Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (32 page)

Nothing was simple. For Peter, this type of generosity came at a price.
As Kenneth Tynan reported, “Sellers is a self-accusing man who incessantly
ponders ethical questions. Once, driving home from the studio, he saw a
ragged old woman standing on a street corner, and ordered his car to stop.
‘I got out and gave her some money, without telling her who I was. And
then, just as I was getting back into the car, I heard myself thinking, “This’ll
do me good later. This’ll make God like me.”

“ ‘ “That’s wrecked it,” I said to myself. “That’s absolutely wrecked
it.” ’ ”

There was some degree of paranoia involved in Peter’s erratic behavior.
Peter himself labeled it “intuition.”

Roy Boulting remembers that Peter “would keep you up half the night
on the telephone, then when you yawned out of sheer fatigue, it would be
interpreted as an unfriendly attitude. It got to be a killer, his ‘intuition.’ ”

Maurice Woodruff played right into it, and so, surprisingly, did Dennis
Selinger—in secret collaboration with the quack Woodruff. As Selinger
later told it, “Maurice used to phone me and say, ‘Peter’s coming. Is there
anything you want me to tell him? Should I say ‘yes’ or ‘no’?” Selinger was
only too happy to oblige. This way,
everyone
was happy: Woodruff’s bogus
predictions turned out to be sound, Peter made responsible career choices,
and Selinger got his cut.

• • •

Bill Sellers died in October. He was sixty-two.

“My father died following three coronary attacks,” Peter later said, “but
it was trouble with his prostate that killed him.”

Echoing just about everyone else who knew him, two of Bill’s nephews
describe their uncle as a shadow man who “wouldn’t say boo to a goose.”
What gives Dick Ray and Ray Marks’s observations about their uncle their
bite is their follow-up contention: that this was Peter’s essential nature as
well—half of it, anyway.

According to Dick Ray, Peter took after both of his parents—the aggressive, performing mother and the quiet and aloof father. But then, says
Ray, “the minute the camera stopped he’d go back to himself again—”

Ray Marks finishes the sentence: “. . . to Bill Sellers.”

• • •

Peter Sellers was asked that year what he saw when he looked into a mirror.
His answer: “Someone who has never grown up, a wild sentimentalist,
capable of great heights and black, black depths—a person who has no real
voice of his own. I’m like a mike—I have no set sound of my own. I pick
it up from my surroundings.”

And this: “I don’t know who Peter Sellers is, except that he’s the one
who gets paid.”

By the end of 1962, Peter had successfully created for himself a public
persona based on blank peculiarity. The automobile fixation had become a
journalistic cliché, but once in a while Peter would touch on something
authentic when discussing his lists of cars. There were two factors behind
his obsessive buying and selling of automobiles, he announced: “One is a
search for perfection in a machine; the other stems from a great sense of
depression at being unable to supply what I know I should be able to
deliver.” He was himself the best sports car, the finest Rolls, the silkiest
limousine, endlessly nicked by a siege of pebbles. Beyond, or behind, or in
some way circling around the escalating nuttiness, Peter Sellers did know
himself. Sometimes.

But, he immediately declared, everything had just changed.

“
Now
I’ve finally got what I want,” he swore. It was a Bristol 407.

“It’s perfect! I didn’t know such a car existed! The Bentley Continental
wasn’t bad for room, for speed. But the 407 combines
everything
.”

M
eanwhile, in Hollywood, the screenwriter Maurice Richlin was shopping for a collaborator. He approached Blake Edwards. “I have an
idea about a detective who is trying to catch a jewel thief who is having an
affair with his wife,” Richlin announced to the director of
Breakfast at
Tiffany’s
(1961) and
Days of Wine and Roses
(1962). Together they carved
out a script that featured a variety of gimmicks: two glamorous women, an
urbane leading man, a piece of early sixties vealcake, fashionable European
locales, and a wondrous gem with a tiny flaw. If one looked at it closely,
the jewel would seem to have embedded deep within it the distinct image
of an animal. The director knew one thing for certain:
The Pink Panther
(1964) would be a perfect vehicle for David Niven.

