Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (58 page)

As for the skiing, Moellinger says that Peter “did enjoy it very much,
because he said so. I once taught Robert MacNamara [the Secretary of
Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson Administration and later president of the World Bank], and he said that skiing was the only time he
could really relax because he had to concentrate so much. Peter felt the
same way. He liked the whiteness of the snow, the absolute quietness—especially in the high altitudes like Zermatt. It was very special to him—the only place he could relax. But with his heart problems we couldn’t stay
very long at a high altitude, so for him it was better at Gstaad.”

Lots of things were better in Gstaad. Michael Sellers recalls the high-octane party he attended with his father at Polanski’s rented chalet; Michael
was around twenty at the time, which places the event in the neighborhood
of 1974. “Someone produced some grass,” Michael writes, “and Dad got
me busy rolling joints—until someone arrived with cocaine. I was then
equipped with a razor blade and asked to cut the cocaine on Roman’s marble
table.”

• • •

Drugs aside, work went on.

“Clouseau never died,” Blake Edwards said, in late 1974, of the idiot
detective’s sudden reemergence in the public eye after ten years of moribundity. “Over the years Peter and I kept him alive. He would call me up
with Clouseau’s voice on the phone at all times of the day and night, and
we’d spend hours thinking up ideas, talking and laughing like idiots.”

The film’s executive producer, the British impresario Sir Lew Grade,
reported a rather different regeneration. It was he, Sir Lew wrote in his
memoirs, who instigated
The Return of the Pink Panther
(1975) by approaching Blake with the idea of reviving Clouseau. Edwards was then living
in London with his wife, Julie Andrews, having fled the States after their
oddly melancholy and violently overpriced musical,
Darling Lili
(1970),
tanked at the box office and effectively, albeit temporarily, wrecked their
Hollywood careers. According to Grade, Edwards’s response was simple:
He told Grade that he was under the impression that Peter Sellers would
never make another
Pink Panther
comedy or work with him in any capacity
on any project ever again.

But Grade placed a call to Peter anyway, met with him for several hours,
and got him to agree. On one point at least, it seems, Edwards and Sellers
were absolutely in tune with each other, particularly in the downer period
of 1974. Clouseau, Edwards once said, “is a man who eventually survives
in spite of himself, which is, I guess, a human condition devoutly to be
wished.”

• • •

It’s another jewel heist. The “Pink Panther” diamond goes missing. Sir
Charles Litton, the gentleman thief from the original
Pink Panther
, is the
prime suspect.

Edwards asked David Niven to reprise his role as Litton, but he had
already committed himself to film
Paper Tiger
(1975) in Malaysia. Then
Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was announced and dropped before the role was taken
by Christopher Plummer. Catherine Schell costarred.

Peter was by all accounts astoundingly cooperative during the production of
The Return of the Pink Panther
, a fact Edwards later attributed to a
certain penitence mixed with revived ambition: “If you caught Peter when
he was on a downgrade, he’d be okay. He was manageable and rational.
He wanted it to be successful so he could get back up on top again. I was
able to negotiate almost
for
him. There was a certain amount of risk taking,
but if it worked, the rewards would be enormous. Peter was extremely
happy. He got quite wealthy from that project. We had a fun time—really
enjoyable.”

The Return of the Pink Panther
begins with a magnificent credits sequence (by the British animator Richard Williams) in which the luridly
coated panther’s ass swings back and forth in a gesture of jaunty pride. But
Sellers’s Clouseau is even more cartoonish than the cartoon. For one thing,
the accent has become extreme—a parody of Peter’s own parody.

At the beginning, while Clouseau concerns himself with a street accordionist and his accompanying pet, thieves rob the bank next door. In the
following scene, Chief Inspector Dreyfus (Herbert Lom) is outraged. Clouseau explains:

C
LOUSEAU:
I did not kneau ze benk was being reubbed because I was
en
-gezhed in my sworn duty as a police officer. . . . Z’ere was some
question as to whez’er ze beggar or his minkey was breuking the lew!

D
REYFUS:
Minkey?

C
LOUSEAU:
What?

D
REYFUS:
You said “minkey”!

