Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (59 page)

While in New York, Peter, dressed and accented as Clouseau, was
named an honorary detective by the New York Police Department. He and
Titi hightailed it out of the city on May 22, bound for Heathrow.

“All I’m trying to do is get through the day—that’s all,” he told a
British journalist before flying back to Los Angeles in July to appear on
The
Tonight Show
.

• • •

In August, there was a special premiere in Gstaad. Peter requested of United
Artists that they provide a few round-trip tickets: one for Michael Sellers,
one for Sarah Sellers, one for Victoria Sellers, one for Bert Mortimer, one
for Peter Sellers, two for George Harrison, and one for Peter’s as-yet-unknown date—unknown because, by that point, Titi was history. During
their acrimonious breakup in July, Peter demanded that Titi return the
£2,000 Cartier watch he gave her while Titi frantically attempted to retrieve
a stuffed dog.

The Gstaad junket’s locus was the Palace Hotel. Peter flew in along
with his family and George Harrison, Lew Grade, Catherine Schell, Christopher Plummer, Henry Mancini and his orchestra, and, for some reason,
John Boorman. Liz and Dick turned up as surprise guests at the gala dinner
for 250 journalists.

Peter was seeing multiple women in August alone. One was the
eighteen-year-old Tessa Dahl, the daughter of the novelist Roald Dahl and
his wife, the actress Patricia Neal. Another was the model Lorraine Cootamundra, née MacKenzie. “In the past ten days,” a British tabloid gasped
that month, “he has taken out Susan George three times and is also seeing
Scandinavian beauty Liza Farringer, who is in her late 20s.” By the end of
the month he was high in the Rockies—Vail, Colorado, to be exact—for
a lunch with the First Lady of the United States, Betty Ford, and her
eighteen-year-old daughter, Susan, whom he was photographing for
Vogue
.

In September Peter hosted a party at his rented pad in Beverly Hills.
Cary Grant showed up. So did Bill Wyman and Ron Wood of the Rolling
Stones, Keith Moon, and David Bowie. The party turned into an impromptu jam session, with Peter doing his bit on drums. Bowie played the
saxophone. Earlier that year, Moon had invited Peter and Graham Chapman to his Beverly Glen home, where the three Brits amused themselves
with reenactments of old
Goon Show
sketches.

September also had him in London, where he was a presenter at the
glittering Society of Film and Television Awards. Princess Anne was the
honored hostess. Peter handed Joanne Woodward her award; Hayley Mills
gave one to John Gielgud; Jack Nicholson’s trophy was proffered by
Twiggy. By early October Peter was back in Los Angeles, where he attended
Groucho Marx’s birthday party along with Elliott Gould, Sally Kellerman,
Milton Berle, Red Buttons, Carroll O’Connor, Sally Struthers, Jack Lemmon, Lynn Redgrave, Roddy McDowall, and Bob Hope. Peter was subdued. “Just to sit there and realize you are in the same room with Groucho
Marx is a delightful experience,” he remarked.

In October, Keith Moon took a short break from the beginning of his
yearlong tour with The Who and booked a room at the Londonderry Hotel
on Park Lane, in which he threw a rambunctious party for a group of select
friends, including Peter, Ringo, and Harry Nilsson. The party got out of
hand when a sizable chunk of plaster suddenly blasted into the adjacent
room. According to Moon, he was just “trying to show Peter Sellers how
to open a bottle of champagne without touching the cork. It involves banging it against the wall.”

• • •

With Peter back in the movie game, and with so much time having elapsed
since the unpleasant closing of
Brouhaha
—and with few people having
remembered the unproduced
The Illusionist
—the producer Bernard Miles
tried to convince him, again, to return to the theater.
Richard III
. Peter
turned it down in favor of more films.

Clouseau was a cash cow, but not a perfect one. “God forbid that I
should do a whole series,” Peter said in May, while Blake Edwards was
industriously preparing the script of
The Pink Panther Strikes Again
(1976).
But money mattered to Peter, as it should have, given his previously
deteriorated fortune; by the time
The Return of the Pink Panther
opened in
Europe in September, it had already taken in $36 million in the United
States alone, second only to
Jaws
(1975). And so he soon agreed to another
round of Clouseau. One early idea for the fourth
Pink Panther
was that
Peter would take four roles: in addition to Clouseau, he’d play (or replay)
James Bond as well as playing Dr. Phibes and the fiendish Fu Manchu.

