Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (52 page)

In an apparent attempt to make the film even more raw than its subject
matter destined it to be, Hessera cast an unknown and inexperienced actor,
Mark Burns, in the lead. Burns plays “Uncle Bernie,” so nicknamed because
his estranged wife refuses to tell her daughter, Winnie (Beatrice Edney),
that the abysmal drunkard is really her father. It’s a one-dimensional performance, the dimension being surliness.

Midway through the film, after a snack of three bottles of beer at a
seaside cafe, Uncle Bernie leaves Winnie to fend for herself on the beach,
in the rain, and staggers into a beachside trinket shop. He asks the proprietor for a shell. Peter Sellers’s face appears in sudden close-up. He’s wearing
a white sweater and smart print ascot. His right shoulder is thrust forward.
“Why don’t you come in and choose one,” he asks, toying with his earlobe.

Enter a grinning Graham Stark in a bright red shirt and print ascot;
Peter’s unnamed character addresses Stark as “Pipi.” (The film’s credits cite
“The Partners: A. Queen and Graham Stark.”) Peter tells Pipi to get some
beer “while I keep this young man happy.” Biting his finger, he declares
that Pipi “goes and ruins
everything, always
.”

Peter takes his sunglasses off and sucks on the earpiece. Pipi returns.
“She wants three bottles and an opener,” he says, referring to Uncle Bernie.
(By this point, Hessera has cut away to the little girl, who is now tangled
up in fishing netting and screaming in terror, but Uncle Bernie is shopping
for shells and cannot hear her.) Uncle Bernie tells off Pipi for ruining Peter’s
life and leaves.

Bernie retrieves Winnie, who has somehow managed to extract herself
from the netting, and they spend the rest of the day together, he drinking
beer, she wandering around. The final scene occurs at night in an empty,
cobblestoned town square. The bottomed-out Uncle Bernie staggers in, led
by little Winnie, abruptly pitches forward, slams his head against the cobblestones, and croaks. The film’s last words belong to the wailing little
Winnie: “Uncle Bernie!”

“It’s not good,” Polanski acknowledges. “The problem is, I’m afraid,
the director, and also insufficient funds. But the main problem is the actor.
You can’t watch a man playing a drunk for one-and-a-half hours unless he’s
a really great actor and has some charisma. That guy had none.

“Other than that, I mean, the film. . . . If there had been a great performance. . . . The film is done well enough to work. What
didn’t
work was
the casting. Simon was not a director, and, let’s face it, we were a little bit
cavalier.”

• • •

What Polanski doesn’t mention is that his work on
A Day at the Beach
was
interrupted. He and Gutowski were in London when, in the early hours of
Friday, August 8, 1969, some intruders creepy-crawled their way onto Polanski’s rented estate in the hills above Bel Air, shot a young man to death
in the driveway, and then murdered everyone inside the house. The victims
were Sharon Tate, who was only a few weeks away from giving birth to a
son; Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojiciech Frykowski, and Steve Parent,
the youth in the driveway. No motive, no mercy, no sense, no solace.

Gene Gutowski remembers: “Shortly after Sharon’s murder I flew with
Polanski from London to California. His friends gathered around him.
There was Peter, Warren Beatty, Yul Brynner. . . . We kept a vigil, cheering
him up as best we could and giving him support and friendship. Peter was
instrumental. It was a tough time for everybody, absolutely.” Peter attended
Sharon’s funeral on Wednesday, August 13, at Holy Cross Cemetery.

One month later, Roman and some friends offered a $25,000 reward
for information leading to the arrests of the killers. Polanski himself doesn’t
remember the details anymore: “Peter Sellers . . . ? I don’t recall—not
enough. I remember putting up the reward, and I know that the reward
led to the capture of the people because it was paid out. Somehow no one
mentioned it afterwards. If it was reported there must be some truth in it—I
just don’t remember. I mean, that period, I never go back to it, you know,
voluntarily, and if you don’t refresh your memory by going back to it, it
fades out much faster.”

Gutowski, however, is very clear about Peter’s help. He did put up part
of the reward money, Gutowski says, and “he was motivated by pure friendship and his desire to help find the guilty.” Polanski, Beatty, Brynner, and
others provided the rest.

At the time, Peter spoke out in public: “Someone must have knowledge
or suspicions they are withholding or may be afraid to reveal. Someone
must have seen the blood-soaked clothing, the knife, the gun, the getaway
car. Someone must be able to help.”

