Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  “It’s based upon a true story,” the director Clive Rees explains. “Actually, they were German soldiers who were looting a warehouse when the Red Army was coming. The entrance was blown up by the Germans, who trapped their own people inside. Years later the place was opened up. Two people were found alive, four or five dead and bathed in flour, and of the two people who came out alive, one died ten minutes after rescue, the other thirty-six hours later, blind and insane.”

  Sellers plays the Frenchman, Rouquet, a quiet former teacher. There was little difficulty in piquing his interest in the role. “Oddly enough, we just rang him up,” says Rees. “Anthony Rufus Isaacs, who was the producer, knew him greatly. He was in Ireland and married to Miranda, who was a bit ill—she was recovering from meningitis—and we went over to see him. She liked it a lot and told him to read it, and he should do it, and we talked briefly, and he said yes.

  “Dennis Selinger then got on to us, and said that Peter had changed his mind and wouldn’t do it at all, because obviously the kind of money we had would only be enough for a bit part. So we rang Peter up and said, ‘You don’t want to do it?’ He said, ‘That’s rubbish. I do want to do it. I will do it.’ So he did it.” Always a Goon at heart, Peter evidently appreciated the ultimate absurdity of being buried alive by the greatest liberation army in human history.

  “William Morris told us that Charles Aznavour (who plays Visconti) didn’t want to do it either,” Rees adds, “and yet he did want to do it. We flew over to Paris, where his agent met us early in the morning and took us out to lunch. When she asked what was the budget of the film, we said, ‘About £75,000.’ She presumed that that was Charles’s fee.” Then Rees and Rufus Isaacs met with Aznavour himself. “The agent made it quite apparent that she thought that Anthony and I were from Warner Brothers—serious film-type people, which we weren’t. Then she said, ‘What is the budget for this film?’ We said ‘£75,000,’ and she said, ‘I think you should leave.’ ” They were at the front door of Aznavour’s house, Rees says, when Aznavour assured them, “ ‘Don’t worry. I’ll do your film.’ In fact, he did it for seven grand. When we ran out of money during the film he never asked for it. He never pushed us at all. Peter, on the other hand, did.

  “I got a call from Peter saying, ‘I’m not coming to your fucking rehearsal until I get my fucking money.’ Well, we didn’t have very much, so Anthony got on to my bank manager and said, ‘We’ve got Peter Sellers, we owe him ten grand, he wants it now, or he’s not going to continue.’ So he lent us twenty grand. When we got it, we asked Peter who we should pay it to, and he said, ‘Pay it to Hare Krishna in Geneva, Switzerland.’ That’s what happened, and I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  • • •

  The Blockhouse is about being buried alive and yet remaining alive. Stocked plentifully by the Gestapo, the bunker is a cavernous warehouse full of water, canned food, sacks of flour, wine, and candles, so the men can survive for quite some time, knowing all the while that they must die there. It’s a social drama, cerebral but raw—part Samuel Beckett, part Samuel Fuller. “I’ve been studying these candles,” Rouquet gently announces early in the film. “They last about five hours each. Since we have been in this room we have burned exactly twelve. My pulse rate is normally seventy-two beats per minute. If you multiply that by sixty it will give you four thousand three hundred twenty beats per hour. We had been down here about twenty-four hours before we came to this room. That makes three days in all, exactly. It seems a pretty reliable way of keeping time—provided we have candles and my heart doesn’t stop.”

  Clive Rees describes another moment: “There’s a kind of ridiculous party scene. Rouquet thinks he’d like a drink, so he asks Visconti at the bar to give him some brandy, and being a typical kind of Nepalese rat, Visconti says, ‘Get it yourself.’ So Lund (Per Oscarsson) offers to get him something. Rouquet is so childishly grateful that he looks over, food falling out of his mouth, and tears are running down his face. That’s genuine—Peter just cried. He was an extraordinary man to work with.

  “To me there’s a humanity in it. I don’t expect anybody else to see it, but I think there’s a kind of poetry. As I say, I’m very pretentious, but it starts off very conventionally, and gradually it gets more and more interior; there’s more and more silence, and people’s thoughts and feelings are expressed not by what they say but by what is registered in their faces. To me it was like a series of icons, and therefore there was a sort of beauty. Harry Crafton, the makeup person, contributed a great deal to that film because although they’re getting more and more wrecked, they’re actually getting rather beautiful. At least that was the idea.

