Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (45 page)

Originally, Peter hoped to direct as well as star in
The Bobo
, which was
scheduled for production at Cinecittà in the fall. But by the middle of the
summer he’d decided to limit himself to performing, and Robert Parrish
took over as the film’s director. “The trouble is,” Peter explained, “my role
starts early in the movie and goes right through to the end. So does Britt’s.
In order to make the most of my role and the scenes with Britt, I’ve had
to concentrate on acting, not directing, this time.”

• • •

The Bobo
became, as Parrish’s widow, Kathleen, describes it, “a disaster
that we considered a death in the family and never mentioned.” Parrish
himself told one comparatively benign tale in his memoirs: “After three
weeks’ shooting in Rome, Peter called me aside and whispered, ‘I’m not
coming back after lunch if that bitch is on the set.’ ‘Tell me which one
and I’ll take care of it,’ I cringed. He had already had the script girl fired.
I figured it was the makeup girl’s turn. ‘The one over my left shoulder,
in the white dress. Don’t look now,’ he said, and slinked away to charm
the cast and crew. The girl in the white dress was his wife and costar,
Britt.”

To Parrish’s surprise, he ran into the couple an hour or two later. They
were lunching together at the Cinecittà commissary. “As I passed their table
they raised their glasses to me.”

One piece of information unavailable to Parrish is supplied by Michael
Sellers, who reports that a few days before shooting began on
The Bobo
,
Peter “got his solicitors to write to Britt and tell her that he intended to
file for divorce.”

• • •

Peter took a few days away from
The Bobo
and flew to Paris to film a scene
with Shirley MacLaine in MacLaine’s multicharacter comedy
Woman Times
Seven
(1967). Directed by Vittorio De Sica,
Woman Times Seven
features
MacLaine as the eponymous number of characters opposite an array of
costars including Alan Arkin and Michael Caine. Peter’s scene was simple;
there was little room for arguments with De Sica, and besides, his wife
wasn’t his costar.

As a funeral cortege makes its incongruous way through the park beneath the Eiffel Tower, a physician (Peter, looking very much like Auguste
Topaze) comforts the widow, Paulette (MacLaine). The doctor’s comfort
slides into a passionate declaration of love, prompting Paulette to cry all
the harder—briefly. Soon they’re discussing where they’re going to live
together, and before the casket has even reached the cemetery they diverge
from the funeral route and walk off in each other’s arms.

• • •

On Monday, October 17, Peter arrived on
The Bobo
’s Cinecittà set at
4:10
P
.
M
., having just watched all the rushes to date. “I’ve just seen the
most wonderful film!” he exclaimed enthusiastically. “It’s marvelous!” He
shot a scene or two with Parrish and finished at 7
P
.
M
. At 8:30
P
.
M
. Parrish
picked up his ringing telephone. “I’m low on the film,” Peter told him. It
was Britt’s fault. “Her reading of lines is amateurish,” her husband opined.

It got worse.

“Peter called Britt ‘a cunt’ in front of the entire cast and crew,” Kathleen
Parrish states. Everyone froze, but the Italian crew members were especially
mortified at Peter’s vulgar treatment of a woman—his own wife, a Scandinavian bombshell to top it all off, a lady whose toes they would gladly
have kissed.

A gregarious group,
The Bobo
’s crew enjoyed fixing a fairly elaborate
lunch for themselves and a few select guests. They liked Robert Parrish—everyone did—and they invited him to join them once or twice. But they
never wanted to have much to do with Peter at all, let alone share a meal
they cooked themselves. And Peter, as always, wanted very much to be
invited. According to Kathy Parrish, the “cunt” incident only served to
cement the crew’s enmity, and afterward they became even more open in
giving Peter the cold shoulder.

So, in a grossly misguided effort to get the crew to like him and invite
him to lunch, Peter bought a dozen knockoff Rolex watches and began
doling them out as gifts.

He approached the camera operator and handed him one of the cheap
watches. The camera operator literally spat on it and threw it on the ground
at Peter’s feet.

