Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (36 page)

Peter was thirty-eight. He weighed less than ever, smoked three packs
of cigarettes a day, and popped a variety of prescription drugs to combat
frequent insomnia and depression. “I was getting into the pill area in a big
way,” he later admitted. At the time, the movie star described his experience
of life starkly: “ghostly and unreal” were the words he used.

• • •

Peter Sellers was always going to be the star of
A Shot in the Dark
(1964),
but Clouseau, surprisingly, was something of an afterthought. The Mirisch
brothers—Harold, Walter, and Marvin—owned the rights to Harry Kurnitz’s one-set, dialogue-heavy stage play, which was itself an adaptation of
a French play by Marcel Achard. With
The Pink Panther
safely in the can
after a smooth production, they signed Peter to play the lead—a French
magistrate leading a pretrial murder investigation. Anatole Litvak would
direct.

But Peter found Litvak to be uninspiring, as have many film critics
over the years, and he threatened to quit. (To be fair to Litvak, he did direct
some good pictures in his long and commercially successful career, among
them
Sorry, Wrong Number
and
The Snake Pit
, both released in 1948.) So
to keep their star happy, the Mirisches fired Litvak and brought in Blake
Edwards, who already had a multifilm contract with their company. Edwards then hired a new writer, William Peter Blatty, and together they
turned
A Shot in the Dark
into a Clouseau comedy. In the process, two
actors dropped out—Walter Matthau and, of all people, Sophia Loren.

And yet, despite all the preproduction commotion,
A Shot in the Dark
turned out to be a much finer film than
The Pink Panther
. On the narrative
level, the stakes are higher. People die. And they die just as Clouseau’s level
of competence sinks even lower. From the fluid, carefully orchestrated pre-credits sequence to the equally calibrated interrogation scene at the end,
A
Shot in the Dark
is one of the richest, most fully realized films of Peter’s
career.

Elke Sommer is Maria Gambrelli, the maid accused of shooting the
chauffeur. George Sanders is Maria’s employer, Benjamin Ballon. For the
role of Chief Inspector Dreyfus, whom Clouseau’s incompetence drives
insane, Edwards chose Herbert Lom. And as was often the case, Peter suggested his best friends for two of the smaller roles: Graham Stark would be
Clouseau’s laconic assistant, Hercule, and David Lodge would show up
briefly as a gardener. Shooting took place between November 1963 and
January 1964 at Shepperton, and once again, Peter got the best suite at the
Dorchester for the duration of the production as part of his lucrative deal.

A Shot in the Dark
presents the first roll-out of Clouseau’s many signature disguises, none of which works for the purpose of disguising him;
he’s the easily identifiable balloon seller standing outside the jail when Maria
Gambrelli is released from custody. When she’s released a second time,
there’s Toulouse-Lautrec kneeling on the sidewalk. In similar fashion,
A
Shot in the Dark
’s broad physical comedy only barely disguises the fact that,
like
The Goon Show
, the movie is an essentially philosophical enterprise.
The film historians Peter Lehman and William Luhr get it right when they
point out that “reason is likely to be not a guiding light but a Judas goat”
in the
Pink Panther
films. Clouseau, they write, “exudes logical disconnectedness,” a paradox that calls into question the basic assumptions of
civilization. For these clever critics, Clouseau is a ceaselessly disintegrating
protagonist, a character much more in synch with the absurdity of late
twentieth-century life than anyone else. That’s how he’s able to continue
functioning in the face of an unending series of calamities.

As an example of what Lehman and Luhr call Clouseau’s merely
“vestigial” rationality, they cite the sequence from
A Shot in the Dark
in which
“instead of walking through a doorway, he walks behind the door into a
wall [and] attempts to regain the dignity he never had by declaring that the
architect should be investigated.”

The servant Maurice, responding to Maria Gambrelli’s claim of innocence, utters the word “ridiculous.” This sets Clouseau off. It is
he
who is
necessarily the arbiter of postmodern incoherence:

“
I
will decide what is ridiculous! I believe everything. I believe nothing.
I suspect everyone, and I suspect no one. I gather the facts”—he is examining a jar of cold cream at close range and places it to his nose—“I examine
the clues”—his nose emerges with a white tip, and—“Before you know it,
the case is seulved.”

