Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  “There was a fabulous happening,” Gene Gutowski fondly recalls, “the premiere of Rosemary’s Baby in Paris. Peter was very much in attendance. We took over a whole hotel—the little place where Oscar Wilde had lived and died. It had become a showpiece, boutique-type hotel. We had a magnificent three-day party, the whole place reeking of, uh, substances, controlled or uncontrolled, mostly un-. Peter liked to indulge.”

  Asked whether Peter’s drug use made his mood swings more drastic, Gutowski answers, “It’s difficult for me to judge. He definitely had mood changes, but I couldn’t tell you if it was under the influence of whatever he was taking or smoking or was just simply his nature. He would be quite happy and suddenly become very depressed and dark. That was typical of him.”

  Peter took a casual attitude toward carrying drugs across international borders. “He was very friendly with a great friend of Roman’s,” Gutowski explains, “a Moroccan Jewish film director by the name of Simon Hessera. Simon was forever trying to make a picture, and he became very friendly with Peter. Peter spent some time in Rome, and before he left, he left me a note: Would I please collect a jar of honey from an English lady at an address in Rome and have Simon bring it to him in London? It was as simple as that.

  “When I sent Simon to pick up the honey, it was an extraordinary amount of money—something like $200. Simon was quite amazed and upset about it: ‘What is this stupid thing? What kind of honey is he eating?’ I said, ‘Simon, I really don’t know. He’s a health freak. Maybe it’s royal jelly. Just shut up and take it to London.’

  “Poor Simon, shaking his head, carried it to London. Soon after, he realized that this honey was heavily laced with hashish. Peter was giving it out in tiny spoonfuls to his friends. When Simon found out what he’d carried past customs he was very upset.”

  • • •

  Michael Sellers started smoking marijuana at age thirteen. Peter didn’t realize it at the time, but he was his own son’s drug connection, for the boy simply snitched it from his father’s stash, which Peter kept stored in empty film canisters around the house. “There was so much of the stuff that I knew he wouldn’t miss a little. . . . It was like his pills. He had thousands of them, and I would help myself to amphetamines or Mandrax sleeping pills.”

  Sarah kept a defensive low profile. A cute, quiet child, she let her mother raise her. When Peter demanded her presence, she went along.

  Victoria Sellers’s first memories are of Brookfield, its ducks and geese, the chicken coop, the trampoline Peter put up in the yard, and the pastel-pink bedroom in which she slept, always with the lights on, for she knew the house was haunted.

  Peter sold Brookfield to Ringo Starr in 1969 for £60,000.

  • • •

  His offscreen concerns seem mostly to have been money and women. Peter could be as cheap as he was extravagant. It depended on his mood. He’d treat his friends to dinners, trips on his yacht, baubles; then, without warning, he’d make them foot the bills. A friend of his, the skiing instructor Hans Moellinger, got a taste of this after a trip with Peter to Vienna. “He was always telling me about buying property in the Seychelles, and this and that—he was obviously very rich—but in a way he was very stingy. Once we were staying at the Hotel Sacher with two beautiful girls, and. . . .” Asked who Peter’s companion was, Moellinger is vague. “I was with Miss Sweden at the time, and she always had five or six friends around. . . . And we went to the opera and did the usual sightseeing, and finally we left. The bill was the equivalent of about two or three thousand dollars nowadays. I thought he paid it. One or two weeks later I got an invoice. It said, ‘Mr. Sellers thought you should pay the bill.’ Can you imagine? At that time my monetary situation was not so good,” the ski coach notes.

  As for the ideal woman, Peter had a dream—one of many. “These photographs you see of Gorky or Goethe,” Peter remarked to Joe McGrath one day.

