Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (47 page)

Let me see—how
is
it to be managed?

I suppose I ought to eat or drink something or other;
but the great question is, what?

I
t was 1967. The Beatles had their maharishi, Peter had his yoga, and the
counterculture, regardless of its income level, turned to the jangling
rhythms of southern Asia for druggy inspiration.

Peter became friendly with Ravi Shankar, the world’s most famous sitar
master. When Peter was in Los Angeles that year, he invited Shankar to his
rented house to perform a private concert. Paul Mazursky, one of the guests,
reports that Peter imitated Ravi’s accented voice directly to Ravi’s face—much to Ravi’s amusement. And in fact it was Shankar who demonstrated
the elements of sitar technique for Peter on the set of
The Party
, when
Hrundi, early in the film, sits alone and plays.

Sellers’s friendship with Shankar led to an even closer friendship with
George Harrison. “I got to re-know him through Ravi Shankar,” Harrison
says. “He liked Ravi a lot and became close friends with him, and at that
time, you know, I was with Ravi all the time learning the sitar. We hung
out together, the three of us, which was quite an unusual combination.”

Harrison also reports that Peter was quite immersed in his spiritual
quest: “He was doing a lot of yoga and trying to hone in on ‘Who am I?’
‘What is it all about?’ ” He hadn’t discovered any lasting answers.

• • •

Peter could be social and outgoing if the mood suited him. He, Britt,
Edwards, Edwards’s new and as-yet unannounced girlfriend, Julie Andrews,
and other key
Party
people did, in fact, party in a grandiose, Hollywood
sort of way—when Edwards and Peter were speaking, at least. As filming
neared completion, Peter threw a fifty-guest cocktail do, after which everyone climbed onto the busses he had chartered and headed to the Greek
Theater in Los Feliz, where Henry Mancini was opening that night. There
was also a three-hundred-person wrap party thrown by the producers on
the
Party
set, with music provided by the onscreen band (The Party Four).
On a more sober note, Peter returned to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital to
address a group of cardiologists about his experiences as a heart-attack survivor.

Peter made new friends, too. The closest by far was Roman Polanski. They met in an Italian restaurant near the Paramount lot, where
Polanski was filming
Rosemary’s Baby
(1968) with Mia Farrow. “My first
impression of him was of a sad, shy man who hid his essential melancholy behind a fixed smile that revealed his rather prominent teeth,” Polanski writes in his autobiography. “His manner conveyed profound
depression.”

Asked to elaborate on this observation in person, however, Polanski is
quick to clarify: “He was at that time in such a mood, but it doesn’t mean
that it prevailed throughout the years that we knew each other. He had a
lot of reasons to be depressed, like everybody else. I don’t think that he was
particularly stricken by depression throughout his life.” Obviously bored
by all the one-dimensional “Mad Peter” lore, Roman Polanski defends him.
Still, Polanski acknowledges, “Peter’s idiosyncrasies could be a drag.” For
example, Sellers tended to walk out of restaurants mid-meal. “This often
happened at The Luau,” Polanski writes. “I grew to dread the moment
when, after ordering, Peter would whisper, ‘Ro, I can’t stand it—bad vibes
in here—let’s go somewhere else.’ ”

• • •

Going somewhere else was Peter’s way of life. At the end of July, Peter and
Britt flew to Paris, then to Marseilles, where they began a two-week cruise
of the Mediterranean. “When the Sellerses discovered that they couldn’t
get all their belongings they’d picked up during their Hollywood stay on
their plane,” the columnist Dorothy Manners gasped, “they ordered a second freight plane just to transport the haul. The only thing they were forced
to leave was Peter’s new car.”

It was a Corvette Stingray. There hadn’t been one available in Los
Angeles, so Peter—who once described himself as being “auto erotic”—got
his press agent to call Detroit and have General Motors ship one to him
immediately so he could drive it around Beverly Hills during the filming
of
The Party
. He had to have it.

“You tell them you want a car as soon as possible,” Peter said at the
time, “and you’ll bloody well get it two weeks from now. You tell them
you want it
today
and they know you mean business.” He got away with
this sort of thing precisely because he could.

