by Ed Sikov
Peter’s remarks became a scandal, one which did not please Sophia, who was swiftly pestered to respond to Peter’s public despair. “I could not write about every partner I have had in the movies,” she told one reporter. “It would have taken volumes. I only wrote about the most important events of my life. Peter lived in Los Angeles and it was too far to go to see him from Italy.” At this point Sophia became angry: “I will not answer any more questions about Peter Sellers! I wrote the book to tell the truth about my life, not for gossip columnists!”
“I know the men I’ve slept with,” Sophia told Shirley MacLaine privately. “And Peter, bless his phantasmagorical mind, was not one of them.”
MacLaine was soon surprised to find herself in the same phantasmagorical boat. During the production of Being There, she later wrote, “He did tell me in detail of his love affairs with Sophia Loren and Liza Minnelli. I wondered about his lack of discretion but sometimes found his reenactments very funny.” Then she discovered, after filming had concluded, that Peter was describing to others the details of his torrid affair with Shirley MacLaine. In fact, one Hollywood producer reported that he had been in the same room with Peter when Peter was “whispering sweet nothings” to MacLaine on the telephone. “Then he was whispering to a dial tone,” is MacLaine’s response.
• • •
His fourth marriage’s denouement seemed inevitable to the point of redundancy. Just before Being There began shooting, Peter was asked about Lynne. “I’m so lucky,” he answered. “She’s a beautiful girl in every sense. I just wish I’d met her long ago. It’s been a long, bumpy road to find her, but God at last has smiled on me. . . . Lynne is exactly the kind of girl whom Peg would have wanted for me. She [Peg] is always around, always giving me help and advice. . . . She loves Lynne and wants us to be happy together.”
Lynne’s own mother, Iris, still hadn’t spoken to her daughter since the marriage, though she did continue speaking to the press. “What mother can be expected to approve of the marriage of her daughter to such a man?” Mrs. Frederick declared to the Los Angeles Times in late January. “Their marriage was doomed from the start.”
Iris was right.
Lynne saw a shrink. The doctor’s diagnosis was one to which Peter failed to cotton. “A psychiatrist she went to was crazy enough to suggest that because I loved my mother I was still looking for another mother figure!” he declared in exasperation. “When my mother was alive,” he explained, “she did everything she could in her life to help me. She was content and always there, both for my father and me. I said to Lynne one day that because of her kindness, she reminded me of my mother. . . . Sometime later she went to a psychiatrist in Hollywood. Those shrinks are awful! What he told Lynne was that the trouble between us—the strain which I hadn’t noticed—was caused by my looking for another mother figure. And it was that incestuous feeling that prevented us from having children. Now that is mad, isn’t it? Quite mad!”
Peter wanted a divorce. Typically, he told a reporter about it first. “That was what hurt,” Lynne said, “reading in a newspaper that our marriage was finished. It’s true we had discussed divorce, but no decision had been reached when he left. We’ve both consulted lawyers, but nothing’s happened yet.”
It seems that in the third week of April, just after Being There wrapped, Peter left Los Angeles for Barbados, alone and in a rage, because Lynne had refused to accompany him on the vacation. He stayed in Barbados a single day and then flew to London. “From there he telephoned me to announce that his marriage was over,” Roderick Mann wrote in the Sunday Express on April 28. “A few days later he made the same statement to London newspapermen.”
The whole thing continued to be played out in newspapers and, in a secondary sense, in daily telephone calls between the two aggrieved parties, who clung to each other long distance. In early May, Peter was in his room at the Inn on the Park in London and sleeping in until 4 P.M. He was “haggard and bleary-eyed” when he answered the door, found a reporter, tried to slam the door in the reporter’s face, and ended up slamming it on his own foot.
“I don’t mind being alone,” he told still another scribe. Yet in mid-May, he mentioned to a third journalist that he’d asked Lynne to fly to London for what he called a “love summit”; he himself having left London briefly to make an appearance at the Cannes Film Festival. “For tax reasons I cannot work in London,” he said to a fourth reporter, “but I can certainly go there to save my marriage.” To a fifth he added that “up till now all the discussions regarding our future life together have been on the telephone.”
