Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  Gail Gerber, Southern’s companion, recalls chaos of a more literary nature:

  “Terry became nonplussed the first time when he realized that the producers had decided it was ‘episodic’ and needed something to tie it together. They thought, or maybe Terry thought, that Guy Grand could adopt a son or something. Terry always took suggestions in good faith.

  “He was prepared to write in the son, which he did, and fortunately Ringo got to do the part. He was great in it—weird and great. Of course the book had nothing to do with any of that, but this was a pretty off-the-wall production anyhow.

  “There were lots of phone calls. ‘You’ve got to get to London! You’ve got to get to London!’ We were going to leave Burroughs in our apartment on 36th Street [the poet William S. Burroughs, the author of Naked Lunch and Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict] and go to London, but Terry kept dragging his feet for some reason until finally we got on a plane and went. Meanwhile they’d already started shooting.

  “Because Terry wasn’t there, Peter got all these other writers. They went for a whole different sort of slapstick thing. By the time we got there, several scenes were, in Terry’s estimation, ruined. There was the hunting scene, where they were blowing away birds until they were charcoal, and what mostly offended Terry was the scene at the auction house. Guy Grand was a very kind person and a great connoisseur of art, and he would never, ever plunge a knife into a fine painting. But they got carried away in their own funny way.”

  One day, says Gerber, “Terry came back from the set and said, ‘You’ll never believe what they said today. “We’ve got Raquel Welch!” ’

  “Terry said, ‘I don’t have a part for Raquel Welch.’ “They said, ‘Well, write one.’ ”

  • • •

  Cameos abound in The Magic Christian.

  Spike Milligan turns up as a traffic warden. He gives Guy Grand’s black Mercedes limousine a parking ticket, only to be told by Grand that if he eats the ticket he’ll get £500. So he eats it.

  Michael Sellers appears as a teenage hippie.

  Wilfrid Hyde-White plays the ship’s captain. (The Magic Christian is the name of the oceanliner.)

  Christopher Lee is the ship’s vampire.

  Roman Polanski sits alone at the ship’s bar. A large, diamond-brooched blond approaches him and asks, “Would you like to buy a girl a dwink?” Through the haze of Polanski’s cigarettes, she begins to sing “Mad About the Boy,” parades theatrically around the room, and pulls her wig off to reveal the head of Yul Brynner.

  Everyone adjourns to the engine room, where they find seventy bare-breasted women rowing the ship forward. Their slavemistress: Raquel Welch. She’s “the Priestess of the Whip.” “In, out! In, out! In, out!” Raquel cries. King Kong then kills Wilfrid Hyde-White.

  Terry Southern wanted Stanley Kubrick to appear in a cameo, too, but as McGrath notes, “Stanley was just never available.”

  Peter himself performs an eerie sort of cameo in The Magic Christian. McGrath explains: “He plays the part of a nun. You just see this nun occasionally in the back of the train.” With a demented smile on her face, the good sister shoots photos during the strobe-light sequence. “That’s Peter. He had the nun outfit on, and he called up and said ‘Joe, quick, quick! Come up to the dressing room!’ Of course I rushed up there. I thought there was something wrong with him.

  “He had the wimple on and said, ‘Who am I?’

  “I said, ‘You’re Peg.’ ”

  “ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m Peg.’ He looked exactly like her.”

  • • •

  “The last scene in the movie is a shit vat, where everybody goes into the shit for money,” observes McGrath. “Terry and I insisted that we do this in the States under the Statue of Liberty.”

  So the cast and crew finished up in London and prepared to go to New York to film rich people wallowing for dollars in a tank full of feces.

  “We were having this wrap party in London,” Gail Gerber looks back. “There were about thirty of us at a giant round table. Peter was dating Miranda Quarry at the time, and we’re onto coffee and, well, you know how a hushed silence can fall? Well, it fell. And my voice rang out saying that I had never had an ocean voyage. Peter picked up on it immediately and said, ‘Yes! We must take the QE2 to New York! Don’t you think, Miranda?’ ”

  It was not an idle question. At the time, Lord Mancroft, Miranda’s stepfather, was a director of the Cunard Line, of which the Queen Elizabeth II was the flagship. Luxury transatlantic passage was swiftly arranged. “We all got a free trip,” says McGrath.

