Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (26 page)

• • •

If
The Millionairess
were a comic masterpiece, all the sordid behind-the-scenes turmoil might have served some lofty aesthetic purpose. But as it
turned out, Peter’s agony of love was largely for naught. Sophia did not
end up leaving Carlo Ponti for him, nor was
The Millionairess
one of Peter’s
better films. It’s an extravagant but dull (for lack of a better word) affair.
Sophia’s costumes are dazzling, her unnatural beauty even more so, her
performance hammy. Shaw’s wit can be brittle, which may not be a bad
thing, but in this case—or at least in Wolf Mankowitz’s adaptation—it’s
impossible to accept without the lingering odor of smut. Why would a
pious Muslim doctor who has devoted his life to the poor consent, even at
the end, to spend the rest of his life with the world’s most spoiled and
cutthroat heiress, other than to finally get his hands on her gigantic breasts?
There’s just something fundamentally filthy about it. The closing scene, in
which the heiress and the doctor finally declare their love and share a moonlit dance on a terrace, is lush but inane.
The Millionairess
did only so-so at
the box office.

And yet Peter’s performance is extraordinary. His earlier Indian routines on
The Goon Show
and on comedy records were funny because they were so broad; Dr. Kabir is funny—
when
he is funny, that is—because of Peter’s technical restraint. At times, in fact, there’s no comedy to speak of
in the performance. In a pivotal scene, Sophia’s character, Epiphania, shows
up at Dr. Kabir’s clinic having bought it and all the surrounding land in a
gesture of spoiled meanness and callous intimidation. She then strips down
to an eye-popping black corset, stockings, and garters. Dr. Kabir loses his
temper.

The idea of Peter Sellers as an enraged Indian doctor seems, of course,
to be inherently hilarious, but in point of fact Dr. Kabir’s breakdown isn’t
comical at all, nor is it meant to be, at least from the perspective of the
performer. Dr. Kabir is genuinely appalled at her arrogance, and for good
reason. There’s also a touch of defensiveness, owing to his awareness of her
attractiveness to him. His pitch rises slightly; he gesticulates, but only to a
point; and suddenly he begins speaking rapidly in his own language. Dr.
Kabir is not a caricature, and whatever authentic emotion
The Millionairess
projects is due to what the camera’s cool lens recorded, as it often did, as
Peter Sellers’s innate humanity.

• • •

The end of shooting
The Millionairess
scarcely dampened Peter’s ardor.
Sophia left for Rome.

He followed.

“After the film was finished he’d phone her all over the place and go
off to Italy to try to see her,” says Anne. Michael recalls Peter’s telephone
conversations with Sophia occurring no matter whether his wife or children
were in earshot. “I love you, darling,” Peter would say, and say, and say
again, his children overhearing all of it.

Sophia returned to London for a few days to record a song with Peter,
“Goodness Gracious Me,” as publicity for the film: A patient (Sophia) describes to her Indian doctor (Peter) her heart’s peculiar response to a certain
man. His chief response, initially placid but increasingly excited, is the
song’s title. With its bouncy, jingly tune and spoken lyrics, it’s basically a
novelty record. But although
The Millionairess
itself wasn’t a hit, the song—which was deemed too frivolous for inclusion as title music in a George
Bernard Shaw film—appeared on the best-selling charts in November 1960,
and stayed there for fourteen weeks, peaking at number four.

Carlo Ponti accompanied his wife to London on the “Goodness Gracious Me” trip, but Mr. Loren’s presence didn’t seem to affect Peter one
way or the other. As he saw it, she would leave Carlo, he would leave Anne,
and then he and Sophia would be free.

Implausibly, the whole thing didn’t blow up in anyone’s face—at least
not at the time. Peter, Sophia, and Carlo all remained friendly, and in fact
Peter was a guest in their home for many years. As further publicity for
The
Millionairess
, Peter and Sophia recorded three other songs for inclusion on
an entire album,
Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren
, released late in 1960 by
EMI. “Bangers and Mash,” like “Goodness Gracious Me,” was a novelty
hit—it’s a mostly spoken menu battle between an English WWII veteran
and his Neapolitan war bride. He craves the eponymous sausages; she insists
on tagliatelle, all to the tune of a jaunty military fife-and-trumpet background. The song reached number twenty-two on the pop charts in January
1961.

