Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (53 page)

“He just laughed and went away. Ben said, ‘Why did you say that?’ I
said, ‘Because it will never happen.’ He was like a bouncing ball. You know
things are going to go wrong. Sure enough, Ben did go on a trip and sent
Peter the bill. Peter ignored it.

“He
meant
it,” Rakoff is convinced. “At the time he absolutely
meant
it. He wanted us to go—that day.”

• • •

Rakoff always thought
Hoffman
’s pace was too slow: “It does have faults. I
am to blame for some of them because I couldn’t cajole, applaud,
whip
Peter to play it faster. I couldn’t get it out of him, and that, I think, is the
principle felony. But character-wise, it works.
Sellers
-wise it works.”

Actually, the film’s chief fault lies not with its pace but with its sound
track, where an easy-listening 1970-vintage score belies both the cruelty and
the poignancy of the drama. Hoffman treats Miss Smith abominably, and
yet the musical score is that of a light romantic comedy. Even when their
emotional tenors begin to shift, the slight and forgettable music sets the
wrong tone.

Commercially, the film was a failure that never had the chance to be a
critical flop. According to Bryan Forbes, Peter “entered into one of his
manic depressive periods” during the production and demanded, upon
completion, “to buy back the negative and remake it. . . . I had to take the
blame.” According to Rakoff, Forbes’s own disputes within Elstree led to
the film’s exceedingly poor distribution—so poor, in fact, that
Hoffman
waited until 1982 to be screened in a New York repertory house.

• • •

His faulty heart was necessarily on his mind, and together with his declining
cinematic fortunes, Peter’s thoughts turned morbid. At the time, according
to Rakoff, Peter talked about dying quite a bit. He told the director that
he was planning to be cryogenically preserved. “He told me more than
once. We’re talking about a man who had been pronounced dead and was
brought back to life. He said he’d arranged to be frozen. You could either
have just your head frozen or your whole body frozen. I think he said he
had arranged for the whole body; maybe it was just the head; I don’t really
know. I said, ‘Aren’t you worried? We know that everything deteriorates
when frozen, so when you come to, you won’t be the same. If, a thousand
years from now, they know how to revive a dead man, you won’t be the
same
dead man. You’ll be a freak!’ And he said, ‘I don’t care. At least I’ll
be alive.’ ”

• • •

In October, with
Hoffman
still in production, Peter mentioned to the
Evening Standard
that he was set to return to the stage. It wasn’t going to be
a splashy exercise like
Brouhaha
; Jane Arden’s
The Illusionist
would play at
the Open-Space theater, which was located in a Tottenham Court
basement. “The main character is a music-hall illusionist who does tricks,” he
said. “It’s a very evil part. The play is a strange piece. It has an edge of great
horror.”
The Illusionist
would have a ten-week run beginning in January.

Then it changed;
The Illusionist
would play at the Round House theater, and Peter’s costar would be Charlotte Rampling.

It changed once more—Peter never appeared in
The Illusionist
. It all
ended in a little lawsuit and was forgotten.

• • •

“Very een-ter-est-ing,” Artie Johnson murmurs in a 1969 episode of
Laugh-In
. Peter pops up out of the bushes in matching German military gear. He
stares intently at Johnson. “I sink zat
you
are very een-ter-esting, too!” says
Peter, cracking up at the end of the line and descending back into the
bushes together with a giggling Johnson.

Dan Rowan and Dick Martin’s
Laugh-In
was the hippest American
comedy show of the period—Burbank’s answer to
Monty Python
. (
Laugh-In
actually predated
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
by a year.) Guest stars
turned up regularly to add a certain celebrity kick to the series’ regulars—Johnson, Judy Carne, Ruth Buzzi, Henry Gibson, Goldie Hawn, Alan Sues,
and Joanne Worley. Richard Nixon once appeared, famously saying “Sock
it to
me
?” On the program on which Peter turned up, the other special
guests were Johnny Carson and Debbie Reynolds.

