Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (29 page)

The nominations themselves rendered the matter moot, for neither
Sellers nor Mason was tapped for Best Actor. Gregory Peck won for
To Kill
a Mockingbird
(1962).
Lolita
’s sole nomination was for its adapted screenplay—Vladimir Nabokov was honored for writing words he hadn’t written,
but it didn’t matter, because he lost to Horton Foote for
To Kill a Mockingbird
.

• • •

On June 11, 1962, with
Lolita
on the brink of release, Peter Sellers addressed the University Indian Society at Cambridge. “I hope you did
not all think I was going to be funny,” he announced, “because I am a
uniquely unfunny person. I usually climb into a corner.” Bob Hope
took a different point of view during the production of Peter’s next picture—Hope and Crosby’s
The Road to Hong Kong
(1962), in which Peter, uncredited, appeared in a five-minute cameo as a crank Indian
neurologist. “Get rid of this man,” Hope had declared during the production. “He’s too funny.”

However amusing Hope found Sellers, the scene itself is singly unpleasant. In this, the seventh and final
Road to
 . . . comedy (Bob and Bing had
already trekked to Singapore, Zanzibar, Morocco, Utopia, Rio, and Bali),
Bob loses his memory in a freak flying contraption accident, so Bing hustles
him to “the most highly respected neurologist in India.” It’s Peter replaying
Dr. Kabir as ghastly parody.

The dark-faced doctor examines Hope and groans repeatedly. “What
is it, doctor?” Bing asks with alarm. “Terrible heartburn,” Peter replies.
“Put too much curry in my cornflakes.”

He then shines a light in Bob’s ear and tosses off his only good line in
the now-trademarked Indian accent: “I’m looking in here—goodness gracious me!”

• • •

It was inevitable. He wanted to direct.

And so,
Mr. Topaze
(1961). Of course he also had to star.

Mr. Topaze
came and went and never returned. The film currently
exists in one print stored deep in the archives of the British Film Institute,
its once-bright colors having faded to a nearly uniform shade of sick pink.

Based on Marcel Pagnol’s play
Topaze
, the film, a satirical comedy,
traces the rise of Auguste Topaze (Sellers) from shy schoolteacher to corrupt
business magnate. At first, Auguste is a saintly figure, teaching his young
charges by day and, after school, taking on the task of private tutor to a
familiar-looking young boy (Michael Sellers). “Money does not buy happiness,” he tells his students; “money is the trial of friendship.” He is rewarded
for his moralism by getting fired. A wealthy couple (Herbert Lom and Nadia
Gray) hires him to run a dummy corporation for them, but he proves to be
so proficient at corrupt business practices that he takes over the company,
becomes a millionaire, and seizes the couple’s chateau. At the end, one of his
old schoolteacher colleagues leads a group of boys past the magnificent residence. The self-satisfied Topaze tells his old friend that he’s come to accept
the criminal nature of the business world; he’s had to accept it, he says, since
everything he has done since he left teaching is punishable by law.

“Has your money bought you happiness?” the friend asks.

And Topaze replies: “Has it bought me happiness?” He smiles and
gestures to the grand chateau behind him. “It’s buying it now.”

The friend leaves Topaze standing alone on the terrace. Directing himself, Peter films this sardonic conclusion in extreme long shot, dwarfing
himself on the vast CinemaScope screen.

He seemed upbeat during the production. His fee was substantial,
£75,000 for directing and starring. “What I am really hoping for is that I
will be able to achieve sufficient success as a director to give up acting
entirely,” he told a reporter. “I writhe when I see myself on the screen. I’m
such a dreadful clumsy hulking image. I say to myself, ‘Why doesn’t he get
off? Why doesn’t he get off?’ I mean I look like such an idiot. Some fat
awkward thing dredged up from some third-rate drama company. I must
stop thinking about it, otherwise I shan’t be able to go on working.”

His friend Kenneth Tynan was writing a profile of him at the time, so
Peter invited him to watch some dailies. Sellers’s response to himself was
quite different then:

“Observing himself in the rushes, Sellers seemed to be watching a total
stranger. ‘Look at that idiot!’ he would cry when Topaze bumped into
something; or ‘Poor bastard!’ during a scene of edgy flirtation. And he
would laugh, merrily and musically, shaking his head like a man at once
baffled and amused by the behavior of someone he had never met.”

