Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  “It breaks the spell, do you understand? Do you understand, it breaks the spell! Do you hear me, it breaks the spell! I’m telling you how it breaks the spell. . . .”

  • • •

  “I’ve got an illegitimate daughter running around somewhere,” he claimed in April 1980. He was speaking of the baby he believed he and the unnamed mystery woman had conceived while he was serving in the Royal Air Force—the one Peg had invited to dinner while Anne was recovering from her miscarriage. He had three children, whom he treated more or less poorly, if at all, but thoughts of his maybe, maybe-not lost daughter only intensified as his health deteriorated.

  Of his three children, Michael Sellers enjoyed the least troubled relationship with his father. There had been periods of tension, but the two males seemed to get along well enough. Michael had his mother for emotional support; his father was there for infrequent fun.

  Michael and Sarah were each the beneficiaries of a one-time gift of £20,000 when they turned twenty-one. It wasn’t much, considering Peter’s wealth, but, as usual, it was all he had to give them.

  Peter had never quite gotten around to setting up a trust for his third child. Victoria Sellers had spent most of her life forced into playing the role of pawn in a nasty chess game; Peter was the black king, Britt the blond queen. With an unerring sense, the early-teenage Victoria once showed up for a visit clad entirely in purple. Peter threw a typical fit, but soon whisked her away on a shopping spree, both to make up for his rage and to ensure that she wouldn’t wear the offending color in his presence. On another occasion, Peter canceled Victoria’s planned visit to Port Grimaud at the last minute, thereby enraging Britt, thus provoking Peter to tell Sue Evans to write a letter to Victoria on his behalf and tell her, as Michael Sellers puts it, “that she should no longer regard him as her father.”

  That one blew over, slightly, but at the end of March 1980, the fifteen-year-old Victoria made the mistake of telling her father what she thought of his work: “He asked me if I’d seen his latest film, Being There. I said yes, I thought it was great. But then I said, ‘You looked like a little fat, old man.’

  “I didn’t mean to hurt him. I meant his character in the film looked like a little old man. But he went mad. He threw his drink over me and told me to get the next plane home.”

  Sarah Sellers usually knew enough to keep her distance. She tried to please her father, but for reasons she never understood, she kept on failing. “When I was a student and rather poor,” she says, “I didn’t know what to give him and Lynne for Christmas, so I got her some lace doilies and him an old print. I got a letter back from him saying, ‘I know it’s the thought that counts, but what a thought. Yours, Dad.’ I was devastated. But then he turned up a few months later as if nothing had happened.”

  But when Sarah put her two cents in over Victoria and the drink-throwing episode, she received the following telegram: “Dear Sarah, After what happened this morning with Victoria, I shall be happy if I never hear from you again. I won’t tell you what I think of you. It must be obvious. Goodbye, Your Father.”

  • • •

  Entertainment writers’ conventional wisdom, if one can call it that, holds that movie stars demean themselves by appearing in television commercials. It’s considered far more honorable for stars to demean themselves on celluloid. But when Barclay’s Bank offered Peter £1 million for a series of four commercials, he accepted, and rightly so. It was a great deal of money. He may not have needed it to survive, but he needed it nonetheless. After all, he certainly wasn’t acting for his health.

  The commercials were shot in Dublin, with Joe McGrath directing. Peter’s character is a con man called Monty Casino, who bilks the unsuspecting out of their quid, the suggestion being that Barclay’s Bank offered protection against such shady scams. (The name plays not only on Monte Carlo’s casinos but also Monte Cassino, where Spike Milligan nearly got blown up during World War II.) In the first, Monty swindles a young musician out of his money; in the second, he cons a stately manor’s aristocratic owner. The third featured Monty gulling a student out of his rent money. The fourth was never filmed.

  “He had a heart attack, and we couldn’t finish,” McGrath relates. “He started to get palpitations and said, ‘My God.’ I said, ‘Is it your heart?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s the Pacemaker—it’s gone into top gear. Quick—give me that bag!’ He took out this tiny leather case which had green and red things on it. I said what is it? He said, ‘It’s Gucci jump leads, you can start me up. What are friends for?’

