Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (57 page)

Magical cards were not the only issue in the relationship. According to
Theadora Van Runkle, a friend to both Peter and Liza, “Peter was mad
about Liza. He told me she was really sexy. But he got really angry with
her one night at dinner because she crept up behind him and pulled off his
toupee. He was livid with her, and that was the end of the relationship.”

Michael Caine thought the couple was very much in love at the luncheon party he threw at his house. Peter brought along his Polaroid camera
and took many pictures; at one point, he handed the camera to Caine, who
took a snapshot of Peter and Liza.

There was another party the following Tuesday; Peter and Liza had
split the day before. Either Kay Thompson or Marlene Dietrich—Caine
says Dietrich, logic says Thompson—advised Caine that he should tell his
good friend Peter that she thought “he is a rotten bastard for the way he
has treated my beautiful Liza.” Liza herself showed Caine the Polaroid,
which Peter had given her as a memento. “Thanks for the memory, Pete,”
he wrote on the back. She flew back to New York on June 20.

Peter told the
Daily Mail
, “I don’t think marriage is my bag.” A few
days later he jetted to Paris to photograph Marisa Berenson.

• • •

“I’m going back to the Boultings after this film,” Peter told the press during
the production of
The Blockhouse
. “We always brought each other good
luck.” The film in question was
Soft Beds, Hard Battles
.

Roy Boulting seems not to have seen his association in quite in the
same way. For one thing, Boulting had found their most recent collaboration,
There’s a Girl in My Soup
, to be especially trying because of Peter’s
moody whims. For another, that movie flopped.

Based on a verbal commitment from Peter,
Soft Beds, Hard Battles
was
scheduled to go before the cameras in the late summer of 1972, but whatever luck the Boultings may have had with Sellers ran out when he suffered
one of his inexplicable changes of mind and the production had to be called
off. A few weeks later, Peter was considering doing the movie after all. This
time, his agent Denis O’Brien put it in writing. Filming began in mid-April, 1973, at Shepperton.

The first scene: 1940, a Parisian bordello. As a narrator (Peter doing
his broadly American “Balham—Gateway to the South” voice) provides
background, an old man dresses after an encounter with a pretty prostitute.
General Latour (Peter with the voice of a hoarse French geezer) looks like
Marshal Pétain and General de Gaulle’s superannuated love child. Cut to
another room in the whorehouse, where a British officer (Peter doing David
Niven) puts on his clothes after a similar romp. Peter proceeds through the
course of the film to play four more roles—another French officer, the head
of the Paris Gestapo, the Crown Prince of Japan, and Hitler.

A military sex farce set in an ornate bordello,
Soft Beds, Hard Battles
is an awful movie—“an almost creepily witless endeavor,” as Vincent
Canby wrote in the
New York Times
—that may have looked even worse
on paper. It makes
There’s a Girl in My Soup
seem like Molière. Men insistently jerk their batons, poke their swords, and tilt champagne bottles
up at the crotch. Hitler appears at the bordello to pay his respects to the
madam, Madame Grenier (Lila Kedrova), but when an African prostitute
comes into view, the Fuehrer is disgusted. “Eine schwartze!” he cries.
When the first of Peter’s Frenchmen, General Latour, goes before a firing
squad, he slumps forward and his toupee falls off. “The truth cannot be
camouflaged,” the narrator intones. Comedy bits include beds that spring
up suddenly and hurl hapless Nazis down an air shaft as well as
flatulence-inducing elephant pills slipped into glasses of champagne. The
Nazis fart themselves to death.

Toward the end, the whores flee to a convent where they masquerade
as nuns. That’s where Prince Kyoto comes in—Peter in waxen yellowface,
foldless eyes, and an overbite. “Fetch watah an’ towah!” Prince Kyoto barks
after a bumbling “novice” spills a tray of food on his pants. It ought to go
without saying that she rubs the stains off his groin. It is very sad.

