Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  Photoplay got the scoop: “Peter Sellers has his cast, crew, and friends so confused with his demands. Sellers, I’m told, ‘is behaving like a brat.’ Most popular joke on the Warners lot is when someone asks, ‘Was that a sonic boom?’ Answer: ‘No, that’s Sellers blowing his top.’ ”

  While Peter was filming I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! in Hollywood, Britt was in New York filming The Night They Raided Minsky’s, which left Peter more than enough room to come on to Leigh Taylor-Young. And yet Peter sent Britt at least twenty benevolent telegrams while they were separated. One was signed “Elizabeth and Philip,” another “Margaret and Tony.” “Richard and Elizabeth,” “John, Paul, George, and Ringo,” “Carlo and Sophia,” “Alec Guinness and Peter O’Toole,” and “Maharishi Yogi” were also among the well-wishers.

  Despite the violence and the grilling, Britt was still making an effort, however doomed, to be the wife Peter wanted, or claimed to want, so she shuttled back and forth between the Minsky’s shoot in New York and Peter in Los Angeles. Some weekends, one of her costars, Elliot Gould, would fly with her to Hollywood to spend two days with his wife, Barbra Streisand, who was filming Funny Girl (1968). The two couples sometimes had dinner together at Barbra’s beach house in Malibu.

  • • •

  On the set, Peter Sellers continued to live up to the gossip, but his brilliance when the camera was running kept striking his colleagues as well. He was “a magnificent artist,” declares the actor Salem Ludwig. “It was a pleasure to be on the set with him. Once the camera was on, you wouldn’t want more from an actor. He was really with you. He was so supportive on camera—he did everything to make you comfortable.”

  Then comes the inevitable caveat. Ludwig also had the opportunity to view Peter at his temperamental worst when he caused an incident with Jo Van Fleet on the day the pot brownies scene was scheduled to be shot. Though no one realized it at the time, the contretemps had actually begun brewing the day before. Knowing that one of the film’s key scenes would occupy them the following morning and afternoon, the actors, director, and crew wrapped up quickly, and everybody left the set except for the four brownie principals (Peter, Van Patten, Van Fleet, and Ludwig), the director Averback, and the two writers, Mazursky and Tucker. Ludwig recalls that a vague conversation began to arise—few words but lots of implications—but nobody said anything explicit until finally it had to be spelled out for Ludwig and Van Fleet: Everybody was supposed to head over to Peter’s place and get stoned. The plan was to use their experiences when the cameras rolled in the morning.

  Van Fleet and Ludwig each expressed concern about the illegality of smoking marijuana. Van Fleet was especially nervous about it and begged off, claiming to be allergic to the stuff. Besides, the two older actors said, they were actors. They could pretend. As Ludwig made a point of observing at the time, “You don’t have to actually explode an atomic bomb to get the effect of a mushroom cloud.” And so neither Ludwig nor Van Fleet went to Peter’s house to get high.

  There was a 7:30 A.M. call the next morning, but Peter didn’t show up. Everybody sat around waiting until finally, at about 11:30, Peter surfaced, smiling very broadly and greeting almost everyone with unusual effusion. (Ludwig figures the delay cost at least $40,000, but Sellers was characteristically unperturbed by that kind of expense.) The crew then launched into what Ludwig describes as the standard routine of filming with Peter, which is to say that Peter disappeared, the crew arranged everything precisely for him, and only then did they call him onto the set. Jo Van Fleet was sitting on the couch when he arrived. Sellers appeared and realized that she was the only person he hadn’t greeted yet.

  What he didn’t understand was that she was in character already. And unfortunately for Peter, her character was that of his mother. Clearly, she had her own idiosyncracies.

  In the manner of a six-year-old, Peter tiptoed up to the side of the couch and whispered, in a little-boyish way, “Jo.” She didn’t respond. He repeated it: “Jo.” And again she didn’t respond. He tiptoed around to the other side of the couch and tried again. “Jo.” Then he blew up. “I hope you’re feeling better this morning!” he shouted.

  “Oh, good morning, Peter,” Van Fleet said matter-of-factly.