  “He said, ‘We’ve got to get a specialist.’ So, I phoned downstairs and said we needed a specialist for Mr. Sellers. They said, ‘You can’t get a specialist unless an MD comes and examines him.’ So I said to Peter that an MD would come up and then we’d get him into a hospital. He was lying in bed. I had come in from my room and was still in a dressing gown, and I had dark glasses on, and there was a knock on the door. This guy was standing there, and he said, ‘You look terrible, Mr. Sellers! You should get to bed!’ Peter said, ‘That’s what I need—an Irish doctor.’

  “I took him into intensive care. The last thing he said was, ‘I’ll see you in London.’ He was in there for a couple of days, and then he was out. And, like the fool he was, he went to Cannes.”

  • • •

  McGrath is getting ahead of the story.

  Nurse Lynne flew into Dublin from Los Angeles and announced to the press that it was just a false alarm and not a heart attack at all. This time it wasn’t oysters but a bicycle. Peter had had to ride a bike in one of the Barclay’s commercials, she explained, and he’d simply overdone it. Her motive seems clearly to have been commercial in nature; she was trying to protect his insurability.

  Nevertheless, shortly after leaving the hospital and flying down to Cannes for the film festival, Peter endorsed an advertisement for the British Heart Association. The ad, printed in London newspapers, featured a photo of Peter; it was captioned “Heart Attack Survivor.” Accompanying the pictures was a quote:

  “I’m lucky—I survived!”

  • • •

  Lynne accompanied Peter to Cannes, where Being There was in competition for the Golden Palm. He kept a fairly low profile, except for the little garden party arranged by Lorimar for about 450 guests. “I’m fine, thank you, I’m feeling very fit; I’m fine, thank you, I’m feeling very fit,” Peter kept repeating as he made his way through the horde. But the journalists kept asking.

  “Please, I am not an invalid,” he insisted to the crowd of reporters, who were legitimately confused by his remarks because they were being told simultaneously by Lorimar staffers that Peter was “not a well man.”

  Paparazzi, kept out of the affair by a wrought-iron fence, simply poked their lenses through the iron bars while a string quartet played in the background. The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner’s Wanda McDaniel described the turmoil: “When Sellers arrived, the roots of garden party etiquette got severed to smithereens. At one point, the crush took on shades of panic until bodyguards convinced the curious that there are better ways to go than getting trampled to death at a garden fete.”

  The garden party certainly helped the film’s publicity, but it scarcely mattered as far as the awards were concerned. The Golden Palm went to two films that year: Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979) and Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha (1980).

  And the Best Actor? Michel Piccoli for Salto nel vuoto (1979).

  • • •

  “The only rocks in this marriage are the rocks other people are throwing,” Lynne declared at the end of May. And furthermore, she made a point of noting, “My mother and I are enjoying a very good relationship once again because she now approves of Peter. She assumed our marriage would last only a couple of months. Instead we have been together almost five years and we celebrated our third wedding anniversary in February. We are proving my mother wrong, so she has finally had to accept Peter.”

  “My mother still hasn’t met him,” Lynn
e went on to say. “One of the reasons is that she lives in Spain and we have no plans to go there.”

  Instead, Peter and Lynne went in precisely the opposite direction. They embarked on a yachting trip to the Aegean Sea.

  • • •

  It was probably wise of both Peter and Lynne to stay away from Iris Frederick, but even a luxurious sail could only do so much. The effects of the face-lift were wiped away by Peter’s worsening heart condition. His face was taking on a gaunt quality; the precise shape of his skull emerging more clearly with every pound of weight he lost, not to mention every added line of worry and stress. And yet, typically, and despite his increasing frailty, he continued to develop new film ideas. It was the only therapy he trusted.

  The writer Stephen Bach, then an executive with United Artists, flew to Gstaad in June. “Peter Sellers was wraithlike,” Bach later wrote. “The smile he wore seemed paralyzed in place, and I thought I had never seen so delicate a man. His skull, his fingers, the tightly drawn, almost transparent skin—all seemed frail, infinitely fragile . . . . [He was] a spectral presence, a man made of eggshells.”

