by Ed Sikov
• • •
Joe McGrath recalls his close friend Peter with a refreshing lack of malice: “There was a kindness there—a soft kindness, do you know what I mean? It was a side of him a lot of people never saw. So, I would forgive him most things. I mean, we had a bad time on Casino Royale because he went off and disappeared for three weeks. He was chasing Britt. They had trouble, and she went back to Sweden. But meanwhile Orson Welles and two thousand extras were waiting. Orson said, ‘Where’s your thin friend, Joe?’ ”
Wolf Mankowitz was not as forgiving of Peter. In fact, he was downright nasty: “He was a treacherous lunatic,” the screenwriter later swore. “My advice to Charles Feldman was not in any circumstances to get involved with Sellers. But Sellers was at his peak at that time. I told Charlie that Sellers would fuck everything up—he wanted different directors, he wanted to piss around with the script. He knew nothing about anything except going on and doing funny faces and funny voices, and he wasn’t really a great actor.
“He was terrified of playing with Orson and converted this into an aversion for Orson before he even met Orson,” Mankowitz went on. There are a number of stories of bad behavior regarding Sellers and Welles: Peter overheard a young woman comment, about Welles, “Isn’t he sexy?” and immediately became jealous. Peter, together in his suite with Orson, tried to get Welles to laugh, failed, and never got over his resentment. Peter met Orson in a Dorchester Hotel elevator. Sellers was coming down from his penthouse, and Orson and Mankowitz got on on a lower floor and Peter remarked that he hoped the elevator wouldn’t collapse from the weight.
Princess Margaret was the last straw. Welles had developed a friendship with Margaret some years earlier when he was in London directing his stage production of Othello. Sellers, having no idea that she and Welles even knew each other, invited her to stop by the already greatly troubled set on February 18 for lunch. He made the mistake of crowing about it to Welles. “Then Princess Margaret came,” Welles later gloated, “and passed him by and said, ‘Hello, Orson, I haven’t seen you for days!’ That was the real end. ‘Orson, I haven’t seen you for days!’ absolutely killed him. He went white as a sheet because he was going to get to present me.”
“That’s been blown up to ridiculous proportions,” Joe McGrath retorts. “Peter never resented Orson at that lunch. I think the problem was really that Britt left and Sellers just got the scent and chased. When he came back, Orson was just sitting there sort of smiling. And Peter lost his courage. I talked to Milligan, and Milligan said, ‘Well, yeah—he’s obviously so ashamed that he just doesn’t want to face up.’ ”
In fact, Peter had already decided the weekend before the fatal Margaret luncheon to issue a new demand to Feldman. He insisted that his scenes with Welles be shot in what Feldman’s production log calls “single cuts—thereby avoiding having both of them working together.”
Whatever the reason for his attitude and conduct, Peter proceeded to make the filming of Casino Royale substantially more difficult than such a heaving, overproduced extravaganza was already destined to be. At one point he departed the set and simply left a sign that said “Yankee Go Home.”
Describing the Welles imbroglio, McGrath says that Peter informed him that “ ‘as long as I’m not in the same setup I’ll go back.’ I said, ‘No! What are we doing, a home movie? This is Orson Welles you’re talking about. And not only that, Peter, but you wanted Orson Welles. You said, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we got Orson Welles?” And we get him and suddenly this happens.’ ” McGrath also pointed out to Peter that from a technical perspective alone it would be ridiculous to shoot a Panavision film with two stars in different setups; the point of any widescreen process, after all, is to shoot wide. Keeping Sellers and Welles in separate spaces and cutting back and forth between them would look, in a word, dumb.
Peter’s sharp aversion to Orson was not the only problem for McGrath. “At one point he said to me, ‘Sorry, I was a bit late coming back when you called me. I had something important to do. I was trying to get a new stylus for my record player.’ I said, ‘Oh, that’s very funny. Don’t treat me like you treat everybody else. Come on. What’s going on?’ ‘No,’ he said.
“I said, ‘Who do you think you are? Peter Sellers?’
“He said, ‘Yes. I fucking am Peter Sellers!’