  “What are you talking about?” the confused McGrath replied. “He said, ‘Well, I don’t have any photographs of Goethe. But those Russian writers, and those early American writers—they’re all sitting there, and there’s a cottage in the background, and there’s always a woman, slightly out of focus, drying her hands on a towel. That’s what I want—that sort of woman. I really want somebody that’s going to be a cushion for me.’ ”

  Peter did not go wanting for women after his second marriage ended, but most appear to have been cushions of a very different sort. He revealed to one girlfriend the secret of his success: as a pickup line he’d tell them he was descended from Lord Nelson, a throwback to his chubby childhood. But faking lineage can’t have been his only skill. Peter Sellers was a desirable man: funny, glamorous, rich, handsome (yes, he was handsome), and world-famous. His good looks were precise and curious, distinctly unconventional. He radiated on a physical level—the flashing smile, the slim frame he worked daily to carve from a naturally larger mass, sad eyes that pierced nonetheless. And he was sexy; and women knew it. Britt Ekland once revealed that Peter displayed what she called “extraordinary talents as a lover.” She knew his flaws better than almost anyone, but, as she acknowledged, “If some things disappointed me in our marriage, that was never one of them.” Among the beautiful women he dated around this time were Zsa Zsa Gabor’s daughter Francesca Hilton and Alice Joyce, a Pan American Airlines flight attendant, to whom Peter actually proposed.

  Emotionally, he was perpetually disappointed; sexually, he got what he wanted. The paradox tore at him. “His intimate life, with the women . . . ,” Polanski says, trailing off and beginning again. “It was not always what you would call the happiest relationships.”

  In the drawing rooms of London, Peter’s skills at seduction led to increasing speculation about the precise nature of his friendship with Princess Margaret, particularly when her own marriage to Lord Snowdon became more publicly rocky. With Tony causing talk about his relationship with Lady Jacqueline Rufus Isaacs, Margaret was rumored to be spending time alone with Peter at his Mayfair apartment. According to Margaret’s biographers, the source of the rumor was—guess—Peter himself.

  Siân Phillips saw him in action one evening “at dinner when I was in a show in the West End. I got there after my performance, and I thought, well, I know everybody—except for one little woman I didn’t know at all. ‘She’s obviously not in the business, I’ll catch up with her later.’ ” And so Siân Phillips sat down. “O’Toole was laughing, of course, because he didn’t give a damn, but Sellers was looking absolutely ashen because I reserved her for later. Of course, it was Princess Margaret. She was the only one I hadn’t recognized. Sellers really wanted to impress her. He wanted everything to go really well; he didn’t want any hiccups.” Phillips notes, “You had to be careful around her. I don’t know if those stories about him and her are true or not, but certainly she was terrifying to be out with. She’d be a nice little person singing songs and playing the piano, and then suddenly she was HRH and you had to grovel. You couldn’t overstep the mark.”

  “Well, I obviously don’t know how intimate they were,” Joe McGrath states. “But they were very, very close. Oh yeah, very. They were all close. I mean, so was Tony.”

  As for Margaret’s feelings about Peter, she once remarked that he was “the most difficult man I know.” He proved the point when he called her on the telephone one day and did an excruciating imitation of her husband describing in obscene detail one of his dates with Jackie Rufus Isaacs.

  • • •

  One day about twenty years earlier—he and Anne were still married—Peter Sellers looked across a London park and spied a pretty little three-year-old girl. He began dating her in 1968, when she was twenty-one.

  Miranda Quarry was delicate but curvy, with long, straight hair and an aristocratic bearing. Her stepfather was noble in the technical sense of the word; he was Lord Mancroft, a former junior minister in Parliament. Miranda was a patrician hippie without any of the distracting dirt or politics. She moved in the circles expected
of her; her peers were literally so.

  She and Peter crossed paths since their earliest encounter in the park. A modern debutante, Miranda had once taken a come-and-go job creating floral arrangements in the Dorchester’s flower shop, where Peter used to buy bouquets for Britt. They met again on the set of his new picture, The Magic Christian—she was a publicity assistant at that point—and soon began dating. It was an affair of convenience. She liked to hang around with Peter and his movie people, Peter enjoyed romancing a delicious aristocrat, and they got together when it was convenient.

  Peter’s first wife and two daughters comment on his relationships with women during this period:

  Victoria: “As any man would be who is no longer married, he went out with a lot of different women, and traveled here and there, and decided to rent a house in this country for a few months, and then, no, no, we’re going to rent a house here, and then we’re going to stay in that hotel. . . . It was all mixed up and jumbled but, I would say, interesting.”