  Peter had been working on the script of The Romance of the Pink Panther with a writer named Jim Moloney; the film’s producer, Danny Rissner, had sent Peter some script notes, and Peter, after reading them on the yacht in the Aegean, had threatened to jump overboard. He insisted that Lynne be named as executive producer. If UA balked, he would walk.

  It must be said that Lynne Frederick had her hands full with Peter, as did each of his other wives. The difference was that none of his friends could stand this one. They knew him too well, for one thing. And they trusted neither her motives nor her personal performances—the ones she gave privately for them. It was relatively distant business associates who got the full treatment. Bach, for instance, believed Lynne’s benevolent routine on his trip to Gstaad to salvage the project. “The atmosphere was uneasy only until Lynne Frederick came into the room, exuding an aura of calm that somehow enveloped us all like an Alpine fragrance. She was only in her mid-twenties but instantly observable as the mature center around which the household revolved, an emotional anchor that looked like a daffodil.”

  At the same time, Lynne Frederick deserves a bit of compassion herself in retrospect. It was the helpless Peter she nursed, the dependent and infantile creature of impulse and consequent contrition. Patiently, she ministered to him. And eventually, as Bach observes, Peter was moved to cooperate. At the end of the meeting, Bach observes, “I noticed, as he rose, that not once in the long, talkative afternoon had he let go of Lynne’s hand, nor had she moved away. She transfused him simultaneously with calm and energy and the hand he clung to was less a hand than a lifeline.”

  • • •

  The Romance of the Pink Panther was not the only project on Peter’s mind. Marshall Brickman’s Valium, now called Lovesick, was still in development. Brickman still possesses a tape recording of Peter practicing his scenes as a Viennese psychiatrist. Unfaithfully Yours, too, was moving forward, as was a sort of reunion project with Terry Southern. The proposed title: Grossing Out.

  It was to be a satire based on someone Peter claimed to have met. Peter had, the story goes, once been invited to the wedding of a Saudi princess and found himself sitting on an Arabia-bound airplane next to a man who appeared to be a fabulously dressed rock star but who turned out to be an international arms dealer. “He had an accent that Peter couldn’t pin—Mediterranean, but you couldn’t tell where,” Southern’s companion, Gail Gerber, relates.

  “ ‘This jacket is bulletproof,’ ” the weapons trader explained. “Peter was fascinated. ‘And these buttons are the shell casings of bullets that were shot into it.’ That knocked Peter out.”

  From that point, spinning out script ideas with the gloriously warped Terry Southern must have been great fun—the scenes taking place in the international arms marketplace, for example. “As Peter explained it to Terry, it was just like going to a shopping mall,” says Gerber. On much the same wavelength as Peter and Terry, Hal Ashby expressed interest in directing Grossing Out, and the Hollywood trade papers reported that Peter would be getting $3 million for his appearance.

  To the list was added The Ferret; written and directed by Blake Edwards, the comedy-on-the-drawing-boards was to be a spin-off of the Pink Panther series, still involving the character of Clouseau, but redefining the story that surrounded him.

  “Without my work, life would be intolerable,” Peter said. “It is the only panacea I know.”

  • • •

  From Gstaad in early summer, Peter called his British lawyer, Elwood Rickless, and told him that he had finally agreed to the angiogram—an X-ray of one or more blood vessels of the cardiovascular system—that his cardiologist had recommended, the point being to determine whether his heart was strong enough to withstand surgery. He arranged to fly to London and then to Los Angeles, where he would check into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for the exam. He chose Cedars-Sinai because of his positive experience there in 1964. If the cardiology team recommended it, Peter agreed that he would undergo immediate open-heart surgery.

  “I was speaking to Peter on the phone,” Spike Milligan said. “The subject of children came up, and he said, ‘You know, I’m a bloody fool. I keep leaving them in and out of the will. Some weeks I put them in, others I take them out. It depends on how I feel.’ ” Spike offered his opinion—that he thought all children were entitled to inherit at least some of their father’s estate. “Yes,” Peter responded, “I really must change my will.”

  Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Malcolm McDowell ran into Lynne: “I was sitting in Ma Maison restaurant on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood, and I looked over and there was Lynne Frederick Sellers. Because I had worked with her, of course, I went over to say hello, and she introduced me to her lawyer. We chatted for a minute, and I started to walk off, and then she came over and said, ‘Malcolm, I’m meeting with my lawyer because I’ve had it with Peter. It’s over.’ I said, ‘I’m very sorry to hear that, Lynne.’ She said, ‘I’m really sick of him. I’m sick of him! I mean, this has gone too far. I should have done this ages ago, and that’s it!’ ”

  Peter had the same idea. “She annoys me,” he told his son in July, expressing in ever more distinct terms the ambivalence of his feelings all along. “I just wish the divorce was over and done with.”

  • • •

  The novelist Auberon Waugh interviewed Peter in Gstaad. Peter’s personal assistant, Michael Jeffery, was caring for him in Lynne’s customary absence. Stephen Bach’s trip to Gstaad had been business related, so Lynne had an interest in being present. Now she was in Philadelphia.

  Waugh describes Michael Jeffery: “a young costume designer in tight corduroy trousers who wore a gold stud in one ear and walked with the unmistakable skip of a former ballet dancer. It is Mike who cooked him his meals, made sure he kept his appointments, and scolded him if he forgot to put his boots on when going out of doors. Without disrespect to either, one could say that he had found his mother-figure, although there seemed a certain amount of aggravation in the air between them.”

  Peter was dressed for the interview in a “navy blue track suit with various bits of string attached.” As for the house, Waugh writes, “The main floor was like an open-plan bungalow, with sitting room, kitchen, and dining areas, and another area where Mike Jeffery slept, his bed surrounded by impressive photographic equipment.” Peter slept on the floor below. In the basement was a bomb shelter, which came with the house.

  At Waugh’s prompting, Peter named the four films of which he was proudest: I’m All Right, Jack; Dr. Strangelove; The Party; and Being There. Waugh noted that, for Peter, Spike “remained—usually by telephone, and often at very long distance—the chief guru in his life.” The other, of course, was Swami Venkesananda, who kept an ashram in Mauritius. But Waugh was skeptical of Peter’s devotion to the swami: “I could not avoid the suspicion that part of his fascination is that Mr. Sellers could st
udy his accents, his intonations and gestures, and practice them quietly to himself in the bathroom afterwards.”

  • • •

  On Monday, July 21, Peter and Michael Jeffery flew to London from Geneva in Peter’s private plane. They landed at Stansted Airport in Essex (Peter preferred to avoid Heathrow), drove down to London, and checked into the Dorchester. He wanted to stay in the Harlequin Suite, but it was already booked, so he made do with the Oliver Messel suite, named for—and designed by—the noted theater designer. In addition to his clothes, he made sure to bring along the script-in-progress for The Romance of the Pink Panther.

  Peter had spoken to Spike before arriving in London, and Spike, rather morbidly, had told him, “ ‘We’re all getting old. How about one more dinner?’ ‘Yes, of course!’ he said. ‘One more dinner.’ ” Harry Secombe got “a message from Spike saying ‘Let’s go and have dinner with Peter before one of us is walking behind the coffin.’ ” The three old friends set up their reunion for the following night.

  Before turning in, Peter, accompanied by Jeffery, climbed into a limousine, drove to North London, and paid his first visit to the Golders Green crematorium and memorial garden where Peg and Bill’s ashes lay.

  He woke up early the next morning, showered and shaved, put on his loose blue workout suit, ordered some coffee and melba toast, called Michael Jeffery’s room, ordered a massage, and then called Sue Evans, who arrived around 9 A.M. Peter took a nap while Evans and Jeffery went over the day’s affairs. His lawyer, Elwood Rickless, showed up and got Peter to sign a document setting up the long-delayed trust for the fifteen-year-old Victoria, and then it was time for lunch. Peter asked for a double order of grilled plaice, a salad, and a little cheese; he requested the double order of plaice because he was convinced that the Dorchester was stingy with its fish. After finishing his meal, Jeffery helped Peter select his outfit for the evening—black, black, and black (pants, shirt, lizardskin shoes)—topped with a black and white check jacket. Sue Evans got ready to leave. “Sue, don’t go yet,” he asked. “Sit on for a bit and talk to me.”