by Ed Sikov
He was accepted. “Ted went to his ‘making.’ When they introduced him, he just looked up at the sky and cried. It’s what his mother wanted him to do. Ted said it was a bit embarrassing, really, because he couldn’t speak—he was just looking up and crying.”
• • •
Nine years earlier, in late 1964, Peter and Britt had spent some time in the company of Judy Garland, her companion Mark Herron, and her eighteen-year-old daughter, Liza Minnelli. In May of 1973, Liza, twenty-seven, was back in London and starring at the Palladium. Peter was in the audience, entranced, at Liza’s Friday evening performance, and three days later they were engaged to be married.
Billie Whitelaw reintroduced them after Friday’s show. She remembers that Peter was in one of his peculiar moods that night: “Liza kept looking at me, as if to ask, ‘Hey, is this guy putting me on?’ I told her I wasn’t sure, but if I were her, I’d watch it. Anyway, they went home together.” On Saturday night the giddy couple dined at Tratou and adjourned to the piano after dinner, where Liza soloed on “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man.” It was true; she couldn’t help it. On Sunday, Liza held a press conference at the Savoy to announce their love. “I’m going to marry Liza,” Peter said on Monday.
This news came as a surprise to Liza’s other fiancé, the one in Hollywood. “My engagement to Desi Arnaz [Jr.]—well, the relationship has been deteriorating for some time. There is no engagement,” Liza told the press. Desi’s mother, Lucille Ball, responded by exclaiming, “Peter Sellers? Who’s kidding who? Liza must be crazy!”
Liza showed up one day at Shepperton, where Peter was shooting his new comedy, Soft Beds, Hard Battles (1973). During a break, they talked again to the press. “I’m in love with a genius,” Liza stated. Peter mentioned that his and Miranda’s divorce “would go through the courts in its own time.” Liza was asked if she was worried about becoming Peter’s fourth wife. She replied in the voice of Sally Bowles: “Oh, no! Four is my lucky number, my dear.”
Peter and Liza—and Charles Chaplin, Laurence Olivier, Lord Snowdon, David Niven, Ralph Richardson, and David Frost—were among the mourners at Noel Coward’s funeral May 24, 1973, at St. Martin in the Fields. Niven recalled Peter’s mood at the end of the service—an inexplicable one, given the extraordinary interest his new romance was generating at the time. “As we walked out into the sunshine, Peter said, ‘I do hope no one will ever arrange that sort of thing for me.’ Niven asked why. ‘Because I don’t think anyone will show up.’ ”
Liza had to return to the States briefly at the end of May for a scheduled concert, but in less than a week she was back in London and moving into Peter’s Eaton Muse house, where she competed for space with Peter’s multimedia equipment and toys as well as pictures of his children and Sri Swami Venkatesananda. Liza’s godmother, the irrepressible actress and author Kay Thompson, moved in, too. (Kay Thompson appeared with Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire in Stanley Donen’s Funny Face, 1957, and wrote the children’s book Eloise and its several sequels.)
Eccentricity reigned. One night, at three o’clock, Liza declared that she simply had to see the gravesite of the fictional dog Bella from The Optimists, so Peter picked up a bottle of chilled champagne and off they went to a cemetery. Peter led Liza to the tiny burial ground in Hyde Park, where they climbed over the fence and prowled. “Where is it?” Liza kept crying out in the darkness.
Like a vast Venus flytrap snapping shut on two desirable and helpless flies, the British media fed. Peter grew annoyed by the frenzy and called his friend Joan Collins (whose husband, Ron Kass, had been The Optimists’ executive producer) to arrange an escape to her house. He traveled incognito. Collins describes the disguise: “an SS officer’s uniform, complete with leather jacket liberally festooned with swastikas and an SS armband, [and] a steel helmet covering his whole head.” At the end of the visit, Collins says, he sped away in his Mercedes holding his arm stiffly out the window and shouting “ ‘Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler! Sieg Heil’ in his most guttural German.”