Billie Whitelaw, who played Topaze’s love interest early in the film,
found Sellers very easy to work with, and in fact she stresses the point in
her memoirs in a self-evident effort to correct Sellers’s postmortem reputation as nothing more than a buffoonish crank. Herbert Lom agrees: “We
worked easily together. It was all charming and easy and natural.”

Still, looking back on his single experience of being directed by Peter,
Herbert Lom declares simply that “he was not a director. He wasn’t particularly interested in directing. Why he directed I wouldn’t know.”

Lom goes on to explain that Sellers wasn’t inattentive to his fellow
actors, he just didn’t perform any of the many other responsibilities of a
film director: “He certainly tried to help us in acting the parts. He was one
of the actors—he never really figured as the director. He was a colleague
who helped us plan the scenes. I have no particular memories of him as an
inspiring or irritating director. He was just Peter Sellers.”

Lom makes a point of the fact that there wasn’t anybody else taking
on the tasks Peter wasn’t carrying out. Peter was the director in name only,
but according to Lom there was no de facto supervisor to back him up:
“Probably
nobody
directed us. That’s why the picture, if I remember, didn’t
really turn out to be anything worth talking about—because we probably
had no director.”

Mr. Topaze
isn’t bad; it just isn’t good. Despite its bitter tone, it’s dull.
“Judgment on his directing powers must be reserved until he can handle a
subject without the extra headache of acting,” was
Variety
’s critique, and
because Peter was directing himself, “His personal performance has suffered
some.” The critic was also troubled by the cruelty of the subject matter;
the “quiet comedy” of a shy schoolteacher erupted into “an uncomfortably
brittle, snide drama.” That
Mr. Topaze
is not a feel-good comedy is inherent
to the material. What’s notable is that Sellers didn’t play up this intrinsic
acerbity more; the problem with
Mr. Topaze
is its blandness.

The film’s tepid reception was a very personal disappointment to Peter—so much so that he barely talked again about
Mr. Topaze
. Soon
thereafter he called Spike Milligan and suggested they bring back
The Goon
Show
. In his later years he actually insisted that he’d never directed a movie
in his life.

He was growing bitter. “Criticism should be done by critics,” Peter
declared in September 1961, “and a critic should have some training and
some love for the medium he is discussing. But these days, gossip-columnist
training seems to be enough qualification. I suppose an ability to stand on
your feet through interminable cocktail parties and swig interminable gins
in between devouring masses of fried prawns may just possibly help you to
understand and appreciate what a director is getting at, but for the life of
me I can’t see how.”

P
eter didn’t bother to ask his wife when he put Chipperfield up for sale
near the end of 1961. He didn’t even tell his mother. A
Daily Mail
reporter called Peg for confirmation after hearing the rumor. “I’m sure it
can’t be right,” Mother stated with authority. “Peter rings me up nearly
every night for a mother-and-son heart-to-heart. And he hasn’t mentioned
anything about moving.”

According to Sigmund Freud, the key to a healthy personality is the
tolerance of contradiction, but Peter’s ability to sustain drastic paradox
offers a twist to the theory. At times, at least,
he
seemed to tolerate his
radical contradictions rather well; it was those around him who couldn’t
handle the strain. More and more, Peter’s mind functioned like two geological fault lines grinding inexorably against each other, all part of nature.
It was nearby residents who felt the rumblings and lived in fear.

A case in point: With the sale of Chipperfield, Peter believed, or wanted
to believe, that by leading his wife and two children out of one more house
and into still another, he was acting in
their
interests. For him, changing
addresses again would engender a sense of stability. “One tries to create
roots,” he explained. “It’s vital for the children.” It’s incidents like this that
lead the great Sellers fan Dimitris Verionis to offer an astonishingly acute
observation: “Peter was never a double-dealer. He was straight in his reactions—instinctive and sometimes brutally innocent.”