  Sarah: “That’s how he operated. Once he got bored with one toy, he wanted the next. It was a constant quest, really, and I think the women were just a part of that. . . . I think he found it very difficult to have a decent relationship. It probably boils down to his mother.”

  Anne: “He used to bring me all his new acquisitions in the way of girlfriends, so that ‘Mum’ could see them and tell him what I thought of them.”

  If some men seem unable to deal with women apart from the categories of the virgin and the whore, Peter Sellers, as usual, provided a novel twist. His classifications were the virginal sexpot and his own mother. Anne, never either, now found herself hideously transformed into a woman she despised and thus had no desire to emulate for her ex-husband. Peter wasn’t able to help himself, and she was unable to stop him.

  • • •

  “It started off with Terry Southern,” says Joe McGrath. “We were going to do Flash and Filigree, his other novel, but Peter said, ‘No, let’s do The Magic Christian [1969]’.”

  Given Peter’s recent history with directors, McGrath found himself the object of warnings from friends and associates. “Some people said, ‘You accepted the poison chalice.’ I said, ‘I don’t really see it like that, you know.’

  “He could be very depressive. If you got him on a bad day he could fuck up the day’s filming for you. But I got to know him well enough that I could say to him, ‘You’re obviously exhausted’ and just send him home. He had this great thing that comedy is—energy. And if you are not feeling fit or good, you can’t be funny.

  “He always avoided confrontations, so I think an awful lot of people thought him devious. He would never face up to confrontation. He would say, ‘Excuse me’ or something and go somewhere else, then have a minion tell the person, ‘This is what we’re doing.’ I got past that with him. He would have a confrontation with me. Not on the floor. He would say, ‘Can we go to the dressing room?’ or something, and then we would figure it out and argue it and discuss it and then he would come back and do it. By that time I knew Peter well; I could tell him what I thought. As Spike Milligan always said, ‘Once you go past that barrier with Peter, you’re a friend. But if you don’t, he’ll always look on you as some servant he’s telling what to do.’ ”

  Peter was in Hollywood on January, 22, 1969, when he held a combination cocktail party and press conference for The Magic Christian at the Beverly Hills Hotel. But it was his costar who fielded many of the questions, and they mostly didn’t have to do with The Magic Christian. Ringo Starr was about to join the other Beatles for their final public performance on the roof of the Apple building in London the following week.

  John Lennon had been the first choice for the role, but Lennon wasn’t able to do it. Hence Ringo. The good-natured drummer’s last picture, Candy (1968), called on him to play a Latino gardener in hot pursuit of the title character, a nubile female Candide. (Candy, scripted by Buck Henry, is based on Terry Southern’s novel of the same name.) In The Magic Christian, he plays Peter’s character’s adopted son. It was less of a stretch.

  Ringo found the experience of acting with Sellers to be particularly strange, owing to the two men having known each other for years without cameras rolling in the background. “I knew [him] quite well, but suddenly there he was going into character, and I got confused,” said Ringo.

  “The amazing thing with Peter was that, though we would work all day and go out and have dinner that night—and we would usually leave him laughing hysterically, because he was hilarious—the next morning we’d say, ‘Hi, Pete!,’ and we’d have to start again. There was no continuation. You had to make the friendship start again from 9 o’clock every morning. We’d all be laughing at 6 o’clock at night, but the next morning it would be, ‘Hi, Pete!,’ then ‘Oh, God!’ We’d have to knock the wall down again to say ‘hello.’ Sometimes we’d be asked to leave the set, because Peter Sellers was being Peter Sellers.”

  For his part, Sellers had only positive comments about Starr’s performance. “Ringo is a natural mime,” said Peter. “He can speak with his eyes.” Ringo said of Peter, “He would always say, ‘It’s your eyes, Ring. It’s your eyes. They’ll be two hundred feet big up there, you know.’ ”

  • • •

  The story goes: Sir Guy Grand, KG, KC, CBE (Peter), a lonely but immensely wealthy aristocrat, meets a homeless youth (Ringo) and immediately adopts him. (KG stands for Knight, Most Noble Order of the Garter, and CBE for Commander, the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. There is no KC in the British system of honors, so let’s call it an informal abbreviation of KCB, which stands for Knight Commander, the Most Honourable Order of the Bath.) “Well, then, Youngman Grand,” Guy states after the brief ceremony. “Father!” Youngman cries. Together they spend a lot of money in a series of colorful, seemingly pharmaceutically oriented, more or less disconnected adventures.