  As Ludwig puts it, “Peter vituperated.” It was all directed at an astonished Jo. She was awful in the picture, Peter declared to the room, over and over, and with increasing amplitude. She was ruining the whole film, he roared. And by the way, she was ruining everyone else’s morale, too.

  “I realized he was talking about himself,” Ludwig observes.

  Joyce Van Patten slipped quickly away in a successful effort to distance herself from the acrimony. But Hy Averback simply froze in place, as did Mazursky and everyone else. Peter kept on yelling for a full twenty minutes. No one made any attempt to calm Peter down, nor did anyone come to Jo Van Fleet’s defense.

  “Peter?” Ludwig finally broke in. “Is there some grievance? Let’s go into your dressing room and talk about it.” “Yes,” Peter snapped. “It’s something very specific. It’s her general attitude!” And with that he marched off the set.

  Ludwig began to follow him but was restrained from doing so on the grounds that Peter needed no further encouragement. “If you do this,” someone said, “he’ll get on his yacht and we’ll never see him again.”

  Jo Van Fleet “went to pieces.” Distraught, she called her psychoanalyst and discussed it with him over the phone, after which she invited Ludwig to dinner that night and talked it through with him as well, at which point Mazursky telephoned and invited himself over for more conversation about Peter and his perceptions and what it all meant and what they were going to do about it. Mazursky expressed regret. “You did something I should have done,” he told Ludwig.

  The problem was easily but awkwardly solved the following day. The scene was shot in two parts. Peter and Joyce Van Patten performed on one side of the soundstage, while Jo Van Fleet and Salem Ludwig performed on the other. The editor Robert C. Jones pieced it all together later. (In fact, there is a single shot of the four characters all in the same space; the rest is done in close-ups and two-shots.)

  Sad to say, grudges were held. When I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! was about to open, Salem Ludwig was left conspicuously uninvited to the cast and crew screening. He called the production office and was told just to show up. He did so—and was promptly snubbed by Paul Mazursky.

  Sellers went on to bad-mouth the film in the press. “You should have seen it before they got at it. . . . They set up this marvelous Jewish wedding ceremony and at the last moment they lost their nerve and dubbed the rabbi into English! Now if the audience hadn’t gathered by then that he was a rabbi speaking Hebrew, I don’t see that there’s much hope for the human race.” (In fact, the brief shot of the rabbi’s lips moving proves that indeed Warner Bros. did embrace the lowest common denominator by overdubbing Hebrew into English.)

  A more outlandish complaint came much later, in 1980, when Peter expressed what appeared to be his long-standing outrage in a Rolling Stone profile:

  “I wish you’d seen the original one with the interviews with Allen Ginsberg and Tim Leary. Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker and myself, we got into the lab at night and we cut the film. Can you believe it? We bribed the guard, we spent all night with an editor, and when the schmucks came in the following day, we were there bright and early as though we’d just arrived, and we said, ‘Listen—we don’t like the finished film. We think you should see our attempts.’ So they see it and they say [impersonating a crass Hollywood executive] ‘Too weird. Who the fuck is Ginsberg? Who the fuck is Leary? People are going to know about Ginsberg and Leary in Orange County? I mean, dat’s ridiculous!’ I said, ‘They’re not for Orange County! They’re for the world!’ ”

  One must wonder one of two things: At what points were the narrative of I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! disrupted by interviews with two reigning gurus of the counterculture, or at what point did Peter fabricate the tale
?

  • • •

  With Britt in New York, London, or Sweden, and with Peter never being one for monogamy and Roman having introduced Peter to Mia Farrow, the two couples—Peter and Mia, Roman and Sharon—went into the desert.

  Their destination: Joshua Tree, California, a lunar terrain with parched, desolate earth punctuated by bizarre cacti, all conveniently located within a few minutes’ drive of Palm Springs. “Because of its reputation for UFO sightings,” Polanski recounts, “it was very much in vogue.” Necessarily, they all smoked some pot, after which Peter and Mia wandered into the dry wasteland holding hands. Unknown to them, Roman followed. He eavesdropped as they engaged in a deeply spiritual, mystical, ludicrous, and entirely appropriate dialogue about eternity, stars, and alien life forms. The puckish Polanski then tossed a stick at them from the darkness. “Did you hear that?!” Peter whispered. “What was it?” Mia asked.