One day, BBC radio featured one of Maurice Woodruff’s competitors, the psychic Frederick Davies, who divined that Peter Sellers and Liza Minnelli would in fact never marry. Liza’s response to this intrusion on her intimate life was to call and make a personal appointment with Davies. “I read the Tarot cards for her [and] told her that the romance was ill-fated,” Davies reveals. “She became slightly emotional.”
Magical cards were not the only issue in the relationship. According to Theadora Van Runkle, a friend to both Peter and Liza, “Peter was mad about Liza. He told me she was really sexy. But he got really angry with her one night at dinner because she crept up behind him and pulled off his toupee. He was livid with her, and that was the end of the relationship.”
Michael Caine thought the couple was very much in love at the luncheon party he threw at his house. Peter brought along his Polaroid camera and took many pictures; at one point, he handed the camera to Caine, who took a snapshot of Peter and Liza.
There was another party the following Tuesday; Peter and Liza had split the day before. Either Kay Thompson or Marlene Dietrich—Caine says Dietrich, logic says Thompson—advised Caine that he should tell his good friend Peter that she thought “he is a rotten bastard for the way he has treated my beautiful Liza.” Liza herself showed Caine the Polaroid, which Peter had given her as a memento. “Thanks for the memory, Pete,” he wrote on the back. She flew back to New York on June 20.
Peter told the Daily Mail, “I don’t think marriage is my bag.” A few days later he jetted to Paris to photograph Marisa Berenson.
• • •
“I’m going back to the Boultings after this film,” Peter told the press during the production of The Blockhouse. “We always brought each other good luck.” The film in question was Soft Beds, Hard Battles.
Roy Boulting seems not to have seen his association in quite in the same way. For one thing, Boulting had found their most recent collaboration, There’s a Girl in My Soup, to be especially trying because of Peter’s moody whims. For another, that movie flopped.
Based on a verbal commitment from Peter, Soft Beds, Hard Battles was scheduled to go before the cameras in the late summer of 1972, but whatever luck the Boultings may have had with Sellers ran out when he suffered one of his inexplicable changes of mind and the production had to be called off. A few weeks later, Peter was considering doing the movie after all. This time, his agent Denis O’Brien put it in writing. Filming began in mid-April, 1973, at Shepperton.
The first scene: 1940, a Parisian bordello. As a narrator (Peter doing his broadly American “Balham—Gateway to the South” voice) provides background, an old man dresses after an encounter with a pretty prostitute. General Latour (Peter with the voice of a hoarse French geezer) looks like Marshal Pétain and General de Gaulle’s superannuated love child. Cut to another room in the whorehouse, where a British officer (Peter doing David Niven) puts on his clothes after a similar romp. Peter proceeds through the course of the film to play four more roles—another French officer, the head of the Paris Gestapo, the Crown Prince of Japan, and Hitler.
A military sex farce set in an ornate bordello, Soft Beds, Hard Battles is an awful movie—“an almost creepily witless endeavor,” as Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times—that may have looked even worse on paper. It makes There’s a Girl in My Soup seem like Molière. Men insistently jerk their batons, poke their swords, and tilt champagne bottles up at the crotch. Hitler appears at the bordello to pay his respects to the madam, Madame Grenier (Lila Kedrova), but when an African prostitute comes into view, the Fuehrer is disgusted. “Eine schwartze!” he cries. When the first of Peter’s Frenchmen, General Latour, goes before a firing squad, he slumps forward and his toupee falls off. “The truth cannot be camouflaged,” the narrator intones. Comedy bits include beds that spring up suddenly and hurl hapless Nazis down an air shaft as well as flatulence-inducing elephant pills slipped into glasses of champagne. The Nazis fart themselves to death.<
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Toward the end, the whores flee to a convent where they masquerade as nuns. That’s where Prince Kyoto comes in—Peter in waxen yellowface, foldless eyes, and an overbite. “Fetch watah an’ towah!” Prince Kyoto barks after a bumbling “novice” spills a tray of food on his pants. It ought to go without saying that she rubs the stains off his groin. It is very sad.
