Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  Miranda arrived with Lord and Lady Mancroft at 12 noon exactly. She was wearing a gypsy-style dress with a full length skirt in puce printed silk and a black velvet bodice. She had a black sombrero hat and carried a posy of white roses. With her were her two three-year-old Pekinese dogs, Tabatha and Thomasina. “They are my bridesmaids,” she said with a smile. . . .

  Witnesses at the ten minute ceremony were Sellers’ closest friend, Bert Mortimer, who was also best man, and solicitor John Humphries.

  With two rings did he wed. He slipped both on Miranda’s finger—a traditional platinum band and a more elaborate Russian ring that signified love, fidelity, and happiness.

  • • •

  “Every man’s dream is still, I’m sure, finding a virgin,” Peter told an Esquire interviewer shortly before the wedding. He and Miranda were married by the time the profile was published, so his remarks became an unfortunate historical record. “That’s why marriage has gone on the rocks,” he persisted. “The original idea was that the girl had never been with anyone else, and it was so pure. That’s not quite the word. So I came to the conclusion that to be in love with the girl of one’s dreams—who if possible was a virgin—was the ultimate happiness.”

  His notions about the desirability of virgins went quickly by the boards. Peter clearly harbored grave misgivings about his long-term prospects with Miranda. And, as was his custom, he took his complaints to an ex-wife, in this case Britt. In one of their disconcertingly frequent telephone conversations during this period, he was markedly perplexed. “I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing,” he whined, “but Miranda says it’s now or never.” Anne was consulted as well.

  Despite his insistence to Esquire that he wasn’t at all the sad, neurotic clown that his first biographer, Peter Evans, had just gotten through portraying in The Mask Behind the Mask (a good book that Peter hated), Peter was often quite morose. Siân Phillips recounts the melancholy nature of a man adrift in a sea of material splendor: “He turned up in Rome in O’Toole’s suite at the Excelsior and said, ‘Could I sleep on your couch?’ He wanted to come to England, but he wasn’t allowed—he’d be arrested for tax or something, I don’t know—so he pitched his tent, as it were, in O’Toole’s sitting room. O’Toole thought this was great fun for a bit and then got very tired of it and said, ‘Go and stay with my wife in Hampstead. I know she won’t tell anybody. You can just sneak in and hole up there, and just don’t go out, and nobody will know you’re there.’

  “Now, I had two children and a house full of people, and the only bed was in the study on the ground floor, where all the phones were as well. So I thought, ‘Right, okay, I’ll do this, he probably won’t be here for very long.’ So he arrived with Bert, his trusty, chauffeur, companion, friend, whatever, and they moved in with a mountain of luggage. I’ve never seen more Louis Vuitton in my life—there were trunks! I couldn’t believe it. I thought, ‘This is not very good.’

  “I told my mother, who looked after the house for us. I said, ‘Peter Sellers is coming to stay.’ ‘When’s he coming?’ ‘I don’t know. He’s sneaking in under cover of darkness.’ ‘Never mind—I’ll make a big boef bourguignon.’ So she spent most of the day making a very authentic, exquisite boef bourguignon, and Peter arrived, and she said, ‘Settle down, Mr. Sellers’—she was Welsh—‘and I will get you your supper. I’ve got a very good boef bourguignon.’

  “ ‘Oh, I’m a vegetarian.’

  “Consternation.

  “People were sent out to comb Hampstead for vegetables at that hour of night, and from that moment on, the kitchen was piled high with chopped vegetables. There were pyramids of vegetables all the way up and down the work tops. Nobody could get anything done because my mother was always making homemade soup for Peter Sellers. He said, ‘This is the best soup I have ever tasted in my life.’ I said, ‘Well done, Mummy, you know, but what is it?’ She said, ‘Well, I put bones in it, of course. And marrow.’

  “He was there for over a month, using both phones constantly, night and day. Nobody could make a phone call. He had all these charts of Eastern—I don’t know what they were, pictures of Buddhists. . . .

