Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (35 page)

It is this that causes Peter Bull, standing to Peter’s right, to break out
into unrestrained laughter. Kubrick found Peter’s raw spontaneity more
important than a background actor’s giggle, so he used that take rather than
reshooting it.

• • •

Dr. Strangelove
ends with a miracle. Peter, as the brilliant but decrepit
Strangelove, a technical genius but not a whole man, rises out of his
wheelchair and hobbles stiffly across the shiny floor. It’s shot low-angle, like an
aggrandizing ad for a crippled children’s hospital, except, of course, that
the angle is aggrandizing a madman and the world is blowing up.

“Mein Fuehrer!
I can walk!
” Cue Vera Lynne as a montage of mushroom clouds fills the screen.

“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

“You must be,” said the Cat,

“or you wouldn’t have come here.”

T
he Hollywood gossip columnist and former actress Hedda Hopper had
several items to report about Peter Sellers in 1963. Sarah and Michael
had accompanied him on a trip to Hollywood in early summer, and he’d
taken them to all three of the region’s major amusement parks—Disneyland, Marineland, and Knott’s Berry Farm. “The recently divorced Peter
took out some glamour girls at night,” Hopper noted, “but he says it’s
nothing serious.” Peter had become quite the swinging single, and he finally
had the body to go with the image. He weighed 158 pounds, down from
his all-time high of 210.

On the professional front, Hopper and others reported that a
second
Billy Wilder project had found its way onto Peter Sellers’s horizon. Wilder
had purchased the rights to the Sherlock Holmes characters from the estate
of Arthur Conan Doyle, the scribes revealed, and he planned to write and
direct a new Holmes film. Peter O’Toole was to be Sherlock, Peter Sellers
Watson.

He recorded a new comedy album,
Fool Britannia
, with Anthony Newley and Joan Collins; it was a warped-from-the-headlines satire of the Profumo sex scandal—involving John Profumo, the British Secretary of State
for War; Eugene Ivanov, the Soviet Assistant Naval Attaché and spy; and
Christine Keeler, the showgirl they shared—that rocked Britain that year.

The
Telegoons
arrived on British television in the fall of 1963—a puppet
version of the radio series, with Peter, Harry, and Secombe providing the
voices.

The director Jules Dassin offered him the lead role in his lavish heist
comedy
Topkapi
, but when Peter learned that Maximilian Schell was being
considered for the picture as well, he turned Dassin down. It makes little
sense, but Schell and Sophia had costarred in a film already, and that apparently made Peter’s participation in
Topkapi
impossible. So Peter Ustinov
took the role.

Robert Aldrich considered making a film version of
Brouhaha
, of all
things—with Peter, perhaps needless to say, in the leading role—but production delays on Aldrich’s
Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte
stalled the project
permanently.

The comedy writer S. J. Perelman met with Peter and Harvey Orkin,
one of his several agents; Perelman tried to persuade Peter to play all of the
major roles in a film version of his play
The Beauty Part
—Bert Lahr had
played them onstage—but Peter seems not to have been interested, and the
film was never made.

And the entertainment writer Joe Hyams told Elke Sommer that he
had struck a deal with Peter to write his life story. But the deal fell apart
and the book was never written.

• • •

In addition to the Los Angeles trip, Peter spirited his kids away on flash
vacations, making up his mind suddenly and tearing into whatever new
locale he’d chosen with a frenzy. As Bert Mortimer rather too colorfully
put it, “for the first few days he’d rape the place.”

Bert was given the job of taking family pictures, but Peter would soon
grow bored and go off on his own, leaving the children in the care of Bert
and Hattie. “He wanted the photos to establish that he’d had children,” said
Bert, “and was capable of playing the father to them the way fathers are supposed to do. The sad thing was, children really didn’t interest him at all.”

With Peter out of town so often, the task of accompanying Peg on
shopping trips in her brand new Bentley fell to Hattie Stevenson. “Go and
spend what you like, my darling,” Peter told his mother, and “have it all
charged to me.” Off Peg went.

“I’m Peter Sellers’s mother,” she would proclaim upon entering any
given shop. “And I want
the best
.”

