Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (49 page)

Peter and Mia were of their time and place, and it is only because their
extraordinary talent and celebrated friends enabled them to remain famous
for the next thirty or thirty-five years that their behavior during the sixties
remains mock-worthy while the rest of us maintain our comfortable anonymity as though we never did anything similar at the time.

Like anyone who could afford it, Peter and Mia enjoyed, as Polanski
describes it, “dressing up as rich hippies, complete with beads, chunky
costume jewelry, and Indian cotton caftans.” The Mamas and the Papas’
John Phillips recalls that Peter once walked in on a very stoned Mia and
John and declared, colorfully, that he would get Mia “down from that drug
if I have to pull you down by the pubic hairs.”

At Christmastime 1967, Roman and Sharon invited Peter for a skiing
holiday in Cortina. On Christmas Day, Sellers insisted on dressing as Santa
Claus and handing out the gifts. Sharon helped him fashion the outfit—her fox fur coat, a red ski cap as a hat, and a white ski cap as a beard. But
by the next day he had become so depressed and miserable that he left.

On January 20, 1968, Peter was one of Roman and Sharon’s wedding
guests at London’s Playboy Club; the club was run by Victor Loundes,
who, as Gene Gutowski describes him, “had a very open house.” Naturally
Warren Beatty, Rudolf Nureyev, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Sean Connery, Vidal Sassoon, Kenneth Tynan, and Laurence Harvey came to the
party, too.

Also that year Sonny and Cher hosted a party for Twiggy in their house
in the Hollywood Hills; among the guests were Peter, Steve McQueen,
Marlon Brando, Robert Mitchum, Tony Curtis, and Kirk Douglas.

In 1968, Peter Sellers was surveying the world from a very lofty perch.
The air at the top may have been growing thinner by the month, but it
was still exceedingly fresh—if you didn’t notice the smoke.

• • •

The Mirisch brothers put another
Pink Panther
film on the drawing boards.
But Blake Edwards wasn’t directing; the job went to Bud Yorkin.

Inspector Clouseau
(1968) “was first offered to Peter, and he refused it,”
Edwards later said. Instead, the role went to Alan Arkin. “In all the years I
knew Peter, in spite of all the times when he swore he was never going to
do another
Panther
, he never stopped complaining about the fact that the
Mirisch Company had chosen Arkin. Peter was a collector of grievances,
but he seemed to bear more of a grudge concerning the Arkin thing than
just about anything else. For the sake of my own sanity, I have long since
stopped trying to figure it out.” Edwards goes on to say that
Inspector Clouseau
was the only unsuccessful
Panther
, but Peter took no consolation in
its failure.

Still, Peter did return, however briefly, to the familiar in the summer
of 1968 when a televised
Goon Show
aired in Britain in early August. Written by Spike, directed by Joe McGrath, and produced by Peter Eton, the
program was not an attempt to present Crun, Bluebottle, Minnie, Eccles,
and Seagoon in action, as one might expect from a visual medium, but
rather simply to film the three veteran Goons standing at microphones
doing their voices, just as they had done on BBC radio. (Strangely, this TV
Goon Show
was not produced by the BBC but by Thames for ITV.)

The show was not terribly successful. Milligan, who had originally been
hired to write a new script, failed to be inspired to do so, and the Goons
were forced to revert to the already late in the game “Tale of Men’s Shirts”
from 1959. As a result, what might have been a promising television series
was cut short by a weak pilot.

• • •

Richard Lester once observed that the trouble with Peter Sellers having
reached and sustained international superstardom was that he stopped coming into contact with ordinary people. Lester’s point is not simply that he
was emotionally isolated. More at issue for his work was that Peter’s luxurious detachment, punctuated by parties with the glitter bunch, left him
without everyday models on whom to draw for character development. “If
you’re in limousines all the time you don’t meet many people,” Lester said.

According to Siân Phillips, Kenneth Griffith “used to try and get him
to travel on the underground. He used to say to Sellers, ‘I honestly think
it would give you a lot of interest in life—and peace of mind—if you
mingled more and went on the subway with people.’ But you know how
Sellers was. He was completely insane and had absolutely no intention.”