“I said, ‘This is getting out of control. We call you and you don’t come. I’m not talking for Charlie Feldman, but Feldman did give you the chance with What’s New Pussycat?, you know, and here you are, and Charlie is frightened to ask you, to tell you, to get here on time. He is the producer. And he is frightened to actually say, “Get here on time.” He is saying to me, “Would you tell him please to get there on time?” So what game are you playing? Either get here on time or don’t get here at all.’
“And then there was a break, and we went into the trailer to talk about another scene, and he said, ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ and he swung a punch at me.
“He hit me on the side of the jaw, and it sort of bounced off me, you know—it was halfhearted—but I thought, What the hell? If you want to hit me, come on. So I tried to hit him. Jerry Crampton, a stunt man, was outside, and he opened the door. Peter and I were, as Terry Southern later said, ‘aiming blows at each other like school girls trying to hit wasps.’ Crampton grabbed us and separated us and said, ‘I love you both; I do not know which one of you to hit.’ Sellers and I started laughing, and that was it.
“Then he disappeared again, and he was afraid to come back because of embarrassment. If he came back and I was still directing, and he walked onto the set and Orson was there, everybody was going to say, ‘Oh what a shit you are.’ So he said to me, ‘I’ll come back if I don’t play any scenes with Orson,’ and I said, ‘Get lost,’ and that was it.” And with that, Joe McGrath left Casino Royale.
Actually, Feldman had been against McGrath from the beginning and later claimed only to have hired him because Peter had demanded it. Feldman claimed that he’d wanted multiple directors from the start. If that was really the case, then the producer got exactly what he wanted.
As early as February, Feldman tried to get Bryan Forbes to come on board again, but Forbes refused, particularly after he learned that Columbia executives, still stung by his refusal to accept the job originally, were reacting to his tough financial demands by calling him a blackmailing whore behind his back. Feldman turned to Blake Edwards, who said that all it took was a million dollars. Feldman didn’t have a spare million dollars, so he turned to Clive Donner, whom Peter rejected. Feldman then hired Val Guest. And Ken Hughes. And Robert Parrish. And Richard Talmadge. And John Huston.
All in all, the filming of Casino Royale took place not only at Shepperton but at the Pinewood studios and at MGM’s studios as well, with different directors directing different actors in different scenes with three directors of photography—Jack Hildyard, John Wilcox, and Nicolas Roeg. The whole thing took eight months to shoot.
None of this was easy on Charlie Feldman. There were midnight meetings with Peter and Britt, whom Peter was at one time pushing to be cast in the film. Phone calls and meetings with five new directors along with a growing list of writers. More meetings with Peter and his slew of agents and managers and lawyers—Harvey Orkin, Bill Wills, Freddie Fields, John Humphries. . . . Explanations by letter and wire to Columbia executives in Hollywood, who were becoming apoplectic at the rising costs. Then Orson decided he’d had enough and left for Barcelona.
Feldman brought Robert Parrish onto the project not only because Parrish was an experienced director (Fire Down Below, 1957, with Rita Hayworth and Robert Mitchum, among others), but because he was an experienced editor, too, having cut such films as John Ford’s The Battle of Midway (1942) and Max Ophuls’s Caught (1949). (Parrish had also been a child actor; he’s one of the mean boys who pitch spitballs at the Tramp in Chaplin’s City Lights, 1931.) Feldman’s hope was that Parrish would know what to do with the countless reels of disjointed foo
tage into which his multimillion-dollar baby, the still far from complete Casino Royale, had degenerated. (The final cost was at least $12 million, at that time a very high price tag.)
Parrish was also known for being a gentleman, someone who could handle a temperamental movie star—or two—so at Feldman’s behest, Parrish flew to Barcelona to meet with Welles and convince him to return. Delicately and with characteristic charm, he told the director of Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), and Touch of Evil (1958) that he and Charlie Feldman would be very grateful to him if he would please come back to London so that they could finish filming Casino Royale. He’d be delighted to return, Orson replied. He’d just gotten bored waiting for Peter to show up on the set and thought he’d take a holiday in Spain.
