Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  Joe McGrath and Peter Sellers made up after Peter himself walked away from Casino Royale. McGrath reports: “I got a letter from Peter later, apologizing, saying, ‘I’m terribly sorry about what happened, I was wrong. We will work together again, I promise you.’ ” They were having drinks at the Dorchester bar soon thereafter when a Columbia executive came by the table. “Joe!” he cried. “God! I’m so sorry that you left the film! It was that bastard Sellers that fucked everything up. And it’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Allen.”

  To keep the weight off, Peter ate nothing but spaghetti for a time. There was also a Chinese vegetable diet, a macrobiotic diet, and a yoga diet. There was a wine-and-steak diet, too. For a while he consumed only bananas.

  The children continued to find life with their father to be difficult. Spike once commented that “he used the children as pawns. He loved them, but on his own terms. They had to love him when he demanded it.”

  “He threw me out of home for the first time when I was eight or nine,” Michael Sellers says. “He asked us who we loved more, our mother or him. Sarah, to keep the peace, said, ‘I love you both equally.’ I said, ‘No, I love my mum.’ He threw the two of us out and said he never wanted to see us again.” But of course he did, and of course their encounters were just as troubled, if not quite so memorable. Michael was shuttled around a lot, and not only between his parents. “By the time I was twelve I’d been to about eight or nine different schools.” He and Sarah liked their stepmother, though. “Britt was interested in us,” says Sarah. “None of his other women was.”

  As for Peg, her hostility to Britt seemed to wane a bit over time, perhaps in response to Britt’s obvious affection for Michael and Sarah. Baby Victoria didn’t get much affection from Grandma, though. “Peg did not like the role of Grannie,” says Ekland. “And she would always refer to Victoria as ‘it.’ ”

  • • •

  Peg Sellers, the former vaudeville showgirl, cut an increasingly bizarre figure around mod, swinging London in the mid-1960s. “She liked to wear little-girl dresses and even flaunted mini-skirts although she was well past sixty,” Britt reports. “She also painted thick lashings of rouge on her face and bright, glossy lipstick.”

  Peg’s heavy consumption of liquor and cigarettes had done nothing but increase throughout her widowhood. Britt couldn’t help but notice that she hid her smokes under the cushions of the couch and decanted her booze into empty medicine bottles, which she then stashed in the bathroom cabinet, all to keep Peter from confronting his mother’s vices directly. Still, says Ekland, “I got along with Peg well and I knew that as long as I didn’t betray the secret of her gin reservoirs, I always would.”

  • • •

  Through it all, Peter’s closest and most trusted friends provided him with the greatest comfort. “The thing about psychiatry, I found, is just talking to someone,” he mentioned to a British newspaper in 1966, “and in England if you have some good friends, as I have, then you don’t need to go to a psychiatrist.” Maybe, maybe not.

  But the fact is, Peter did find compassion and solace among his mates. Spike, Joe McGrath, Graham Stark, Kenneth Griffith, David Lodge—these men showed him the kind of mercy that most frail people deserve but rarely receive. Their companionship was genuine, particularly when, from Peter’s perspective, the rest of the world appeared inexplicably to become more and more hostile to him. His friends saw Peter’s oddities—how could they help but notice them, since he wore his eccentricities on his sleeve?—but they saw the tender core beneath. Also, he was hilarious.

  “He could be very, very funny,” says McGrath. “There used to be an Italian restaurant called the Tratou in London. Milligan, Peter, Eric Sykes, and myself—we would get our wives or girlfriends, whoever we were with at the time, and we’d go around at ten at night and have dinner. Then they would close the restaurant, but we were allowed to stay. There was a pianist called Alan Claire, who they used to use a lot in television shows—Frank Sinatra always used him when he came over—and he’d be there, and we would finish dinner and sit around till three or four o’clock in the morning, and Peter would sing. He’d sing standards, and Spike would play the trumpet. That’s a side that other people never saw.”

  For other people, the so-called normal, it takes great trust to expose their ugliest aspects to those closest to them. Typically, though, Peter Sellers got it backward. He trusted only his closest friends enough to reveal to them his essentially good heart.