  “I don’t know,” Peter replied, “but it was fantastic. Fantastic!”

  Peter and Mia were of their time and place, and it is only because their extraordinary talent and celebrated friends enabled them to remain famous for the next thirty or thirty-five years that their behavior during the sixties remains mock-worthy while the rest of us maintain our comfortable anonymity as though we never did anything similar at the time.

  Like anyone who could afford it, Peter and Mia enjoyed, as Polanski describes it, “dressing up as rich hippies, complete with beads, chunky costume jewelry, and Indian cotton caftans.” The Mamas and the Papas’ John Phillips recalls that Peter once walked in on a very stoned Mia and John and declared, colorfully, that he would get Mia “down from that drug if I have to pull you down by the pubic hairs.”

  At Christmastime 1967, Roman and Sharon invited Peter for a skiing holiday in Cortina. On Christmas Day, Sellers insisted on dressing as Santa Claus and handing out the gifts. Sharon helped him fashion the outfit—her fox fur coat, a red ski cap as a hat, and a white ski cap as a beard. But by the next day he had become so depressed and miserable that he left.

  On January 20, 1968, Peter was one of Roman and Sharon’s wedding guests at London’s Playboy Club; the club was run by Victor Loundes, who, as Gene Gutowski describes him, “had a very open house.” Naturally Warren Beatty, Rudolf Nureyev, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Sean Connery, Vidal Sassoon, Kenneth Tynan, and Laurence Harvey came to the party, too.

  Also that year Sonny and Cher hosted a party for Twiggy in their house in the Hollywood Hills; among the guests were Peter, Steve McQueen, Marlon Brando, Robert Mitchum, Tony Curtis, and Kirk Douglas.

  In 1968, Peter Sellers was surveying the world from a very lofty perch. The air at the top may have been growing thinner by the month, but it was still exceedingly fresh—if you didn’t notice the smoke.

  • • •

  The Mirisch brothers put another Pink Panther film on the drawing boards. But Blake Edwards wasn’t directing; the job went to Bud Yorkin.

  Inspector Clouseau (1968) “was first offered to Peter, and he refused it,” Edwards later said. Instead, the role went to Alan Arkin. “In all the years I knew Peter, in spite of all the times when he swore he was never going to do another Panther, he never stopped complaining about the fact that the Mirisch Company had chosen Arkin. Peter was a collector of grievances, but he seemed to bear more of a grudge concerning the Arkin thing than just about anything else. For the sake of my own sanity, I have long since stopped trying to figure it out.” Edwards goes on to say that Inspector Clouseau was the only unsuccessful Panther, but Peter took no consolation in its failure.

  Still, Peter did return, however briefly, to the familiar in the summer of 1968 when a televised Goon Show aired in Britain in early August. Written by Spike, directed by Joe McGrath, and produced by Peter Eton, the program was not an attempt to present Crun, Bluebottle, Minnie, Eccles, and Seagoon in action, as one might expect from a visual medium, but rather simply to film the three veteran Goons standing at microphones doing their voices, just as they had done on BBC radio. (Strangely, this TV Goon Show was not produced by the BBC but by Thames for ITV.)

  The show was not terribly successful. Milligan, who had originally been hired to write a new script, failed to be inspired to do so, and the Goons were forced to revert to the already late in the game “Tale of Men’s Shirts” from 1959. As a result, what might have been a promising television series was cut short by a weak pilot.

  • • •

  Richard Lester once observed that the trouble with Peter Sellers having reached and sustained international superstardom was that he stopped coming into contact with ordinary people. Lester’s point is not simply that he was emotionally isolated. More at issue for his work was that Peter’s luxurious detachment, punctuated by parties with the glitter bunch, left him without everyday models on whom to draw for character development. “If you’re in limousines all the time you don’t meet many people,” Lester said.

  According to Siân Phillips, Kenneth Griffith “used to try and get him to travel on the underground. He used to say to Sellers, ‘I honestly think it would give you a lot of interest in life—and peace of mind—if you mingled more and went on the subway with people.’ But you know how Sellers was. He was completely insane and had absolutely no intention.”

