by Ed Sikov
Clouseau shows up at the costume shop of Professor Balls (Graham Stark) to try on his new disguise—a leg-shortened Toulouse-Lautrec number complete with blue smock, beard, and straw hat. At first, he stumbles and totters, unused to the absence of tibia, but then he gets it. It’s the end of Dr. Strangelove:
BALLS: That’s it, Chief Inspector! You can walk!
CLOUSEAU: I ken . . . ! I ken’a weuk!
At which point he tips his hat and launches into “Zank ’eaven for Leettle Girls.”
A henchman at the front door hands him the requisite bomb. Clouseau accepts it, reaches into his pocket for a tip, and announces his dismay: “I’m sorry. I’m a little short.”
Then: “A beum? Wear yeu expicting weune? A beaum!” He tosses it, as is his habit, away from himself and toward the nearest person—Balls.
December found the cast and crew in a Shepperton soundstage, where, just before Christmas there was a friendly reunion when Princes Charles, Andrew, and Edward paid a visit. (They watched Peter film the scene in which Clouseau and Cato attempt to gain entrance to a drug speakeasy-disco, Le Club Foot.) By the first week of February, the production had moved to Hong Kong for extended location shooting, and the film wrapped in April on the French Riviera.
Peter and Lynne seem to have been getting along well at the time. “It’s a whole new second-stage rocket,” Peter said of his marriage around that time. “Mind-boggling and marvelous . . . ! I knew that we had met before in a previous incarnation, and I know we shall meet again after this.”
• • •
With each passing Panther, Burt Kwouk couldn’t help but notice the escalation in comic extremism, not to mention the soaring costs and metastasizing scope: “Peter’s accent got worse and worse, we all started to look older, and the pictures, for some reason, became larger in scale as they went on. A Shot in the Dark was pretty small scale; the last one was a huge epic.” But, Kwouk quickly adds, “I’ll tell you the honest truth—I can no longer tell one movie from the other. It just seems like one enormous twelve-hour movie that took twenty years to shoot.”
Given the huge financial successes of The Return of the Pink Panther and The Pink Panther Strikes Again, the whiff of another enormous blast of cash was in the air in the offices of United Artists, so the company arranged another lavish press junket, just to make sure. At a cost of $300,000—nearly triple the price of the Return affair—UA invited three hundred guests including seventy-five reporters, their spouses, Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters, and Don Ho, to Kahuku, Oahu, to celebrate the Fourth of July. Only a week before the extravaganza, with studio executives giddily preparing to buy favorable worldwide press, Blake Edwards was seized with misgivings about a portion of the fireworks scene, so he summoned Peter and Dyan Cannon to an MGM studio set on June 24 and 25 and hastily reshot the sequence.
Despite the strain of orchestrating what one disgruntled publicist called “this goddam junket”—“Blake and Tony [Adams] are scum and I really don’t give a shit anymore how it turns out,” the publicist privately opined—it was a big success. Media coverage of the film was most extensive.
At the press conference with Edwards, Dyan Cannon, Burt Kwouk, and Herbert Lom, Peter was asked about his heart attacks. “I’m trying to give them up,” he replied. “I’m down to two a day now. It’s about time for one now! It all began when I met Sue Mengers.” (Sue Mengers was the powerful, notoriously abrasive Hollywood agent later parodied by Blake Edwards in the form of Shelley Winters’s character in S.O.B., 1981.) Blake quickly diverted the conversation in another direction: “The only thing I worry about is mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It might excite him too much.” Peter and Lynne flew to London for the British premiere the following week.
Revenge of the Pink Panther was highly successful at the box office. Like The Pink Panther Strikes Again, it took in an estimated $100 million in revenues.
Since both Sellers and Edwards had repeatedly said that each would never work with the other again, the occasion of the fifth Pink Panther (and, with The Party, their sixth collaboration) necessitated some sort of explanation for the radical change of heart. Edwards took his pragmatic, workhorse stance: “I guess it’s the old Hollywood thing—‘I’ll never work with the guy again—until I need him.’ ” Edwards also provided an astute evaluation of Peter’s physical comedy style: “Peter is not really a physical comedian in the sense that Chaplin or Keaton were. He is not that kind of an acrobat, and he is not trained that way. But he has a mind that thinks that way.”