  • • •

  In June of 1966, shortly after walking out on Casino Royale, Peter was named Commander of the British Empire by Elizabeth II in the Queen’s Birthday Honors List. The queen named Harold Pinter as well.

  Then destiny called: Peter spent four days shooting Alice in Wonderland (1967). He was the befuddled King of Hearts.

  “I didn’t want a lot of famous featured performances with lots of animal heads,” the director Jonathan Miller declares of his adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s philosophically absurd children’s book. The physician-turned-satirist and Goon Show fan had something darker and more cerebral in mind: “It’s rather melancholy. The film was designed to be a recreation of Victorian life and the melancholy of growing up—the Victorian thing about childhood being an innocent time and everything else being sad and decaying.” Miller made Alice in Wonderland on a relatively low budget for BBC television, a fact that did not discourage some of Britain’s best performers from appearing in it. “I asked John Geilgud, Michael Redgrave, Leo McKern, and Peter Cook, and then I went to Sellers [and] said, ‘Would you do it for as little as £500, which is all you’ll get paid by the BBC?’ ”

  Miller had worked with Peter in 1961. “I once appeared on what was then called a gramophone record with him—‘The Bridge on the River Wye.’ Peter Cook and I figured as minor characters in that, with Sellers rather brilliantly playing Alec Guinness, and it was quite funny. We spent a day doing it, and he was very jolly. There was lots of laughter then.” (The record, a spoof of the 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai, costarred Spike and used an old Goon Show episode, “The Africa Incident,” as the core; George Martin produced it. After the record was cut, but before it was released, the producers of the film threatened to sue, so Martin was forced painstakingly to remove the sound k from every utterance of “Kwai.” Hence “Wye.”)

  Miller couldn’t help but notice the change in Sellers, who was markedly troubled during the production of Alice in Wonderland. “He was a moody bugger, you know? He was very superstitious. If things had gone badly on the way to the location, if his stars hadn’t read right, he’d be sunk in a gloom and would be unwilling to film.” Still, Miller knew, “you could amuse him, and a sort of strange, mischievous smile would spread across his face.” The rest of the time, though, Peter “kept to himself and often sat apart in a deck chair in a starry gloom.”

  Peter Eyre, who played the Knave of Hearts, retains no fond memories of working with Sellers in Alice in Wonderland. “I thought Peter Sellers was going to be like an actor. But he wasn’t, really. He absolutely didn’t relate to any of the other actors. He had to be slightly polite to the old actress who played the Queen of Hearts, Alison Leggatt, but otherwise he was completely closed off as a person. He only ever loosened up when Snowdon came to photograph. There were a lot of well-known actors in the production; I don’t remember him actually speaking to anybody. And those other famous actors, like Michael Redgrave and John Gielgud—they weren’t like that at all. Then again, they didn’t have cars with chauffeurs. Sellers was a movie star.”

  As he had with Spike Milligan, Eyre attributes Peter’s distance to the fact that he was, at his core, a comedian: “They can’t bear the idea that somebody else is going to get a laugh. It’s like an illness.”

  Without contradicting those who found Peter to be generous to them in front of a camera, Eyre is probably right about what might be called the comedian’s curse. Apart from his closest friends, Peter’s richest relationships were with his audien
ces, particularly the ones he never saw. It was with the disconnected listeners and spectators of radio, television, and film that he most securely bonded, and he did so instinctively and spontaneously in flashes of raw creation.

  “He improvised very beautifully in the same tone as Carroll wrote,” Jonathan Miller explains. “I didn’t let anyone improvise unless they actually had the logic Carroll did.” Miller suggested that Peter play the King of Hearts as a familiar Goon Show routine: “I borrowed a character of his—that feeble old man, Henry Crun—very vague and unfocused. He improvised wonderfully at one moment—when the letter gets picked up, and the White Rabbit brandishes it and says, ‘This letter’s just been picked up,’ and the foreman of the jury says, ‘Who’s it written to?’ and he opens it up and says, ‘It seems to be a letter written by the prisoner to somebody.’ Sellers then said [in Henry Crun’s voice-of-the-shakes], ‘It must be that. I mean, it can’t just be written to nobody. You can’t just write to nobody. I mean, if you did that all the time, well, the post office would come to a standstill! I mean, you’ve got to have somebody, I mean, well—we-ee-ll—it’s not allowed!’ That was just the sort of thing that Carroll would have written.”