• • •

In the Boultings’
Heavens Above
(1963), Peg’s son played a priest.

The Rev. John Smallwood (Peter) is appointed to the position of vicar
at Holy Trinity in the parish of Orbiston Parva, a factory town dominated
by the Despards, an old industrialist family. (They make “Tranquilax,” a
popular sedative, stimulant, and laxative.) He pays visits to the locals to
discuss the residents’ spiritual lives and finds that they have none. His first
sermon is direct on this point: “This town is full of people who call themselves ‘Christian,’ but from what I’ve seen of it, I wouldn’t mind taking a
bet there aren’t enough
real
Christians about to feed one decent lion.” While
constructing his character, Sellers once said, he stood in front of a mirror
and suddenly realized that he was Brother Cornelius, his old teacher at
St. Aloysius: “The Jewish boy knows his catechism better than the rest of
you!”

A squatter camp spreads its dingy self just outside the windows of the
Tranquilax offices; Irene Handl plays the queen of the dump. At Smallwood’s behest, the squatters move—to the grounds of the church. To the
entrenched vestry’s dismay, he brings in a black man, a Caribbean immigrant, as the new vicar’s warden. He piles outrage upon outrage, and yet
the vicar begins to have an effect upon Lady Despard, who, seeing the light
of mercy and charity for the first time in her life, abruptly spurs the establishment of a church food bank. But like Ian Carmichael’s character in
I’m
All Right, Jack
, Smallwood only succeeds in provoking chaos.

As it happens, they’ve got the wrong John Smallwood; the real one
(Ian Carmichael), shows up later, suitably complacent and patrician.

Peter’s is a muted performance—priestly sincerity dusted with a
thin veneer of a skilled actor’s sardonic calculation, a balanced response
on Sellers’s part to what is at its Boulting-brothers core a cynical social
comedy. Once again, the Boultings gently rib the rich, including the
Church, and save their bitter wrath to shower on the ignorant poor.
Then again, when the good people of Orbison Parva beat the Rev.
Smallwood to a pulp at the end of
Heaven’s Above
, the crowd does appear to cross all class lines.

• • •

The World of Henry Orient
(1964) took Peter back to New York for several
weeks of shooting in July and August 1963. Written by Nunnally Johnson
and his daughter, Nora Johnson, and directed by George Roy Hill,
Henry
Orient
concerns a pianist, not of the highest rank, and his absurd encounters
with two Upper East Side schoolgirls (played by Tippy Walker and Merrie
Spaeth), who find him dreamy. Budgeted at $2 million,
The World of Henry
Orient
was, according to the
Times
, the most expensive movie ever filmed
in New York.

Johnson, a longtime Hollywood screenwriter, was unhappy with Peter’s
casting as Henry; Johnson wanted Rex Harrison. According to George Roy
Hill, the filmmakers had Oscar Levant in mind as the model for Henry,
but that’s most unfair to Levant, who was extraordinarily witty, urbane,
and depressed, whereas Henry Orient is an unadulterated fool whose erotic
interest lies in some unseen guy’s neurotic wife (Paula Prentiss). In any
event, Peter concocted one of his most bizarre voices for Henry. As he
described it, “He has a dreadful Brooklynese accent, but in an attempt to
appear cultured and charming, he hides it with a phony French accent.”
One critic described the result as “a cross between Rocky Graziano, Liberace, and Charles Boyer,” an assessment that lands not far off the mark.
(“Shut the door” comes out “Shu’ de doerr.”) Adding to the voice’s complexity is its instability; Henry keeps slipping out of it, and as such he’s one
of Peter’s most openly fragmented creations.

(Just to note: Nunnally Johnson’s credits include the adaptation of John
Steinbeck’s novel
The Grapes of Wrath
, 1940, for John Ford; Fritz Lang’s
The Woman in the Window
, 1944; and
The Three Faces of Eve
, 1959, which
he directed. George Roy Hill went on to direct such hits as
Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid
, 1969, and
The Sting
, 1973. And Oscar Levant was
not from Brooklyn; he was from Pittsburgh.)