  “The whole film was shot underground. We were seventy feet down, and it was so incredibly quiet and depressive. And what with the nature of the story, it kind of got to people. Sellers could really feed on that. It enabled him, I think.

  “It was filmed in Guernsey, a small island just off the French coast,” says Rees. “Peter would be standing on his head in the morning, eating his special macrobiotic food and all that,” and causing no difficulties. “The fact was,” Rees notes, “we were virtually trapped on an island. No one had anywhere to go, so we sort of lived it, in a way. There weren’t any night clubs to go off to; there weren’t any distractions.”

  Still, there was the obligatory Sellers-as-bad-boy incident. One morning, Rees relates, “He told the makeup and hair people what they should put him in. He turned up in this incredible wig. Peter had designed a punk show, and he looked ridiculous. He was also stoned out of his head. He’d been smoking dope like nobody’s business, and he was writing stuff like ‘Bruce Sucks’ all over the walls. I really didn’t know what to do.

  “It was a scene in which each of the actors had, by that time, established his own little section of the room. So I decided, Sellers was here, so I’d start there and work my way around the room and get to him last. When I finally got around to him, he’d fallen asleep. I woke him up and said I wasn’t feeling too well and we’d continue it tomorrow.

  “At 3:00 o’clock that morning, I got a phone call from Peter saying, ‘You didn’t like my wig, did you?’

  “I said that, no, I thought it was wrong in the circumstance, and I explained the thing about the aging and the changing and the icons and that kind of stuff, and he agreed, and that was the end of it. He was amazingly helpful and sympathetic, once we got his money off to Hare Krishna.”

  • • •

  In the film, Rouquet eventually commits suicide. Rees describes the long take in which he filmed the scene: “He does it in such a careful, methodical, considerate, kind sort of way. He’s a schoolteacher—a compassionate and careful man. The candles are running. He looks at his photograph. (That’s his old school, you see. I mean, you don’t know that, but he knows it.) He’s very tidy. He puts everything back in the little box, thinks a bit, carefully rolls his sleeve back, opens his box, and gets from it a knife. He puts his hand into a sack of flour; he’s neat—he doesn’t want to bleed anywhere. He puts the knife in, pauses, and winces as he’s cutting himself. His hand comes out, and you can just see a little blood and flour, and he just puts his hand on the candle, and it fizzles out.”

  Bert Mortimer, who witnessed the filming, later said that “he was so wrapped up in the part I believed he actually might do it. And Peter was so nervous himself that it might actually have come about.”

  Clive Rees sums up his association with Peter: “I knew him very well as the man who played Rouquet—as an actor who was fantastic to work with, who was very sympathetic, polite, and physically quite touchy. I mean, he would hold you. I don’t mean hug you, like we do today. But he would touch you. We had a close relationship, but it was about what we were doing, and that’s where it began and ended. I was aware that I was working with a genius—not just a great actor. A genius. He was different. Aznavour is, I think, a really good actor. He’s an entertainer, a really wonderful bloke. But I wouldn’t use the word genius. Peter had
that.”

  • • •

  By the time The Blockhouse was being filmed in the summer of 1972, Peter’s marriage to Miranda was essentially over, though it took a long time for the legal formalities to be arranged. Hans Moellinger recalls Peter’s emotional state, the ambivalence of a paranoiac: “We were in Munich. He was still with Miranda then and was always speaking in cheerless terms that he was afraid that she was cheating on him. All of a sudden, in the middle of the night, he said, ‘Hans, I must go back to Dublin!’ I said it was impossible—night flights are forbidden in Munich. But he said, ‘You must get me a plane, I have to go back immediately, Miranda is cheating on me!’ I said, ‘Wait until morning, you’ll fly back and you’ll see that. . . .’ ‘No no no no!’ he said. ‘Get the plane!’