  When the camera wasn’t rolling, Sellers’s strangeness could be less appealing. Miller goes on: “He was fascinated by wealth and his Rolls Royce and his various attendants who looked after him and the peculiar sort of Barbie-doll wife he had. He gave a party for my wife and me and a number of other people at his house, and I remember there was an enormous champagne bucket filled with caviar. It did seem rather immoderate.

  “He was a difficult man—sort of show biz, sort of genius, but completely empty when he wasn’t playing anyone. He was a receptacle rather than a person. And whatever parts he played completely filled the receptacle, and then they were drained out. And the receptacle was left empty and featureless. Like a lot of people who can pretend to be other people very convincingly and change their characters, he could do so because he hadn’t had any character himself—not unlike Olivier in that way.” But, Miller quickly adds, “He was much more subversive and interesting and modern than Olivier.”

  • • •

  As early as June 1966, with Casino Royale still stumbling forward in production, Variety reported that two Hollywood producers, Jerry Gershwin and Elliott Kastner, had grown so skeptical of Peter’s Hollywood agent Harvey Orkin’s dismissive treatment of them—Orkin told the producers that Peter was booked solid for the measurable future—that they had taken it upon themselves to get on a plane, fly to London, and deliver a new screenplay to him personally, and that Peter had agreed to do the picture. One week later, everybody having been sufficiently embarrassed by the story, Variety noted that Gershwin and Kastner vehemently denied the whole thing. No, the producers categorically stated in Hollywood’s trade paper of record; they had made Peter’s deal for The Bobo (1967) directly with Harvey Orkin.

  Bobo means fool in Barcelona. The script had much to recommend it, including a European location, an accent, a bizarre sight gag, and a role for Britt. The ridiculous yet somehow suave Juan Bautista arrives in Barcelona from a remote village and bills himself as the greatest singing matador in all of Spain. (“I sing before, after, and during, but not so much during, as it is difficult to sing when I am running.”) A corpulent impresario agrees to book him in his theater on one condition: that he conquer and humiliate the greatest blond in all of Spain—Olimpia (Britt), a spoiled, capricious, voluptuous ball-breaker who has, of course, spurned the impresario. An elaborate masquerade ensues before Olimpia discovers Juan Bautista’s true identity and exacts her strange revenge by dyeing him blue from head to toe. He ends up in a Barcelona bull ring as “the singing blue matador” and performs before a cheering crowd. She drives off with a genuinely rich suitor, a man more her speed.

  Originally, Peter hoped to direct as well as star in The Bobo, which was scheduled for production at Cinecittà in the fall. But by the middle of the summer he’d decided to limit himself to performing, and Robert Parrish took over as the film’s director. “The trouble is,” Peter explained, “my role starts early in the movie and goes right through to the end. So does Britt’s. In order to make the most of my role and the scenes with Britt, I’ve had to concentrate on acting, not directing, this time.”

  • • •

  The Bobo became, as Parrish’s widow, Kathleen, describes it, “a disaster that we considered a death in the family and never mentioned.” Parrish himself told one comparatively benign tale in his memoirs: “After three weeks’ shooting in Rome, Peter called me aside and whispered, ‘I’m not coming back after lunch if that bitch is on the set.’ ‘Tell me which one and I’ll take care of it,’ I cringed. He had already had the script girl fired. I figured it was the makeup girl’s turn. ‘The one over my left shoulder, in the white dress. Don’t look now,’ he said, and slinked away to charm the cast and crew. The girl in the white dress was his wife and costar, Britt.”

  To Parrish’s surprise, he ran into the couple an hour or two later. They were lunching together at the Cinecittà commissary. “As I passed their table they raised their glasses to me.”

  One piece of information unavailable to Parrish is supplied by Michael Sellers, who reports that a few days before shooting began on The Bobo, Peter “got his solicitors to write to Britt and tell her that he intended to file for divorce.”