There was just one thing, Parrish then mentioned. “Peter doesn’t want to film any more scenes with you.” And with that, Parrish later declared, “Orson got up from the table, came over, kissed me—square on the lips—and said, ‘That’s the best news I’ve ever heard!’ ”
The two men returned to London, but shooting still didn’t proceed on schedule. According to Parrish’s wife, Kathleen, Peter would drive around in his car and constantly call the studio on his car phone to see whether Welles was on the set. For his part, Welles would start drinking champagne at nine in the morning and continue all day long. The hours went by—Orson was quite the life of the party—and then Peter would stick his head in the door and Orson would immediately and loudly needle him and nothing would get done that day.
• • •
Charlie Feldman’s contracts alone were creating a massive pile on his desk. John Huston, the director of such films as The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) turned up in March as one of the Casino Royale’s directors as well as one of its actors. Huston had not only just finished directing The Bible (1966). He’d played Noah, the narrator, and the Voice of God, too. Maybe Feldman thought that only He could control Peter Sellers.
The screenwriter John Law began work in March, too. Peter insisted on it. Law was a television writer who worked, along with Graham Chapman, John Cleese, and Denis Norden, on David Frost’s program, The Frost Report. Peter thought he’d be great for Casino Royale, and so Law was added to the lengthening list of rewriters.
John Law was just the latest in what was to be a very long line of scribes; at least eleven people wrote dialogue for, restructured the story of, tinkered with, and destroyed the work of others on the script of Casino Royale. Only Mankowitz, Law, and Michael Sayers got screen credit. Woody Allen, Val Guest, Terry Southern, and Peter himself contributed to it as well, uncredited. (On top of everything else, Peter and Feldman spent March and April going back and forth with each other over whether Sellers would get a writing credit. He didn’t.) The novelist Joseph Heller (Catch 22), the television writer Lorenzo Semple, Jr. (Batman), and none other than Peter’s Hollywood nemesis Billy Wilder were also brought on board by Feldman at one point or another to try and salvage this great, wobbling behemoth, but nobody has ever really sorted out exactly what any of them wrote or whether any of it managed to find its way into the finished film.
John Huston was ensconced in style at Claridge’s when the screenwriter Nunnally Johnson, also in London, tried to get into the act as well. He sent over to Huston some new script pages for Casino Royale with a little note that might have just as easily applied to the whole fiasco: “If you can use the enclosed, help yourself. If not, tear it up.”
By springtime, rumors of the conspicuous catastrophe were raging through Hollywood and London like two clouds of loud mosquitoes. They continued to bite until well after the film’s release. Peter “got hung up on safety,” a Hollywood reporter divulged, “and his constant calls from his Rolls squad car to Scotland Yard to report traffic violations frequently made Page One. He insisted on immediate police action and often got so carried away [that] he would make the arrest himself. Several afternoons of production were lost when Sellers appeared in court with his civilian arrests.” This was an exaggeration, though it is true that on one occasion Peter did bring a reckless driving charge against another driver, and he only seems to have had to appear in court once (on April 1). After some protracted discussions with Feldman’s assistant, Jerry Bressler, he agreed to give the production a free day of shooting to make up for the day lost to the court appearance.
Ursula Andress was growing so weary of the interminable production that she started complaining to the press hounds. “I started the film on January 11,” she sighed to Sheilah Graham in April. “It was to be just a few weeks. It is already three months, and we can’t finish before June. Why? There are so many things. If Peter feels tired, we must slow down. We are never allowed to rush because of him. . . . [And] he writes a lot.”
Andress, for example, was originally supposed to have performed a scene with Peter atop an elephant, but Peter nixed it and decided that the scene should really feature bagpipers. The deleted elephant had, however, provided Peter with an opening, which he seized, in one of his early battles with Orson Welles. Welles and Sellers were shooting the key scene in which LeChiffre and Tremble play the crucial rounds of baccarat. Welles decided it was time for him to do a little improvising, so instead of going along with the script, which required his character to lose the game, he performed some off-the-cuff card tricks and won. Sellers is said to have blown a gasket. “No!” Peter shouted in front of the assembled crowd of technicians and extras. “I’ve had enough from one elephant.”
