by Ed Sikov
Guinness related another whimsy: “We all had identical caravans [dressing room trailers], set up in alphabetical order. Peter insisted on having a bigger caravan than everyone else. Eventually they did find him one—a hideous thing—that was six inches longer. David Niven and I saw him out with a tape measure measuring it.”
Peter also got into a pissing match with Peter Falk—as Guinness described him, “that one-eyed actor.” “Neither would come on to the set before the other one. The whole thing had to be timed with stopwatches so they would arrive at the same time.” The dueling Peters simply couldn’t deal with having to wait for the other to show up. “It was just a stupid game they were playing,” Maggie Smith declares.
Dame Maggie also found Peter to be difficult, unpredictable, and strange. One evening, she relates, he corralled everyone in the cast and the key members of the creative team to watch one of his films; Smith cannot recall which one—only that it was very long and very dull. After it was over, Neil Simon turned and said, “I hate to sleep and run. . . .”
Smith also remembers the day Eileen Brennan showed up in one of the snazzy outfits the film’s costume designer, Ann Roth, had fashioned for her—a brilliant purple gown with matching boa. Peter flipped out on the spot and insisted that the deadly gown be stricken from the wardrobe and remade in another color. “Poor Ann Roth had to stay up all night making a new costume,” Smith sighs. It ended up being apricot.
“David Niven finally cracked,” Dame Maggie comments. “He became very irritated and upset and said to Sellers, ‘How dare you behave this way?’ It was so unlike David.” Niven had always been so even-tempered, quiet, and polite that, according to Smith, “Peter did listen to him,” however briefly.
His friends found him easier to bear than his costars. The actor Malcolm McDowell, with whom Peter shared the agenting services of Dennis Selinger, describes it well: “Peter’s thing was, you never knew whether he’d be talkative or not because he was a manic-depressive. But I knew not to worry if he didn’t say anything—just to ignore it, and eventually he’d come round, which he invariably did. I remember a private dinner in a restaurant called Julie’s [in London], for Dennis Selinger’s sister—she was 70—and all the clients were there. Roger Moore, Michael Caine, all those people. . . . I sat next to Peter, and he was completely silent through the whole dinner. And at the end of it, one of the ladies got up and said, ‘Oh! I’ve lost my diamond earring!’ Everyone started to look for it, whereupon Peter stood up and did a whole Inspector Clouseau thing. Everybody was in tears laughing. It was incredible, a mark of genius. It was the first time he’d spoken all night.”
• • •
In February, Peter and his newest costars—Colin Blakely, Leonard Rossiter, and Lesley-Anne Down—began the production of Blake Edwards’s The Pink Panther Strikes Again, in which Clouseau inadvertently prevents the now-mad (and now-former) Chief Inspector Dreyfus from destroying the world. The critic Jim Yoakum observes that the fifth Panther’s storyline bears more than a passing resemblance to that of The Mouse That Roared: a kidnapped, bearded scientist and daughter; a doomsday device; Peter’s character succeeding despite himself.
His accent worsens further; now even his own name verges on unintelligibility. (“Yes, this is Chief Inspector Clyieuzaeauh.”) The disguises go just as far: Clouseau purchases a new “Quasimodo Hunchback Disguise Kit” with an inflatable helium hump and ends up floating over the rooftops of Paris and past Notre Dame until he shoots off the helium release valve in his crotch and plops into the Seine. (“Feurtunately zere was sufficient air still left in my heump to keep me afleut until the rescyeau.”)
There’s an anachronistically eerie moment when the evil Dreyfus causes the United Nations Building in New York City to disappear. It’s violent insanity as a response to gross stupidity:
DREYFUS: What do you suppose they will call the crater? “The Dreyfus Ditch”! (He laughs maniacally.)
KIDNAPPED PHYSICIST: There shall be no crater.
DREYFUS: No crater? But I want a crater! I want wreckage! Twisted metal! Something the world will not forget!
But the laser beam Dreyfus sets off only makes the building disappear from the Manhattan skyline without a trace.
“What kind of a man are you?” the physicist asks Dreyfus. “A madman,” Dreyfus replies.