“Really,” he said, “I am a romantic, so I can’t rule out getting married again. But this time it will be to an older woman—someone who is thirty-one or thirty-two.”
One of Lynne’s friends told the Daily Mail that “she doesn’t appear upset about anything.”
• • •
In May, Peter announced that he was starting work on a new record album. Sellers Market, which was recorded in France in June. It was originally going to feature a conversation between Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and I’m All Right, Jack’s Fred Kite; it would have been a classic, but the final selection includes no such cut. Instead, Sellers Market includes among its highlights an unusual rendition of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day”—it’s done in Morse code—and an equally warped version of Freed and Brown’s “Singin’ in the Rain” done as a military march.
The best track, though, is “The Cultural Scene: The Compleat Guide to Accents of the British Isles,” in which an American professor, Don Schulman (Sellers) tours the United Kingdom and finds a wide variety of rhythms and inflections, all done by Sellers: London (Cockney), Surrey (Russian), Birmingham (Indian), Wales (lilting singsong), Edinburgh (kilty), and Glasgow (virtually incomprehensible and belligerently drunk).
He kept himself occupied in other ways, too. He had several new film projects in mind: The Romance of the Pink Panther, to be directed by Sidney Poitier; Chandu the Magician for Orion; The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, also for Orion; and a remake of Preston Sturges’s classic 1948 screwball comedy Unfaithfully Yours for Twentieth Century-Fox. He even talked about making a science-fiction film with Satyajit Ray.
The Romance of the Pink Panther would be different than the other Panthers, Peter told the Hollywood columnist Marilyn Beck. Clouseau will “expose a side of himself no one has seen. He’s going to be involved with a woman who’s deeply in love with him, and we’ll see his reaction to that.” There was still no word on who would play the woman, Anastasia Puissance. In fact, the script was not yet completed at the time. According to Peter, production wouldn’t begin until August 1980, at the earliest. Reportedly, Peter would be getting $3 million up front for the film—half of which, he claimed, had already been paid. He would also get 10 percent of the gross. Estimating from the financial success of the last Panther, The Romance of the Pink Panther alone might earn him $8 million.
That Sidney Poitier rather than Blake Edwards was set to direct The Romance of the Pink Panther seems not to have been the result of animosity between Peter and Blake. He’d filmed a cameo for Edwards’s latest picture, 10 (1979), which starred Dudley Moore, Julie Andrews, and Bo Derek. Peter played drums in a jazz band, but the scene was cut before the film’s release.
• • •
In the beginning of August, Rolling Stone’s Mitchell Glazer conducted his interview with Peter in Gstaad. He found the words “Om Shanti” inscribed over the front door of Peter’s chalet and an autographed photo of Stan Laurel hanging on the wall. “It’s nice to walk around here and get stoned,” Peter told Glazer for publication. “This place is so beautiful even I can relax.”
• • •
In December 1979, when the latest issue of Britain’s Club International magazine hit the stands, readers and gossip columnists were delighted to find what the magazine billed as “exclusive” nude photos of Britt Ekland and Lynne Frederick. Britt’s were full-frontal, Lynne’s simply bare-b
reasted. “It’s gossiped that Sellers himself snapped the pics, but not for publication,” the Hollywood Reporter noted.
• • •
In January 1980, Being There was screened for President Jimmy Carter and the first lady, Rosalynn, at the White House. President Carter particularly enjoyed the exchange between Chance and the president—the one during which the president thinks he is getting political advice but in fact is receiving the basic facts of plant life. “That’s better advice than I get,” said President Carter.
• • •
Before embarking on The Romance of the Pink Panther, Unfaithfully Yours, Chandu the Magician, or the unlikely space alien picture for Satyajit Ray, Peter made The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980) with Helen Mirren and Sid Caesar.
