at the Cool Elephant that night were David Frost and his girlfriend, who happened to be Peter’s ex-girlfriend, Janette Scott, who happened later to marry Mel Torme.

  The jet set was, in a word, flying. In April, Peter and Britt skipped over to Blue Harbor, Jamaica, where they visited Noel Coward. (“Peter Sellers and his wife came over to lunch the other day and were sweet,” Coward wrote in his diary.) They were back in London in time for the queen’s thirty-ninth birthday bash, hosted by Princess Margaret at Kensington Palace. The evening began with everyone—Elizabeth, Philip, Margaret, Snowdon, Peter, Michael Bentine, and Harry Secombe—attending a performance of Son of Oblomov, a West End comedy starring Spike Milligan. The actor Peter Eyre remembers that particular night all too well:

  “Basically, the play was Spike Milligan humiliating a lot of actors, of which I was the youngest. (It was a straight play, but it began to go wrong in rehearsals. They didn’t know what to do, so they began adding gags.) On the Queen’s birthday, the Royal Family all came to the theater. Princess Margaret and Snowdon brought Peter Sellers along, and he did a sort of double act from the stalls with Spike Milligan on the stage.” The other performers, including Eyre, found themselves upstaged not only by the show’s erratic star but by a member of the audience. Eyre resented it, though the audience itself seems to have been delighted. Still, Eyre may have a point: “I thought that Milligan was, like most comedians, totally selfish. Comedians want it to be just them and the audience. They don’t want other people.”

  • • •

  Peter and Britt were traveling in a closed circle of celebrities and growing rather used to hanging out with the royals. One of Peter’s young fans used to call him at the office. Hattie Stevenson remembers answering the phone and finding the teenage Prince Charles on the line: “You’d suddenly get the heir-apparent on the other end of the phone talking Bluebottle at you.” Charles was a guest at Peter’s estate, Brookfield, as well.

  And the royals reciprocated. Peter and Britt were invited to Windsor Castle to go pheasant shooting, an occasion that provided Peter with the opportunity to outfit himself with a new £1,200 Purdy 12-bore shotgun and a fine hunting costume topped by a deerstalker. With practice, Peter wasn’t a bad shot. It was thrilling to watch birds drop out of the sky at his instigation, and the congratulations of Princes Philip and Charles didn’t hurt either. Peter and Britt also enjoyed teatime with Elizabeth II. The queen arranged the cups and saucers; Britt discussed Sweden; Phillip, Peter, Margaret, Tony, Charles, Princess Anne, and the Duke and Duchess of Kent put their two pence in. After tea was finished, they all played charades.

  They were hanging out with the Beatles, too. George Harrison became a particularly good friend to Peter over the next few years; they shared an interest in Eastern religions. At first, Peter’s fame was such that even the Fab Four were daunted by him. “We met him at numerous parties and different things,” Harrison later said, “but at that time we were more in awe of him because of our childhoods and the Goons. We just loved the Goons. It was the greatest thing we’d ever heard. I remember thinking that we’d met all these film stars and presidents and kings and queens. . . . But there were very few people who really impressed me.” Peter Sellers was one who did.

  When the Beatles won two Grammy awards that year—Best New Artist(s) and Best Vocal Performance by a Group (for “A Hard Day’s Night”)—it was Peter who presented it to them in a videotaped sequence. John, Paul, George, and Ringo could not attend the proceedings in person because they were in London filming Help, 1965, with Richard Lester.

  After Sellers gave the Beatles their awards, John Lennon responded Goonishly by launching into a speech in nonsense French; the others followed suit, and the whole thing ended up slipping into “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”

  • • •

  Although Peter had filmed his scenes in Dr. Strangelove two years earlier, the film was still very much in the news in the spring of 1965. It had been Columbia’s biggest hit of 1964, pulling in the then-sizable sum of $5 million in the United States alone. Now it was up for four Oscars, all in top categories: Best Actor (Peter), Best Director (Kubrick), Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium (Kubrick, Southern, and George), and Best Picture.