  “We tried to get a plane in Munich, in Berlin—it was impossible. Finally we got one in Geneva. The plane came to Munich at 2:00 A.M.—for about 37,000 Swiss francs. I called the director of the airport and told him that Peter Sellers, who had had a heart attack—everybody knew he had a weak heart—had to get to his doctor in Dublin. He said, ‘I’ll try to organize something.’ At about 4:00 or 4:30 in the morning, I went with my girlfriend and Peter to the airport. We were sort of dragging him into the hall, left and right, holding him, schlepping him through to the plane. But now the problem came: ‘Hans, I can’t fly alone.’ ”

  Moellinger’s girlfriend at the time was nineteen years old and still in school, and she didn’t happen to have her passport with her at the airport. Moellinger hadn’t thought to bring his along either. “Peter said, ‘It doesn’t matter. We’ll fly to Dublin and the plane will fly you back.’

  “ ‘I can’t, Peter.’

  “ ‘You must.’

  “So finally I arranged it so that the girlfriend stayed there and I flew with him to Dublin, and I arrived back at about 9:30 in the morning, and the whole trip cost about 170,000 [Swiss] francs. When I get back the telephone rings, and Peter says, ‘Hans, I knew it. She was cheating on me. She was in the arms of another man, I promise you.’ I said, ‘How did you know?’ He said, ‘I felt it.’ ”

  • • •

  While living in Ireland, Peter and Miranda had renovated a house in the county of Wiltshire, about sixty miles west of London. Stonehenge is in Wiltshire, for example. But Miranda was now living there by herself.

  With Miranda, or even without her, there seems never to have been the ardor of his obsessive love for both Anne and Britt. Miranda was pretty and amusing in a kicky, cusp-of-the-sixties sort of way, but her breeding got in the way. It’s insensitive, not to mention inaccurate, to label Peter’s interest in Lord Mancroft’s stepdaughter as nothing more than crass social-climbing, as others have done; after all, a queen, a princess, and a prince each trump the stepdaughter of a lord. But he does appear to have been delighted, at first at least, to expand his social circle to include the established gentry. Still, as with all things Peter, it didn’t last long. (As Lady Mancroft noted at the time, “I’m not surprised at anything to do with Peter.”) He hated the Miranda-engineered parties at which half of Burke’s Peerage would demand instantaneous comedy routines. Also, he later said of his third wife, “She was my intellectual superior.”

  • • •

  On December 9, 1972, at the Rainbow Theater in London, The Who—Roger Daltrey, Keith Moon, Peter Townsend, and John Entwistle—backed by the London Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Choir and joined by an almost all-star cast, performed their rock opera Tommy onstage—twice—before live audiences as a charity event. An orchestra-backed studio album, released two months earlier, had been a smash hit, but The Who wanted to take it live.

  Onstage at the Rainbow, Daltrey was Tommy, Moon the depraved Uncle Ernie, Entwistle was Cousin Kevin, and Townsend served as the narrator. Steve Winwood (of the groups Blind Faith and Traffic) played Tommy’s father, Maggie Bell (of the Scottish group Stone the Crows) appeared as his mother, and Merry Clayton was the Acid Queen; Clayton is the belting singer best known for her feverish backup vocals on the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” Peter Sellers played the doctor who attempts to cure the legendary deaf, dumb, and blind boy in the song “Go to the Mirror.” (Richard Harris performs the role on the album.) The show was taped and broadcast in the United Kingdom later that month and raised £10,000, for a group supposedly called the Stars’ Organisation for Spastics.

  It was from the Who’s drummer, Keith Moon, that Peter felt the strongest and most reciprocal pull of friendship. Moon was also, as the critic Ira Robbins describes him, “an irrepressible adolescent, reckless, fearless and merciless in his need to entertain and be amused. His destructive exploits—hotel rooms, cars, stages, drums—made The Who more dangerous than other groups,” though somehow, as Robbins points out, it all seemed to be in harmless fun. In person, “Moon the Loon” lived big. He was relentlessly inventive, openly friendly, and completely off his rocker. In private, Keith Moon was, in Robbins’s words, “a sad, needy guy incapable of basic human experience.”

  As a drummer, says Robbins, “Keith was less a timekeeper than an explosive charge that detonated on time, every time.” Peter was much the same as an actor, and the two became friends. Moon’s improvisations weren’t those of a jazz drummer; he was too undisciplined for that. Who concerts were more like open adventures than structured series of impromptu riffs. Robbins points out that as performers neither Moon nor Sellers tended to do the same thing twice or follow a previously agreed upon plan. “And that may be the key to Moon’s similarity to Sellers,” says Robbins. “In a sense, those anarchic characters improvised because that was the only way they could function. They lacked the ability not to.”