• • •
The Pink Panther Strikes Back contains the most purely ghastly comedy sequence in Peter Sellers’s career. The comic tone is beyond baroque:
Dreyfus has a toothache. Clouseau, dressed with a frizz of white hair, a sort of Alpine Einstein, administers laughing gas to himself and to Dreyfus and extracts the tooth—the wrong tooth—with a pair of pliers while, because of the excessive heat in Dreyfus’s lair, Clouseau’s latex-laden geezer makeup begins to melt off his face. To the sound of the two men’s incessant spastic laughter, Clouseau’s face dangles in great, pendulous globs from his nose. The laughter becomes shriller and more mirthless as Clouseau, physically disintegrating, frantically grabs handfuls of his face and packs them back onto himself. Following through perfectly on Clouseau’s philosophical trajectory all through the Panther series, his disguise decays at the same pace as rationality. It’s ugly to watch, as it was clearly meant to be.
“How’s this?” Clouseau asks Dreyfus of his own badly reconstructed head. “Grotesque!” Dreyfus shouts, both of them laughing in agony.
Peter Sellers’s innate ability to sustain such a complex and peculiar tone has rarely if ever been matched. Attempts by others to play Clouseau—Alan Arkin in Inspector Clouseau (1968), Roger Moore as Jacques Clouseau in Curse of the Pink Panther (1983), Roberto Benigni as Jacques Clouseau, Jr., in Son of the Pink Panther (1993)—necessarily ended in dull failure. One of the world’s foremost Peter Sellers fans, Maxine Ventham, makes a crucial point when she observes that “Clouseau would be unbearable—and is unbearable when played by other actors—if he didn’t have those sad, vulnerable, dark eyes peering out at the world.” Look at Peter’s melancholy eyes as Clouseau’s face falls off in globs and you will see precisely what she means.
• • •
It wasn’t a happy shoot. Lesley-Anne Down was not a happy trouper. Each day, she says, “There would be at least an hour of doing absolutely nothing. It would just be Peter being very silly. Little by little we would start working on an idea. And it would be just one shot. Very often, that’s all we would get in a day—one shot. A film that had a schedule of eleven or twelve weeks ended up taking twenty weeks to do.”
“He had terrible feuds with other people,” Herbert Lom recalls with a certain distaste, “for instance, Blake Edwards. They were not on speaking terms. He used to send messages to Blake about the scene, and Blake used to send messages through his assistant to Peter, and we all stood around looking at the ceiling till they stopped playing their game.” Moreover, Lom adds, “Blake showed me telegrams he had received: ‘You are a rotten human being.’ ‘You are a shit and I can afford to work without you.’ ‘I don’t need you to get work. Love, Peter.’
“Peter wouldn’t tolerate Blake, who needed to direct everybody. But Peter wasn’t going to be directed by Blake. He didn’t like him as a person. Peter thought at the time that Blake was a shit, and he wasn’t going to be bossed around by a worthless human being, and all that kind of crap.” Their relationship was like a screwball marriage—comedy and combat in equal measure—and it was based on mutual need.
Still, Lom insists on one point: “I never found him to be difficult. Never.”
For his part, Blake Edwards offers a stark account of Peter’s troubles: “He talked to God, what can I tell you? He called me up in the middle of the night and said, ‘Don’t worry about how we’re going to do that scene tomorrow. I just talked to God, and He told me how to do it.’ ”
• • •
“I’m very protective of Peter,” Burt Kwouk insists. According to Kwouk, the reason is simple: “Respect. Respect for what he was. There’s too little respec
t in our business. There are very few actors who are not troubled people.” Asked if Peter Sellers was more troubled than most, Kwouk answers, “I happen to think that he wasn’t. He wasn’t any more fucked up than I am.” For Kwouk, the difference was this: “When you’re somebody like Peter Sellers, the media latch onto it and make it much bigger than it seems. That’s what the media do. What the hell, they’ve got to make a living.
“He was a complicated man. Some of us loved him, some of us hated him. Of course. That’s true of everybody. There were people who didn’t like Jesus Christ. They nailed him to a cross, for chrissake. The business of being a human being is what it’s all about. It’s not about being a movie star, not about being an actor, not about being world famous. It’s about being a human being. We all go to the toilet every morning, whoever we are.”