With his combined share of all the Pink Panther revenues reported to have been $4 million, Peter was rich again. And he’d reached his limit: “I’ve honestly had enough of Clouseau myself. I’ve got nothing more to give.”
• • •
On the small screen, Peter stands in a straggly brown wig topped by a horned Wagnerian helmet and performs a brief imitation of Queen Victoria to a fascinated Kermit the Frog. The Muppet Show, with Peter as the week’s guest star, aired during the last week of February 1978.
Kermit tells Peter that while he really loves all of Peter’s funny characters, it’s perfectly okay for him to just relax and be himself:
PETER: (in the stentorian voice of a very old, very grand British thespian) But that, you see, my dear Kermit, would be altogether impossible. I could never be myself.
KERMIT: Uh, never yourself?
PETER: No. You see, there is no me. I do not exist.
KERMIT: (uncomfortable) Er, I beg your pardon?
PETER: (leaning in close and looking nervously around for eavesdroppers) There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed.
KERMIT: (looking nauseated) Uh, er, can . . . can we change the subject?
In a minute, Kermit. Peter Sellers was terribly self-conscious about his lack of a self, and it must have been taxing to sustain such a robust contradiction. What does it mean to have no self if you yourself think you have none? Sellers had selves, just as everyone does; his were just more extravagant, and most of them were played out under high-key lights in movies, television, and publicity photos. They were provisional, performative selves, and they popped up whenever the need for a particular one arose. His favorites were fictional, snapped on spontaneously and crafted over time. These selves made him a fortune and a lot of clever and successful friends who enjoyed his company. His least pleasant selves, the remorse-producing ones, were, in a word, selfish—hungry, impulse-driven selves bent on gratification at any cost. Expensive car, beautiful wife, willing girlfriend, latest camera, compliant child—he had to have it, and he had to have it right away, and, completing the performance, he had to let everyone know. Once he got it, of course, the selfish self faded away, satisfied but empty. Surgically removing that set of selves must have seemed less painful than living with them.
• • •
Peter and Lynne returned from Hong Kong to a domestic disruption in London. They were living in an elegant apartment in Roebuck House. The apartment, done in Indian-techno-Goon, featured saffron-colored walls, a lot of burning candles, a small carved Buddha, a prominent picture of Spike, acres of electronics and photographic equipment, and a huge blow-up photo of Lynne that had been taken by Peter.
Peter had been living there from the time before Titi; Tessa had briefly moved in. Now they found themselves faced with a 300 percent rent increase. Peter’s upstairs neighbors were outraged, too—Lord Olivier and his wife, Joan Plowright, who according to Peter had a habit of dropping marbles on the hardwood floor. “We tried living in France last year,” Lynne told the press, “but it wasn’t a success. I don’t know where we would go now. I hope it won’t be America.” They abandoned Roebuck House with no London residence to take its place.
Lynne described Peter as “incredibly volatile. He’ll say, ‘We’re going to Egypt tomorrow night.’ He needs someone to gently pull him down to earth a bit. . . . You need incredible patience. But I think I have it. I think I’m perhaps the first calm woman he’s found. He thinks he’s d
ifficult to get along with. Past wives and girlfriends have put forward this moody, broody image. But I don’t see him like that.”
“What went wrong with my marriages?” Peter asked rhetorically some time later. He never condemned Anne, toward whom he remained friendly and needy. Miranda was too sophisticated and aristocratic for him, but he never ripped into her in public. He was now saving it all for Britt, to whom he generally referred tersely as “Ekland.” “She’s a professional girlfriend, so there’s no more to be said,” he declared on one occasion. On another he added this: “Every move she makes, she ruins a life. It’s her hard, driving, ruthless ambition.” Peter also made a point of letting Victoria know the depth of his feelings about her mother.
• • •
Physically, Peter’s heart was kept going by a pacemaker, but emotionally it was fracturing to the point that in the early summer of 1978 he flew with Lynne to the Philippines for several sessions of shamanistic surgery. As Michael Sellers describes it, the shamans “conducted their ‘surgery’ by invisibly passing their hands into a patient’s body and plucking out the diseased tissues.” Michael tried to talk him out of it. Lynne thought there was no harm in trying, so off they went.