  “He would just stay in his study communing with himself or with Bert on the phone. He was just terribly, terribly sad. I have to say that as a house guest he was the most depressing person I’ve ever had in the house. I used to creep in at night and try to sneak past the study door so I could get to bed without Peter intercepting me, because he would sit down and cry. He would talk about his life, and, oh, it was so. . . . I was sorry for him, but it was so depressing having him around. Not one joke from beginning to end. Not a laugh.”

  And so he married Miranda.

  • • •

  “I was the best man at that wedding, and the bridesmaids were the dogs,” Bert later said. “Then they went off to their honeymoon. I accompanied them. We were in the south of France on the yacht, and it’s honeymoon time, and then one morning we couldn’t find him. The ship-to-shore phone rang, and it was him. He’d booked himself into a hotel, and he’d left his bride of weeks on the yacht with me, and we couldn’t work out why.”

  Neither could he. As any actor knows, most entrances require an exit. Even with Miranda he kept moving. For tax reasons, the newlyweds moved to Ireland; they bought the coach house of a 1,000-acre manor near the village of Maynooth in County Kildare, about an hour’s drive from Dublin. Periodic privileges at the immense manor came with the deal.

  He and Peg remained in touch. As he told the British entertainment reporter Roderick Mann, “When I was living in Ireland with Miranda, we kept chickens. And one day the hen got lost. I thought the fox had got it, but as Miranda was distressed we held a séance. When Peg came through I asked her, ‘Do you know where the hen has gone?’ ‘Of course I do,’ she said. ‘It’s up in the rafters of the stable.’ ‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘I’ll take a look.’

  “Well, I couldn’t find the damn thing and I told her so. ‘It’s not there,’ I said. ‘Of course it’s there,’ she said. ‘Go and have another look. But don’t be long. I’m not sodding about all night looking for a perishing hen.’ ” They found the hen the next day. It was trapped in the rafters, just as Mother promised.

  But the tale is suspect because, on other occasions, Peter claimed that, no, he did not actually speak to Peg directly but rather to an intermediary; another departed soul relayed her messages. According to Peter, the medium was the spirit of an American Indian named Red Cloud.

  • • •

  “I’ve been in pictures since Jesus was a lance corporal,” declares Rod Amateau, the director of Peter’s next picture, Where Does It Hurt? (1972). “I never treated him with any reverence. Only respect.”

  Where Does It Hurt? is a gleefully sour comedy about a guy named Hammond (Rick Lenz) who comes into Valley Vue Hospital for a chest X-ray but has no health insurance. It looks bad for him until he mentions that he owns his own house. “You have a house!” the receptionist cries, her eyes lighting up as she pushes the secret toe buzzer that alerts Albert Hopfnagel (Peter), the fast-talking hospital administrator, to the presence of an easy mark. Hammond is whisked away and given a variety of procedures, a good deal of which pertain to his anus—blood work, a high colonic, an electrocardiogram, a rectal probe, urinalysis, and a barium enema, all leading up to a pointless appendectomy.

  The comedy is raw, bitter, and misanthropic. “Let me add this up,” Hopfnagel snaps at one of the doctors in Peter’s most pinched American accent to date. “A) Your sister-in-law, Mrs. Manzini, needs a hysterectomy; b) she wants you to operate; and c) she wants to pay for the hysterectomy with S&H Green Stamps. Does she have any idea of how many S&H Green Stamps this operation would take?” “She has,” the doctor replies. “She was president of the Blessed Sacrament Ladies’ Auxiliary. They collected Green Stamps. They broke up over birth control, and she kept the stamps.” Hopfnagel works with this information: “As you know, our customary charge for a hysterectomy is $500. We sh
all have to charge her $2,000 because we are taking Green Stamps. Yes or no?!”

  Where Does It Hurt? is an equal opportunity offender. “So much for faggot power,” Hopfnagel mutters discontentedly after a gay informant fails to provide precise information on the potential visit of the city’s hospital commissioner. He then calls the hospital’s Japanese-American lab technician (Pat Morita) a “greedy little Buddha-head.” “If it hadn’t been for my creative white cell count,” Mr. Nishimoto retorts, “that sore-ass Hebe wouldn’t even be a patient.” (Patient Hammond has been confused with patient Epstein and has been treated accordingly.) “So much for the Yellow Peril,” says Hopfnagel after throwing Mr. Nishimoto out of his office. It’s a nasty comedy, but that’s its aesthetic. In its bitterness, if not its political incorrectness, Where Does It Hurt? was ahead of its time.