• • •

If it weren’t for the tremendous talent, the domestic horrors, and the periodic fits of public charm, Peter Sellers’s life could be described in the form
of a warehouse inventory and an accompanying list of the stamps on his
passport. He had commissioned a new yacht while on a side trip to Genoa
during the production of
The Bobo
—a fifty-foot number, which he christened
The Bobo
—and in August 1967, he and Britt sailed to Sardinia to
spend a little time with the Aga Khan. The couple, divorce postponed, were
accompanied by Margaret and Tony Snowdon; the Aga was tossing the
princess a birthday bash. Kirk and Anne Douglas were there, too; Peter had
met them in Monte Carlo on the way. Margaret’s cousin, Princess Alexandra, and her husband, Angus Ogilvy, came along as well. So did Michael,
Sarah, and Victoria Sellers, the youngest being cared for by her Swedish
nanny, Inger.

“It was the real jet set period,” Roman Polanski declares. “It was, like,
one day in Rome, one day in L.A., then we’d suddenly be in London. Our
jobs would take us to various places, and we would meet like that, you
know.” Paris, Rome, London, Los Angeles, Monte Carlo; Peter, Margaret,
Roman, Kirk, the Aga; films, income, houses, taxes, luggage. . . . It was
rather like a progressive dinner, where guests go from house to house for
each new course, only in 1967 they were jetting, not driving, and the food
was better, and there was unlimited champagne and lots of drugs, and
everybody was famous. Through Roman, Peter met Warren (Beatty). Warren introduced him to Julie (Christie). “You have to look back at what
London was like in the ’60s,” says Peter’s friend Gene Gutowski, who had
been Polanski’s producer on
Repulsion
(1965),
Cul de Sac
(1966), and
The
Fearless Vampire Killers, or: Pardon Me But Your Teeth Are In My Neck
(1967). “We were young, we were successful, and everybody’s star was on
the rise. It was limited to much more of a select group than today. Let’s
put it this way: there were not as many celebrities around in those days.”

With Roman, Peter enjoyed playing an odd game of their own
invention: Sellers, assuming the personality of a cretin, would climb into the
driver’s seat of his latest Rolls Corniche, and Roman would give a driving
lesson as though to the mentally handicapped. “Press the right-hand pedal,
gently—no, too hard! . . .” And so on, through the busy streets of London.
According to Polanski, it was especially amusing to play the game stoned
on hashish.

In the late fall of 1967, the Polanski circle got together to plan a communal Christmas holiday in Cortina. Roman and his magnificent girlfriend,
Sharon Tate, took Peter out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant to talk about
the trip and introduce him to some of the other guests. A physician named
Tony Greenburgh—described by Gene Gutowski as “a society doctor”—was seated across the table from Peter. The talk turned to the question of
whether doctors bore any moral responsibility to patients who seemed
driven to self-destruction. Not knowing Peter at all, Greenburgh all-too-calmly stated his opinion: that doctors were unable to stop hell-bent patients
from killing themselves, whether it was through drinking, drugging, smoking, or overwork, and therefore he bore absolutely no responsibility for his
patients outside of the particulars of his practice.

Peter became wildly enraged, his reaction so abrupt and extreme that
the other guests naturally assumed it was one of his impromptu comedy
routines. Their amused disbelief continued even after Peter got up from
the table, marched around to Greenburgh’s side, shrieked “You’re wrong,
Doctor—you’re wrong, you’re
fucking wrong!
” and grabbed the physician
by the throat and began to choke him. Someone at the table giggled and
casually told Peter to stop acting silly. Greenburgh, for his part, was turning
blue.

Polanski sprang to the doctor’s defense and pried Peter’s fingers loose
from his throat. He then asked Peter to sit down, whereupon Peter, according to Polanski, “buried his face in his hands and began to sob.”

• • •

These were trying times for certain people with whom Peter Sellers came
into contact; some had it easier than others. Many years after inspiring
mutual unpleasantness during the production of
I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!
(1968) Peter and one of the film’s writers, Paul Mazursky, ran into each
other at the Beverly Hills Hotel. They greeted each other warmly after their
long estrangement. “I was wrong, Paul,” Sellers is said to have confessed.
“Will you ever forgive me?” “There’s nothing to forgive,” Mazursky
benevolently replied, only to chronicle the whole ugly thing later, lavishly and at
Peter’s expense, in his autobiography.