  Gail Gerber recites the passenger list on the QE2: “There was Peter, and Miranda, and a BBC crew following them, and the producer, and his wife, and Derek Taylor (because of Ringo), and his wife, and five children, and nanny, and Ringo, and Maureen, and was it one or two kids?, and a nanny, and Terry and me. Allen Klein was on the ship as well. What the hell was he doing there?” McGrath adds, “John Lennon was supposed to come with us, but he got turned back at Southampton because of the visa thing. He’d come down from London with us. In fact, we’d all gone down in the big Mercedes limo we used in the film.” (Derek Taylor was the Beatles’ friend and press agent; Maureen was Ringo’s wife; Allen Klein was in the process of becoming the Beatles’ manager, a relationship that soon soured and ended in protracted litigation. John Lennon was denied a visa by the United States Embassy in London because of his arrest and conviction for marijuana possession in October 1968.)

  “Hash oil, tobacco, cannabis, dynamite-like opium. . . .” Terry Southern is reciting the drug list on the QE2. “Peter became absolutely enthralled—he couldn’t get enough. For five days we were kind of in a dream state.”

  “They were all out of their heads,” McGrath notes. “There were blankets being rolled up and stuffed under doors.”

  On the first night, there came a rap on McGrath’s door. He opened it to find Peter dressed as the leader of a gang of nineteenth-century London street urchin pickpockets. “Good evening,” said Peter. “I am the ship’s Fagin. Tomorrow I shall be the ship’s purser, but tonight I am the ship’s Fagin!” All night long he knocked on people’s doors and greeted them singing “You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two.”

  The stabilizers weren’t working properly—those of the QE2—and not only Gail Gerber but some members of the crew became violently seasick. Luckily, Sellers had brought along a remedy. “Peter had a great big jar of honey,” Gerber relates, “and a big, long-handled spoon. It was laced with hash oil. And with everybody he would meet, he’d dip the spoon in and pass it around. He thought it was absolutely wonderful. He saw me all green, and he dipped the spoon in and gave me some. I felt a lot better.”

  An advance team had flown across the Atlantic and, as McGrath continues, “set up to do the shit vat on the island under the statue. At the last minute Commonwealth United, which put the money up, said no. ‘We’re not going along with this—it’s making it too hot for us.’ ‘You mean hot for the money men,’ Terry said. Sellers then paid out of his own pocket, and we shot it down on the banks of the Thames with St. Paul’s and all that in the background. Sellers paid for that himself, and later on Commonwealth United gave him back the money. But they wouldn’t do it under the Statue of Liberty. They wanted the movie, they wanted Peter Sellers, ‘We’ll give you anything, do it, do it, do it. . . .’ But, when it came to that, as Terry said, it was too hot for them.”

  The Magic Christian, shit scene and all, was given a Royal Charity world premiere at the Kensington Odeon Theater in London on December 11, 1969, to benefit Britain’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Princess Margaret, president.

  Spike Milligan provided the last word some years later: “It’s a very funny film. I loved every inch of it. You’ve really got to hate people to love this film.”

  • • •

  Throughout 1969, as the Beatles’ personal behavior toward one another deteriorated—Paul was getting bos
sier, John wanted the group to break up, George resented Paul telling him how to play the guitar, Ringo was very nice—they recorded an anthem not of mere tolerance but of a more genuine acceptance, touched as it was with resignation. “Let It Be,” they sang. Some of their recording sessions—not only for “Let It Be” but other songs as well, along with their rooftop concert—were filmed for inclusion in the film Let It Be (1970).

  Peter turns up in a scene that wasn’t used in Let It Be’s final cut, for obvious reasons. The band is sitting on couches taking a break when their good friend Pete shows up and pleasantly offers them some knockout grass. It’s a facetious conversation punctuated by a lot of merry laughter, but it still doesn’t seem terribly far off the mark in terms of Peter’s habits at the time, not to mention the Beatles’ own drug use.