  • • •

  According to Rod Amateau, money was the key to understanding Peter Sellers. In the director’s words, Peter was “economically determined.” (“The word is penurious,” Amateau adds by way of clarification.) In a meeting in Ireland at what Amateau calls Peter’s “drafty manor—it was terribly cold,” they agreed to finance the film fifty-fifty and take equal shares of the profits. (Where Does It Hurt? was coproduced by Josef Shaftel.) “This was an independent production done on the cheap,” Amateau bluntly states. “About $600,000. I mean, really low.” “We can make this picture for short money,” Amateau remembers telling Peter, which provoked the following reply. Peter (in Hopfnagel’s reedy American twang): “Rod, yer my kinda guy.”

  There was a brief rehearsal period before shooting began in Los Angeles on July 7, at which point Peter called and asked for his limousine. Rod replied that he could certainly provide a limo for Peter if that was what Peter wished, but since their deal was to split the costs evenly as well as the profits, the car would cost Peter $50 a day. The following morning, Peter left his rented Benedict Canyon house and arrived at the studio in the passenger seat of the key grip’s pickup truck. “He lives near me,” was the way Peter explained his transportation to Amateau, who adds that “from then on there wasn’t one moment of delay on the whole picture. He couldn’t have been nicer. He was watching the clock the whole time.”

  Peter was very well liked by the cast and crew. He was efficient, helpful, and methodical in getting the film completed on schedule. Asked if he was doing any drugs at the time, Amateau replies, “Who didn’t do drugs?”

  “It wasn’t a very good picture,” Amateau acknowledges, but it did end up in the black. “It made money not because it was a great picture but because it was cheap. Peter was very happy to go home with a full wallet.”

  For a birthday present, Peter gave Amateau a copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica in two condensed, microprinted volumes, along with an accompanying magnifying glass. “You want to know everything,” Peter told his director, “here’s your chance to know everything else.” Soon thereafter, Peter and Amateau happened to be in Rome at the same time, and the three of them—Rod, Peter, and Bert—went out to dinner in Trastevere, where Peter and Rod launched into an argument about Fellini. “He’s great,” said Rod. “You’re crazy,” said Peter. “You like everybody.” No, Rod protested, Fellini is a very nice man. . . . No, said Peter. Amateau doesn’t remember precisely what they argued about—there was wine involved—but he does recall that Fellini’s tendency (as Amateau describes it) “to direct by the numbers” made no sense to Peter, who found it offensive to actors. (Fellini, with whom Amateau had worked, often directed his actors to move around the set in a series of numbered positions, and he rarely gave them dialogue when they shot but instead filmed them without sound and dubbed in the dialogue later. Sellers, who never worked with Fellini, found the director’s habits to be obnoxious.)

  “Fuck him,” said Peter.

  As the Fellini argument escalated, Bert began to make silent no-no gestures on the sly. Rod changed the subject. The men parted when dinner was over. Peter was a little chilly. Rod returned to his hotel, took a shower, and the doorbell rang. “It’s not me,” said Bert. “You’ve got to understand Peter. You won’t like it, but he wants the encyclopedia back. He’s mad at you. Don’t say he’s childish! I’ve told him that. And don’t say no or you’ll get me in trouble.” Amateau gave Bert the encyclopedia. Bert left.

  A little while later, the phone rang. “In other words,” said Peter’s voice through the receiver, “you thought so little of my gift that you gave it back without protest. If you’d have really liked it you’d have fought for it.”

  Rod: “I don’t fight for anything except women and money.”

  Peter: “You’re off my list.” Then he hung up.

  For the next few months, Peter kept calling from wherever he happened to be—Switzerland, England, Italy, Ireland—and begging Amateau to please let him send it back. “Don’t send it, Peter,” said the amiable Amateau. “Bring it with you the next time we get together.”

  Eventually they found themselves in London at the same time, whereupon Bert arrived at Rod’s door bearing the encyclopedia. “He’s downstairs,” said Bert. Amateau went to the window and saw Peter sitting in his car, waving up to him in the queenly manner.