The other two songs they recorded together were “I Fell in Love with
an Englishman” and “Fare Thee Well.”

• • •

Early in 1960, before their collaboration on
The Millionairess
, Peter and
Wolf Mankowitz decided to form their own production company, Sellers-Mankowitz Productions, Ltd. In March, before their own deal with each
other had been signed, they announced a distribution deal with Continental
to produce, in Britain, two out of three of the following projects:
Memoirs
of a Cross-Eyed Man
,
My Old Man’s a Dustman
, and
The Man Who Corrupted America
. (Continental was already set to distribute
Battle of the Sexes
in the United States.)
Memoirs of a Cross-Eyed Man
seems to have been the
most likely of the projects to be produced; it was the story of an everyday
kind of fellow who falls in love with a movie star. They considered Shirley
MacLaine for the role.

The writer Peter Evans once described the producer-screenwriter with
whom Peter tried to form a business: “Mankowitz is a phlegmatic, cultivated
East End Jew whose bulk lends his look of supine disdain a threatening
authority. His face, even in repose, seems a network of subtle sneers.” “I
have found in Wolf a person who really understands me,” Peter said. A
portrait of Daniel Mendoza was to be their logo.

By summer, however, Mankowitz was becoming annoyed with the slow
pace of his negotiations with Peter, or, better, the slow pace with which
Peter conducted his side of the negotiations. “I can’t understand why Peter’s
and my contracts with one another are taking so long to draw up,” he wrote
to Bill Wills.

Mankowitz scheduled a meeting on August 30 with some financiers
who were almost ready to back the company to the tune of £124,000. That
morning, Peter sent him a letter, delivered by hand, in which he told Mankowitz that the deal was off; Peter had decided to keep his focus on acting.
Mankowitz was thus forced to show up at the meeting and tell the financiers, “I think you should put your money back in your pockets.” Peter had
closed his letter by calling Mankowitz “muzzel,” a Yiddish term of endearment. Mankowitz didn’t feel especially endearing in return.

Peter then proceeded to shoot his now-former friend in the back. Mankowitz, Sellers told the press, “is a very strange person with so many things
on his mind. He should concentrate more on one thing, like screenwriting,
and leave the impresario business alone.”

As for himself, Peter had a different employment option in mind that
year, or so he said. Beyond the constant onslaught of cars, Peter also purchased a life-size mechanical elephant. One could ride atop it on its howdah.
Peter was captivated. To him, the peculiar contraption represented a sort
of safety net for his career: “I was thinking of things I could fall back on—it
was a security if I ever failed,” he told the
Observer
. Apparently he believed
that advertisers would flock to it for use in product promotion.

“Peter’s not a genius,” Spike Milligan declared in 1960. “He’s something more. He’s a freak.”

• • •

The movie star took a reporter on a tour of Chipperfield, which the star
had filled with antiques. He proudly pointed out the remarkable early Victorian (as he put it) “commode”: “You must admit they disguised them
well.” With the “Emperor Waltz” playing on the high-end hi-fi, the Sellerses’ butler silently walked in and poured tea while Peter told the reporter
that he had owned fifty-two cars in the last six years. Presents for friends,
toys for the kids, clothes, cameras, pets, collectibles, cars, more cars, all the
result of deepening despair.