  At the same time, the benefits of interactions with the ordinary are thoroughly overrated as far as celebrities themselves are concerned. Movie stars’ lives can quickly turn grotesque whenever fans barge in. Peter told of his experience on a plane from Barcelona to Rome during the production of The Bobo. He was in first class when a group of tourists, in coach, learned there was a star on board: “For an hour they came in shifts of three to look at me. One man told me his brother-in-law had done the titles on one of my films and seemed offended when I didn’t know him. He asked me to write a note to his brother-in-law on a menu card saying I bumped into Ethel and George on the plane. Then Ethel and George argued about what I should say.” And at a Hollywood get-together, Peter once told, “a long, thin thing glided up to me at a party and said, ‘I do find all of your films terrifyingly boring.’ ”

  Robert Parrish was an independent witness to another such deformed encounter between Peter and his so-called fans. The two men were on a plane together—heading to Barcelona this time—when a group of Americans got on. They were each wearing a lapel button that read, “We smile more!” One of the smilers marched right up to Peter and said, “Mr. Sellers! I just saw one of your pictures recently, and it wasn’t very good, and I didn’t think your performance was very good either.”

  Sellers froze. “Thank you for pointing that out to me,” he muttered.

  As Spike Milligan once put it, “He sees himself as a clean person in a colony of lepers—can’t afford to mix with them too much if he’s to come out alive.”

  • • •

  For reasons with which only bitterly divorced people can perhaps fully sympathize, Peter and Britt flew to Venice for another reconciliation. Accompanied by Britt’s three terriers—Scruff, Pucci, and Fred—they sailed The Bobo through the Gulf of Trieste and down the Adriatic, ending the cruise at Brindisi. They flew over to Rome, checked into the Excelsior, and proceeded to have such a vicious fight that the night porter showed up and humbly made known to them their neighbors’ complaints. Britt took a few Valium and went to bed. She was awakened by Peter placing a telephone call to his Italian agent. “Franco,” Peter announced, “I want you to come to the hotel immediately and collect my wife. She is leaving Rome this instant. Our marriage is finished.” To his groggy wife he said, “Just get out of here and don’t ever come back. I never want to see you again, you bitch.” So she left.

  By midmorning of the following day, Peter had ordered the crew of The Bobo to throw all of Britt’s belongings onto the dock. Among the detritus were Scuff, Pucci, and Fred.

  Britt served Peter with divorce papers. Peter convinced Britt to have lunch with him. “I know I can’t live without you,” he told her, but she pursued the divorce
anyway. “For the first time in my life I was alone,” Britt writes, though her solitude didn’t last very long, for she soon took up with Count Ascanio “Bino” Cicogna, an Italian playboy who went out and bought a bigger yacht than The Bobo.

  The divorce was finalized on December 18, 1968. Spike sent Britt a congratulatory telegram.

  Two days later, Peter arrived at London’s fashionable Mirabelle restaurant for a dinner party with Roman, Sharon, Warren, Julie, and the producer Sam Spiegel. Not surprisingly, Peter’s date was a beautiful and fashionable blond film star. Oddly, she was Britt Ekland. The date ended at Peter’s place when Peter pulled down his £1,200 shotgun and threatened to shoot his ex-wife to death. “Don’t be silly, Peter,” was Britt’s adept reply. Knowing who she was dealing with, she kept talking to him in a soothing voice until she could slip the gun out of his hands. Then he burst into tears.

  EIGHTEEN

  On his own—at least away from Britt—Peter kept running with the fast-living Polanski crowd, which, in addition to Roman and Sharon and Warren and Julie, included Yul Brynner, Peter Lawford, Gene Gutowski, the playboy Jay Sebring, and the screenwriter James Poe.

  As Polanski himself describes it, “There was quite a bunch of friends during this period; we were all usually in a very happy mood. Having had a few drinks or having just smoked a joint, we would start joking and kidding around, and it would develop into a kind of routine. We would start playing Italians, you know—just pretending we spoke Italian. There were always two arguing, and one other would sort of stand and observe, and then he would get involved in the argument of the other two. One of the two would start arguing with him, leaving the other one out. And it would go around like this—we could do it for hours. Sometimes we would do operas, make up singing. Often we would do Spaniards—whatever came to our minds. It was dependent on the kind of drink we had had and the extent of our drunkenness. It was really great fun.”