  “I had the best of him because I appealed to his worst nature,” Amateau fondly concludes. “And lemme tell you, it takes one to know one. He was a lot more talented, but what the hell?”

  • • •

  Where Does It Hurt? was lucky. Many projects didn’t pan out at all. “Spike Milligan and I are working on an idea now,” Peter had declared in 1970. “I can’t tell you what it is, but it’s similar to spiritualism and that sort of thing. Not spiritualism, but in a similar area.” Spike was less circumspect. It was to be, in Spike’s words, “a comic version of the Bible.” Lo, it did not come to pass.

  The Last Goon Show of All was sufficiently antediluvian to make up for any missing biblical tale. Recorded on April 30, 1972, at the Camden Theatre (to be broadcast on radio May 10 on Radio 4 and televised on BBC1 at Christmastime), it marked a reunion between Peter, Spike (who wrote the script), Harry, Ray Ellington, Max Geldray, and the announcer Andrew Timothy, who had been onboard for the first Crazy People in 1951. “When I announced the first Goon Show I was thirty,” Timothy declares in the opening moments. “I am now ninety-three.”

  “I will now whistle the soliloquy from Hamlet,” Peter announces in stentorian tones to the assembled studio audience, which included Prince Philip and Princess Anne. (Prince Charles was in the navy at the time and telegrammed that he was “enraged” that he couldn’t attend.) And the soliloquy Peter did whistle, trailing off after the first few recognizable bars and moving slightly away from his microphone, at which point Andrew Timothy dryly breaks in:

  “That was Mr. Sellers practicing his comeback.”

  TWENTY

  Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end?

  He hoped to solve his career problems by making a movie about a cretin. Shortly after Jerzy Kosinski’s newest book hit the stands in 1971, the émigré novelist received a brief and cryptic telegram: “Available my garden or outside it. C. Gardiner,” followed by a telephone number. Curious, Kosinski dialed it. Peter picked up. Kosinski had created Being There’s Chauncey Gardiner to express the life and soul of Peter Sellers, Peter Sellers said. As Kosinski later described it, “He sees his life as dictated by chance.” They met at an Italian restaurant in London. “He was responsible for the worst diarrhea of my life,” Kosinski later declared.

  Gene Gutowski took an option for the film rights. “I had a deal with MGM—a very quick one I made when the book was a bestseller. Kosinski gave me the rights because he thought I had done such a good job with the Polanski pictures, and he trusted me. Through a social friendship with Kirk Kerkorian, I was able to get it right through the management of MGM, and very quickly I had an okay to go ahead with the picture. It was then on the basis of Gore Vidal writing the screenplay. Gore was happy to do so. It all happened in forty-eight hours. T
hen Kosinski changed his mind under the influence of a friend of his, a Polish cameraman who wanted to direct the picture and said to Kosinski, ‘Look, with Gore Vidal writing the screenplay, you’ll never have full control.’ It was very self-serving, because he wanted to direct the picture. The project disintegrated, and of course MGM stepped out.”

  • • •

  What Peter made instead was another filmed production of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1972), which consisted entirely of famous featured performances with lots of animal heads. Peter plays the March Hare. He filmed his rather short sequence at Shepperton in June 1972.

  Despite its all-star cast—including Michael Crawford, Spike Milligan, Dudley Moore, and Ralph Richardson—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland turned out to be, in Peter’s words, “a lousy film.” He was publicly enthusiastic about the movie’s prospects while it was still being shot, but as he announced to the press after seeing the thing, “We all feel—I’m speaking on behalf of all the actors because we all spoke about it—that it’s a poorly constructed piece of movie.” Fortunately for Peter, or at least for Peter’s art, he left London soon after completing his work on Alice and went off to the Channel Islands to film one of the best but least-known movies of his career.

  • • •

  The Blockhouse (1973) is about a group of Allied prisoners of war who happen to be building fortifications on the northern coast of France when D-day hits. With bombs falling all around them, their Nazi guards flee, leaving the prisoners unsupervised. They dive into a well-stocked bunker, where a perfectly targeted Allied bomb seals them in, and they die, one by one, over time.