  Guy and Youngman attend a performance of Hamlet; the lead, Laurence Harvey, performs the soliloquy as a strip show routine, getting down to—and past—the Danish prince’s bodkin, in this case a black leather jockstrap. (“You’ve got to hand it to that Laurence Harvey,” Youngman Grand remarks to Guy. “He really knows his job.”) A train trip turns into a psychedelic burlesque show with a strobe light sequence. A shooting expedition becomes a World War II battlefield complete with machine guns, artillery, and tanks. (They barbecue a bird with a flame-thrower.) At a fine art auction, Guy notices a dark portrait and engages a Sotheby’s representative (John Cleese) in conversation. The rep tells him that while the painting has not been specifically attributed to the master himself, it is decidedly of the school of Rembrandt:

  GUY: (in Peter’s parody-Eton-ish lockjaw voice) I like “School of Rembrandt.” Yes, I enjoy all the French painters.

  SOTHERBY’S REPRESENTATIVE: (without the parody) Uh, well, Rembrandt was, in a sense, Dutch.

  Guy purchases the painting out of auction for £30,000, cuts out the nose, which he keeps, and orders Sotheby’s to burn the useless rest. With its purposeful incoherence and stabs at druggy social satire, The Magic Christian is, like Peter and Mia’s cosmic walk in the desert, distinctly of its time and place.

  • • •

  According to Terry Southern’s son, Nile, “Peter would get agitated when he wasn’t working. He would just get really eager and impatient and just start working on the material, and he’d bring in his other friends to start working on it, and it ended up that, like, nine people ended up working on that script.” Terry used to joke that Peter would just run into someone at a cocktail party and the next thing anyone knew, that person was rewriting the script of The Magic Christian.

  Graham Chapman and John Cleese were among them. Chapman once declared that the future Monty Python stars—Monty Python’s Flying Circus premiered on the BBC a few months later in October 1969—had originally been hired “to write in a part for Ringo Starr. The reason given was so that the financiers could find the money to make the movie.” Joe McGrath re
members the situation rather differently: “Cleese and Chapman were pretty unknown at the time, but Peter wanted them. Terry resented them quite a lot, [but] Peter insisted on bringing them in because he was going to play Guy Grand as an Englishman. We got the money in this country, so it was set in England.” McGrath adds, “At one point, before he could find his voice, he was actually playing it like Groucho Marx.”

  In any case, Chapman described his experience on The Magic Christian as “an ordeal-by-fire.” According to him, he and Cleese wrote a scene in which a very nervous man was to sit on a hostess’s Pekinese and kill it. Sellers “laughed hysterically at it, but the next day when we came back to see Peter, he’d gone off it totally. He’d actually read this piece of script to the man who delivered his milk, and he hadn’t laughed. So it was out.”

  Cleese, says McGrath, is “very funny in the Sotheby’s scene, but I had to bring him back. The first day he was a nervous wreck. He couldn’t play opposite Peter. He said, ‘My God, I never realized the heat that comes off him.’

  “At the end of the first day [of shooting Cleese’s sequence], Peter said to me, ‘We’ve really got to get rid of him and cast somebody else. Surely we can cast somebody else and bring him in tomorrow.’ He’d just blown the first day, [so] I said, ‘Let me talk to him.’ Sellers said, ‘I’m going home—you obviously want to see yesterday’s dailies—so give me a call later.’

  “I went up to see John in the dressing room. He was really in tears. He said, ‘I know I have blown this, I understand if you don’t want me back tomorrow, I understand what’s going on. . . .’ I said, ‘Now look. Peter has gone home, so what we’ll do is we’ll have an early call tomorrow, and we’ll shoot some reverses on the scene we did today.’ We got him in early, and we shot the reverses, and I sent that reel off immediately to be developed. Peter came in about 10:00 A.M. and I showed it to Peter, who looked at it and said, ‘Oh, yeah, we can use it. I think he’s just very nervous.’ Peter and I went up to John’s dressing room, and everything was okay.”