Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (44 page)

Casino Royale
opened in April 1967, with a royal command performance in London. Kathy Parrish remembers the queen sitting in one row
laughing and enjoying herself and Feldman sitting in the row behind her,
knowing the gargantuan thing just wasn’t any good. Notices were mixed,
but the film did find its audience and made at least some of its money back.
It has but a few critical defenders today. One is the film scholar Robert
Von Dassanowsky, who sees in its fragmented pastiche a grander philosophy: “The failure of modernity and a celebration of what Umberto Eco
would call the postmodern ‘crisis of reason’ permeates nearly every scene
of
Casino Royale
.” If Von Dassanowsky is right, then Peter Sellers himself
really may turn out to be the quintessential postmodern man.

F
ragmentation reigned, as it must for every postmodernist. Peter’s constant dieting continued, as did his marital discord and bad-tempered
parenting, all broken up with pleasant evenings spent around a piano with
friends, singing, laughing, and being the man he could have been if he
hadn’t been so many other less agreeable people in the meantime.

Joe McGrath and Peter Sellers made up after Peter himself walked away
from
Casino Royale
. McGrath reports: “I got a letter from Peter later, apologizing, saying, ‘I’m terribly sorry about what happened, I was wrong. We
will work together again, I promise you.’ ” They were having drinks at the
Dorchester bar soon thereafter when a Columbia executive came by the
table. “Joe!” he cried. “God! I’m so sorry that you left the film! It was that
bastard Sellers that fucked everything up. And it’s a pleasure to meet you,
Mr. Allen.”

To keep the weight off, Peter ate nothing but spaghetti for a time.
There was also a Chinese vegetable diet, a macrobiotic diet, and a yoga diet.
There was a wine-and-steak diet, too. For a while he consumed only bananas.

The children continued to find life with their father to be difficult.
Spike once commented that “he used the children as pawns. He loved them,
but on his own terms. They had to love him when he demanded it.”

“He threw me out of home for the first time when I was eight or nine,”
Michael Sellers says. “He asked us who we loved more, our mother or him.
Sarah, to keep the peace, said, ‘I love you both equally.’ I said, ‘No, I love
my mum.’ He threw the two of us out and said he never wanted to see us
again.” But of course he did, and of course their encounters were just as
troubled, if not quite so memorable. Michael was shuttled around a lot,
and not only between his parents. “By the time I was twelve I’d been to
about eight or nine different schools.” He and Sarah liked their stepmother,
though. “Britt was interested in us,” says Sarah. “None of his other women
was.”

As for Peg, her hostility to Britt seemed to wane a bit over time, perhaps
in response to Britt’s obvious affection for Michael and Sarah. Baby Victoria
didn’t get much affection from Grandma, though. “Peg did not like the
role of Grannie,” says Ekland. “And she would always refer to Victoria as
‘it.’ ”

• • •

Peg Sellers, the former vaudeville showgirl, cut an increasingly bizarre figure
around mod, swinging London in the mid-1960s. “She liked to wear little-girl dresses and even flaunted mini-skirts although she was well past sixty,”
Britt reports. “She also painted thick lashings of rouge on her face and
bright, glossy lipstick.”

Peg’s heavy consumption of liquor and cigarettes had done nothing but
increase throughout her widowhood. Britt couldn’t help but notice that she
hid her smokes under the cushions of the couch and decanted her booze
into empty medicine bottles, which she then stashed in the bathroom cabinet, all to keep Peter from confronting his mother’s vices directly. Still,
says Ekland, “I got along with Peg well and I knew that as long as I didn’t
betray the secret of her gin reservoirs, I always would.”

• • •

Through it all, Peter’s closest and most trusted friends provided him with
the greatest comfort. “The thing about psychiatry, I found, is just talking
to someone,” he mentioned to a British newspaper in 1966, “and in England if you have some good friends, as I have, then you don’t need to go
to a psychiatrist.” Maybe, maybe not.