The stories keep coming. According to McGrath, there was to have been a scene with “a giant roulette wheel when Sellers had a dream. And he’s the ball, spinning around on this giant roulette wheel, and the red and black divisions of the roulette wheel are girls’ legs in dresses—they’re in black and red. He’s spinning around the rim, and then he rolls into someone’s crotch.” The sequence was shot but discarded; Peter didn’t like it.
Then, in what Jacqueline Bisset recalls as a “sick joke,” Peter shot her in the face with a blank. In the scene in question, Tremble creeps into a window with his gun drawn and is most surprised when the occupant, Miss Goodthighs (Bisset) recognizes him and calls out his name. Tremble was supposed to turn and fire the gun in her general direction, but Peter pointed it right at her and pulled the trigger. “First I thought I had actually been actually shot,” Bisset later said. “Then, when I realized it had been a blank, I thought I had been blinded. My face looked like a shower spout of pinpricks leaking blood. To get shot in your first scene with a big star—that’s a nightmare.”
And day after day, everybody was kept waiting for everybody else to show up on the set. In the annals of Casino Royale, Peter has taken the brunt of the blame for the delays. But the production logs tell a more nuanced story: “Waiting for Mr. Sellers.” “Waiting for Mr. Welles.” “Waiting for Miss Andress.” “Waiting for Mr. Welles.” “Waiting for Mr. Sellers.” “Waiting for Crowd . . .” By mid-March, with Casino Royale already running weeks over schedule, Peter was calling in sick. “Only able to shoot fifteen seconds.” “Only able to shoot twenty seconds.” “Only thirty seconds possible.” By the beginning of April, Feldman had calculated the total of Peter’s delays at fourteen-and-a-half days at a cost of $705,000. Peter simply left the production sometime in May or June, which is the reason Terence Cooper suddenly takes over as yet another 007. At that point, somebody had to replace Peter, and it didn’t much matter who.
• • •
Casino Royale was the biggest, most overproduced mess of Peter’s career, but even it has a few good moments, one of which features Peter in a ridiculous striped outfit of no discernable category—a one-piece affair with shorts and a revealing V-neck (in the back), a sort of Matelot pajama—spinning with Ursula Andress on a round and revolving fuschia-covered bed surrounded by mirrors. Andress’s character, Vesper, is filming home movies at the time, after which, meaninglessly, she shoots still photos of Evelyn Tremble as Hitler, Napoleon, an ano
nymous flaming queen (“Hello, sailor!”), and Toulouse-Lautrec.
Peter’s card game with Orson is pretty much the disaster it promised to be, given that the two actors appear together in only one setup, with the rest of the sequence being filmed in individual shots. The characters look like they’re worlds apart; even with the flagrantly artificial mise-en-scène of Casino Royale the camera doesn’t lie. And despite some marvelous special effects, the subsequent scene in which Le Chiffre tortures Tremble is obviously filmed not only in separate shots but in separate sets. “The most exquisite torture is all in the mind,” Le Chiffre tells Tremble before pulling the switches. He may be right, but by the time the spaceship lands in Trafalgar Square, one just doesn’t care anymore.
Casino Royale opened in April 1967, with a royal command performance in London. Kathy Parrish remembers the queen sitting in one row laughing and enjoying herself and Feldman sitting in the row behind her, knowing the gargantuan thing just wasn’t any good. Notices were mixed, but the film did find its audience and made at least some of its money back. It has but a few critical defenders today. One is the film scholar Robert Von Dassanowsky, who sees in its fragmented pastiche a grander philosophy: “The failure of modernity and a celebration of what Umberto Eco would call the postmodern ‘crisis of reason’ permeates nearly every scene of Casino Royale.” If Von Dassanowsky is right, then Peter Sellers himself really may turn out to be the quintessential postmodern man.
SIXTEEN
Fragmentation reigned, as it must for every postmodernist. Peter’s constant dieting continued, as did his marital discord and bad-tempered parenting, all broken up with pleasant evenings spent around a piano with friends, singing, laughing, and being the man he could have been if he hadn’t been so many other less agreeable people in the meantime.