But before the
Panther
comedy had a chance to go before the cameras
in early 1976, he made Neil Simon’s detective spoof,
Murder by Death
(1976). His role: Sidney Wang, a hideous parody of the already-appalling
Charlie Chan. His costars were Maggie Smith and David Niven as the
Thin
Man
-esque sleuths Dick and Dora Charleston; Elsa Lanchester, with a nod
to Agatha Christie, as Jessica Marbles; Peter Falk as Humphrey Bogart as
Sam Spade; James Coco as Milo Perrier (another, more strained, Agatha
Christie joke); Eileen Brennan as the flamboyant Tess Skeffington; the unnaturally hilarious Truman Capote as their host, Lionel Twain; Nancy Walker as the deaf maid; and Alec Guinness as the blind butler. (“It’s nice to
hear guests again,” says the butler. “Thank you,” says Dora Charleston;
“You are . . . ?” “Bensonmum.” “Thank you, Benson.” “No, no, Bensonmum. My name is
Bensonmum
.”)

Peter prepared for his role by flying to Los Angeles—on TWA, of
course—to see as many Charlie Chan pictures as Raystar, Ray Stark’s production company, could find for him.
Murder By Death
went into
production in the fall of 1975 and concluded just before Christmas.

“He behaved very peculiarly,” Alec Guinness said shortly before his
death in 2000. “I think he was a little bit round the bend then. He had a
ring with some sort of crystal in it that changed color with his mood,” said
Guinness, who found such things baffling. “One day he didn’t turn up at
all. Everyone sat around, sat around. . . . Then we all went home. David
Niven went back to his hotel and saw Peter having lunch with someone.
He was fine.”

Guinness related another whimsy: “We all had identical caravans [dressing room trailers], set up in alphabetical order. Peter insisted on having a
bigger caravan than everyone else. Eventually they did find him one—a
hideous thing—that was six inches longer. David Niven and I saw him out
with a tape measure measuring it.”

Peter also got into a pissing match with Peter Falk—as Guinness described him, “that one-eyed actor.” “Neither would come on to the set
before the other one. The whole thing had to be timed with stopwatches
so they would arrive at the same time.” The dueling Peters simply couldn’t
deal with having to wait for the other to show up. “It was just a stupid
game they were playing,” Maggie Smith declares.

Dame Maggie also found Peter to be difficult, unpredictable, and
strange. One evening, she relates, he corralled everyone in the cast and the
key members of the creative team to watch one of his films; Smith cannot
recall which one—only that it was very long and very dull. After it was
over, Neil Simon turned and said, “I hate to sleep and run. . . .”

Smith also remembers the day Eileen Brennan showed up in one of the
snazzy outfits the film’s costume designer, Ann Roth, had fashioned for
her—a brilliant purple gown with matching boa. Peter flipped out on the
spot and insisted that the deadly gown be stricken from the wardrobe and
remade in another color. “Poor Ann Roth had to stay up all night making
a new costume,” Smith sighs. It ended up being apricot.

“David Niven finally cracked,” Dame Maggie comments. “He became
very irritated and upset and said to Sellers, ‘How dare you behave this way?’
It was so unlike David.” Niven had always been so even-tempered, quiet,
and polite that, according to Smith, “Peter did listen to him,” however
briefly.

His friends found him easier to bear than his costars. The actor Malcolm McDowell, with whom Peter shared the agenting services of Dennis
Selinger, describes it well: “Peter’s thing was, you never knew whether he’d
be talkative or not because he was a manic-depressive. But I knew not to
worry if he didn’t say anything—just to ignore it, and eventually he’d come
round, which he invariably did. I remember a private dinner in a restaurant
called Julie’s [in London], for Dennis Selinger’s sister—she was 70—and
all the clients were there. Roger Moore, Michael Caine, all those people. . . .
I sat next to Peter, and he was completely silent through the whole dinner.
And at the end of it, one of the ladies got up and said, ‘Oh! I’ve lost my
diamond earring!’ Everyone started to look for it, whereupon Peter stood
up and did a whole Inspector Clouseau thing. Everybody was in tears laughing. It was incredible, a mark of genius. It was the first time he’d spoken
all night.”

