Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (39 page)

They told very few people. But near the end of the summer, during a
brief trip to Costa Brava, Britt took an unexpected call from a British gossip
columnist, who asked her to confirm the rumor that she was carrying Peter’s
baby.

Britt’s marriage with Peter was, like Anne’s with Peter—and everyone’s,
for that matter—punctuated by moments of tension and argument. But
despite witnessing her husband’s irrational jealousy during their first weeks
of matrimony, Britt once claimed not to have noticed anything truly out
of the ordinary about his behavior until later that summer: “The first time
I felt it was not normal was when Hugh Hefner called and said ‘We have
nude photographs of Britt, but we feel that you are such a wonderful photographer, so why don’t you take some photographs of her?’ I said, ‘But
Peter, I have never,
ever
posed for nude photographs.’ Peter said, ‘If Hugh
Hefner says you have, you have.’ There was nothing I could say or do.”

Ekland was even more shocked and hurt when Peter suggested during
one of their escalating fights that she abort the fetus. Britt sought the help
of Bryan Forbes and Nanette Newman, who talked him out of it. With his
quicksilver mood swings, he soon stopped mentioning abortion as a solution
and began referring to an idea he claimed to have learned from Stanley
Kubrick. There was an African tribe, Kubrick supposedly told Peter, a tribe
that blended ancient ritual with modern Western medical practices and
believed that the best and healthiest babies were produced only when a
pregnant woman was strapped into a chair and placed in an oxygen tent.
He suggested that Britt try it. According to Britt, only an increasing stream
of calls from his agents and managers distracted him enough that he never
forced her to go through with it.

• • •

Before his ill-fated trip to Los Angeles, Peter had formed a new production
company with a filmmaker of great experience. John Bryan was a former
art director (Anthony Asquith’s
Pygmalion
, 1938, among others), and
production designer (including David Lean’s
Great Expectations
, 1946, for
which he won an Oscar, and
Becket
, 1964, with Peter O’Toole and Richard
Burton, for which he won a BAFTA award). Bryan was also a producer,
two of whose better known films starred Alec Guinness:
The Card
(1952)
and
The Horse’s Mouth
(1958).

Calling their company Brookfield, Sellers and Bryan were quite active
in terms of planning. Between March and October 1964, Brookfield announced five film projects that were in various stages of preproduction.
First was
The Borrowers
, which was to be written by the screenwriter Jay
Presson based on May Norton’s children’s book about a family of minuscule
people who lived under the floorboards of somebody’s country home. They
announced this one in March, before Peter’s heart attacks. In April, with
Peter still in his hospital bed, Brookfield pledged to do a film version of
Oliver!
, Lionel Bart’s hit musical based on
Oliver Twist
, with Peter as Fagin.
Then came
My Favorite Comrade
, written by Maurice Richlin; that, too,
was announced with Peter still recuperating at Cedars of Lebanon. Next
came
Don Quixote
, with Peter (both ironically and not) in the title role. In
October
Maggie May
was added to the roster; it was based on a West End
play.

With characteristic enthusiasm and verve for work, Peter explained why
he wanted to become a producer. “I love this medium so much,” he said,
“I thought it might be ideal if and when I begin to slip in popularity as an
actor. And there’s such a dearth of really good acting material—so much
bad stuff. My hospitalization was a time of reflection for me.”

As far as playing Fagin was concerned, Peter was acutely conscious of
the material’s inherent racism. What had been acceptable to Dickens and
his readers in the late 1830s was no longer so in the mid-1960s, especially
not to Jews. There had been some uproar when Alec Guinness played the
role in David Lean’s 1948 drama, the first production since the Holocaust;
this time, the
New York Times
reported, it would be different: “From the
start, [Sellers] said he would play Fagin simply as an old rogue. After all,
he argued, he was part-Jewish himself and would not be a party to any hint
of anti-Semitism.”