Told by Maria Gambrelli that he should get out of his wet clothes
because he’ll catch his death of pneumonia—he has made his entrance by
falling into a fountain—Clouseau responds with resignation: “Yes, I probably will. But it’s all part of life’s rich pageant, you know.” (Many years
later, this line inspired the title of an R.E.M. album.)

Soon afterward, he sets his trenchcoat on fire. “Your coat!” Maria cries.
“Yes,” says Clouseau, “it
is
my coat.”

He trails her to a rustic summer camp. Despite the fact that everyone
he sees is completely undressed, Clouseau cannot comprehend what he sees
and must be specifically instructed by a guitar-strumming naked man, “This
is a nudist colony!” (The naked man is played by Peter’s friend Bryan
Forbes, credited pseudonymously as “Turk Thrust.”) Clouseau jumps backward in shock and alarm. “A
nudist
colony?!” he cries, appalled. He emerges
a few moments later stark naked, holding the guitar as his fig leaf, and
immediately encounters an absurd nudist orchestra absurdly playing
“Theme from
A Shot in the Dark
” by Henry Mancini.

Moments later, language itself loses its logical foundation and devolves
into a series of Goon-like sounds when Clouseau comes upon what he sees
as a slumbering nudist. Maria calls to him from the bushes:

“That’s Dudu!”

“Dudu?”

“She’s dead!”

“Dead? Dudu?”

Then he faints.

• • •

To say that Clouseau illustrates the modern human condition is also to say
that he is a jackass, an imbecile beyond either hope or contempt. Chief
Inspector Dreyfus proceeds to lose his mind under the threat to rationality
that Clouseau’s brainless anarchy represents. Dreyfus is correct in his
response:

D
REYFUS
(agitated): Are you saying that this man—the man Maria
Gambrelli is protecting, her former lover—killed eight people because he was jealous?!

C
LOUSEAU
(calm): Insanely jealous.

D
REYFUS:
So jealous he made it look like Maria Gambrelli was the
murderer?!

C
LOUSEAU:
He’s a madman. A psychotic.

D
REYFUS:
(increasingly agitated) What about the maid? Was he jealous
of her, too? He strangled her!

C
LOUSEAU:
(calm) It’s possible that his intended victim was a man and
he made a mistake.

D
REYFUS:
A mistake?! In a nudist camp?! Idiot! Nincompoop! Lunatic!

By the end of the film Dreyfus is on the ground, dementedly biting
Clouseau’s ankles. It is the “lunatic” Clouseau who survives unscathed.

Clouseau’s improbable durability also reveals itself when, in the dim
light of Clouseau’s apartment, the door handle turns. An Asian man enters,
dressed all in black. He sneaks into Clouseau’s bedroom and, with a piercing
shriek, leaps upon the supine detective and begins to strangle him. A desperate fight ensues until the phone rings. The intruder answers it: “Inspector
Clouseau’s residence.”

The job of Clouseau’s valet, Cato, includes karate attacks sprung on
his boss without warning, the nominal goal being to keep Clouseau’s barely
functioning physical coordination from collapsing entirely. Burt Kwouk was
the nimble young actor Edwards cast in the role. “Cato is a physically very
agile human being,” Kwouk says today. “In those days, so was Burt Kwouk.”
Asked about the development of what was to become a recurring character,
Kwouk cuts right through it: “Cato did what Clouseau told him. And Burt
Kwouk did what Blake Edwards told him.”

Kwouk takes a similarly clear-eyed perspective toward Peter: “Complex
people are very difficult to understand. That’s about the size of it, really.”
He continues: “Hardly anybody has the same perception of Peter Sellers;
hardly any of us saw every facet of him. Possibly only his mother ever saw
that. I mean, there’s the view that there was
no
Peter Sellers—there was
just all those characters—[but] that’s just a facile way of putting it.” Kwouk
is onto something. Some sociologists consider the self to be relatively stable;
postmodernists see it not as
it
at all, but
them
—provisional, relational selves
dependent on circumstance and changeable over time. Sellers was ahead of
the curve on this; postmodern theory is a late twentieth-century construct.
As Kwouk puts it, “Like everybody, we present different faces to different
people. People in different areas see different angles, different sides of us,
and therefore have different perceptions of us. In Peter’s case it was exaggerated.

