Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (61 page)

With each passing
Panther
, Burt Kwouk couldn’t help but notice the escalation in comic extremism, not to mention the soaring costs and metastasizing scope: “Peter’s accent got worse and worse, we all started to look
older, and the pictures, for some reason, became larger in scale as they went
on.
A Shot in the Dark
was pretty small scale; the last one was a huge epic.”
But, Kwouk quickly adds, “I’ll tell you the honest truth—I can no longer
tell one movie from the other. It just seems like one enormous twelve-hour
movie that took twenty years to shoot.”

Given the huge financial successes of
The Return of the Pink Panther
and
The Pink Panther Strikes Again
, the whiff of another enormous blast of
cash was in the air in the offices of United Artists, so the company arranged
another lavish press junket, just to make sure. At a cost of $300,000—nearly triple the price of the
Return
affair—UA invited three hundred guests
including seventy-five reporters, their spouses, Steve Martin, Bernadette
Peters, and Don Ho, to Kahuku, Oahu, to celebrate the Fourth of July.
Only a week before the extravaganza, with studio executives giddily preparing to buy favorable worldwide press, Blake Edwards was seized with
misgivings about a portion of the fireworks scene, so he summoned Peter
and Dyan Cannon to an MGM studio set on June 24 and 25 and hastily
reshot the sequence.

Despite the strain of orchestrating what one disgruntled publicist called
“this goddam junket”—“Blake and Tony [Adams] are scum and I really
don’t give a shit anymore how it turns out,” the publicist privately opined—it was a big success. Media coverage of the film was most extensive.

At the press conference with Edwards, Dyan Cannon, Burt Kwouk,
and Herbert Lom, Peter was asked about his heart attacks. “I’m trying to
give them up,” he replied. “I’m down to two a day now. It’s about time
for one
now
! It all began when I met Sue Mengers.” (Sue Mengers was the
powerful, notoriously abrasive Hollywood agent later parodied by Blake
Edwards in the form of Shelley Winters’s character in
S.O.B.
, 1981.) Blake
quickly diverted the conversation in another direction: “The only thing
I
worry about is mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It might excite him too
much.” Peter and Lynne flew to London for the British premiere the following week.

Revenge of the Pink Panther
was highly successful at the box office. Like
The Pink Panther Strikes Again
, it took in an estimated $100 million in
revenues.

Since both Sellers and Edwards had repeatedly said that each would
never work with the other again, the occasion of the fifth
Pink Panther
(and, with
The Party
, their sixth collaboration) necessitated some sort of
explanation for the radical change of heart. Edwards took his pragmatic,
workhorse stance: “I guess it’s the old Hollywood thing—‘I’ll never work
with the guy again—until I need him.’ ” Edwards also provided an astute
evaluation of Peter’s physical comedy style: “Peter is not really a physical
comedian in the sense that Chaplin or Keaton were. He is not that kind of
an acrobat, and he is not trained that way. But he has a mind that
thinks
that way.”

With his combined share of all the
Pink Panther
revenues reported to
have been $4 million, Peter was rich again. And he’d reached his limit: “I’ve
honestly had enough of Clouseau myself. I’ve got nothing more to give.”

• • •

On the small screen, Peter stands in a straggly brown wig topped by a
horned Wagnerian helmet and performs a brief imitation of Queen Victoria
to a fascinated Kermit the Frog.
The Muppet Show
, with Peter as the week’s
guest star, aired during the last week of February 1978.

Kermit tells Peter that while he really loves all of Peter’s funny characters, it’s perfectly okay for him to just relax and be himself:

P
ETER:
(in the stentorian voice of a very old, very grand British thespian) But that, you see, my dear Kermit, would be altogether impossible. I could never be myself.

K
ERMIT:
Uh, never yourself?

P
ETER:
No. You see, there is no me. I do not exist.

K
ERMIT:
(uncomfortable) Er, I beg your pardon?

P
ETER:
(leaning in close and looking nervously around for eavesdroppers) There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed.