So with the cruel guilelessness of the spoiled child he always was, Peter
Sellers impulsively bought a seven-year, £31,000 lease on a vast penthouse
apartment overlooking Hampstead Heath. As Graham Stark puts it, “He
couldn’t have done anything worse.”

While the apartment was being renovated, the Sellerses moved into a
fourteenth-floor suite at the Carlton Tower hotel in Belgravia. Stark recalls
the bitter litter of Christmas 1961. Covering the floor of the suite were
scads of unopened holiday presents that had been given, nominally, to
Michael and Sarah. Many of them had been trod into a trampled mess. It
was not the result of a lightning-like Peter tantrum. These children’s gifts
were British film producers’ way of currying the movie star’s favor. And the
kids, being kids, simply stopped unwrapping them out of sheer boredom
with all the obsequious plenitude. After that they stomped the rest to death.

• • •

“At the moment I’ve got a South African architect working on my new flat
in Hampstead,” Peter told
Playboy
. It was affecting his personality: “I tend
to speak in a South African accent all the time.”

The designer, Ted Levy, was hauling his clients out of the Tudor era
by way of a preciously masculine, Euro-Beverly Hills style—High Sixties
early in the decade. The Hampstead apartment was large, polished, and
very rich—five bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a fully equipped recording
studio. Many of the rooms were fully paneled in opulent, garnet-dark rosewood. No hoi-polloi drapes here; Levy designed the windows to be covered
by moveable leather panels.

Anne worked closely with the architect. “They kind of overruled me,
always around, the two of them buying wallpaper and wood and stuff,”
Peter later complained. Michael Sellers reports that it was Peter who convinced Anne to take Ted along on the shopping trips, it was Peter who
“encouraged Ted to take Mum out for lunch,” and it was Peter who suddenly turned on his interior designer one day and “ordered Ted to take my
mother away.” “I don’t want her!” Peter shouted.

What with Peter and Anne’s affectionate hand-holding and public solicitousness, all of Peter’s pecking of Anne’s cheek when the couple and
Levy were together (two captivating performances by actors, after all), it
was only when Peter broke down and shrieked at him that Ted Levy finally
comprehended that his clients’ marriage was a sour charade.

• • •

Peter went off to Paris to film John Guillermin’s adaptation of Jean Anouilh’s play
The Waltz of the Toreadors
(1962). A period-piece costume comedy scripted by Wolf Mankowitz, it’s
Millionairess
-like in its grand
oversizing of a small satirical idea. The beautiful French actress Dany Robin
takes the Sophia role, with the requisite breathtaking costumes and hats.
Peter, instead of playing a low-key Indian doctor, reverts to Bloodnok for
his characterization of the aging general who pursues his old flame (Dany)
in the face of his equally aging and shrewish wife (Margaret Leighton).
Owing to the requirements of the script, however
this
Bloodnok is a satyr
in a fat suit, and the effect is a little jarring.

“Wolf Mankowitz was a friend of mine, and Wolf wrote the script in
about two weeks, and we made the picture,” says John Guillermin. It wasn’t
easy, and it didn’t turn out well, especially from Guillermin’s perspective.
The director maintains his respect for Peter Sellers, however, as many directors continue to do despite the troubles they faced with him. “Based on
the scores of people I’ve worked with over the years, I think Peter was an
outstanding artist who worked in a very eccentric and curious way. It’s rare
that you find people who come out of radio and adapt to the screen successfully. To me, he was unique in that sense.

“Whether or not he was taking lessons from Stanislavsky, he had an
instinct that was totally Method. The very fact that he started with an
actorly tangible, the voice, and then built from it—that’s a very sound way
of going about it.”

Kenneth Griffith provides another colorful description of Peter’s approach to performing. “Once we discussed acting,” Griffith says, “and we
came to the agreement that what we were both trying to achieve was a
mushroom in its prime—beautiful rounded top, stem, febrile roots.
I
always
started from the febrile roots, built up, and finished, I hoped, with a polished clear top.
He
started with the top—because he
saw
it. But it would
be very wrong to say that’s where he stopped. He wasn’t just a brilliant
impersonator. He worked from the top down—to what made that top tick.”