Peter endured twenty grueling “surgeries,” which apparently involved the psychic doctors yanking pig spleens out from their concealment under the operating table.
He pronounced himself cured. Lynne herself went under the psychic knife to heal a persistent back problem and made a show of being equally impressed with the doctors. “They really are incredible,” she declared. “Aren’t they, darling?”
• • •
In late April 1979, when Peter viewed his next film, The Prisoner of Zenda (1979), in a screening room at Universal Studios in Burbank, he had a strong, sour reaction. The lights came up, he told Walter Mirisch, “You’ll be hearing from me,” and then he departed.
The next morning, he sent Mirisch a thirteen-point memo that described in excruciating detail how much he detested The Prisoner of Zenda. Halfway through the screening he began sweating and swearing; by the end he was in a blind rage. “I don’t know how I held myself in check that evening,” he told the durable British journalist Roderick Mann. “The version I saw was so bad! Mirisch has tried to turn it into a sort of poor man’s Pink Panther and shot extra scenes using doubles which I knew absolutely nothing about. I’m so upset and disappointed. I even thought of renting a billboard to voice my protests, or hiring the Goodyear blimp and putting a message on it. Don’t see it. It’s a disaster.
“I’m just not going to sit back and be clobbered. After all, I do know something about comedy.”
Stan Dragoti had originally been slated to direct The Prisoner of Zenda, but he was replaced by Richard Quine, the director of such slick and commercially successful pictures as My Sister Eileen (1955), The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956), and The World of Suzie Wong (1960). The film features Peter in three roles; his costars are Lionel Jeffries (with whom Peter had appeared in Two-Way Stretch, Up the Creek, and The Wrong Arm of the Law), Elke Sommer, and Lynne Frederick.
The story: King Rudolph IV of Ruritania (Peter as a sort of Bavarian Methuselah), floating high above his domain in a balloon filled with hot air, opens one too many bottles of champagne, pops a hole in the balloon, and stands in befuddled terror at his sudden descent. He lands in a tree in a faraway village and promptly falls into a well.
Meanwhile, in Ruritania, plots are afoot as General Saft (Jeffries) moves to subvert the monarchical process; meanwhile, in London, the king’s debauched son (Peter doing a particularly jaded Terry-Thomas) is amusing himself in a gambling hall when he’s told of his father’s demise. “The king is dead. Long live me,” Rudolph V pronounces.
Ruritanian ministers then hire a look-alike carriage driver named Syd (Peter doing a fairly standard Cockney) to impersonate the new king; he eventually falls in love with Princess Flavia (Lynne) and, in the end, assumes the throne himself. The Prisoner of Zenda is an expensive, flabby dud.
Peter’s Terry-Thomas voice is a bit florid, especially since he combines it with a speech impediment— ws serve as rs—which renders many of Rudolph’s lines unintelligible. Some are quite funny—“The cwown is mine!”—but all in all it’s still not one of Peter’s better efforts.
With Peter flush with cash and fame again—Revenge of the Pink Panther was the tenth-top-grossing film of 1978—he was firmly back in the groove as far as on-set antics were concerned. In some cases, he was probably right; the script was terrible, Quine’s direction indecisive, Walter Mirisch’s meddling unproductive. The film may legitimately have seemed to him to be headed for failure. But in other cases, Peter was just being Peter at his worst. Lionel Jeffries told (the real) Terry-Thomas privately that Peter’s behavior had been truly dreadful on the set one day, and that Peter had telephoned Jeffries about it later that night. “Was I really awful today?” Peter asked. “Well, yes,” Jeffries said, at which Peter laughed and hung up.
• • •
The cut of The Prisoner of Zenda Peter had seen with Walter Mirisch was not the final one; the picture still required some dubbing on Peter’s part. He refused to do it.
A few days later, under threat of legal action, he did it.
Then he flew to Barbados for a month. Lynne stayed in Los Angeles. He rented the theater designer Oliver Messel’s old place by himself. From Barbados he flew to Switzerland to oversee the move into his new house in Gstaad.
He changed his mind about The Prisoner of Zenda, at least in public, by the time the film was released. “I think it’s a wonderfully entertaining movie,” he penned in a letter to Roderick Mann. The print he’d seen, he explained, didn’t have a musical score and was even missing several scenes. Lynne, separately, put her two cents in, too: “Part of the trouble was we saw the film by ourselves, not with an audience. So there was no laughter. And Peter got upset.”