Roman Polanski had once been mentioned as a director for the film, but nothing came of it. John G. Avildson spent a week with Peter discussing the possibility of his directing it, after which Orion paid Avildson $100,000 to walk away. Richard Quine was approached; he too dropped out after arguing with Peter about the direction the film should take. Piers Haggard was finally hired. Haggard had directed such films as The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970).
Filming began at the Studios de Boulogne in Paris at the end of September.
Fu Manchu, the eponymous fiend, had long held a special appeal for Peter: “I listened fanatically to the Fu Manchu radio serials on the BBC. They were more terrifying than the BBC’s light musical programs.” Now, in performing the role himself, Peter strove to avoid what he called “the stilted stereotype of swapping rs for ls. It’s demeaning, it’s been done to death, and it’s not funny.” (In other words, it had been funny in Murder By Death, but now he was bored with it.) Instead, Peter provided Fu Manchu with the backstory of an English prep-school education—in Peter’s words, “where he learned the meaning of torture, like any proper British schoolboy”—and then claimed to have based Fu Manchu’s British accent on Lord Snowdon. Peter swore that he’d asked Snowdon for his permission, which Snowdon is said to have swiftly granted, but in point of fact the fiend’s voice sounds a good bit too Chinese for the tale to be true.
Peter also claimed that he was focusing on Fu Manchu’s astounding sex appeal. “After all,” Peter explained, “if you’ve devoted 150 years to depravity, you’re bound to get good at it.”
His makeup: a spray-applied rubber that hardened into crow’s feet and wrinkles; twelve molded sponge devices to create Asiatic features; tinted contact lenses; a beard; and long black plastic fingernails. It was all painful. “The bloody lenses made my eyes run, my skin itched from the spirit gum on the beard, and the fingernails were a bore. I kept poking myself in odd places. I don’t know how women manage with them,” Peter remarked.
In early November, the production moved to St. Gervais, the Alpine resort, for some location work, after which The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu moved back to the Studios de Boulogne. Just before Christmas, Peter flew to Gstaad for some rest, promising to return after the holidays. He did return, whereupon he promptly fired Piers Haggard, whom, like several other directors over the years, he had grown to hate for reasons of his own. Peter took over the filming himself.
In January, Peter summoned David Lodge to Paris, where Lodge found Lynne to have become “very hard—not the same person” he had met earlier. In some sense they were back together, but since their relationship had always included long separations followed by intense reunions, their current togetherness was simply par for the course.
According to Lodge, Peter retained the contractual right to reshoot anything he wanted, and he could reshoot any given scene as often as he wanted. So to Lodge’s amazement, Peter reshot Lodge’s scene entirely in close-ups. (A scene shot entirely in close-ups would produce a rather avant-garde effect.) Lodge tried to just sit there and let Peter film him, but, from Peter’s perspective, Lodge just couldn’t seem to get it right. “Your eyebrows are popping up and down like a fiddler’s elbow!” Peter told him before insisting that they retake the scene yet again.
“Do what Gene Hackman does,” Peter advised his oldest continuous friend. “Fuck all.” (By this Peter meant something on the order of “don’t do anything—just sit there.”)
Lodge concludes his tale by noting that despite Peter’s right to reshoot anything he pleased, Orion was under no obligation to use any of it, so Lodge’s scene ended up on the cutting room floor.
• • •
The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu has two remarkable performances, both by Peter, some beautiful set designs by Alexandre Trauner (who designed The Apartment, 1960, for Billy Wilder, among other films), no script, and few laughs. The film opens with Fu’s minions singing “Happy Birthday to Fu” on the occasion of his 168th birthday. He prepares ritualistically to drink the elixir vitae that keeps him alive, but a servant drops the bottle. (“You look familiar,” Fu remarks to the servant, played by Burt Kwouk.) Fu spends the rest of the film assembling the exotic ingredients, all the while pursued by a retired Scotland Yard inspector, Nayland Smith (Peter), and alternatively thwarted and aided by Inspector Alice Rage (Helen Mirren).