• • •
In the south of France in July, in London in August, in Los Angeles in September, and with a side trip to the Seychelles sometime in between, Peter, fifty, was beginning to keep company in the form and figure of Lynne Frederick, a wild little thing of twenty-one. An actress (she appeared as Catherine Howard in Masterpiece Theatre’s Henry VIII and His Six Wives) and girl about town (by the time she hooked up with Peter, the precocious Lynne had already enjoyed affairs with both the thirty-seven-year-old David Frost and the fifty-year-old West End gaming club operator Julian Posner), Lynne was a striking beauty, confident beyond her years. And ambitious.
Sellers himself described her as having what he called an “extrasensory instinct” that told her precisely what he needed at any given moment. She, in turn, provided it. She was four months younger than his son.
On December 15, 1976, The Pink Panther Strikes Again received its Royal World Charity Premiere at London’s Odeon in Leicester Square. A single invitation was sent to Mr. Peter Sellers, who was insulted at being unable to invite his chosen date, specifically Lynne, since royal invitations cannot be altered, even for close friends of the royals. “If Lynne is not allowed to be there I’m bloody well not going myself,” he said. And so he boycotted the British premiere of his own film, to much stir in the British press.
Now it was Prince Charles’s turn to be offended. Charles was aghast at his old friend’s behavior and the scandal it caused. It was still bloody: “I was bloody annoyed that he didn’t turn up,” the Prince declared at the time. “I wish I could take my girlfriend to functions, but I can’t. I’m going to tell him how I feel when I see him.”
Peter, Lynne, and Victoria left for Gstaad two days later.
After eleven months passed, a reporter was curious. “Are you still in the doghouse with Prince Charles?” Peter was asked. “Don’t know,” Peter replied. “Haven’t seen him since.”
• • •
Malcolm McDowell was already acquainted with Lynne Frederick. “I’d just worked with her on a film called Voyage of the Damned (1976) so I was rather. . . . I would have warned him off, had I known. But you can’t, can you?”
At a party, McDowell recalls, “Peter actually said to me, ‘I will walk into a room of forty women, and there is one woman in that room that is poisonous for me, and I will walk straight up to her and ask her to marry me.’ ”
The wedding took place in Paris on February 18, 1977. They soon flew to their new summer house at Port Grimaud near Saint-Tropez.
Lynne’s mother, Iris Frederick, a Thames television casting agent, was pointedly not invited to the ceremony. “I wouldn’t have gone in any case,” Iris declared to reporters. “I will never, ever talk to him. There is the age difference, but more important, there is Mr. Sellers’s track record. He has three failed marriages behind him. Three women can’t be that wrong.” She and Lynne had stopped speaking three months earlier and remained estranged for quite some time.
As for the precise cause of the marriage itself—Peter and Lynne had been living together for months before tying the knot—it seems to have been a form of coercion on Peter’s part. It was he who demanded that she marry him; she’d been offered a five-month television job in Moscow, and he didn’t want her to go and leave him alone.
• • •
As Spike Milligan once told Michael Sellers, Peter “was always searching for a bloody heart attack as if it were a letter he knew had been posted and hadn’t arrived.” The mail was delivered on March 20, 1977, on board an Air France Boeing 727 from Nice to Heathrow. The plane was about twenty-five minutes away from London when Peter’s chest seized; a flight attendant described him as looking “dreadful.” There was a doctor on board, and he made Peter comfortable and reassured him while air traffic controllers gave the plane top priority for landing. After a brief examination by a physician at Heathrow’s medical unit, he was rushed to Charing Cross Hospital.
“It is not a heart attack and there is nothing to worry about,” Lynne told the press. It was all the result of bad oysters in Saint-Tropez, she said. The senior cardiologist at Charing Cross took a different opinion.