By December 1969, Charles Manson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle, Tex Watson, Leslie Van Houton, and Linda Kasabian had all been
charged with the murders. Charges against Kasabian were dropped when
she agreed to be the star witness for the prosecution. The rest were convicted
and are spending their lives in jail. A biker named Danny DeCarlo, who
was familiar with the defendants and who felt the need to extract himself
from a host of legal problems by sharing what he knew, evidently got some
of the reward money; so, it seems, did Ronni Howard, a.k.a. Shelley Nadell,
a.k.a. Connie Schampeau, to whom Susan Atkins had spilled some gory
details in prison.

P
eter Sellers was capable of enormous compassion, tenderness, and love—so much so that you thought you were going to be friends for life. And
then hours, days, weeks later, the scale would tip the other way, and a very
unlikable, aggressive person would emerge.”

The director Alvin Rakoff is describing his experience of making the
small scale, too-little-known
Hoffman
(1970). “I look back at Peter with
great affection, and love, and puzzlement. He was an extraordinary firecracker, and yet you were in danger of being burnt.”

Filmed in the fall of 1969 in seven weeks at Elstree Studios, with one
additional week on location (Wimbledon Common, the Thames Embankment),
Hoffman
is the story of a middle-aged man who blackmails a pretty
young woman into letting him dominate her, potentially sexually, for a
one-week period after he discovers that her boyfriend, his employee, has
been cheating him at work. The comedy-drama—of which there is substantially more unnerving drama than comedy of any sort—introduced the
twenty-one-year-old Irish actress Sinead Cusack, the daughter of the actor
Cyril Cusack, to the screen.

Rakoff had directed an earlier, shorter version of
Hoffman
for television,
but as the project headed for the big screen, he found himself in some
trouble. Donald Pleasance had played the role on TV, but he wasn’t considered big enough for the silver screen. So Peter was hired, thanks to Bryan
Forbes, who had become head of production at Elstree Studios, then controlled by EMI. But after a meeting at Peter’s apartment on Clarges Street,
Mayfair, Peter decided, as Rakoff describes it, that “he and I would never
get on with each other, and I should leave the picture. I left the meeting.

“But Bryan Forbes said to Peter, ‘I’m not paying him off. If you want
him to go,
you
pay him off.’ And the next thing I know, there’s a call from
Peter, saying ‘I’m sure we can get on with each other—shall we try?’ So
there I was—fired from the picture by the leading man and reluctantly
taken back. But then we got on like a house on fire—a very warm friendship.”

“I auditioned Sinead with Peter, and Peter liked her,” Rakoff reports.
“It was essential that there be some sort of chemistry between the two of
them.” That there was. As Rakoff describes it, they got along “too well.”

“Peter said, ‘Let’s have dinner tonight,’ and she said yes, so he said, ‘I’ll
pick you up.’ About 8:00 o’clock I heard the helicopter Peter had ordered.
He took her to Paris for dinner. ‘Let’s have dinner’ became not ‘dinner’
but a love dinner at a very good Parisian restaurant. I would defy any
beautiful girl not to fall in love with such a man. He was a very lovable guy
when he wanted to be.”

The affair was intense, rather brief, and sequentially joyous and harsh.
“Oh, they had terrible riles, those two, but again, who wasn’t riled with
Peter Sellers?” says Rakoff.

Miranda Quarry didn’t go entirely missing while Peter was romancing
Sinead. According to Rakoff, Miranda “was around all the time. She was
around the night Peter said, ‘I don’t think you and I are going to get on.’
She was around then, and I knew it was fairly disastrous then. I told him—‘There’s nothing to this love, Peter.’ He hadn’t had his eye opened. He had
certain questions about other women, so it didn’t appear that he was overwhelmingly, passionately single-minded about Miranda Quarry.”

• • •

“Please make yourself look as if you want to be
fertilized
.”

That’s Benjamin Hoffman (Sellers), leaning up against the bathroom
door with a lascivious grin. Miss Smith (Cusack) has locked herself inside
in terror. The film is full of such unpleasant lines, but that is its nature; it’s
about a mean, lonely, middle-aged man and a mousy, trod-upon young
woman. “What you’re doing to me is atrocious,” she spits. “It’s the filthiest
thing I’ve ever heard of.” “Yes, I am filthy, yes,” he replies with a smirk,
“but there’s no escaping one’s fate.”