But the question of how Peter would play Fagin in
Oliver!
was permanently tabled because Sellers and Bryan weren’t allowed to make the
film. A legal dispute with a rival production company ended badly for
Brookfield. As it turned out, Ron Moody played Fagin in
Oliver!
(1968),
The Borrowers
was eventually produced as a made-for-television movie in
1973, and
My Favorite Comrade
,
Don Quixote
, and
Maggie May
were never
made at all.

In late October, Peter went before the cameras for the first time since
his last day on the set of
Kiss Me, Stupid
. It was charity work. He agreed
to spend four days in New York shooting a United Nations–sponsored plea
for world peace called
Carol for Another Christmas
(1965). The project did
boast a prestige director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who made the brilliant
comedy of theater ill-manners,
All About Eve
(1950), among other fine
films. But Peter agreed to appear in
Carol for Another Christmas
, he told
the press, because Adlai Stevenson had asked him personally. Also, he said,
“After an illness like this, you wonder if you can work again.” The possibility
of brain damage nagged at him. He worried about whether he could even
remember dialogue any more, so he thought he’d start back to work with
something small.

They paid him $350, total, and chauffeured him each of the four days
of filming from his suite at the Regency to the studio, which was actually
a converted hangar at Long Island’s Roosevelt Field. Peter’s American fans
were anxious to see him, and a number of them showed up clamoring at
the gate.
Newsweek
rather cruelly reported the excitement at the old airport:
“ ‘We want Pete! We want Pete!,’ shrieked the gaggle of middle-aged, fruit-hatted females outside the studio fence. ‘Come on out, Pete!,’ they shouted,
clutching at the wire like frenzied monkeys.”

Carol for Another Christmas
was a relatively low-budget, made-for-television, post–atomic holocaust parable with good intentions and a
(mostly) reputable cast: Sterling Hayden, Eva Marie Saint, Ben Gazzara,
Richard Harris, Peter Fonda, and Steve Lawrence (who played the Ghost
of Christmas Past). The script was by
The Twilight Zone
’s Rod Serling, who
provided even more arch irony than usual—so much so that it verged on
clairvoyance. Peter played the head of a band of fanatical individualists.
“The Individual Me’s” have survived a devastating atomic bomb blast only
to devote their lives to eliminating everyone else—except, of course, for the
perfect Me, who would be allowed to live. Clad in a gaudy Wild West show
outfit complete with a ten-gallon hat emblazoned with the word “Me” in
sequins, Peter’s charismatic character addresses his cult: “If we let them seep
in here from down yonder and cross river—if we let these do-gooders, these
bleeding hearts, propagate their insidious doctrine of involvement among
us—then my dear friends, my beloved Me’s” [dramatic pause] “we’s in
trouble.” His eyes glistening with the thrill of control, the greatest Me
continues: “We must carry our glorious philosophy through to its glorious
culmination! So that in the end, with enterprise and determination, the
world and everything in it will belong to one individual Me! And that will
be the ultimate! The absolute ultimate!”

The heart attack survivor then breezed out of New York and returned
to London, where, on October 29, he and Britt accompanied Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon to the Variety Club of Great Britain’s Royal Gala
performance, the beneficiary of which was the National Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The event was a circus, literally. As one
of the highlights, a group of children had to lie very still on the ground
while an elephant stepped over them. A few days later, Peter flew to Paris
and began shooting his next feature film.

• • •

What’s New Pussycat?
’s opening credits are historic. In lurid, squiggly cartoon script, the typographic equivalent of sixties’ paisley, they read: “Charles
K. Feldman / presents / Peter Sellers / Peter O’Toole / Romy Schneider / Capucine / Paula Prentiss / and introducing Woody Allen.”

What’s New Pussycat?
was the former television writer and diffident
stand-up comic Allen’s first appearance on film as well as being his first
screenplay. Characteristically, it was all about sex and the mind. O’Toole
plays Michael James, the disturbed editor of a fashion magazine. Michael
considers himself to be sexually compulsive, so he seeks the aid of a Viennese
psychiatrist, Dr. Fritz Fassbender—Peter Sellers in a Prince Valiant wig and
maroon velvet suit. “My job is a lecher’s dream,” Michael confesses during
their first session. Dr. Fassbender leans in very close, his interest more than
piqued. Very soon he takes Michael’s place on the couch and confides with
a rutting tone, “I like thighs. Do you like thighs?”