At the same time, the benefits of interactions with the ordinary are
thoroughly overrated as far as celebrities themselves are concerned. Movie
stars’ lives can quickly turn grotesque whenever fans barge in. Peter told of
his experience on a plane from Barcelona to Rome during the production
of
The Bobo
. He was in first class when a group of tourists, in coach, learned
there was a star on board: “For an hour they came in shifts of three to look
at me. One man told me his brother-in-law had done the titles on one of
my films and seemed offended when I didn’t know him. He asked me to
write a note to his brother-in-law on a menu card saying I bumped into
Ethel and George on the plane. Then Ethel and George argued about what
I should say.” And at a Hollywood get-together, Peter once told, “a long,
thin thing glided up to me at a party and said, ‘I do find all of your films
terrifyingly boring.’ ”

Robert Parrish was an independent witness to another such deformed
encounter between Peter and his so-called fans. The two men were on a
plane together—heading to Barcelona this time—when a group of Americans got on. They were each wearing a lapel button that read, “We smile
more!” One of the smilers marched right up to Peter and said, “Mr. Sellers!
I just saw one of your pictures recently, and it wasn’t very good, and I didn’t
think your performance was very good either.”

Sellers froze. “Thank you for pointing that out to me,” he muttered.

As Spike Milligan once put it, “He sees himself as a clean person in a
colony of lepers—can’t afford to mix with them too much if he’s to come
out alive.”

• • •

For reasons with which only bitterly divorced people can perhaps fully
sympathize, Peter and Britt flew to Venice for another reconciliation. Accompanied by Britt’s three terriers—Scruff, Pucci, and Fred—they sailed
The Bobo
through the Gulf of Trieste and down the Adriatic, ending the
cruise at Brindisi. They flew over to Rome, checked into the Excelsior, and
proceeded to have such a vicious fight that the night porter showed up and
humbly made known to them their neighbors’ complaints. Britt took a few
Valium and went to bed. She was awakened by Peter placing a telephone
call to his Italian agent. “Franco,” Peter announced, “I want you to come
to the hotel immediately and collect my wife. She is leaving Rome this
instant. Our marriage is finished.” To his groggy wife he said, “Just get out
of here and don’t ever come back. I never want to see you again, you bitch.”
So she left.

By midmorning of the following day, Peter had ordered the crew of
The Bobo
to throw all of Britt’s belongings onto the dock. Among the
detritus were Scuff, Pucci, and Fred.

Britt served Peter with divorce papers. Peter convinced Britt to have
lunch with him. “I know I can’t live without you,” he told her, but she
pursued the divorce anyway. “For the first time in my life I was alone,”
Britt writes, though her solitude didn’t last very long, for she soon took up
with Count Ascanio “Bino” Cicogna, an Italian playboy who went out and
bought a bigger yacht than
The Bobo
.

The divorce was finalized on December 18, 1968. Spike sent Britt a
congratulatory telegram.

Two days later, Peter arrived at London’s fashionable Mirabelle restaurant for a dinner party with Roman, Sharon, Warren, Julie, and the producer Sam Spiegel. Not surprisingly, Peter’s date was a beautiful and
fashionable blond film star. Oddly, she was Britt Ekland. The date ended
at Peter’s place when Peter pulled down his £1,200 shotgun and threatened
to shoot his ex-wife to death. “Don’t be silly, Peter,” was Britt’s adept reply.
Knowing who she was dealing with, she kept talking to him in a soothing
voice until she could slip the gun out of his hands. Then he burst into tears.

O
n his own—at least away from Britt—Peter kept running with the
fast-living Polanski crowd, which, in addition to Roman and Sharon
and Warren and Julie, included Yul Brynner, Peter Lawford, Gene Gutowski, the playboy Jay Sebring, and the screenwriter James Poe.