“Miss Smith, you are here to be two arms, two legs, a face, and what
fits in the middle.”

“There are two people in all of us—the child in the snapshot and the
monster the child grows into.”

“Women are always hungry for something—fallopian tubes with
teeth.”

He shows her the new flat he’s building for himself:

M
ISS
S
MITH
: What’s wrong with the old place?

H
OFFMAN:
Oh, well, you know—treacheries, miseries, failure, despair.

At times, Peter inhabits Benjamin Hoffman so wholly that he appears
to be speaking from his own heart:

“You were afraid to go out with me because of my maniac face,” he
mentions. “Yes, girls all over the world are afraid of men with my expression—plain, sad-faced men. You look at us, all of you, and you’re right.”
(In fact, of course, Peter Sellers rarely experienced this phenomenon in his
life. Even before he glamorized himself for Sophia Loren, the
actual
sad-faced man generally got the beautiful women he sought, and their fear, if
any, came later.) As he concludes his speech, he walks past the picture of
Daniel Mendoza that happens to be hanging on Hoffman’s wall, glances
up at it, and declares, speaking of the millions of melancholy men in the
world, “Their day is coming. . . . Hope never dies in a man with a good,
dirty mind.”

According to Alvin Rakoff, this was all scripted: “He was certainly
capable of any sort of improvising he wanted. All you had to do was tell
him to improvise. But the text of the script was there, and that’s the script
we did.”

It is an astute, actorly performance on Sellers’s part. He plays Hoffman
differently when Hoffman is not in Miss Smith’s presence; when she’s not
around he becomes mutedly fidgety and insecure. When he knows she can
see or hear him, he acts the cool lothario, spinning each line with insinuating inflection (or infection as the case may be). But even from her perspective it’s a failed performance. She sees through it and falls in love
with him.

• • •

Hoffman
may be a miniature, but it does contain one striking technical feat.
There is a single shot that lasts for about eight minutes. Rakoff explains:
“Peter said, ‘Can’t we . . . ?’ He was always asking, ‘Can’t we . . . ?’ ”

The shot—which begins when Hoffman escorts Miss Smith back into
the bedroom after she attempts to flee—was complicated to design and
treacherous to execute. According to Rakoff, there were 118 camera positions for the cameraman and tracking crew. But they only had to do several
takes, and Rakoff believes they used the first or second; Peter’s fears of brain
damage from the heart attack were certainly given the lie by his ability to
remember all the lines, gestures, and movement cues. Rakoff remains impressed by the social aspect of it as well. “Peter wanted to do a long take,
so he put his teeth into it. It helped pull the unit together because they
thought it was a remarkable achievement that, as a film crew, they could
do this. Everyone kept saying it was impossible. But Peter liked the idea;
he liked going for broke. I kept saying, ‘Okay, we’ll stop
there
,’ and he’d
say, ‘No, let’s keep going.’ Sinead was in awe of him, of course, so she, too,
was motivated.”

He wasn’t always in such control in front of the camera, the worst
problem being a certain unreliability. “He was an actor who giggled a lot—that’s an endearing quality,” says Rakoff. “Once, right after lunch, he got
a fit of the giggles, as actors can do.
Anything
we tried doing, he couldn’t
stop giggling, and he had to leave the set—and the studio. That’s another
thing—I’d never know if he’d ever come back. I said, ‘Okay, Peter, we’d
better call it a day,’ and he was just giggling, and said, ‘I’ll try to come back
tomorrow. I can’t be sure.’ ”

Rakoff recalls that Peter “arrived on the last day of shooting with gifts
for everybody. He gave the camera operator a color television set—that was
pretty rare in 1969. He gave Leica cameras, tape recorders, small portable
radios. . . . His factotum, Bert, distributed them. When he came to Ben
[Arbeid, the film’s producer] and me, he put his arm around both of us
and said, ‘You two guys—I didn’t know what to get you, so what I want
you to do is to take your wives, go on a trip to anywhere that you’ve wanted
to go—anywhere in the world! And send me the bill.’ I looked at Ben, and
Ben said, ‘Oh, that’s lovely—that’s a terrific gift!’ And I said, ‘Please, Peter,
can I have a color television set?’