K
ERMIT:
(looking nauseated) Uh, er, can . . . can we change the subject?

In a minute, Kermit. Peter Sellers was terribly self-conscious about his
lack of a self, and it must have been taxing to sustain such a robust contradiction. What does it mean to have no self if you yourself think you have
none? Sellers had
selves
, just as everyone does; his were just more extravagant, and most of them were played out under high-key lights in movies,
television, and publicity photos. They were provisional, performative selves,
and they popped up whenever the need for a particular one arose. His
favorites were fictional, snapped on spontaneously and crafted over time.
These selves made him a fortune and a lot of clever and successful friends
who enjoyed his company. His least pleasant selves, the remorse-producing
ones, were, in a word, selfish—hungry, impulse-driven selves bent on gratification at any cost. Expensive car, beautiful wife, willing girlfriend, latest
camera, compliant child—
he had to have it
, and he had to have it
right
away
, and, completing the performance, he had to
let everyone know
. Once
he got it, of course, the selfish self faded away, satisfied but empty. Surgically
removing that set of selves must have seemed less painful than living with
them.

• • •

Peter and Lynne returned from Hong Kong to a domestic disruption in
London. They were living in an elegant apartment in Roebuck House. The
apartment, done in Indian-techno-Goon, featured saffron-colored walls, a
lot of burning candles, a small carved Buddha, a prominent picture of Spike,
acres of electronics and photographic equipment, and a huge blow-up photo
of Lynne that had been taken by Peter.

Peter had been living there from the time before Titi; Tessa had briefly
moved in. Now they found themselves faced with a 300 percent rent increase. Peter’s upstairs neighbors were outraged, too—Lord Olivier and his
wife, Joan Plowright, who according to Peter had a habit of dropping marbles on the hardwood floor. “We tried living in France last year,” Lynne
told the press, “but it wasn’t a success. I don’t know where we would go
now. I hope it won’t be America.” They abandoned Roebuck House with
no London residence to take its place.

Lynne described Peter as “incredibly volatile. He’ll say, ‘We’re going
to Egypt tomorrow night.’ He needs someone to gently pull him down to
earth a bit. . . . You need incredible patience. But I think I have it. I think
I’m perhaps the first calm woman he’s found. He thinks he’s difficult to
get along with. Past wives and girlfriends have put forward this moody,
broody image. But I don’t see him like that.”

“What went wrong with my marriages?” Peter asked rhetorically some
time later. He never condemned Anne, toward whom he remained friendly
and needy. Miranda was too sophisticated and aristocratic for him, but he
never ripped into her in public. He was now saving it all for Britt, to whom
he generally referred tersely as “Ekland.” “She’s a professional girlfriend, so
there’s no more to be said,” he declared on one occasion. On another he
added this: “Every move she makes, she ruins a life. It’s her hard, driving,
ruthless ambition.” Peter also made a point of letting Victoria know the
depth of his feelings about her mother.

• • •

Physically, Peter’s heart was kept going by a pacemaker, but emotionally it
was fracturing to the point that in the early summer of 1978 he flew with
Lynne to the Philippines for several sessions of shamanistic surgery. As
Michael Sellers describes it, the shamans “conducted their ‘surgery’ by invisibly passing their hands into a patient’s body and plucking out the diseased tissues.” Michael tried to talk him out of it. Lynne thought there was
no harm in trying, so off they went.

Peter endured twenty grueling “surgeries,” which apparently involved
the psychic doctors yanking pig spleens out from their concealment under
the operating table.

He pronounced himself cured. Lynne herself went under the psychic
knife to heal a persistent back problem and made a show of being equally
impressed with the doctors. “They really are incredible,” she declared.
“Aren’t they, darling?”

• • •

In late April 1979, when Peter viewed his next film,
The Prisoner of Zenda
(1979), in a screening room at Universal Studios in Burbank, he had a
strong, sour reaction. The lights came up, he told Walter Mirisch, “You’ll
be hearing from me,” and then he departed.