• • •
The pirate comedy Ghost in the Noonday Sun (1973) is even worse. Spike Milligan cowrote the script, based on Sid Fleischman’s successful children’s novel. Spike costarred in the film as well. Peter Medak, who made the successful satire The Ruling Class two years earlier, directed. It was shot in sunny Cyprus, and it’s still ghastly. Peter fought with Tony Franciosa (who plays the Fairbanks-like Pierre) and walked off the set twice. The production team built a tall ship to specifications, but the specs were off; it was too tall and rocked violently and couldn’t be steered.
Peter personally asked Larry Pizer to shoot the film. One day well into the production, Peter invited Pizer to a small, intimate party. Victoria Sellers sat on Larry’s knee. They all sang songs and had a good time. The following day Peter had Larry fired.
Says Pizer, “I had to leave the island that day, like I had the fucking plague or something.” A few weeks later, Pizer got a letter. “Chaos is supreme here,” Peter wrote. “Don’t be unhappy. It has nothing to do with you.”
Even at the time of the firing Pizer knew it wasn’t personal. “He wanted to get at Peter Medak,” is Pizer’s simple explanation; like Peter’s harassing the After the Fox publicist as a way of venting his rage toward Vittorio De Sica, Peter still needed to communicate his desire to get rid of his director by proxy. A year or so later, Pizer ran into Peter at a party. Peter wanted to talk about it and explain, but Pizer turned away and they never spoke again. And yet, Pizer concludes, as so many did, “He was a pleasure to work with in many ways.”
Peter plays a pirate named Dick Scratcher. Spike plays his rival, Billy Bombay. The unpleasant film itself ends in bickering: The last shot is of Dick Scratcher buried up to his chin in the dry ground, with Billy Bombay tied to a tree with rope so thick and plentiful that it verges on mummification, and they’re bickering interminably. On the day it was shot, the production crew of Ghost in the Noonday Sun saw the chance to exact their revenge. They recorded a parody calypso number detailing every rotten thing that occurred during the shoot and forced the helpless Peter and Spike, physically restrained, to listen to it.
• • •
The Blockhouse was brilliant, but it wasn’t released. Neither was Ghost in the Noonday Sun. Nor Hoffman. (The Blockhouse was finally shown in New York in 1981; Hoffman in 1982; Ghost in the Noonday Sun was released later on video.) Where Does It Hurt? made money because it was intensely cheap. The Optimists was dreary, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Soft Beds, Hard Battles were dreadful disasters. With six duds in a row, Peter’s most personal project, Being There, hadn’t a chance of getting made.
Gene Gutowski kept trying: “Kosinski wrote his own screenplay, and I was able to resuscitate it with Peter. Sidney Lumet would direct it. I had discussions with Hemdale in London, but they backed out at the last minute. At that time Sellers was not really bankable.”
The director Hal Ashby was also interested in directing Being There. Peter approached him while Ashby was doing postproduction work on The Last Detail (1973). Ashby met with Sellers in London in the summer of 1973, but the meetings were more or less futile because, as Ashby later admitted, “Neither one of us had the power then to raise the money for it.”
• • •
So he made one more dud, just to top it off. Like most of the others, The Great McGonagall (1974) was artistically well-intentioned, but it just didn’t work. Joe McGrath directed the picture for Spike Milligan; the two old friends were great admirers of the eponymous and dreadful Scottish poet. “Peter insisted on coming and guesting in it,” says McGrath. His role was that of Queen Victoria. “He played it all on his knees in a Victorian dress wearing roller-skates.”
A series of absurdist vignettes strung together as a kind of bitter vaudeville routine—as the end credits note, the film was shot “entirely on location at Wilton’s Music Hall, 1-5 Grace’s Alley, Cable Street, London E1”—the picture was meant to be a showcase for Spike, who plays the talentless bard. One fine exchange occurs when Spike, as McGonagall, takes the witness stand, where he is asked his trade by a prosecutor. McGonagall answers: “For twenty years now, I have worked patiently as an unemployed weaver, and I am currently training to be a poet.” “Who employs you, and what are your wages?” the prosecutor booms. “I am self-employed,” McGonagall calmly responds, “so there’s no wages. . . . It’s not what you’d call regular employment.” “What would you call it?” the prosecutor demands. “Unemployment!” McGonagall cries.