Stardom demanded upkeep. Peter enjoyed some of it. There were film
premieres at which to show his face, charity events, theater openings, parties. At the Royal Film Show at London’s Empire Cinema in 1959, he and
Anne celebrated in the company of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother,
Princess Margaret, Maurice Chevalier, Alec Guinness, and Lauren Bacall.
At the Lord Taverners’ Ball the following year, he mingled with Prince
Philip, if a prince can be said to mingle. He nabbed the Film Actor of 1960
award at the Variety Club. At the 1961 Evening Standard Drama awards
(held in January 1962), he presented the award for Best Musical to the
antic masterminds of
Beyond the Fringe
—Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan
Bennett, and Jonathan Miller. The Queen herself showed up at the Odeon,
Leicester Square, in March 1962, along with Princess Margaret, Claudia
Cardinale, Yul Brynner, Pat Boone, Leslie Caron and her husband Peter
Hall, Peter Finch, and Melina Mercouri. Peter enjoyed a few moments of
conversation with the queen in the theater’s foyer.

Personality profiles were appearing at a furious pace. “In relaxed moments he has a slightly bewildered look, like an awakening owl,” was one
truly great observation.

And to Peter Sellers’s eventual peril, he repeatedly ignored the advice
Alec Guinness had given him during the production of
The Ladykillers
:
“Don’t ever let the press know anything about your private life.” Indeed,
Peter came up with a strategy to solve the problem. Killing two birds with
a single stone, he began to tell the world he had no personality at all: “In
myself I have nothing to offer as a personality. But as soon as I can get into
some character I’m away. I use the characters to protect myself, as a shield—like getting into a hut and saying ‘nobody can see me.’ ” And, “As far as
I’m aware, I have no personality of my own whatsoever. That is, I have no
personality to offer the public. I have nothing to project.”

The press took the bait. Peter Sellers, wrote one of the many critics to
follow Peter’s lead over the years, “possesses one rare distinction—that of
total anonymity.”

• • •

Around this time, Peter’s friend Herbert Kretzmer described him more
closely, more sympathetically, and consequently more tragically:

“He is the most successful actor since Olivier and Guinness. He enjoys
a riotous acclaim clear across the world. He has more money than he can
spend in his lifetime—and the endless promise of more. . . . Yet Peter Sellers is one of the saddest, most self-tortured men I have ever known. Here
is a man almost devoid of any capacity to sit back and enjoy the riches his
genius has produced. There is certainly no more complex personality in the
whole spectrum of British show business.”

“I can’t explain
myself,
I’m afraid, sir,” said Alice,
“because I’m not myself, you see.”

I
n January 1961, Peter found himself in need of a new driver. Bert Mortimer had been Cary Grant’s chauffeur when Grant was in England, but
Cary was spending more time in Hollywood and Bert was looking for work.
First Peter tried him out on Peg. When that worked out, he took Bert for
himself.

“I was a bit concerned because I’d heard that staff came and went like
turning on the tap and running water,” Bert later observed. “But we prevailed. And everything turned out fine.” Until the end.

Bert Mortimer became Peter’s primary caregiver. Driving, fetching,
emotional-crisis management, delivering messages Peter wanted to avoid
delivering himself, cleaning up dog shit deposited in the back seat of a Rolls
Royce. Mortimer performed many tasks. Says Bryan Forbes, “Peter built
him up into a legend. He became known as ‘The Great Bert.’ ”

Peter also hired a new secretary. Naturally, Peter believed that every
fan letter required a personal reply. Hattie Stevenson wrote them. She, too,
came to clean up messes.

• • •

Only Two Can Play
(1962) might have served as the title of a memoir
devoted to the waning years of Peter’s marriage, but in fact it’s fictional.
Based on Kingsley Amis’s novel
That Uncertain Feeling
, it concerns a dapper
Welsh librarian, a lady’s man with a wife and two kids who can’t help but
have an affair with a gorgeous, wealthy, foreign-born woman, herself a serial
adulterer. The British novelist Thomas Wiseman once wrote perceptively
about Peter’s ongoing tendency to play out the blunt facts of his own
interiority in the roles he chose to play for the public.
Only Two Can Play
,
Wiseman declared, was yet another “ingenious form of psychological buck-passing.”

Scripted by Bryan Forbes and directed by Sidney Gilliat for the Boultings,
Only Two Can Play
is one of Peter’s lowest-key films, a muted look
at a conventional marriage and its vicissitudes. It’s Sellers at his most understated. The performance seems effortless, and the film is fascinating.