  • • •

  Peter took a few days away from The Bobo and flew to Paris to film a scene with Shirley MacLaine in MacLaine’s multicharacter comedy Woman Times Seven (1967). Directed by Vittorio De Sica, Woman Times Seven features MacLaine as the eponymous number of characters opposite an array of costars including Alan Arkin and Michael Caine. Peter’s scene was simple; there was little room for arguments with De Sica, and besides, his wife wasn’t his costar.

  As a funeral cortege makes its incongruous way through the park beneath the Eiffel Tower, a physician (Peter, looking very much like Auguste Topaze) comforts the widow, Paulette (MacLaine). The doctor’s comfort slides into a passionate declaration of love, prompting Paulette to cry all the harder—briefly. Soon they’re discussing where they’re going to live together, and before the casket has even reached the cemetery they diverge from the funeral route and walk off in each other’s arms.

  • • •

  On Monday, October 17, Peter arrived on The Bobo’s Cinecittà set at 4:10 P.M., having just watched all the rushes to date. “I’ve just seen the most wonderful film!” he exclaimed enthusiastically. “It’s marvelous!” He shot a scene or two with Parrish and finished at 7 P.M. At 8:30 P.M. Parrish picked up his ringing telephone. “I’m low on the film,” Peter told him. It was Britt’s fault. “Her reading of lines is amateurish,” her husband opined.

  It got worse.

  “Peter called Britt ‘a cunt’ in front of the entire cast and crew,” Kathleen Parrish states. Everyone froze, but the Italian crew members were especially mortified at Peter’s vulgar treatment of a woman—his own wife, a Scandinavian bombshell to top it all off, a lady whose toes they would gladly have kissed.

  A gregarious group, The Bobo’s crew enjoyed fixing a fairly elaborate lunch for themselves and a few select guests. They liked Robert Parrish—everyone did—and they invited him to join them once or twice. But they never wanted to have much to do with Peter at all, let alone share a meal they cooked themselves. And Peter, as always, wanted very much to be invited. According to Kathy Parrish, the “cunt” incident only served to cement the crew’s enmity, and afterward they became even more open in giving Peter the cold shoulder.

  So, in a grossly misguided effort to get the crew to like him and invite him to lunch, Peter bought a dozen knockoff Rolex watches and began doling them out as gifts.

  He approached the camera operator and handed him one of the cheap watches. The camera operator literally spat on it and threw it on the ground at Peter’s feet.

  At one point, Kathy Parrish invited Peter to lunch, and he was complete
ly at ease and low-key. “Peter could be charming,” she notes. They did a jaunty strutting dance together, the Lambeth Walk, and had a fine time in each other’s company. But as far as the production of The Bobo was concerned, she says, “it was ugly from beginning to end. Everything around Peter was awkward.”

  Peter and Britt had returned to the Appian Way—to a somewhat smaller villa than the one they’d rented during the production of After the Fox—but by this point the marriage was in even more drastic trouble. More (and bigger) furniture was hurled. During one rage Peter actually flipped the bed over. One of the castors hit Britt in the mouth and chipped a tooth. She proceeded to leave the production for several days—the mirror opposite of her behavior during Guns at Batasi, for this time she was fleeing from her husband.

  In the middle of it all, Peter got a phone call from London. Peg had suffered a heart attack.

  Robert Parrish asked Peter if he wanted to fly back to be with her. Peter replied that it wasn’t necessary, he spoke to her all the time. She died a few days later, without him.

  • • •

  “He used to be quite terrible to her at times,” Dennis Selinger once said of Peter and his mother, “and yet, probably she was the only woman in his life who really meant anything to him.”

  Peter and Britt flew to London for the funeral, after which Peter sent his mother’s ashes to North London to be interred with Bill’s at the Golders Green cemetery and columbarium. There is a plaque there, placed by Peter, who nonetheless did not visit the cemetery until 1980. As for Peg’s clothes, Peter gathered them from her apartment, took them to Brookfield, and burned them in the garden.

  Peg had moved on, but the mother-and-son heart-to-hearts are said by some to have continued from beyond the grave. “After she’d gone,” Selinger claimed, “he used to have conversations with her. He’d get into a room and talk to her for quite some time.” Evidently she succored him.