  Alas, the deal doesn’t go down. Paul claims that he’s stopped smoking pot; to be precise, Paul claims that a fictitious biographer has claimed that he has stopped smoking pot. Peter expresses great disappointment at this news, especially, he says, because he so fondly recalls the fantastic weed they’d once shared. As the dejected Peter makes his exit, Paul pushes things a little too far by advising Peter not to leave any syringes on the floor of the studio on his way out. Paul explains that he’s worried about the band’s notoriety since John Lennon’s 1968 drug bust. Cut to a close-up of Lennon sitting apart from the others. John is noticeably displeased at Paul’s little joke.

  • • •

  Peter helped three other friends make another film in 1969—the disastrous A Day at the Beach (1970). Simon Hessera directed and Gene Gutowski produced, from a script by Roman Polanski.

  “We wanted Hessera to make his debut as a director,” Polanski relates. “That’s what he wanted to do, and he was really fantastic at acting and imitations, and we were convinced that he could do a good picture. Simon sat down with Gérard Brach, a writer with whom I wrote several scripts, and wrote a script called The Driver. [Brach cowrote the screenplays for Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), Cul-de-sac (1966), and The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967).] Peter wanted to play a lead in the film—whatever he could do—[but] when I read that script I didn’t believe there could be a movie made out of it. I thought we’d better find something else. I read a book by a guy called Heere Heeresma, a Dutch writer, did an adaptation of it, and suggested that Hessera do the film. Peter volunteered to do a cameo, and that was it.

  “We were having a little party or dinner or something like that at the home of my partner at that time, Gene Gutowski, and [the producer] Robert Evans was there with Charlie Bludhorn, the head of Paramount; we were pushing for Paramount to finance the picture. Simon was there, and Peter was there, too, and of course we started doing one of our routines. They were tremendously amused—particularly Charlie—at what Simon and Peter were doing, and somehow started the notion that they were going to give some money for this film to be made.” A Day at the Beach was reportedly financed at a cost of $600,000. “In those times that was a lot of money,” Polanski comments. “I mean, it was sufficient to make a low budget movie.”

  As Gutowski describes it, “A Day at the Beach is the story of the relationship between an alcoholic and his little daughter. He tries to have an outing at the beach and promises his ex-wife that he will not drink. Of course he falls apart and gets blind drunk. We shot it in Denmark—on the beach and in Copenhagen. Peter spent about a week or two with us. We had a very good time. He was always in pursuit of amorous adventures, always in pursuit of being introduced to the woman of his life and, you know, always in love or falling in love. That was Peter.”

  In an apparent attempt to make the film even more raw than its subject matter destined it to be, Hessera cast an unknown and inexperienced actor, Mark Burns, in the lead. Burns plays “Uncle Bernie,” so nicknamed because his estranged wife refuses to tell her daughter, Winnie (Beatrice Edney), that the abysmal drunkard is really her father. It’s a one-dimensional performance, the dimension being surliness.

  Midway through the film, after a snack of three bottles of beer at a seaside cafe, Uncle Bernie leaves Winnie to fend for herself on the beach, in the rain, and staggers into a beachside trinket shop. He asks the proprietor for a shell. Peter Sellers’s face appears in sudden close-up. He’s wearing a white sweater and smart print ascot. His right shoulder is thrust forward. “Why don’t you come in and choose one,” he asks, toying with his earlobe.

  Enter a grinning Graham Stark in a bright red shirt and print ascot; Peter’s unnamed character addresses Stark as “Pipi.” (The film’s credits cite “The Partners: A. Queen and Graham Stark.”) Peter tells Pipi to get some beer “while I keep this young man happy.” Biting his finger, he declares that Pipi “goes and ruins everything, always.”