But the fact is, Peter did find compassion and solace among his mates.
Spike, Joe McGrath, Graham Stark, Kenneth Griffith, David Lodge—these
men showed him the kind of mercy that most frail people deserve but rarely
receive. Their companionship was genuine, particularly when, from Peter’s
perspective, the rest of the world appeared inexplicably to become more
and more hostile to him. His friends saw Peter’s oddities—how could they
help but notice them, since he wore his eccentricities on his sleeve?—but
they saw the tender core beneath. Also, he was hilarious.

“He could be very, very funny,” says McGrath. “There used to be an
Italian restaurant called the Tratou in London. Milligan, Peter, Eric Sykes,
and myself—we would get our wives or girlfriends, whoever we were with
at the time, and we’d go around at ten at night and have dinner. Then they
would close the restaurant, but we were allowed to stay. There was a pianist
called Alan Claire, who they used to use a lot in television shows—Frank
Sinatra always used him when he came over—and he’d be there, and we
would finish dinner and sit around till three or four o’clock in the morning,
and Peter would sing. He’d sing standards, and Spike would play the trumpet. That’s a side that other people never saw.”

For other people, the so-called normal, it takes great trust to expose
their ugliest aspects to those closest to them. Typically, though, Peter Sellers
got it backward. He trusted only his closest friends enough to reveal to
them his essentially good heart.

• • •

In June of 1966, shortly after walking out on
Casino Royale
, Peter was
named Commander of the British Empire by Elizabeth II in the Queen’s
Birthday Honors List. The queen named Harold Pinter as well.

Then destiny called: Peter spent four days shooting
Alice in Wonderland
(1967). He was the befuddled King of Hearts.

“I didn’t want a lot of famous featured performances with lots of animal
heads,” the director Jonathan Miller declares of his adaptation of Lewis
Carroll’s philosophically absurd children’s book. The physician-turned-satirist and
Goon Show
fan had something darker and more cerebral in
mind: “It’s rather melancholy. The film was designed to be a recreation of
Victorian life and the melancholy of growing up—the Victorian thing
about childhood being an innocent time and everything else being sad and
decaying.” Miller made
Alice in Wonderland
on a relatively low budget for
BBC television, a fact that did not discourage some of Britain’s best performers from appearing in it. “I asked John Geilgud, Michael Redgrave,
Leo McKern, and Peter Cook, and then I went to Sellers [and] said, ‘Would
you do it for as little as £500, which is all you’ll get paid by the BBC?’ ”

Miller had worked with Peter in 1961. “I once appeared on what was
then called a gramophone record with him—‘The Bridge on the River
Wye.’ Peter Cook and I figured as minor characters in that, with Sellers
rather brilliantly playing Alec Guinness, and it was quite funny. We spent
a day doing it, and he was very jolly. There was lots of laughter then.” (The
record, a spoof of the 1957 film
The Bridge on the River Kwai
, costarred
Spike and used an old
Goon Show
episode, “The Africa Incident,” as the
core; George Martin produced it. After the record was cut, but before it
was released, the producers of the film threatened to sue, so Martin was
forced painstakingly to remove the sound
k
from every utterance of “Kwai.”
Hence “Wye.”)

Miller couldn’t help but notice the change in Sellers, who was markedly
troubled during the production of
Alice in Wonderland
. “He was a moody
bugger, you know? He was very superstitious. If things had gone badly on
the way to the location, if his stars hadn’t read right, he’d be sunk in a
gloom and would be unwilling to film.” Still, Miller knew, “you could
amuse him, and a sort of strange, mischievous smile would spread across
his face.” The rest of the time, though, Peter “kept to himself and often sat
apart in a deck chair in a starry gloom.”

Peter Eyre, who played the Knave of Hearts, retains no fond memories
of working with Sellers in
Alice in Wonderland
. “I thought Peter Sellers was
going to be like an actor. But he wasn’t, really. He absolutely didn’t relate
to any of the other actors. He had to be slightly polite to the old actress
who played the Queen of Hearts, Alison Leggatt, but otherwise he was
completely closed off as a person. He only ever loosened up when Snowdon
came to photograph. There were a lot of well-known actors in the production; I don’t remember him actually speaking to anybody. And those other
famous actors, like Michael Redgrave and John Gielgud—they weren’t like
that at all. Then again, they didn’t have cars with chauffeurs. Sellers was a
movie star.”