Michael Caine had once been mentioned as a possible Nayland Smith, but Peter took the role himself, and his Nayland Smith couldn’t be more opposed to anything Caine could have produced. Peter’s Nayland is a peculiarly flat-voiced old man—Henry Crun with no affect, having had it tortured out of him by previous encounters with Fu Manchu. In fact, there is something oddly cerebral about both of Sellers’s performances in this lackluster film. Because of the film’s basic storyline, it isn’t a stretch to say that both Fu Manchu and Nayland Smith spend much of the time meditating on their own mortality. The result is weirdly affecting—a badly written, practically undirected comedy played as warped eulogy.
“Peter was fucked up,” his costar Helen Mirren acknowledges. “He could be very cruel, but he was also incredibly vulnerable, like a child.” But like most other of the sensitive people with whom Peter Sellers worked, Mirren adds a crucial filip: “He was very, very nice to me. He did the sweetest thing—he laughed at my jokes. That’s such a kind thing to do to anyone. Especially [for] a great comedian.”
• • •
March 1980 saw the usual swelling tide of pre-Oscars jockeying, handicapping, and hype. Peter flew from Gstaad to London, and from London to New York, where, on March 12, he appeared on the Today show to promote Being There, for which he was nominated for a Best Actor award. “I’m looking for a girl with a sick mind and a beautiful body,” he told Gene Shalit, though he was, of course, still married.
He told Marilyn Beck that he had no plans to appear at the Oscars ceremony at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles on April 14. “I’ll be busy in London editing The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu. But even if I weren’t, I wouldn’t attend the Oscars. I never go to those do’s, never go to anything. I’m very anti-social.”
He was also by that point engaged in a public feud with Jerzy Kosinski, who for his part was running around informing everyone about Peter’s face-lift. Peter, meanwhile, was claiming that Kosinski had not actually written the shooting script of Being There; instead, Peter said, Being There had really been significantly rewritten by Robert C. Jones, who had won an Oscar for Coming Home. This may seem to be an outlandish claim, given Kosinski’s international stature, but in point of fact Hal Ashby, too, supported Jones when Jones took the matter to Writers Guild arbitration after Kosinski refused to share the credit. Unfortunately for Jones, Ashby, and Sellers, the Guild supported Kosinski and awarded him sole credit for the cowritten script.
Peter made the cover of Time on March 3. All six of him.
Backed by images of Chance, Quilty, Strangelove, Clouseau, and the Grand Duchess Gloriana XII, the face of a well-known, little-known actor looked inscrutably toward the camera. The headline was, “Who Is This Man?” Peter was actually pleased by the article, which was written by the critic Richard Schickel—so much so that he wrote an appreciative letter to the ed
itor: “I would like to thank you very much for taking the trouble to probe accurately the deeper recesses of whatever the hell I am.”
At the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on the fourteenth, Jane Fonda strode across the stage, opened the envelope, and announced that Dustin Hoffman won the Best Actor award for Kramer vs. Kramer (1979). By that point Peter had also lost the New York Film Critics Circle award to Hoffman, too. (That one wasn’t even close. Hoffman got thirteen votes, Peter only three.) He had to settle for a Golden Globe and a Best Actor award from the National Board of Review, and he was bitterly disappointed.
He didn’t fare better in Europe. Nominated by BAFTA as Best Actor in 1981, Peter lost to John Hurt for The Elephant Man (1980).
Peter was devastated not only by his failure to win an Oscar; he had been just as upset when he saw the release print of Being There. Without Peter’s approval, Ashby and Braunsberg decided to end the film not with Chance walking on the surface of the lake, but with the outtakes of Peter laughing hysterically, trying and failing to deliver the “now get this, honky” line. The outtakes do pull some easy laughs—it’s hard not to break up when listening to anybody suffering a laughing jag—but to Peter, the essence of his most austere and technically controlled performance was utterly ruined. He sent an angry telex to Ashby:
