Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (37 page)

The wedding took place in Surrey at the Guildford registry office,
which Peter’s wedding planner had transfigured into what Britt later called
“a chamber of spiritual beauty.” There were fifty burning candles and bowls
and bowls of lilacs and roses, creamy white and pink. The bride wore a
Norman Hartnell gown. Peter had chosen the designer; Hartnell also happened to make dresses for the queen. Draped across Britt’s shoulders was a
$15,000 black mink coat, her wedding present from the groom. (A red
Lotus sports car had served as an engagement gift.) Peter wore a simple
blue suit and overcoat.

David Lodge and Graham Stark were Peter’s best men for the brief
ceremony. There were only a handful of guests, but fifteen hundred fans
reportedly cramped themselves around the front of the building as an icy
wind blew snow in their faces. The newspapers were ecstatic: “They outdid
the Beatles fans in their shrieks. . . . Babies were abandoned in their prams
on the lawns!”

It was an unusual day for Michael and Sarah Sellers. “I was at boarding
school,” says Michael. “I was told to get my stuff together because I was
going out for the day. But nobody told me [for] what. The driver picked
me up and said it was because Father was getting married.” Sarah adds,
“We didn’t actually get to go to the wedding ceremony, which I remember
I would have liked to have done.”

At least they made it to the reception at Brookfield.

• • •

Peter insisted that Maurice Woodruff had predicted the whole thing. Someone with the initials B.E. would have a great influence in his life, Peter
repeated. He had told Elke Sommer the news during the production of
A Shot in the Dark
. That B.E. also stood for Blake Edwards was of no concern. . . . Peter had no idea that his psychic was in collusion with his agent.

Peter was smitten as only Peter could be, and Britt gave him very good
reason to be so. Charming, young, fresh, and willing, she also happened to
be mind-bogglingly beautiful. “Darling,” he said to her at one point early
on, “you’re so unspoiled, so pristine, and so very
dishy
.” Bert Mortimer,
who saw Peter in his blackest moments, later said that he “had never seen
him so happy. . . . It made life a lot easier for everybody around him.”
Peter’s mother, on the other hand, wasn’t impressed. Peg showed up at her
son’s wedding this time, but behind Britt’s back she tended to call Peter’s
sweet young bride “the bleeding Nazi.”

Four days after the wedding Peter flew to Los Angeles and checked into
the Beverly Hills Hotel and Bungalows. He was there to film
Kiss Me,
Stupid
, Billy Wilder’s feel-bad comedy about a nebbish Nevada husband
and the fantastic jealousy he sports over his pretty blond wife. Sinatra was
out, Dean Martin was in. Monroe was out, Kim Novak in. Shirley
MacLaine was out, Felicia Farr (who was married to Jack Lemmon) was in.

Britt stayed in London to begin filming
Guns at Batasi
with Richard
Attenborough and John Leyton. David Lodge and Graham Stark both had
roles in the film, so naturally Peter asked them to spy on Britt and report
back to him any suspicious behavior.

Capucine threw a party for him on February 25. Blake Edwards was
there; so were Jack Lemmon and Felicia Farr, Billy and Audrey Wilder, the
director William Wyler, and Swifty Lazar.

Peter taped
The Steve Allen Show
on March 20 and brought the house
down. “It was a very interesting period in my life,” Peter said in response
to Allen’s question about
The Goon Show
. “I worked with a very brilliant
colleague called Spike Milligan, who wrote the show. Who unfortunately
is in a mental home at the moment. [Laughter.] No. He gets a bit under
the weather. [Laughter.] But anyway. . . .”

Allen asked him what he called his mother-in-law: “Well, I think the
English have quite a good way out of it. They just say ‘Hallo!’ [Laughter.]
But Britt’s mother is called Mai-Britt, and I call Britt
my
Britt, you see,
because she belongs to me.”

After keeping Allen unusually entertained and playing drums with the
band on “Honeysuckle Rose” (complete with a show-stopping solo), Peter
finished off his appearance with an extended improvisation in which he
placed a prank call to Scotland Yard. (This was not Peter’s invention. Random phone calls were a standard routine on
The Steve Allen Show
; Jerry
Lewis, Mel Brooks, Johnny Carson, and Jack Lemmon had each placed one
during their guest appearances on the show.)

Given the American premiere of
The Pink Panther
, the L.A. papers
were also full of Peter:

“I don’t enjoy playing multiple parts at all. I know Alec Guinness
doesn’t either. But they do have a sort of showcase value.”

“I feel I’m the only one who really knows basically that I’m a phony
and eventually it will all be found out.”

“Only my children have given me any real happiness. What is wrong
with me? What am I looking for?”

Meanwhile, Peter’s spies not having anything to report, he proceeded
to grill Britt over the phone. What scenes did she film that day? Who with?
Did she have to kiss him? “Britt, just
tell
me.”

He sent telegrams. On March 10, he sent five. “Ying,” read the first.
“Tong,” read the second.

“Iddle.”

“I.”

“Po. Love, Bluebottle.”

He also wrote letters. In one, he described having just attended a screening of
The Great Escape
(1963): “I was getting deeply engrossed when somebody said, ‘Who’s that fellow?’ Someone else said, ‘That’s John Leyton.’ I
thought, ‘John Leyton? He’s in the film that my Britt’s doing. She kissed
him. Oh, but that’s nothing, that’s just acting.’ Then I thought of something an actor once said to me, that he always had to become involved with
the women he worked with, otherwise it didn’t look real enough. The
thought of this made me break out into a cold sweat and want to be sick.

“I’ve depressed myself getting into a state like this. I really am an idiot.
They say all comedians are sad. I wonder if that’s true? Still, I’m not really
a comedian. I don’t know what I am.”

Under the barrage of Peter’s phone calls, Britt took a break from filming. She left London for Los Angeles on March 24. Peter was overjoyed to
see her. They lunched in his dressing room and dined at hotspots like La
Scala or the Bistro. She met Peter’s friends—Cary Grant, Steve McQueen,
Shirley MacLaine, Capucine, “R. J.” Wagner, Goldie Hawn.

Peter had rented a marbled mansion in Beverly Hills for the duration
of
Kiss Me, Stupid
. Home movie footage of the house, which was located
just off Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills, reveals, along with the obligatory
swimming pool, a monochromatic, showy, haute-L.A. style: white front
doors, white marble walls, white marble floors, white dining table, white
chairs. . . . By the time Britt arrived Peter had already outfitted it with a
closet’s worth of clothes for her. Michael and Sarah appeared soon thereafter
for another trip to Disneyland.

The trouble was, Britt had not even come close to completing her
scenes in
Guns at Batasi
, and on March 31, Fox filed a $4.5 million suit
against her for breach of contract. The studio named Peter as well. By a
strange coincidence, the house he had rented in Beverly Hills was owned
by Spyros Skouras, the head of Twentieth Century-Fox, though the landlord decided not to intervene in Peter’s domestic life. A little later, Peter
Sellers countersued for $4 million, but his case was dismissed, and he ended
up paying Fox $60,200 to compensate the studio for the celluloid containing images of Britt.

John Guillermin was
Guns at Batasi
’s under-the-gun director. “Peter
was desperately unhappy, you know, and was talking to Britt all the time
on the phone. She left the picture after two weeks. She was inexperienced.
She hadn’t done much, and I don’t think if she’d had more experience she’d
have left. We got Mia Farrow to do the role and had to reshoot a couple
of weeks of it. Dickie Attenborough was not pleased. I saw Peter after that—it didn’t leave any scars.” Britt herself was later embarrassed by the episode:
“I knew in my heart I was doing the wrong thing. I just knew it. But I
wasn’t my own woman in those days. So I went.”

She was captivated by him—his magnetism, his fame, and his potent
love for her were a dazzling combination. To say that he was controlling is
obvious; more to the point is that Britt loved him.

Peter, of course, was resolute that she had every right to leave the
picture. “The only thing my wife ever signed was Darryl F. Zanuck’s autograph book,” he declared.

• • •

Kiss Me, Stupid
, for which Peter was to be paid $250,000 plus a percentage
of the profits, was only the first picture Wilder planned to make with Peter;
Sherlock Holmes
was the second. Obviously the director had high hopes for
him. But the actual, day-to-day experience of shooting a film together revealed that these two brilliant filmmakers had radically different work habits
and personal styles. Wilder liked to share meals with his stars; he enjoyed
the camaraderie of collaborative filmmaking, as long as no actor dared alter
a single word of the scripts he so carefully crafted with his writing partner,
I. A. L. Diamond. Peter had lunch in his dressing room, and improvisation
was his stock in trade. The hyper and gregarious Wilder enjoyed commanding a wildly open set. His friends; his chic wife, Audrey; his chic wife’s
friends; visitors from out of town. . . . The doors of
Kiss Me, Stupid
’s soundstage at the Goldwyn studio were thrown wide. Peter preferred to film in
relative privacy. Audrey Wilder, a quick-witted pistol and former big-band
singer who, by this point, had become one of Hollywood’s foremost social
leaders, characteristically has something to say about Peter, too: “He
queered his pitch with
me
when he didn’t show up for a dinner we were
giving for him at the apartment. I was
real
mad.”

Sellers later described the atmosphere of
Kiss Me, Stupid
: “I used to go
down to the set with Billy Wilder, and find a Cooks Tour of hangers-on
and sightseers standing off the set in my line of vision. Friends and relatives
of people in the front office come to kibitz. When I told Billy I couldn’t
work with that crowd there, he said, ‘Be like Jack Lemmon. Whenever he
starts a scene he shuts his eyes and says to himself, “It’s magic time” and
then forgets everything else.’ ” Peter found it difficult to forget everything
else. The idea of completing the picture began to gnaw at him.

Then came the sty.

According to Jack Lemmon, Sellers was plagued that week by “a massive
sty” on his right eye. Sheilah Graham reported that he’d missed at least one
day of filming because of it. Lemmon also noticed that Peter “looked as if
he were approaching nervous exhaustion.” He was tired, anxious, irritated.
He could do bits of physical business that pleased his writer-director, but
he couldn’t change a single word of the dialogue. The sty was a clinically
hysterical reaction—a bodily manifestation of what Peter felt inside.

On Friday, April 3, Wilder and Sellers filmed the scene in which Orville
gives a piano lesson to a child while growing increasingly convinced that
his wife, played by Felicia Farr, is (as Wilder put it) “doing it” with the
milkman. Standing on the sidelines along with Peter’s costars Dean Martin,
Kim Novak, Felicia Farr, and Cliff Osmond, Britt watched her husband
perform for the first time. She was amazed by his extraordinary talent and
spark. So were the others, including Wilder himself, who, despite his experience as a director, couldn’t help but break out into unrestrained laughter
during Peter’s takes.

“And then he did not show up on Monday,” Billy Wilder declared
from a distance of thirty-five years. “He had borrowed some money from
me because he wanted to take his kids to Disneyland. He was at Disneyland!
That’s the last I saw of him, giving him the money. It was two or three
hundred dollars.”

• • •

There is a funny but foreboding exchange in
The World of Henry Orient
between the difficult Henry and his earnest manager, Sidney (John Fiedler).
“Henry!” Sidney pleads. “You’ve got to remember you’re not Van Cliburn!
Now if Van Cliburn misses a rehearsal, he’s still Van Cliburn, and nobody
says, ‘Throw the bum out!’ ” But Henry is having his hair done at the
moment and is too busy admiring his own head in a handheld mirror to
concern himself with the warning. “I tried ’a phone ’em,” he mumbles.

In 1964, Peter’s profound misfortune was that he
was
Van Cliburn.
On that incontrovertible basis, he believed he could do as he pleased. In
fact, if comparisons are to be drawn, Peter Sellers was better than Van
Cliburn. He was more famous. And he made more money. And ironically,
despite years of outrageous behavior and eccentricity and periodically debilitating despair, Peter Sellers ended up remaining far longer on the klieg-lit
world stage than Van Cliburn.

• • •

He was worried about his body. As Britt describes it, Peter “believed that
the essence of his masculinity relied on his ardor as a lover. He was always
searching for what he liked to term as the ‘ultimate’ orgasm, and when he
discovered that amyl nitrate assisted his physical endurance the tiny capsules
of chemical became almost a routine component of our nightly love-making
pattern.” So on Monday, April 6, after forgoing the tension-provoking
sound stages of
Kiss Me, Stupid
for VIP treatment at the Magic Kingdom,
Peter and Britt put the kids to sleep and went to bed, inhaled some poppers,
made love with their hearts racing, and afterward opened a bottle of champagne, which spilled all over the sheets. They were changing them when
Peter reached for his chest. “Get me some brandy—quickly,” he said.