  It lost all four.

  My Fair Lady was named Best Picture, Becket Best Screenplay, George Cukor Best Director (for My Fair Lady), and Rex Harrison Best Actor (also for My Fair Lady).

  Dr. Strangelove fared better at the BAFTA gala, where it won the BAFTA Film Award, the award for Best British Film, and the award for Best Film from Any Source.

  Peter, however, lost again in the category of Best Actor—to none other than Richard Attenborough for Guns at Batasi.

  FIFTEEN

  A script by Neil Simon, direction by Vittorio De Sica, a flamboyant and multi-personality role for himself, sunny Italian locations filmed in Technicolor, and even a featured part for Britt. Peter’s next film project looked promising. After all of Brookfield’s fits and starts, After the Fox (1966), a heist spoof, would be Brookfield’s first actual production.

  Given her glamour, Britt Ekland was continually offered film roles, but Peter, in a mix of professional expertise and jealousy, tended to talk her out of them. One nixed project, for example, was to star Dean Martin. “Do you really want Dean Martin breathing bourbon fumes all over you?” he asked his wife. Britt’s role in the De Sica film had one distinct advantage: Peter was the star of the film and would therefore have to be there all the time.

  Peter had met Neil Simon the previous August, and, soon thereafter, Simon showed him the first forty pages of his first screenplay. According to John Bryan, Peter “flipped over it,” saying it was “the best screen material submitted to him in years.” Peter’s enthusiasm grew when Simon suggested a director: De Sica, whose groundbreaking Bicycle Thieves (1948) was one of the cornerstones of Italian neorealism. (The union of a preeminent Italian neorealist and a hot American comedy playwright was not quite as idiotic as it may seem. De Sica had long since moved away from lyrical, black-and-white urban dramas to slick, candy-colored, international moneymakers like Marriage Italian Style, 1964.)

  Sellers got along well enough with Simon and invited him at one point to Brookfield for a script conference. After the meeting concluded, Simon was surprised to find that Princess Margaret, Lord Snowdon, Harry Secombe, and Eric Sykes had been invited to join them for dinner and an improvised Goon Show routine. Simon’s relationship with Sellers was friendly enough, but there were tinges of tension. Simon reports that on another occasion he, Peter, and Britt were sharing a limousine in London when they passed the West End theater at which Simon’s latest hit stage comedy, The Odd Couple, was running. Britt mildly suggested to Peter that they see the show sometime, whereupon Peter turned hotly to Simon and demanded to know “what the hell’s going on between you two?”

  • • •

  After the Fox is a farce about an Italian thief, a master of disguises named Aldo (Peter), who breaks out of prison to protect the morals of his loose sixteen-year-old sister, Gina (Britt). “It will be quite a challenge playing my husband’s sister in the picture,” Britt
said at the time. “I hope I won’t find it too strange.” Simon’s purposely farcical story requires Aldo to assume the guise of an Italian film director, Federico Fabrizi, who purports to film the actual smuggling of purloined gold bricks into Italy. Fabrizi then proceeds to cast a pompous, long-past-his-prime Hollywood star (Victor Mature) in the ersatz film along with Aldo’s sister, whom he rechristens Gina Romantica.

  Filming began in June on the island of Ischia, where Peter and Britt lodged at the Hotel Isobel Regina. For their residence in Rome, where the production moved at the end of July, they rented an elegant villa on the Appian Way, which Peter, true to form, had outfitted with multitudinous gadgets. They included his-and-hers walkie-talkies so that he could stay in touch with his wife when she was in a different part of the house.

  With Peter assuming the role of de facto executive producer as well as star, his tendency to second guess his directors became even more detrimental than usual, since De Sica had to contend not only with a demanding star but a demanding financier as well, all wrapped up in the same moody man. De Sica’s own attitude didn’t help; he started telling friends and associates how much he detested Simon’s screenplay. He didn’t think too highly of Peter’s performance, either.