  Peter takes his sunglasses off and sucks on the earpiece. Pipi returns. “She wants three bottles and an opener,” he says, referring to Uncle Bernie. (By this point, Hessera has cut away to the little girl, who is now tangled up in fishing netting and screaming in terror, but Uncle Bernie is shopping for shells and cannot hear her.) Uncle Bernie tells off Pipi for ruining Peter’s life and leaves.

  Bernie retrieves Winnie, who has somehow managed to extract herself from the netting, and they spend the rest of the day together, he drinking beer, she wandering around. The final scene occurs at night in an empty, cobblestoned town square. The bottomed-out Uncle Bernie staggers in, led by little Winnie, abruptly pitches forward, slams his head against the cobblestones, and croaks. The film’s last words belong to the wailing little Winnie: “Uncle Bernie!”

  “It’s not good,” Polanski acknowledges. “The problem is, I’m afraid, the director, and also insufficient funds. But the main problem is the actor. You can’t watch a man playing a drunk for one-and-a-half hours unless he’s a really great actor and has some charisma. That guy had none.

  “Other than that, I mean, the film. . . . If there had been a great performance. . . . The film is done well enough to work. What didn’t work was the casting. Simon was not a director, and, let’s face it, we were a little bit cavalier.”

  • • •

  What Polanski doesn’t mention is that his work on A Day at the Beach was interrupted. He and Gutowski were in London when, in the early hours of Friday, August 8, 1969, some intruders creepy-crawled their way onto Polanski’s rented estate in the hills above Bel Air, shot a young man to death in the driveway, and then murdered everyone inside the house. The victims were Sharon Tate, who was only a few weeks away from giving birth to a son; Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojiciech Frykowski, and Steve Parent, the youth in the driveway. No motive, no mercy, no sense, no solace.

  Gene Gutowski remembers: “Shortly after Sharon’s murder I flew with Polanski from London to California. His friends gathered around him. There was Peter, Warren Beatty, Yul Brynner. . . . We kept a vigil, cheering him up as best we could and giving him support and friendship. Peter was instrumental. It was a tough time for everybody, absolutely.” Peter attended Sharon’s funeral on Wednesday, August 13, at Holy Cross Cemetery.

  One month later, Roman and some friends offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrests of the killers. Polanski himself doesn’t remember the details anymore: “Peter Sellers . . . ? I don’t recall—not enough. I remember putting up the reward, and I know that the reward led to the capture of the people because it was paid out. Somehow no one mentioned it afterwards. If it was reported there must be some truth in it—I just don’t remember. I mean, that period, I never go back to it, you know, voluntarily, and if you don’t refresh your memory by going back to it, it fades out much faster.”

  Gutowski, however, is very clear about Peter’s help. He did put up part of the reward money, Gutowski says, and “he was motivated by pure friendship and his desire to help find the guilty.” Polanski, Beatty, Brynner, and others provided the rest.

  At the time, Peter spoke out in public: “Someone must have knowledge or suspicions they are withholding or may be afraid to reveal. Some
one must have seen the blood-soaked clothing, the knife, the gun, the getaway car. Someone must be able to help.”

  By December 1969, Charles Manson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle, Tex Watson, Leslie Van Houton, and Linda Kasabian had all been charged with the murders. Charges against Kasabian were dropped when she agreed to be the star witness for the prosecution. The rest were convicted and are spending their lives in jail. A biker named Danny DeCarlo, who was familiar with the defendants and who felt the need to extract himself from a host of legal problems by sharing what he knew, evidently got some of the reward money; so, it seems, did Ronni Howard, a.k.a. Shelley Nadell, a.k.a. Connie Schampeau, to whom Susan Atkins had spilled some gory details in prison.

  NINETEEN

  Peter Sellers was capable of enormous compassion, tenderness, and love—so much so that you thought you were going to be friends for life. And then hours, days, weeks later, the scale would tip the other way, and a very unlikable, aggressive person would emerge.”

  The director Alvin Rakoff is describing his experience of making the small scale, too-little-known Hoffman (1970). “I look back at Peter with great affection, and love, and puzzlement. He was an extraordinary firecracker, and yet you were in danger of being burnt.”