Nora Johnson’s initial reaction to Peter’s performance was to be “jarred
to the roots,” though when she saw
Henry Orient
again many years later,
she was “no longer jarred . . . it had somehow blended like old wine.”

• • •

During a location shoot on East 64th Street, the cameras and klieg lights
drew a crowd. A New York City cop grew so weary of the many bystanders
asking him what they were filming that he told one, “
Guadalcanal Diary
,
lady.”

For the most part, Peter remained serenely above the fray in his trailer
drinking vodka and tonics and waiting to be called. He took the opportunity to show off his wardrobe for a reporter: the bright red lining of
Orient’s houndstooth jacket, his gold karate pants, his opera cape, his blue,
custom-made Tillinger shirts with the initials HO embroidered on the cuffs.
“This role will do great things for my image,” Peter remarked.

Although Sellers brings star power to
The World of Henry Orient
, his
role is surprisingly small. The Johnsons’ script originally contained a strange
coda: Henry ends up playing the piano in a whorehouse. It had been written, in Nunnally Johnson’s words, in case “more exposure was needed to
keep Sellers happy.” But George Roy Hill excised it from the script before
filming even began. But even
with
the coda the film would still have belonged to the two girls; the primary story would have remained theirs.
Henry himself provides only a subplot.

Still, perhaps as part of the predictable backlash against a prolific star,
many reviewers made a point of claiming that Merrie Spaeth and Tippy
Walker “steal” the film away from Peter, who, owing to the script itself,
had already ceded it to them. What with his accent and disagreeable character, it’s a strange, high stakes–gambling performance on Peter’s part, a
fact the director didn’t seem to respect enough. George Roy Hill told the
press when the film was released in February 1964, that “Sellers, for all his
experience, actually comes off second best now and then due to these two
kids,” an attitude that scarcely endeared him to Peter, who flatly refused to
work with him ever again.

• • •

Peter’s offscreen life during the production of
The World of Henry Orient
featured its own sad little comedy or two. Shortly after arriving in New
York, Peter received a fan letter. It was from a blond girl. She enclosed a
close-up of herself along with her note, and Peter quickly contacted her and
invited her to join him.

Peter accompanied Bert and Hattie to the airport to pick her up, but
just before she stepped off the plane he made sure to hide himself behind
a pillar so he could give the thumbs-up (or -down) signal to his factotums.
The fat girl emerged and was instantly vetoed.

He couldn’t very well send her back on the next plane, could he? So
Bert and Hattie took her to a hotel in midtown Manhattan—though emphatically
not
the Plaza, which was where
he
was staying. They kept her
sequestered there for a few days before telling her that, really, she might
think about shedding a few pounds before meeting Mr. Sellers. Then Peter
telephoned her himself and advised her of what he considered to be an
acceptable weight, all this while attempting—and failing—to romance his
happily married costar, Angela Lansbury, who plays the mother of one of
the girls.

For three weeks he kept the girl waiting and dieting. Supposedly she
lost thirty pounds, at which point Peter presented her with an engagement
ring—in absentia, of course. Eventually he grew bored with the situation
and sent the girl home, richer and thinner, never having met her face to
face.

Of much more interest were the contestants in the Miss Universe pageant held in Miami Beach, where Peter served as one of the judges. Indeed,
the playboy Sellers appeared to be turning the judging of beauty contests
into something of a sustained hobby; a few months later he worked the
Miss World pageant at the Lyceum Ballroom in London.

• • •

He bought another estate—Brookfield, located in Elstead, Surrey. (Surrey
is just southwest of London.) It was his first adult home south of London;
even with the out-there Chipperfield, Peter kept his geographical bearings
secure. Apart from the fact that the Hampstead penthouse obviously had
been contaminated by Ted Levy, Peter simply felt the familiar urge for
newness. This time, it took the form of a fifteenth-century redbrick house
with stone floors, lead-latticed windows, and thick-beamed ceilings. In place
of Hampstead’s rosewood walls and leather-paneled window treatments
came inglenooks. There was a lake, some paddocks, and a walled garden.
There were several barns, one of which Peter turned into a gymnasium in
one part and a movie theater with a retractable screen in the other. In the
yard he kept a donkey. Its name was Fred.