C
LOUSEAU:
Yes, shimpanzee minkey! So I left them beuth off with a
warning-
ge
.

D
REYFUS:
The beggar was the lookout man for the gang.

C
LOUSEAU:
Zat is impossible! He was blind! How can a blind man be
a lookout?

D
REYFUS:
How can an idiot be a policeman?! Answer me that!

C
LOUSEAU:
It’s very simple, all he has to do is enlist.

Dreyfus soon seeks the healing wisdom of a psychoanalyst.

• • •

Even more than
A Shot in the Dark
, the comedy is grisly. Clouseau’s loyal
servant, Cato (Burt Kwouk), reappears—Clouseau calls him his “little yellow friend” with “little yellow skin”—only to get blown up by the insanely
commonsensical Clouseau. The doorbell rings and Clouseau opens it, graciously accepts the burning bomb that a masked visitor hands him, calmly
closes the door, comprehends, and tosses it away from himself—toward
Cato, thereby blowing Cato into the next apartment, whereupon a little
old lady bashes him on the head with her handbag.

A cigarette lighter in the shape of a gun finds its way to Dreyfus. He
then picks up the wrong “lighter” and shoots his nose off.

On a more benign note, in one sequence Clouseau was shown to a
terrible and tiny hotel room by an obnoxious concierge and manic bellhop.
The three men could barely move, at which point the chambermaid walked
in. Peter loved what he called “that strange, ‘wild peasant’ look” on Julie
Andrews’s face when she made her entrance as the rustic servant, complete
with chunks of apple stuck into her cheeks to create an air of Alpine plenitude. At the end of the scene, when the maid began softly humming
“Edelweiss,” Peter was overcome by a fit of the giggles—the camera was still
rolling—and had to run out of the room. Unfortunately, the scene was cut
and the footage destroyed.

With its larger, seventies-era budget came a certain lack of old-fashioned narrative coherence; set pieces took the place of a coherent narrative. A critical commonplace has it that the Clouseau films got worse as
the money increased, but that’s not the case, though
The Return of the Pink
Panther
does work best not as a tightly wrought comedy but rather as a
series of exemplary, often morbid moments.

Sellers and Edwards got along well enough that they were also planning
to make
Zwamm
, to be written and directed by Blake. According to
Variety
,
Zwamm
was going to be about a “comic space odyssey excursion . . . in
which Sellers would play a space creature who comes to Earth.” And as
Variety
frighteningly added, “Pair would like Mickey Rooney to join ’em.”
Zwamm
never got made.

Prince Charles was in Montreal when he saw
The Return of the Pink
Panther
. It was his favorite Sellers film to date, he wrote to his friend. In
fact, Charles claimed, he’d laughed so hard that he wet the dress of the
woman in the next seat.

• • •

Peter spent his birthday, September 8, in the Seychelles, where he was
buying land for possible real-estate development. Miranda Quarry’s present
to him, delivered the following day, was the initiation of divorce proceedings. Peter later joked that his epitaph should read: “Star of stage, screen,
and alimony.”

By the beginning of November, he was back in London, lodging in a
suite at the Inn on the Park in Mayfair. The high rise in Victoria was history;
he’d leased a house in Chelsea near King’s Road. (Miranda got the Wiltshire
house as part of the divorce settlement.) He and some old friends—Spike,
Michael Bentine, Prince Charles—got together the following week for a
private dinner at the Dorchester to celebrate the publication of
The Book
of the Goons
, a collection of Spike’s scripts and drawings, photographs of
the Goons in various guises, and a series of private letters and telegrams
among the Goons themselves. The book reveals, for example, that in 1952
Peter had had letterhead printed for the law firm of Whacklow, Futtle, and
Crun just to write an absurd letter to Spike. Spike, meanwhile, was representing himself as the solicitors Wiggle and Fruit to supervise the public auction of Harry Secombe, who was to be sold in lots at the Sutcliffe Arms at Beaulieu. Also from Spike, the Messers Chew, Threats, and Lid (“Chemists and Abortionists by Appointment”) prescribed a remedy for Peter’s
constipation. Harry, meanwhile, sent a single-word telegram to Milligan:

“Fire.”