Victoria appears at the beginning of the film and returns later on wearing a black dress and white lace veil; she’s seated at a piano playing jaunty jazz. The visual gag is mildly funny, and Sellers’s comportment defies description, but then he turns around: Queen Victoria is wearing precisely the self-satisfied smirk of a cocktail lounge pianist acknowledging his nightly applause. It’s worth the whole movie.
The Great McGonagall flopped, like everything else had of late. Peter later said, “I had six or seven years of one flop after another—so much so that I just didn’t work. I was getting to the stage where people were crossing the road so they wouldn’t have to embarrass themselves by saying hello.”
His money was running out. After several quick moves around London, he ended up in a stark, almost Brutalist high-rise in Victoria; the building looked like the residential equivalent of the Bulgarian Ministry of Defense.
TWENTY-ONE
The money wasn’t gone, just dwindling. Unlike Daniel Mendoza, Peter Sellers wasn’t heading for debtors’ prison. But, like his great-great-grandfather, he did tend to spend.
He was on the run, as always. He went to the lush Seychelles in late December, but it turned out to be a little too lush—it rained for ten days straight—so he flew to Gstaad for New Year’s to do some skiing. He told the press that he didn’t like the sport and gave it up after a week of trying, but his ski instructor and friend, Hans Moellinger, disagrees. Moellinger had known Peter for years:
“I had met Peter with Roman in Gstaad. He was not a very good skier, so I gave him some lessons. (I’m sort of the ski instructor for famous people—Jack Nicholson, Yul Brynner, Prince Charles. . . . The oldest was Helena Rubinstein.) Roman was renting a beautiful chalet, where Jack, Peter, and a few others were staying for about two weeks. It was always a great time in Gstaad. The boys always expected me because I always brought along three or four girls. There was always a big hello when I arrived.
“He was not a good skier, but he kept listening. Skiing is a very easy thing to learn if you listen and are not nearsighted. It wasn’t difficult to teach him. After one or two weeks he could do a snowplow, so we could do mountains, no problem.” Peter’s own claims to the contrary notwithstanding, he didn’t give up skiing after his initial attempt, which certainly predated this particular New Year’s excursion. On at least one occasion Moellinger even took him helicopter skiing on the riskier high-altitude slopes near Zermatt. Peter enjoyed it, but there was a problem: “He nearly had an accident. We went up to the glacier, about 3,500 meters high, and started with a traverse. All of a sudden he couldn’t hold it anymore and went into a fall line situation and nearly went over a ridge. At just the last minute I threw him over so that he fell about ten meters before the rock.” (A snowplow is generally the first thing one learns in downhill skiing—a way to slow down and maintain control by pointing the skis in a v-shape in front while bending the knees. A traverse—skis together with all the weight on the downhill ski—is just a way to glide across the mountain. The “fall line situation” to which Moellinger refers means simply that Peter started to go straight down the slope. Nobody but the most expert
skiers ever attempts to head purposely down the fall line, so Moellinger caused Peter to fall to keep him from heading over a cliff.)
Skiing itself was not the only thrill of the Zermatt excursion: “We were staying at the Zermatthof. They’re very conservative people, the Swiss. We celebrated one evening with champagne and two girls. We had an enemy in one of the hotel waiters. I don’t know why, but he didn’t like us—maybe because of the girl situation.” So Moellinger and Sellers decided to pull a weird prank on the surly servant. In the middle of the night, they got one of the women to strip and sit naked on the bed, and then they called room service. The waiter’s knock at the door was Peter’s cue to begin loudly intoning, “Ohmmmmmmm.” Moellinger remains amused by the result: “The waiter put the bottle down and walked backward toward the door—like in the old days with kings. He thought there was some sort of sex party going on.”
As for the skiing, Moellinger says that Peter “did enjoy it very much, because he said so. I once taught Robert MacNamara [the Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson Administration and later president of the World Bank], and he said that skiing was the only time he could really relax because he had to concentrate so much. Peter felt the same way. He liked the whiteness of the snow, the absolute quietness—especially in the high altitudes like Zermatt. It was very special to him—the only place he could relax. But with his heart problems we couldn’t stay very long at a high altitude, so for him it was better at Gstaad.”