At one point, Kathy Parrish invited Peter to lunch, and he was completely at ease and low-key. “Peter could be charming,” she notes. They did
a jaunty strutting dance together, the Lambeth Walk, and had a fine time
in each other’s company. But as far as the production of
The Bobo
was
concerned, she says, “it was ugly from beginning to end. Everything around
Peter was awkward.”

Peter and Britt had returned to the Appian Way—to a somewhat
smaller villa than the one they’d rented during the production of
After the
Fox
—but by this point the marriage was in even more drastic trouble. More
(and bigger) furniture was hurled. During one rage Peter actually flipped
the bed over. One of the castors hit Britt in the mouth and chipped a tooth.
She proceeded to leave the production for several days—the mirror opposite
of her behavior during
Guns at Batasi
, for this time she was fleeing
from
her husband.

In the middle of it all, Peter got a phone call from London. Peg had
suffered a heart attack.

Robert Parrish asked Peter if he wanted to fly back to be with her.
Peter replied that it wasn’t necessary, he spoke to her all the time. She died
a few days later, without him.

• • •

“He used to be quite terrible to her at times,” Dennis Selinger once said of
Peter and his mother, “and yet, probably she was the only woman in his
life who really meant anything to him.”

Peter and Britt flew to London for the funeral, after which Peter sent
his mother’s ashes to North London to be interred with Bill’s at the Golders
Green cemetery and columbarium. There is a plaque there, placed by Peter,
who nonetheless did not visit the cemetery until 1980. As for Peg’s clothes,
Peter gathered them from her apartment, took them to Brookfield, and
burned them in the garden.

Peg had moved on, but the mother-and-son heart-to-hearts are said by
some to have continued from beyond the grave. “After she’d gone,” Selinger
claimed, “he used to have conversations with her. He’d get into a room
and talk to her for quite some time.” Evidently she succored him.

Later, Peter periodically told people he carried some of Peg’s ashes
around with him on his travels. Joe McGrath finds it hard to believe. “He
would make up a lot of it, you know. I mean, if he thought that somebody
would believe he was carrying his mother’s ashes around, it would be very
funny. I know he told people stories about his death experiences—when
he had his heart attacks and stuff like that—but he never told
me
any of
that, and I know he never told Spike Milligan. Spike said, ‘No—he’d never
tell us any of that because we’re gonna say, “You’re putting me on—don’t
give
me
any of that shit.” ’ ”

• • •

Peter Sellers was in such terrible emotional shape during the production of
The Bobo
that even his close friend Kenneth Griffith felt the sting. At Peter’s
insistence, Griffith played the role of Pepe, one of Olimpia’s discarded
lovers. “I came on the set one day and Robert Parrish was sitting like Little
Jack Horner in the corner of the studio.
Peter
was directing.

“The scene I had was with Britt Ekland. I thought, ‘Geez, somebody
could have warned me. Well, perhaps they forgot.’ So I did the scene, which
was quite difficult, with Miss Ekland. She always showed goodwill and tried
very hard, but she was having problems. I think we were into forty-odd
takes—which was quite difficult for me because if
she
got it right it would
be printed and that’s it. But we went on. At the end of the day I got my
makeup off and got changed and sought Robert Parrish—nice man, lovely
man. He was sitting alone. I said, ‘Robert, you didn’t tell me what was
going to happen this afternoon.’ He said, ‘I’m sorry, Kenneth.’ I said, ‘Is
it all with your agreement?’ I thought maybe Peter had said, ‘Look, I can
handle it.’ But Robert very quietly said, ‘No. He just announced that he
was taking over, and I felt that I had a duty to sit quietly and be a servant
to the film. You know, the number-one job is to get this film finished.’

“When the film was finished, the big man in film publicity here [in
London] asked if he could come and see me. He said, ‘You know Peter
wants everyone on the film in a significant capacity to write a piece about
what they think of him as a director’ [for use as publicity]. I said, ‘I can’t
do that, because it would imply that I supported what happened. And I
don’t.’ And he got up—because he’d had orders from Peter—and said,
‘Well, Kenneth, you know everybody on the film has done it. You are the
only one who has said no.’ I said, ‘Look, I love Peter dearly, but I can’t be
a party to this.’ After that Peter cut me dead for six months.”