By that point, Lynne had moved into her own house. As Roderick Mann put it, the move occurred “with Sellers’s blessing.”
He hadn’t found lasting, unconditional love, and he hadn’t found spiritual contentment either. Michael Sellers takes a harsh tone when describing his father’s religious life: “If someone offered a cut-price, special-offer, gift-wrapped religion that guaranteed miracles and a personal audience with the Maker, then Dad would apply for instant enrollment.” Peter was scarcely alone in trying to fashion a spiritual quilt out of appealing and available scraps without worrying too much about how the seams would fit. But few people other than the half-Jewish, Catholic-educated, Buddhist- Hindu- yogic- Castanedaesque Peter Sellers would go so far as to fly a wondrous Catholic priest from Mexico to Gstaad, install him briefly in a hotel, and get him to offer him Holy Communion. Michael dutifully knelt alongside.
Peter had also paid a visit to a Beverly Hills numerologist, he told a friend. “She said that in one incarnation I had been a priest in Roman days. You know—it’s the old déjà vu thing, but every time I’ve been to Rome I’ve felt it—especially one night in the Circus Maximus. It’s now a car park. About three in the morning I was sitting right in the center thinking about all the Christians who had been sacrificed to the lions and feeling that I must have been there.”
• • •
For most of the 1970s, Peter Sellers was obsessed with playing a nobody who became a somebody nobody could really know. As his secretary Sue Evans once said, “You have to understand that Being There was a daily conversation” from the time Peter hired her in 1973 until 1979, when the film was shot and released. Jerzy Kosinski concurred: “For seven and a half years, Peter Sellers became Chauncey Gardiner. He printed calling cards as Chauncey Gardiner. He signed letters Chauncey Gardiner.” Peter often made a point of acting like Chauncey Gardiner, too. At a mid-seventies meeting with Kosinski in a Beverly Hills hotel room, Peter ordered champagne to be sent up. When the waiter arrived, Peter was staring at the television set. Only it wasn’t on. “Would you mind not stepping in the way?” he kindly
asked the mystified waiter, who stepped gingerly all around the room in a strained effort not to block Peter’s view of an empty screen.
At one point a year or two later, Peter was in Malibu renting Larry Hagman’s beach house. “Jerzy Kosinski came over all the time,” Victoria Sellers remembers. “He and my dad hit it off really well.” Conveniently for Peter, the thin, white-haired, white-bearded director Hal Ashby lived in Malibu, too. Ashby was still interested in making the picture, and by that point, Ashby himself was becoming most bankable; his 1978 film Coming Home ended up winning three Oscars—for Jon Voight, Jane Fonda, and the screenwriters Waldo Salt and Robert C. Jones—and was nominated for six more.
In late 1978, Peter was renting an expansive blue and white house on Summitridge Place in Beverly Hills, where he flew the Union Jack above the driveway, just to make a point: He wasn’t one of them. After years of frustration and disappointment, and after a preparatory face-lift, he reached a joint agreement with Ashby, the producer Andrew Braunsberg, and the film and television production company Lorimar to make his most cherished project as a big-scale feature film. In 1973, the entire proposed budget for Being There had been $1,946,300. By the time production began on January 15, 1979, Peter alone was getting $750,000 for sixteen weeks’ work, plus a percentage of the gross, plus living expenses of $2,500 per week during the shoot, plus first star billing above the title, with nobody else getting credit in larger type. Through his agent Marty Baum at Creative Artists, Peter also tried to make it impossible for any other star to share billing space above the title.
“I did it just to see a genius at work,” said Shirley MacLaine, explaining why she agreed to take what she called a supporting role at that stage of her spectacular career (The Trouble With Harry, 1955; The Apartment, 1960; Irma La Douce, 1963; Sweet Charity, 1969; The Turning Point, 1977). Still, MacLaine’s agent successfully played the bad cop in negotiations with Braunsberg, Ashby, and Lorimar and made sure that his client got her name above the title immediately below Peter’s. Jack Warden and Melvyn Douglas’s agents followed suit, so by the time everything was said, signed, printed, and screened, a total of four movie stars’ names preceded the words Being There in the opening credits.