• • •

The pirate comedy
Ghost in the Noonday Sun
(1973) is even worse. Spike
Milligan cowrote the script, based on Sid Fleischman’s successful children’s
novel. Spike costarred in the film as well. Peter Medak, who made the
successful satire
The Ruling Class
two years earlier, directed. It was shot in
sunny Cyprus, and it’s
still
ghastly. Peter fought with Tony Franciosa (who
plays the Fairbanks-like Pierre) and walked off the set twice. The production
team built a tall ship to specifications, but the specs were off; it was
too
tall
and rocked violently and couldn’t be steered.

Peter personally asked Larry Pizer to shoot the film. One day well into
the production, Peter invited Pizer to a small, intimate party. Victoria Sellers
sat on Larry’s knee. They all sang songs and had a good time. The following
day Peter had Larry fired.

Says Pizer, “I had to leave the island that day, like I had the fucking plague
or something.” A few weeks later, Pizer got a letter. “Chaos is supreme
here,” Peter wrote. “Don’t be unhappy. It has nothing to do with you.”

Even at the time of the firing Pizer knew it wasn’t personal. “He wanted
to get at Peter Medak,” is Pizer’s simple explanation; like Peter’s harassing
the
After the Fox
publicist as a way of venting his rage toward Vittorio De
Sica, Peter still needed to communicate his desire to get rid of his director
by proxy. A year or so later, Pizer ran into Peter at a party. Peter wanted
to talk about it and explain, but Pizer turned away and they never spoke
again. And yet, Pizer concludes, as so many did, “He was a pleasure to work
with in many ways.”

Peter plays a pirate named Dick Scratcher. Spike plays his rival, Billy
Bombay. The unpleasant film itself ends in bickering: The last shot is of
Dick Scratcher buried up to his chin in the dry ground, with Billy Bombay
tied to a tree with rope so thick and plentiful that it verges on mummification, and they’re bickering interminably. On the day it was shot, the
production crew of
Ghost in the Noonday Sun
saw the chance to exact their
revenge. They recorded a parody calypso number detailing every rotten
thing that occurred during the shoot and forced the helpless Peter and
Spike, physically restrained, to listen to it.

• • •

The Blockhouse
was brilliant, but it wasn’t released. Neither was
Ghost in
the Noonday Sun
. Nor
Hoffman
. (
The Blockhouse
was finally shown in New
York in 1981;
Hoffman
in 1982;
Ghost in the Noonday Sun
was released
later on video.)
Where Does It Hurt?
made money because it was intensely
cheap.
The Optimists
was dreary,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
and
Soft
Beds, Hard Battles
were dreadful disasters. With six duds in a row, Peter’s
most personal project,
Being There
, hadn’t a chance of getting made.

Gene Gutowski kept trying: “Kosinski wrote his own screenplay, and
I was able to resuscitate it with Peter. Sidney Lumet would direct it. I had
discussions with Hemdale in London, but they backed out at the last minute. At that time Sellers was not really bankable.”

The director Hal Ashby was also interested in directing
Being There
.
Peter approached him while Ashby was doing postproduction work on
The
Last Detail
(1973). Ashby met with Sellers in London in the summer of
1973, but the meetings were more or less futile because, as Ashby later
admitted, “Neither one of us had the power then to raise the money
for it.”

• • •

So he made one more dud, just to top it off. Like most of the others,
The
Great McGonagall
(1974) was artistically well-intentioned, but it just didn’t
work. Joe McGrath directed the picture for Spike Milligan; the two old
friends were great admirers of the eponymous and dreadful Scottish poet.
“Peter insisted on coming and guesting in it,” says McGrath. His role was
that of Queen Victoria. “He played it all on his knees in a Victorian dress
wearing roller-skates.”

A series of absurdist vignettes strung together as a kind of bitter vaudeville routine—as the end credits note, the film was shot “entirely on location
at Wilton’s Music Hall, 1-5 Grace’s Alley, Cable Street, London E1”—the
picture was meant to be a showcase for Spike, who plays the talentless bard.
One fine exchange occurs when Spike, as McGonagall, takes the witness
stand, where he is asked his trade by a prosecutor. McGonagall answers:
“For twenty years now, I have worked patiently as an unemployed weaver,
and I am currently training to be a poet.” “
Who employs you, and what are
your wages?
” the prosecutor booms. “I am self-employed,” McGonagall
calmly responds, “so there’s no wages. . . . It’s not what you’d call regular
employment.” “What would you call it?” the prosecutor demands.
“Unemployment!” McGonagall cries.