Some of Peter’s jokes were defiantly lame. “Thanks for the tea, Dan,”
says Peter, “but it is awfully weak, I’m afraid.” “I’m sorry, Peter,” Rowan
responds. “Say, how long
should
the tea be left in the water?” “Well, let me
put it this way: the tea in the Boston Harbor is just about ready.” A better
bit occurs with Artie Johnson, when Peter turns up as Artie’s friend in
Johnson’s classic, black-coated Dirty Old Man routine. They molest Ruth
Buzzi together on a park bench. She beats Peter back with her pocketbook.
Peter (in Henry Crun voice): “You’ve just made an old man very happy!”
whereupon he and Artie fall off the bench together and die.

“Hel-lo!” Peter sings out as he pulls open a window in the magnificent
Joke Wall. “You really have done a remarkable job in your experiment with
the democratic system here in America. Just think! It was only a hundred
years ago when President Lincoln freed the black people. And already some
of them are even going to school!”

• • •

Always generous to his friends, Peter lent his support to Graham Stark by
agreeing to appear as himself in Stark’s thirty-minute silent comedy short,
Simon Simon
(1970), along with Michael Caine and David Hemmings. A
pair of blokes of limited intelligence (Stark and John Junkin) involve themselves in a series of misadventures involving a truck and short underpass, a
mock firing squad, a stranded cat and a cherry picker, an aerial dogfight
between two cherry pickers, and so on. Peter’s scene lasts all of forty seconds. In the midst of a car chase—the car is chased by two cherry pickers—there occurs a minor crash. The driver of the chased car hits a sleek blue
sports car. Peter is inside. It’s a hit and run accident, but Peter isn’t concerned about legal issues. With a troubled expression on his face, he gets
out, inspects the dent, and gestures impatiently to someone offscreen. An
assistant rushes into the image, gets into the car, and drives away. Peter
gestures again to another offscreen factotum, his new
red
sports car pulls
up, he gets in, and speeds away.

• • •

“I really don’t know if he fell in love with me,” says Goldie Hawn, Peter’s
costar in his next picture,
There’s a Girl in My Soup
(1970). “I only know
that I gave him a surprise party in my home some time after the film. He
spent all evening looking at my things and said, ‘This is the kind of house
I’ve always dreamed of having, with all the warmth and stability that I feel
here.’ Afterwards he sent me this absolutely gorgeous armoire, which I still
have.”

The project carried with it certain ominous specters.
There’s a Girl in
My Soup
was made by the Boulting brothers, John and Roy, who had had
increasingly rough times with Peter on the four films they made together—
Carlton-Browne of the F.O.
;
I’m All Right, Jack
;
Only Two Can Play
; and
Heaven’s Above!
, the last having been made seven years earlier, even before
the debacle of
Casino Royale
.
There’s a Girl in My Soup
was financed by
Columbia Pictures, which made
Casino Royale
. And finally,
There’s a Girl
in My Soup
was coproduced by Mike Frankovich, who declared after
Casino
Royale
that Peter would never be permitted to make another picture for
Columbia Pictures.

Despite its catchy title, the film is a pretty dreary exercise. In London,
the amorous, patrician, middle-aged Robert Danvers (Sellers), the host of
a televised gourmet show, picks up a promiscuous nineteen-year-old American girl (Hawn) who is in the process of breaking up with her handsome,
oafish, more or less worthless boyfriend (Nicky Henson). A free spirit with
a smart mouth and a hard, cruel edge, Marion is scarcely the kooky dumb
blond Goldie Hawn played so triumphantly on
Laugh-In
. Marion is mean.
And Danvers, for his part, is selfish and singular, consumed by his career,
resistant to intrusions, obsessed with sex—in short, and despite his wealth,
an ordinary middle-aged male.