The next morning, he sent Mirisch a thirteen-point memo that described in excruciating detail how much he detested
The Prisoner of Zenda
.
Halfway through the screening he began sweating and swearing; by the end
he was in a blind rage. “I don’t know how I held myself in check that
evening,” he told the durable British journalist Roderick Mann. “The version I saw was so bad! Mirisch has tried to turn it into a sort of poor man’s
Pink Panther
and shot extra scenes using doubles which I knew absolutely
nothing about. I’m so upset and disappointed. I even thought of renting a
billboard to voice my protests, or hiring the Goodyear blimp and putting
a message on it. Don’t see it. It’s a disaster.

“I’m just not going to sit back and be clobbered. After all, I do know
something about comedy.”

Stan Dragoti had originally been slated to direct
The Prisoner of Zenda
,
but he was replaced by Richard Quine, the director of such slick and commercially successful pictures as
My Sister Eileen
(1955),
The Solid Gold
Cadillac
(1956), and
The World of Suzie Wong
(1960). The film features
Peter in three roles; his costars are Lionel Jeffries (with whom Peter had
appeared in
Two-Way Stretch, Up the Creek
, and
The Wrong Arm of the
Law
), Elke Sommer, and Lynne Frederick.

The story: King Rudolph IV of Ruritania (Peter as a sort of Bavarian
Methuselah), floating high above his domain in a balloon filled with hot
air, opens one too many bottles of champagne, pops a hole in the balloon,
and stands in befuddled terror at his sudden descent. He lands in a tree in
a faraway village and promptly falls into a well.

Meanwhile, in Ruritania, plots are afoot as General Saft (Jeffries) moves
to subvert the monarchical process; meanwhile, in London, the king’s debauched son (Peter doing a particularly jaded Terry-Thomas) is amusing
himself in a gambling hall when he’s told of his father’s demise. “The king
is dead. Long live me,” Rudolph V pronounces.

Ruritanian ministers then hire a look-alike carriage driver named Syd
(Peter doing a fairly standard Cockney) to impersonate the new king; he
eventually falls in love with Princess Flavia (Lynne) and, in the end, assumes
the throne himself.
The Prisoner of Zenda
is an expensive, flabby dud.

Peter’s Terry-Thomas voice is a bit florid, especially since he combines
it with a speech impediment—
w
s serve as
r
s—which renders many of Rudolph’s lines unintelligible. Some are quite funny—“The cwown is
mine!”—but all in all it’s still not one of Peter’s better efforts.

With Peter flush with cash and fame again—
Revenge of the Pink Panther
was the tenth-top-grossing film of 1978—he was firmly back in the groove
as far as on-set antics were concerned. In some cases, he was probably right;
the script was terrible, Quine’s direction indecisive, Walter Mirisch’s meddling unproductive. The film may legitimately have seemed to him to be
headed for failure. But in other cases, Peter was just being Peter at his worst.
Lionel Jeffries told (the real) Terry-Thomas privately that Peter’s behavior
had been truly dreadful on the set one day, and that Peter had telephoned
Jeffries about it later that night. “Was I really awful today?” Peter asked.
“Well, yes,” Jeffries said, at which Peter laughed and hung up.

• • •

The cut of
The Prisoner of Zenda
Peter had seen with Walter Mirisch was
not the final one; the picture still required some dubbing on Peter’s part.
He refused to do it.

A few days later, under threat of legal action, he did it.

Then he flew to Barbados for a month. Lynne stayed in Los Angeles.
He rented the theater designer Oliver Messel’s old place by himself. From
Barbados he flew to Switzerland to oversee the move into his new house in
Gstaad.

He changed his mind about
The Prisoner of Zenda
, at least in public,
by the time the film was released. “I think it’s a wonderfully entertaining
movie,” he penned in a letter to Roderick Mann. The print he’d seen, he
explained, didn’t have a musical score and was even missing several scenes.
Lynne, separately, put her two cents in, too: “Part of the trouble was we
saw the film by ourselves, not with an audience. So there was no laughter.
And Peter got upset.”