• • •

With
The Return of the Pink Panther
approaching its release, but not yet certain of the fortune it would earn him, Peter signed a deal with Trans-World
Airlines to make a series of commercials. At first he was to play three characters—an aristocratic Brit named “Piggy” Peake-Tyme; an open-shirted Italian
playboy, Vito D’Motione; and a parsimonious Scotsman named Thrifty
McTravel. Stan Dragoti directed the series, to which was eventually added a
fourth character—a genial American businessman. His deal included provisions for him to appear in a taped TWA trade show short as well.

At the time, Peter himself was flying with Titi Wachtmeister. The
daughter of Count Wilhelm Wachtmeister, who was the Swedish ambassador to the United States for a time, the perky blond countess was introduced to Peter two years earlier by Bengt Ekland, Britt’s brother, at which
point he and Titi began their on-and-off affair.

Titi was already well known in London. A top model in the late
1960s—“a blonde Jean Shrimpton” is how the London
Times
described
her—Titi sparked some notoriety in 1970 when George Harrison tried to
rename his nightclub, Sybilla’s, in her honor. For some reason, the Crown
Estates office found a nightclub named Titi’s to be objectionable—their
word was “vulgar”—and they insisted that Harrison drop the plan. He
settled on renaming his nightclub in a much more wholesome but still-Swedish way—Flicka.

On April 18, Peter was in New York attending—and performing at—
a tributary dinner in honor of Sir Lew Grade at the Hilton. He was on
television that night, too, on Julie Andrews’s prerecorded special,
Julie—My Favorite Things
, directed by Blake in London. “I must be the squarest
person in the world,” the white–bell-bottomed Julie realizes, so she seeks
the advice of a psychiatrist—Peter as Dr. Fritz Fassbender from
What’s New
Pussycat?
, only now, in combination with his dark 1970s glasses, Peter’s wig
makes him resemble less Prince Valiant than Yoko Ono.

J
ULIE:
Aren’t you the famous Fritz Fassbender?

P
ETER:
Yes, of course I am! Heidelberg, Class of ’39! Ph.D., LLD,
SS. . .

J
ULIE:
SS?!

P
ETER:
No, no, it’s a lie! Liar liar, pents on fire! I vas only following
orders!

Dr. Fassbender demands that she prove that she’s really Julie Andrews.
“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” Julie gamely responds, so Peter offers
her a joint and says, “Have a dreg on zis and try saying zat again! Zupakelafragalidzniks. . . . Lizzen, Julie, you are getting hipper and hipper all ze
time by ze minute! One more drag on this and you’ll be practically Cheech
and Chong!”

If Cheech and Chong served as the ideals of hipness in 1975, Peter
himself was
there
. Here is an entry from Kenneth Tynan’s diaries that year:

“The phrase to remember is: ‘The necessary tinge of wham.’ This is
how Peter Sellers (I think it was) summed up, tonight, the salient quality
of Terry Southern. . . . Peter taught us how to get the best out of pot by
spreading tinfoil across the top of a wine glass, prodding holes in it (and a
gash) with a needle, then crumbling the pot over the holes, igniting it, and
sucking the fumes in through the gash.”

Another entry dated a few days later: “More reminiscences of the pot-smoking night with P. Sellers. As one sucks the smoke through the gash in
the tinfoil, the hash embers glow, and the close-up view is exactly like that
of a burning city seen from the air. This led me into an improvisation,
accompanied by Peter, of a Bomber Command navigator talking to the rest
of the crew as they go in through the flak to prang Dresden.”

• • •

On May 5 Peter and Titi, accompanied by Michael Sellers, arrived at the
La Costa resort in San Diego for three days of
Return of the Pink Panther
previews for select press and guests (including Fred MacMurray and Dick
Martin). Sellers, Plummer, and Catherine Schell were each trotted before
the horde of gorging reporters; what with the hotel rooms, cocktail parties,
dinners, entertainment, limousines, and gift bags, the three-day junket cost
United Artists over $125,000. On May 11, Peter was driven back to Los
Angeles for several more days’ worth of publicity work, after which he flew
to New York to appear on
The Merv Griffin Show
. Mervin devoted his
entire ninety-minute program to
The Return of the Pink Panther
.