As he had with Spike Milligan, Eyre attributes Peter’s distance to the
fact that he was, at his core, a comedian: “They can’t bear the idea that
somebody else is going to get a laugh. It’s like an illness.”

Without contradicting those who found Peter to be generous to them
in front of a camera, Eyre is probably right about what might be called the
comedian’s curse. Apart from his closest friends, Peter’s richest relationships
were with his audiences, particularly the ones he never saw. It was with the
disconnected listeners and spectators of radio, television, and film that he
most securely bonded, and he did so instinctively and spontaneously in
flashes of raw creation.

“He improvised very beautifully in the same tone as Carroll wrote,”
Jonathan Miller explains. “I didn’t let anyone improvise unless they actually
had the logic Carroll did.” Miller suggested that Peter play the King of
Hearts as a familiar
Goon Show
routine: “I borrowed a character of his—that feeble old man, Henry Crun—very vague and unfocused. He
improvised wonderfully at one moment—when the letter gets picked up, and the
White Rabbit brandishes it and says, ‘This letter’s just been picked up,’ and
the foreman of the jury says, ‘Who’s it written to?’ and he opens it up and
says, ‘It seems to be a letter written by the prisoner to somebody.’ Sellers
then said [in Henry Crun’s voice-of-the-shakes], ‘It must be
that
. I mean,
it can’t just be written to nobody. You can’t just write to nobody. I mean,
if you did that all the time, well, the post office would come to a standstill!
I mean, you’ve got to have
somebody
, I mean, well—we-ee-ll—it’s not allowed!’ That was just the sort of thing that Carroll would have written.”

When the camera wasn’t rolling, Sellers’s strangeness could be less appealing. Miller goes on: “He was fascinated by wealth and his Rolls Royce
and his various attendants who looked after him and the peculiar sort of
Barbie-doll wife he had. He gave a party for my wife and me and a number
of other people at his house, and I remember there was an enormous champagne bucket filled with caviar. It did seem rather immoderate.

“He was a difficult man—sort of show biz, sort of genius, but completely empty when he wasn’t playing anyone. He was a receptacle rather
than a person. And whatever parts he played completely filled the receptacle,
and then they were drained out. And the receptacle was left empty and
featureless. Like a lot of people who can pretend to be other people very
convincingly and change their characters, he could do so because he hadn’t
had any character himself—not unlike Olivier in that way.” But, Miller
quickly adds, “He was much more subversive and interesting and modern
than Olivier.”

• • •

As early as June 1966, with
Casino Royale
still stumbling forward in production,
Variety
reported that two Hollywood producers, Jerry Gershwin
and Elliott Kastner, had grown so skeptical of Peter’s Hollywood agent
Harvey Orkin’s dismissive treatment of them—Orkin told the producers
that Peter was booked solid for the measurable future—that they had taken
it upon themselves to get on a plane, fly to London, and deliver a new
screenplay to him personally, and that Peter had agreed to do the picture.
One week later, everybody having been sufficiently embarrassed by the
story,
Variety
noted that Gershwin and Kastner vehemently denied the
whole thing. No, the producers categorically stated in Hollywood’s trade
paper of record; they had made Peter’s deal for
The Bobo
(1967) directly
with Harvey Orkin.

Bobo
means
fool
in Barcelona. The script had much to recommend it,
including a European location, an accent, a bizarre sight gag, and a role for
Britt. The ridiculous yet somehow suave Juan Bautista arrives in Barcelona
from a remote village and bills himself as the greatest singing matador in
all of Spain. (“I sing before, after, and during, but not so much during, as
it is difficult to sing when I am running.”) A corpulent impresario agrees
to book him in his theater on one condition: that he conquer and humiliate
the greatest blond in all of Spain—Olimpia (Britt), a spoiled, capricious,
voluptuous ball-breaker who has, of course, spurned the impresario. An
elaborate masquerade ensues before Olimpia discovers Juan Bautista’s true
identity and exacts her strange revenge by dyeing him blue from head to
toe. He ends up in a Barcelona bull ring as “the singing blue matador” and
performs before a cheering crowd. She drives off with a genuinely rich
suitor, a man more her speed.