Victoria appears at the beginning of the film and returns later on wearing a black dress and white lace veil; she’s seated at a piano playing jaunty
jazz. The visual gag is mildly funny, and Sellers’s comportment defies description, but then he turns around: Queen Victoria is wearing precisely
the self-satisfied smirk of a cocktail lounge pianist acknowledging his nightly
applause. It’s worth the whole movie.

The Great McGonagall
flopped, like everything else had of late. Peter
later said, “I had six or seven years of one flop after another—so much so
that I just didn’t work. I was getting to the stage where people were crossing
the road so they wouldn’t have to embarrass themselves by saying hello.”

His money was running out. After several quick moves around London,
he ended up in a stark, almost Brutalist high-rise in Victoria; the building
looked like the residential equivalent of the Bulgarian Ministry of Defense.

T
he money wasn’t
gone
, just dwindling. Unlike Daniel Mendoza, Peter
Sellers wasn’t heading for debtors’ prison. But, like his great-great-grandfather, he did tend to spend.

He was on the run, as always. He went to the lush Seychelles in late
December, but it turned out to be a little
too
lush—it rained for ten days
straight—so he flew to Gstaad for New Year’s to do some skiing. He told
the press that he didn’t like the sport and gave it up after a week of trying,
but his ski instructor and friend, Hans Moellinger, disagrees. Moellinger
had known Peter for years:

“I had met Peter with Roman in Gstaad. He was not a very good skier,
so I gave him some lessons. (I’m sort of the ski instructor for famous
people—Jack Nicholson, Yul Brynner, Prince Charles. . . . The oldest was
Helena Rubinstein.) Roman was renting a beautiful chalet, where Jack,
Peter, and a few others were staying for about two weeks. It was always a
great time in Gstaad. The boys always expected me because I always brought
along three or four girls. There was always a big hello when I arrived.

“He was not a good skier, but he kept listening. Skiing is a very easy
thing to learn if you listen and are not nearsighted. It wasn’t difficult to
teach him. After one or two weeks he could do a snowplow, so we could
do mountains, no problem.” Peter’s own claims to the contrary notwithstanding, he didn’t give up skiing after his initial attempt, which certainly
predated this particular New Year’s excursion. On at least one occasion
Moellinger even took him helicopter skiing on the riskier high-altitude
slopes near Zermatt. Peter enjoyed it, but there was a problem: “He nearly
had an accident. We went up to the glacier, about 3,500 meters high, and
started with a traverse. All of a sudden he couldn’t hold it anymore and
went into a fall line situation and nearly went over a ridge. At just the last
minute I threw him over so that he fell about ten meters before the rock.”
(A snowplow is generally the first thing one learns in downhill skiing—a
way to slow down and maintain control by pointing the skis in a v-shape
in front while bending the knees. A traverse—skis together with all the
weight on the downhill ski—is just a way to glide across the mountain.
The “fall line situation” to which Moellinger refers means simply that Peter
started to go straight down the slope. Nobody but the most expert skiers
ever attempts to head purposely down the fall line, so Moellinger caused
Peter to fall to keep him from heading over a cliff.)

Skiing itself was not the only thrill of the Zermatt excursion: “We were
staying at the Zermatthof. They’re very conservative people, the Swiss. We
celebrated one evening with champagne and two girls. We had an enemy
in one of the hotel waiters. I don’t know why, but he didn’t like us—maybe
because of the girl situation.” So Moellinger and Sellers decided to pull a
weird prank on the surly servant. In the middle of the night, they got one
of the women to strip and sit naked on the bed, and then they called room
service. The waiter’s knock at the door was Peter’s cue to begin loudly
intoning, “Ohmmmmmmm.” Moellinger remains amused by the result:
“The waiter put the bottle down and walked backward toward the door—like in the old days with kings. He thought there was some sort of sex party
going on.”