By late October 1962, casting was completed, financing had been secured from the Mirisch Company, the independent production company
that made such critical and commercial hits as
Some Like It Hot
(1959) and
The Apartment
(1960)—both by Billy Wilder—and shooting was ready to
commence at the Cinecittà soundstages in Rome. Niven would be the sophisticated thief, Robert Wagner his handsome playboy nephew. Claudia
Cardinale would be Princess Darla, the owner of the jewel, a curvaceous
but nevertheless deposed ruler of a necessarily vague Eastern sovereignty.
The detective’s wife, who would be having the affair with the thief, would
be the striking, one-named Capucine. The detective would be Peter Ustinov. (Brigitte Bardot once claimed to have been offered one of the two
babe roles but turned it down. Ava Gardner may also have been sought,
hired, and swiftly replaced because of her excessive demands.)

Edwards and his team flew to Rome, and Ustinov changed his mind.
He didn’t want to be Inspector Clouseau after all. That he waited until
three days before principal photography began wasn’t very nice. Blake Edwards was “ready to kill.”

“At the very last minute—we were in Rome, we were set to shoot the
following Monday, it was Friday—Ustinov said, ‘I can’t do the movie.’ We
all said, ‘Is there somebody we can recast?’ I couldn’t think of anybody at
that time who could do that sort of thing. [The agent] Freddie Fields said,
‘I’ve got an actor who has a window. You’ve got to do him in four weeks.’ ”
(Dennis Selinger was not Peter’s only agent; he had several working in
tandem.) “All I could think of was
I’m All Right, Jack
. In desperation, I
said, ‘Let’s go. We’ve got to do
something
.’ He got off the plane in Rome,
we got in the car, drove back from the airport, [and] by the time we got
to the hotel Clouseau was born.”

Peter himself later claimed to have turned down
The Pink Panther
originally because he hadn’t liked the part—“I didn’t want anything to do
with it”—after which Edwards offered the role to Ustinov. But this account
is doubtful. Graham Stark recounts Peter’s glee upon landing the part of
Clouseau at the eleventh hour: “When he got the first
Panther
, he rang me
up like a child—‘I’ve got five weeks in Rome . . . and I’m getting
£90,000!’ ”

• • •

Panther
lore abounds. Jacques Clouseau’s name is said to have been inspired
by the director Henri Georges Clouzot, his demeanor by the maladroit M.
Hulot in Jacques Tati’s comedies. But there’s also the story of Peter, on the
airplane to Rome, fishing a book of matches out of his pocket and instantly
basing the comportment of his new character on the hero depicted
thereon—the mustachioed Capt. Matthew Webb, who, in 1875, had become the first man to swim the English Channel. It makes a good anecdote,
but it’s not especially convincing, since Peter had been a sucker for a fake
mustache since he was a teenager in Ilfracombe.

As for the accent, despite Peter’s having done Frenchmen at least since
1945, Blake Edwards declares that it was really
his
invention: “I ran into a
French concierge who talked liked this. And he did it for me. And I said,
‘We’ve gotta do it.’ ”

A better genesis story comes from Max Geldray, who remains convinced that Peter, on the suggestion of Michael Bentine, based Inspector
Jacques Clouseau on one of Princess Margaret’s hairdressers.

Shooting on
The Pink Panther
commenced on Monday, November 12,
1962, and in a certain sense it continued sporadically for the next sixteen
years. And of course it was Sellers rather than Niven who emerged upon
the film’s release as the key to its charm and popularity. Peter used to claim,
not without a certain accuracy, that Clouseau became such a hero because
of the character’s bedrock dignity in the face of his own buffoonishness.
He was specifically reminded of his own teenage years and the loss of his
virginity:

“When I was making
The Pink Panther
and playing the accident-prone
Inspector Clouseau for the first time, I remembered the embarrassment I’d
suffered struggling out of my nightwear so that I could get on with satisfying
my barely containable passion. It made a good gag and consolidated the
conviction I had about Clouseau that, in all circumstances, whatever
boob he’d made, the man must keep his dignity—which gave him a certain pathetic charm that the girls found seductive. It all went back to the
frustrations I suffered as a result of a lack of priorities in love-making.”
Still, one must never forget that Clouseau is first and foremost a moron,
and that audiences all over the globe love to laugh at anyone so fiercely
idiotic.