Romy Schneider is Michael’s long-suffering girlfriend; Capucine, Prentiss, and Allen are ancillary neurotics.

Sellers had been friendly with O’Toole for some years. “I introduced
those two,” says the actor Kenneth Griffith. “O’Toole wanted to meet Sellers, and he wanted to meet him right away. Peter was going to see a play
at the Duchess Theater, I think, so he said ‘Well, if it’s today, it will have
to be when I come out of the theater.’ ” Then, says Griffith, “a strange
thing happened. The play ended, and all the people came out, and there
was no Sellers. As I recall it, he was virtually hiding inside. There was great
unease about meeting O’Toole. We went to a restaurant in Chelsea, which
had just shut because it was rather late at night. They said, ‘Oh, we just
shut, Mr. Griffith.’ I said, ‘I’ve got a couple of friends outside—have a
peek.’ They opened up quick. It was a great evening. I remember Sellers
helping with the cooking.”

“We were totally comfortable together,” O’Toole once said of Peter.
“Not cozy—it was far from cozy. It was sometimes downright edgy, but it
was the sharp edginess of stimulation and exploration. I found myself completely eaten up by Pete’s personality.”

Siân Phillips, who was married to O’Toole at the time, recalls that
Sellers’s casting in
What’s New Pussycat?
was problematic from a financial
standpoint, since his heart attacks had rendered him uninsurable. “O’Toole,
out of the kindness of his heart, said, ‘No, I must, must,
must
have Peter
Sellers.’ ” The result was that Charlie Feldman, the film’s producer, essentially self-insured Peter by casting him without outside indemnification.
Siân Phillips goes on: “Sellers insisted on top billing, and O’Toole said,
‘Oh, give it to him.’ I thought that was ungrateful, actually. I didn’t think
it was very chic.” Feldman, on the other hand, told United Artists’ Arthur
Krim that “O’Toole had insisted on flipping a coin to decide whether he
or Sellers should get first billing, [and] Sellers won the toss-up.” Whatever
the circumstances, Peter Sellers’s name did come first.

Peter’s doctors, meanwhile, were insisting that he not go beyond a
five-hour working day. To ease Peter’s mind even further, Feldman
had sent the film’s young director, Clive Donner (who had directed
The Caretaker
, among other films) to meet with Peter the day before
he was to leave for New York to shoot
Carol for Another Christmas
.
Donner reassured the justifiably worried Peter that he wouldn’t exceed
Peter’s relatively light schedule and that the production itself would be
as relaxed as possible.

Shooting began on November 2. During the production, Peter and
Britt stayed in a suite at the Plaza-Athenée. “I mustn’t get into any arguments while filming,” Peter told the columnist Roderick Mann. “It’ll make
me too nervous. I just have to shut up and walk away.” But, he added,
referring jocularly to his fellow filmmakers, “In six months’ time I can tell
them all what I think of them, the swine!”

He was still discussing matters of the spirit with Cannon John Hester
and, at least from Hester’s perspective, preparing to convert to Christianity.
They met once a week at the Plaza-Athenée and talked about God. Ursula
Andress, clad in leopardskin or cheetah, sometimes joined in. According to
Hester, Peter was especially intrigued by the story of Jesus walking on water.

• • •

Woody Allen remains a great admirer of Peter Sellers’s talent: “Sellers goes
to the deep core of what’s funny,” he said fairly recently. “His funniness
was the funniness of genius. What he had to offer was clearly gold.”

But Peter’s genius came at price. Allen found the task of actually working with Peter to be strenuous. Peter O’Toole was no help, either. With
What’s New, Pussycat?
, the first-time actor and screenwriter found himself
rudely belittled by the great Dr. Strangelove and his good friend Lawrence
of Arabia.