The sexual revolution of the late 1960s, along with its concomitant
dismissal of censorship regulations, gave free rein to the Boultings’ love of
smut. At one point, Danvers makes love to a beautiful girl while watching
himself on television talking about impaling a piece of meat, the video
Danvers completing the joke with a matching finger gesture. Later, when
a Frenchman employs the word “happiness,” he accents the second syllable.
And so on.

Still, Sellers is quite accomplished at conveying the depressing trials of
masculinity in middle age. He knew what he was doing. With his own hair
thinning, he covered it with a toupee to go with his capped teeth, exercises,
and constant dieting. Onscreen, when he flexes, shirtless, in front of a triple
mirror, he manages to look both virile and pathetic. It’s a shame that the
character as written is so colorless; Terence Frisby’s script, based on his own
stage play, lacks wit and verbal flair. What saves
There’s a Girl in My Soup
is Goldie Hawn, who lends her unpleasant character an air of relaxed prepossession. Aside from his short bit with Shirley MacLaine in
Woman Times
Seven
, Peter Sellers had never before played opposite such a deft and naturalistic actress.

Roy Boulting later wrote of Peter that “during the making of
There’s a
Girl in My Soup
, the relationship had been a very abrasive one. I emerged
from it, worn, shaken, and swearing that I would never endure such an
experience again.” According to Boulting, Peter was “nervy, irritable, and
deeply unhappy,” during the production, characteristics that Boulting attributed to his relationship with Miranda.

Nineteen seventy does appear to have been a particularly strange,
strained year for Peter. In the late spring, the time during which
There’s a
Girl in My Soup
was shooting, Peter announced that he was in the market
for a new house in a very particular location. A friend had told him, as
Sellers put it, that “when the great nuclear blow-up occurs, and the Earth
is shifted on its axis, there will be only two safe places in which to live.” It
was between Stonehenge and the Ozarks. He chose Stonehenge.

He did not end up moving to Stonehenge, but he did marry Miranda.

• • •

London’s
Evening Standard
, August 24, 1970:

Peter Sellers and Lord Mancroft’s stepdaughter, Miranda Quarry, were
married at Caxton Hall today. About 300 people waiting outside the
register office cheered as the couple emerged. Miranda, 23, and Sellers,
44, have been close friends for about two years but had previously
denied marriage plans. About three dozen guests were at the wedding.
They included actor Spike Milligan, who wore a cream safari-style
shirt and black corduroy peaked cap.

Miranda arrived with Lord and Lady Mancroft at 12 noon exactly.
She was wearing a gypsy-style dress with a full length skirt in puce
printed silk and a black velvet bodice. She had a black sombrero hat
and carried a posy of white roses. With her were her two three-year-old Pekinese dogs, Tabatha and Thomasina. “They are my bridesmaids,” she said with a smile. . . .

Witnesses at the ten minute ceremony were Sellers’ closest friend,
Bert Mortimer, who was also best man, and solicitor John Humphries.

With two rings did he wed. He slipped both on Miranda’s finger—a
traditional platinum band and a more elaborate Russian ring that signified
love, fidelity, and happiness.

• • •

“Every man’s dream is still, I’m sure, finding a virgin,” Peter told an
Esquire
interviewer shortly before the wedding. He and Miranda were married by
the time the profile was published, so his remarks became an unfortunate
historical record. “That’s why marriage has gone on the rocks,” he persisted.
“The original idea was that the girl had never been with anyone else, and
it was so pure. That’s not quite the word. So I came to the conclusion that
to be in love with the girl of one’s dreams—who if possible was a virgin—was the ultimate happiness.”

His notions about the desirability of virgins went quickly by the boards.
Peter clearly harbored grave misgivings about his long-term prospects with
Miranda. And, as was his custom, he took his complaints to an ex-wife, in
this case Britt. In one of their disconcertingly frequent telephone conversations during this period, he was markedly perplexed. “I don’t know if I’m
doing the right thing,” he whined, “but Miranda says it’s now or never.”
Anne was consulted as well.