Actually, Robert Parrish never left the picture entirely in Peter’s hands.
In late November, with the production still grinding on—Peter was by that
point insisting on reshooting scenes without even seeing the rushes—Parrish told his London-based agent that he was getting along “as good as ever”
with Peter and with Elliott Kastner as well. “Peter leans on me when he
needs to and flails out on his own when he doesn’t. Elliott holds his stomach
and says, ‘Bob, what am I going to do?’ ”

Then Harvey Orkin showed up in Rome and helpfully told Peter that
he, Orkin, didn’t like Peter’s interpretation of his role.

Orkin’s asinine remark—had he never
met
his client?—sent Peter into
a tailspin so predictable that one wonders if there was malicious intent on
Orkin’s part. Like most artists, Peter needed a constant, smooth flow of
reassurances, not a sudden stab of criticism, which human beings generally
take badly and actors and writers take even worse. Unfortunately, Peter’s
response to Orkin’s insensitivity was not to question his relationship with
Orkin but rather to insist on reshooting even more scenes in a desperate
attempt to develop an entirely new character.

They were all still at it in late January when Peter demanded a codirecting credit. First he fought with Kastner about it—Kastner told Peter
he was “full of shit”—and then he approached Parrish, who patiently reminded him that he had told Parrish earlier that he’d only wanted credit
as the film’s star. According to Parrish at the time, “Peter accepted this and
said he would never bring it up again.”

“Dear Bob,” Peter cabled on January 31. “Since I have directed
The
Bobo
I also want to cut it, but alone with [the editor] Johnny Jympson. Just
Johnny Jympson and I, in other words. I hope you will agree to this as I
must tell you I intend to go all the way.”

“Dear Bob,” Peter wrote on February 14. “Thank you for your letter
in which you state that you do not agree that I directed
The Bobo
. I wonder
if you would now be good enough to let me know upon what facts you
base this statement.” There were other less-than-pleasant exchanges with
Parrish and others over the musical score, which Peter insisted on reworking
as well. In the end, though, Robert Parrish received sole credit for directing
The Bobo
.

When
The Bobo
was released, it was not widely slammed. On the contrary. The critic Richard Schickel wrote only one of a number of glowing
reviews. Schickel captures the spirit not of that performance, particularly,
but of Sellers’s best work nonetheless: “There is in his character a wonderful
scramble of guile and innocence, humility and dignity, not to mention a
certain wise, romantic rue. . . . What is so good about Sellers’ performance
is that he never insists upon these emotional generalizations at the expense
of specific characterization, is never excessively sweet or sour and never,
never tries obviously to turn the Bobo into an Everyman, as so many lesser
actors have when they have tried to work a vein that is so trickily laced
with fool’s gold. . . . Peter Sellers may be the finest comic actor of his time,
and it is a boon to be able to study him at length and at leisure instead of
merely glimpsing his face in the crowd of those all-star productions where
he has lately been lurking so much of the time.”

• • •

“A certain wise, romantic rue” was indeed what Peter Sellers radiated onscreen. But offscreen, there was little wisdom, and his romances inevitably
turned sour—all that was left was rue. An “atrocious sham” is the way Britt
Ekland describes her marriage to Peter at this point. Like Anne, she was
the object of his increasingly incendiary rages and follow-up periods of deep
remorse. One day, for instance, she returned home at the end of her day
to find Peter in a white-hot jealous fury. Convinced that she was with
another man, Peter grabbed her gold Cartier watch, stomped on it, threw
the pieces in the toilet, and flushed. Soon awash in guilt, he bestowed more
gifts.

One of his favorite domestic games was the treasure hunt—“Treasure
Trove,” he called it—in which he would hide valuables around the house
or apartment and watch delightedly as Britt searched for them. On one of
these hunts, which took place in their suite at the Dorchester, Britt found
a scarf, a cigarette lighter and case, perfume, luxury soaps, and another gold
watch. Yet they spent less and less time together.