As Polanski himself describes it, “There was quite a bunch of friends
during this period; we were all usually in a very happy mood. Having had
a few drinks or having just smoked a joint, we would start joking and
kidding around, and it would develop into a kind of routine. We would
start playing Italians, you know—just pretending we spoke Italian. There
were always two arguing, and one other would sort of stand and observe,
and then he would get involved in the argument of the other two. One of
the two would start arguing with
him
, leaving the other one out. And it
would go around like this—we could do it for hours. Sometimes we would
do operas, make up singing. Often we would do Spaniards—whatever came
to our minds. It was dependent on the kind of drink we had had and the
extent of our drunkenness. It was really great fun.”

“There was a fabulous happening,” Gene Gutowski fondly recalls, “the
premiere of
Rosemary’s Baby
in Paris. Peter was very much in attendance.
We took over a whole hotel—the little place where Oscar Wilde had lived
and died. It had become a showpiece, boutique-type hotel. We had a magnificent three-day party, the whole place reeking of, uh, substances, controlled or uncontrolled, mostly un-. Peter liked to indulge.”

Asked whether Peter’s drug use made his mood swings more drastic,
Gutowski answers, “It’s difficult for me to judge. He definitely had mood
changes, but I couldn’t tell you if it was under the influence of whatever
he was taking or smoking or was just simply his nature. He would be quite
happy and suddenly become very depressed and dark. That was typical
of him.”

Peter took a casual attitude toward carrying drugs across international
borders. “He was very friendly with a great friend of Roman’s,” Gutowski
explains, “a Moroccan Jewish film director by the name of Simon Hessera.
Simon was forever trying to make a picture, and he became very friendly
with Peter. Peter spent some time in Rome, and before he left, he left me
a note: Would I please collect a jar of honey from an English lady at an
address in Rome and have Simon bring it to him in London? It was as
simple as that.

“When I sent Simon to pick up the honey, it was an extraordinary
amount of money—something like $200. Simon was quite amazed and
upset about it: ‘What is this stupid thing? What kind of honey is he eating?’
I said, ‘Simon, I really don’t know. He’s a health freak. Maybe it’s royal
jelly. Just shut up and take it to London.’

“Poor Simon, shaking his head, carried it to London. Soon after, he
realized that this honey was heavily laced with hashish. Peter was giving it
out in tiny spoonfuls to his friends. When Simon found out what he’d
carried past customs he was very upset.”

• • •

Michael Sellers started smoking marijuana at age thirteen. Peter didn’t realize it at the time, but he was his own son’s drug connection, for the boy
simply snitched it from his father’s stash, which Peter kept stored in empty
film canisters around the house. “There was so much of the stuff that I
knew he wouldn’t miss a little. . . . It was like his pills. He had thousands
of them, and I would help myself to amphetamines or Mandrax sleeping
pills.”

Sarah kept a defensive low profile. A cute, quiet child, she let her
mother raise her. When Peter demanded her presence, she went along.

Victoria Sellers’s first memories are of Brookfield, its ducks and geese,
the chicken coop, the trampoline Peter put up in the yard, and the pastel-pink bedroom in which she slept, always with the lights on, for she knew
the house was haunted.

Peter sold Brookfield to Ringo Starr in 1969 for £60,000.

• • •

His offscreen concerns seem mostly to have been money and women. Peter
could be as cheap as he was extravagant. It depended on his mood. He’d
treat his friends to dinners, trips on his yacht, baubles; then, without
warning, he’d make them foot the bills. A friend of his, the skiing instructor
Hans Moellinger, got a taste of this after a trip with Peter to Vienna. “He
was always telling me about buying property in the Seychelles, and this and
that—he was obviously very rich—but in a way he was very stingy. Once
we were staying at the Hotel Sacher with two beautiful girls, and. . . .”
Asked who Peter’s companion was, Moellinger is vague. “I was with Miss
Sweden at the time, and she always had five or six friends around. . . . And
we went to the opera and did the usual sightseeing, and finally we left. The
bill was the equivalent of about two or three thousand dollars nowadays. I
thought he paid it. One or two weeks later I got an invoice. It said, ‘Mr.
Sellers thought you should pay the bill.’ Can you imagine? At that time my
monetary situation was not so good,” the ski coach notes.

As for the ideal woman, Peter had a dream—one of many. “These
photographs you see of Gorky or Goethe,” Peter remarked to Joe McGrath
one day.