Peter took to the role, but then he usually took to the roles he played
to an alarming extent. While filming a
Pink Panther
scene on location, an
onlooker accosted him. “Aren’t you Peter Sellers?” the man asked, to which
Peter replied, “Not today.”

The Pink Panther
’s plot, like those of
The Goon Show
, is more or less
irrelevant. It concerns a gentleman thief (Niven), whose partner in love and
crime (Capucine) happens to be the wife of a hapless Parisian detective
(Sellers). A fine gem goes missing in Rome. It belongs to Princess Darla
(Claudia Cardinale). She wants it back. The gentleman thief’s playboy
nephew (Robert Wagner) romances the inspector’s wife as well. Everyone
goes to Cortina.

What makes
The Pink Panther
work is Edwards’s comic style and tone,
which is given its most acute embodiment by Peter. Like Spike Milligan,
Edwards finds comedy to be profoundly painful, and Peter generally agreed.
Edwards had worked with Leo McCarey early in his career, and he credits
McCarey—the director of such comedies as
Ruggles of Red Gap
(1935) and
The Awful Truth
(1937)—for teaching him the essential truth that humor
can hurt. McCarey had a knack for extending tension-provoking comedy
routines way past the audience’s initial discomfort. “He called it ‘breaking
the pain barrier,’ ” Edwards recalls. Peter Sellers’s Inspector Jacques Clouseau may be the pain barrier’s apotheosis.

At the same time, Peter’s performance in
The Pink Panther
is
remarkably restrained. His accent is pronounced but not asinine, his physical comedy likewise. That would come later.

• • •

The Mirisch Company, in association with United Artists, didn’t open
The
Pink Panther
until February and March 1964 (in Britain and the United
States, respectively), whereupon
Time
dismissed it, citing its “pervasive air
of desperation,” as though Edwards and Sellers’s joint comedy style wasn’t
consciously based on cold despair. “Some of Sellers’s sight gags are funny,”
the critic wrote, “but not funny enough.” “A so-so comedy” sniffed the
critic for
Cue
. But the Hollywood trade paper
Variety
pegged it correctly:
“A vintage record of the farcical Sellers at his peak.”

Looking back on it, Robert Wagner attributes Sellers’s performance to
his disruptive interior life. Sellers was able to achieve so much variety in his
art because, as Wagner puts it, he “had such a circus going on within his
head.”

Blake Edwards is even more succinct: “I think he lived a great part of
his life in hell.”

• • •

Peter Sellers was at the top of his game, his fame, his taste in projects, and
his luck, and he was visibly miserable much of the time, so through the
guidance of Harry Secombe, he sought spiritual advice from a priest.

The sanest and best-natured Goon, Secombe was active in the Actors’
Church Union and, seeing his old friend in increasing distress, made a point
of introducing Peter to Canon John Hester. This priest’s particular ministry
was to men and women whose shifting identities earned them their daily
bread, and still, Peter Sellers presented a special case. “Peter never really
settled, and he seemed aware that this was a real problem,” Hester later
said, referring to Sellers’s spiritual life more than to his locale. “He was
never baptized, and a lot of our sessions were about the possibility of this
happening.” (That a Jew would not have been baptized ought to go without
saying, so Hester, in his restrained Anglican way, left it unsaid that Peter
considered converting to Christianity.)

“He never came very near to settling on any single manifestation of
faith,” Hester continued. “He was looking in all sorts of directions, just as
if he were playing with one of those cameras of his.” The baptism failed to
occur, then or ever—though another equally sacred Roman Catholic ritual
later did—and Peter continued on his unsteady course, ceaselessly seeking
and unable to rest.