Strangely, Peter had been quite friendly with the world’s best-known heart surgeon, the jet-setting Dr. Christiaan Barnard, since the early seventies. And yet Peter never allowed Dr. Barnard to operate on him, nor anyone else for that matter. He’s said to have considered open-heart surgery at Charing Cross, but he decided simply to go with a new electronic pacemaker instead. It was installed, after which he and Lynne flew back to Saint-Tropez.
• • •
In May, they flew to Gstaad.
In June, Peter fired Bert Mortimer.
Sue Evans, Peter’s secretary, remembers the moment well: “I got a call really late one night. It was Peter, and he said, ‘I’m going to dictate a letter, and I don’t want you to say anything. Just take it down, and don’t say anything.’ He started dictating the letter, and it was dismissing Bert. His loyal chauffeur, personal assistant, and friend was gone.”
“I just could not understand why he would want to break that relationship,” says Bert. “Even today I can’t tell you.”
TWENTY-TWO
Kenneth Griffith recalls Lynne Frederick terribly well. He paid the couple a visit. “She was very friendly, pleasant, and nice, but I wasn’t convinced that he wasn’t in trouble. Serious trouble. Which proved to be correct. Because of my sense about her, I said, ‘Pete, you remember when you were living in the Dorchester?’ ”
Peter recalled precisely the occasion to which Griffith referred: Griffith was appearing in a West End play at the time and not making very much money at it. Griffith continues: “I’m sitting there eating wonderful food and feeling a lot better when he suddenly says, ‘Here, Kenny—something worrying you?’ ‘No, no, Pete,’ I said, ‘I’m feeling great. Lovely to see you and be here.’ Four minutes later: ‘Kenny, something is worrying you and I want to know what it is.’ I said, ‘I’ve had a bad time you know, I shouldn’t be doing this fucking play, it’s hard work, I do two performances six nights a week. . . . And I bought a house, it was a struggle to get the money to buy it on top of everything else, and I’ve been doing such rubbish as an actor in films. And,’ I said, ‘it nearly beat me.’ He said, ‘How do you mean “nearly beat you”?’ I said, ‘Well, I think there’s about two thousand quid left. It’s done.’
“He gave me a check for $2,500. I said, ‘No, Peter—out of the question.’ ‘Aw Kenny,’ he said, ‘Don’t, don’t, don’t tear it up, don’t, because it would give me great pleasure, and I’ll speak to Bill [Wills] in the morning. All I’ll do is tell Bill to lose it—who will know? No one will know, but it will give me great pleasure.’ I did tear it up.
“Now—with his new wife there, I said, ‘You know how memory can play tricks with you, Pete?’ ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said. But I wasn’t really speaking to him; I was speaking to her. And I said, ‘Was that true? You put a check for $2,500 in my pocket?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You probably tore it up, didn’t you?’ That’s all. But it was information that I felt she ought to know about her husband. I don’t think she cared at all.” In short, Griffith saw Sel
lers’s generosity; according to him, Lynne saw his bank accounts.
• • •
Sarah Sellers recalls Lynne very well, too: “We were told that she would like to take me and Michael out for a meal and get to know us. She seemed quite nice to begin with. She came across as very bubbly and friendly and warm. Once they got married things definitely changed.”
“Lynne was like the nurse,” Victoria Sellers maintains. “He needed help doing things—he had pill-taking times, and we couldn’t do this, or that, because we couldn’t get Dad all excited.” Sue Evans agrees: “She took over the running of his life. He had alienated so many people by this point that he saw Lynne as the one person who was there.”
Except for Bert, whom Peter fired. That he did so within months of marrying Lynne explains it.
• • •
Army Archerd mentioned Peter’s newest film project, Curse of the Pink Panther, in August. Lynne Frederick would appear with him in it, Peter told another Hollywood columnist a few weeks later, fresh from a trip with Lynne to Disneyland. “In fact,” he said, “I think her role should be enlarged.” Then they left for London.
Curse of the Pink Panther, soon retitled Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978), began shooting in Paris in November. Lynne played no role onscreen.
Clouseau goes in pursuit of the drug lord Douvier (Robert Webber), whose turf (the world) is threatened by rivals; Douvier’s secretary-lover, Simone (Dyan Cannon) helps him until she turns on him and aids Clouseau. They all end up in Hong Kong.