• • •

In February, Peter and his newest costars—Colin Blakely, Leonard Rossiter,
and Lesley-Anne Down—began the production of Blake Edwards’s
The
Pink Panther Strikes Again
, in which Clouseau inadvertently prevents the
now-mad (and now-former) Chief Inspector Dreyfus from destroying the
world. The critic Jim Yoakum observes that the fifth
Panther
’s storyline
bears more than a passing resemblance to that of
The Mouse That Roared
:
a kidnapped, bearded scientist and daughter; a doomsday device; Peter’s
character succeeding despite himself.

His accent worsens further; now even his own name verges on unintelligibility. (“Yes, this is Chief Inspector Clyieuzaeauh.”) The disguises go
just as far: Clouseau purchases a new “Quasimodo Hunchback Disguise
Kit” with an inflatable helium hump and ends up floating over the rooftops
of Paris and past Notre Dame until he shoots off the helium release valve
in his crotch and plops into the Seine. (“Feurtunately zere was sufficient air
still left in my heump to keep me afleut until the rescyeau.”)

There’s an anachronistically eerie moment when the evil Dreyfus causes
the United Nations Building in New York City to disappear. It’s violent
insanity as a response to gross stupidity:

D
REYFUS:
What do you suppose they will call the crater? “The Dreyfus
Ditch”! (He laughs maniacally.)

K
IDNAPPED PHYSICIST:
There shall be no crater.

D
REYFUS:
No crater? But I
want
a crater! I want wreckage! Twisted
metal! Something the world will not forget!

But the laser beam Dreyfus sets off only makes the building disappear from
the Manhattan skyline without a trace.

“What kind of a man are you?” the physicist asks Dreyfus. “A madman,” Dreyfus replies.

• • •

The Pink Panther Strikes Back
contains the most purely ghastly comedy
sequence in Peter Sellers’s career. The comic tone is beyond baroque:

Dreyfus has a toothache. Clouseau, dressed with a frizz of white hair,
a sort of Alpine Einstein, administers laughing gas to himself and to Dreyfus
and extracts the tooth—the
wrong
tooth—with a pair of pliers while, because of the excessive heat in Dreyfus’s lair, Clouseau’s latex-laden geezer
makeup begins to melt off his face. To the sound of the two men’s incessant
spastic laughter, Clouseau’s face dangles in great, pendulous globs from his
nose. The laughter becomes shriller and more mirthless as Clouseau, physically disintegrating, frantically grabs handfuls of his face and packs them
back onto himself. Following through perfectly on Clouseau’s philosophical
trajectory all through the
Panther
series, his disguise decays at the same pace
as rationality. It’s ugly to watch, as it was clearly meant to be.

“How’s this?” Clouseau asks Dreyfus of his own badly reconstructed
head. “Grotesque!” Dreyfus shouts, both of them laughing in agony.

Peter Sellers’s innate ability to sustain such a complex and peculiar tone
has rarely if ever been matched. Attempts by others to play Clouseau—Alan
Arkin in
Inspector Clouseau
(1968), Roger Moore as Jacques Clouseau in
Curse of the Pink Panther
(1983), Roberto Benigni as Jacques Clouseau, Jr.,
in
Son of the Pink Panther
(1993)—necessarily ended in dull failure. One of
the world’s foremost Peter Sellers fans, Maxine Ventham, makes a crucial
point when she observes that “Clouseau would be unbearable—and
is
unbearable when played by other actors—if he didn’t have those sad, vulnerable, dark eyes peering out at the world.” Look at Peter’s melancholy eyes as
Clouseau’s face falls off in globs and you will see precisely what she means.

• • •

It wasn’t a happy shoot. Lesley-Anne Down was not a happy trouper. Each
day, she says, “There would be at least an hour of doing absolutely nothing.
It would just be Peter being very silly. Little by little we would start working
on an idea. And it would be just one shot. Very often, that’s all we would
get in a day—one shot. A film that had a schedule of eleven or twelve weeks
ended up taking twenty weeks to do.”