“He was very complex—
more
complex than most people,” Kwouk concludes. “This is part of the fascination with the man—twenty years after
his death. Very few actors are still interesting twenty years after they die.
Most of them aren’t interesting while they’re alive.”

A Shot in the Dark
builds to a crucial interrogation scene in which, in
radical violation of detective genre convention, reason loses. Chaos reigns,
and language slips away. Clouseau mentions to Ballon the fact that his
fingerprints have been found inside a closet:

B
ALLON:
Why not? It’s my house. I’ve often been in that closet.

C
LOUSEAU:
For what reason?

B
ALLON:
The last time was moths.

C
LOUSEAU:
Meuths?

B
ALLON:
Moths
.

C
LOUSEAU:
Yes,
meuths
.

It’s infectious. Ballon can’t help but reply: “Maria was complaining of
meuths
,” after which he winces, perplexed.

Blake Edwards later recalled the difficulty of shooting that scene in
particular: “One person would start laughing, then someone else. Sellers
was the worst. Finally, I put some money in the center of the room and
said, ‘I don’t care who it is that breaks up, they have to match the pot.’ I’ll
always remember this because George Sanders was in the scene, and he’s
someone who usually just did his role and went to sleep. He didn’t get
actively involved. But when Sellers started using these words—a ‘meuth’ in
the closet, a ‘beump’ on the head—Sanders fell down and wept like a cocker
spaniel.”

But all was not mirth. By the end of the shoot, Edwards and Sellers
had stopped speaking. Their communication consisted of little notes slipped
underneath each other’s door. Each man was experienced; each knew comedy; each had precise ideas; each was neurotic and disturbed. After all,
Edwards’s nickname is “Blackie”—not a diminutive of Blake, but a reference to one of his most frequent moods. In retrospect, it seems inevitable
that because Sellers and Edwards shared a kind of communal personality,
at a certain point they would necessarily cease to communicate.

• • •

Offscreen, Peter Sellers was earnestly repeating himself. “He asked me to
marry him, believe it or not,” Elke Sommer says, “even though no physicality,
nothing
had passed between us.

“I think he was just desperate to marry. I said, ‘Peter, I like you very
much as a person, but I don’t
love
you.’ He said, ‘But that’ll come.’

“I always got the feeling of a very lonely man who would do practically
anything to have somebody who was his.”

Moving along to his next target, in early February 1964, Peter, still
ensconced in his Dorchester suite, sent Bert around to a young starlet’s
room to issue a dinner invitation by proxy. Perhaps the girl would consent
to having some photographs taken as well, Bert asked. She would. Britt-Marie Eklund, a twenty-one-year-old pouty-lipped blond, had just arrived
in London courtesy of Twentieth Century-Fox, which had cast her in a
new action-adventure film,
Guns at Batasi
(1964), in the process forcing
her to shorten her name to Britt Ekland. Thanks to the studio’s publicity
machine, London’s playboy elite was already in the know about her arrival.
Michael Caine had issued an invitation but hadn’t called back yet as he’d
promised to do, so Britt was free to join Peter, who by that point had
started in on the room-service sweet and sour pork. He took some photos
of Britt after dinner, after which they drove by limousine to see
The Pink
Panther
, returning afterward to the Dorchester, where Peter and Britt capped their night with caviar, champagne, and Peter’s new toy, marijuana.
Over the next few days he sent flowers, took her to Trader Vic’s, where
they shared a drink with a floating gardenia; gave her a diamond and gold
brooch from Asprey; and bought her a dachshund. Before the week was
over, she flew to New York on
Guns at Batasi
business, but he called her
often during her brief stay in America. In one call, he mentioned some
news: “I’ve told everyone in London we’re going to marry. Is that all right
by you?” Britt flew back to London. After her plane landed at Heathrow
at 7:40
A
.
M
., one of the many aggressive journalists who had congregated
for the event shouted, “Where’s your engagement ring, Britt?” whereupon
Peter pulled her into a nearby broom closet and presented her with a triple-banded Victorian ring (emeralds, diamonds, rubies) he’d picked up at Garrards. They emerged from the closet for a photo op and got married the
following Wednesday.