  • • •

  Peter was full of plans in the spring of 1973. For the Boulting brothers, there was to be a six-role comedy set in France during the Occupation. He mentioned to the press that he hoped to adapt Richard Condon’s latest thriller, Arigato. (Condon wrote The Manchurian Candidate.) He was still hoping to make Being There, too, as well as a film called Absolute Zero, to be scripted by Ernest Tidyman (who had cowritten Shaft, 1971). Stanley Kubrick also had something in mind for him, he said, but Peter had to be secretive: “Stanley doesn’t want to mention what it’s going to be about.”

  At the time, he was shooting yet another small and depressing film—The Optimists (1973)—in which he plays a decrepit busker. His character, Sam, at one time a successful and popular music hall star, now lives in a ratty flat with Bella, an elderly dog. Two children (Donna Mullane and John Chaffey), regularly vacating their unhappy home, enter his life, and Bella dies.

  Directed by Anthony Simmons, The Optimists’ title is ironic, though a new dog shows up at the end. Peter, of course, fully immersed himself in his North Country character’s voice and mannerisms—so much so that when he filmed his scenes as a street performer in the West End, he seemed so authentic that passersby were oblivious to his identity and reportedly donated money into his hat. (The camera was hidden across the street.) There is even the tale of a real-life busker who became incensed that another performing vagrant was horning in on his turf and angrily shooed the movie star away. When filming was completed for the day, Peter simply rounded the corner in costume, got into his red Mercedes, and drove away.

  Peter modeled Sam on several old North Country comics he recalled from his youth as well as the nineteenth-century variety clown Dan Leno, whom Peter had met during a séance. “We went back to his writings for some of the dialogue,” Peter said at the time. “Phrases like ‘this morning I was in such a state that I washed my breakfast and swallowed myself’ are lines Leno used in his act.” Peter had already revealed in the Esquire profile that he’d been receiving career guidance through the years from the dead Leno. To complete his characterization, Peter’s longtime makeup artist, Stuart Freeborn, applied a prosthetic nose and strange, subtly disfiguring teeth.

  “Peter and I became friendly on that film,” recalls the cinematographer Larry Pizer. “He was a guy who played
games with people for inexplicable reasons. He was a brilliant comedian, but not a happy one. Some people enjoy being funny. He didn’t.”

  At what point does peculiar behavior become so consistent that it ceases to be erratic? For example, the cast and crew of The Optimists arrived on location one day to find Peter standing on his head in the snow. Pizer found it showy—private yogic devotion turned into a piece of public performance art. Another day the prosthetic teeth went missing, but as Pizer says, “It could have been a game.” Peter’s spur-of-the-moment inventions usually achieved their artistic aim—dialogue changes, new bits of actorly dexterity—but they did tend to disrupt the shooting schedule. For instance, there is a scene in which Sam returns to his flea-bitten home very drunk—so much so that he can barely make it up the stairs. According to Pizer, it was Peter who decided to add some small but important business: The staggering Sam methodically empties his coat pockets of drained liquor bottles every few steps. “It took forever to shoot,” Pizer reports. “Hours were ticking by.” Then again, this was Peter’s craft, and it worked on film, where it mattered.

  • • •

  After completing The Optimists, Sellers found himself in a nostalgic mood and contacted his girlfriend from the 1940s, Hilda Parkin. “Peter phoned me out of the blue,” Hilda reports, “and he told me about his film about the busker. He said, ‘I think you would love it—I’d love you to see it.’ We had a long chat. I said, ‘Hey, how about you? Haven’t you done well!’ ”

  Hilda Parkin and her husband, Ted, were in show business, too, and Ted was active in the benevolent British theatrical club the Water Rats; Hilda was in the women’s auxiliary, the Lady Ratlings. “I told Peter I was a Lady Ratling and that Ted was a Water Rat, and he said, ‘You know, Peg always wanted me to be a Water Rat.’ Within no time at all he approached the Water Rats to become one.”