They met while Peter was filming
The Party
. Freddie Fields, Peter’s
Hollywood agent, had read the script, which Mazursky wrote with his collaborator, Larry Tucker, and forwarded a copy to Peter, who agreed overnight to do the film. They were all taken aback by Peter’s first suggestion
for director. “Hello, Freddie,” Peter said into the phone during one of his
early meetings with Mazursky and Tucker. “I’m here with the boys, and
we all agree that our first choice is Fellini.” If Fellini was too busy, Peter
added, then they’d “move on to Bergman.” Fields is said to have told Tucker
and Mazursky privately that he had no intention of approaching either the
director of
Juliet of the Spirits
(1965) or the director of
Persona
(1966) with
a film that centered on pot brownies.

Somebody suggested George Roy Hill. Peter responded by saying that
he refused to work with Hill again after
The World of Henry Orient
. Mike
Nichols’s name came up and was shot down. Jonathan Miller was proposed.
Miller actually flew to Los Angeles for a meeting, but when he brought up
the subject of the film’s musical score, Peter went pale and terminated the
conversation. In Mazursky’s account, Peter is said to have then suggested
Mazursky.

But Peter rejected him, too, supposedly after the writer gave Britt a kiss
on the cheek and Peter accused him of having sex with her. Mazursky to
Freddie Fields: “The only thing I did was tell Peter
The Bobo
stank!” Fields
to Mazursky: “That’s almost as bad as telling Sellers you fucked his wife.”

Peter eventually chose Hy Averback to direct
I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!
and barred Mazursky from the set until the day he asked him back.

At one point during the production, which occurred in December 1967
and January 1968, Mazursky was summoned to Peter’s rented house in
Beverly Hills, where he was greeted warmly by a smiling Peter, who then
burst into tears. “The ship is sinking, Paul. Sinking, I tell you.” And on
and on.

Peter’s strange sociability—ebullient one moment, despondent the
next—led him to launch an informal cinema club to keep him focused on
the art he loved, with other pleasures on the side. The first film he chose
to screen was Satyajit Ray’s
Pather Panchali
(1955), to be screened with an
accompanying dinner of lamb curry. And hash brownies. With Britt having
left for New York to shoot William Friedkin’s
The Night They Raided Minsky’s
(1968)—in which she plays an Amish burlesque dancer—Peter eagerly
invited his pretty young costar, Leigh Taylor-Young, on whom he had
developed the predictable crush.

During the screening, “Peter sat in the back of the small screening room
holding hands with the exquisite Leigh-Taylor,” Mazursky writes, referring
to Taylor-Young.

The club’s next film was to be Fellini’s
I Vitelloni
(1953), to be accompanied by Betsy Mazursky’s spaghetti Bolognese and more brownies, but
when the guests showed up, there was no film. According to Mazursky,
nobody remembered to order it. As Mazursky tells it, Peter’s response was
something on the order of “I don’t want spaghetti, and I don’t want
Vitelloni!
I don’t
ever
want
Vitelloni!
Never, ever, never!” “Fuck you, Peter,”
Mazursky said. “Fuck
you
,” said Peter. The projectionist saved the day by
screening
The Producers
.

As an afterthought, Mazursky mentions that Peter’s “work on the film
was impeccable. He was prompt, fully prepared, and very generous to his
fellow actors.”

Peter’s own account is much less acrimonious than Mazursky’s:

“One night we all wanted to see a Fellini film, see? We were all just
nicely high, and all the girls had baked hash cookies. But the owner comes
in and says, ‘I’m sorry to tell you guys, but they didn’t wanna give us the
Fellini film.’ I said, ‘Oh shit, fuck it.’ But this guy says, ‘No, listen, I got a
film by Mel Brooks. It’s called
Springtime for Hitler
(the original title). So
we gave out a few more cookies, things were very heavily hashed up, and
we got ripped out of our minds. We started watching this film and were
hysterical. I actually had to crawl out of the room on my hands and knees
and go to the lavatory because I was almost sick with laughing. When I
went back in, I just saw white on the screen. We were all just looking at
the white until someone knew enough to say, ‘Change the reel!’ ”