Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (25 page)

Dodger Lane speaks in a most muted Cockney. It’s one of Peter’s least
showy and therefore most generous performances, since he consistently
throws attention away from himself in order to showcase Lodge and Cribbins. It’s lanky Lionel Jeffries who produces the only outrageous voice in
Two-Way Stretch
—a barking squeak, evidently the result of the figurative
crowbar that Crout harbors up his fascistic rear. Perhaps it’s this funny
voice that Peter resented when he began bickering with Jeffries during the
production. Settling into the exasperated groove that would define much
of the rest of his career, Peter was annoyed at Jeffries’s insistence on long
rehearsals, while Jeffries, who responded precisely as many of Peter’s fellow
actors would over the next twenty years, was irritated at Peter’s distaste for
any rehearsals at all. It wasn’t a particularly happy shoot, but it wasn’t a
disaster, either. And it was scarcely the last time that the dull ache of filming
a Peter Sellers comedy wasn’t justified by the final result.

• • •

Lena Horne was playing at the Savoy, an excellent occasion for Anne and
Peter and some friends to spend a luxe night on the town. Anne wore a
beautiful hand-embroidered dress. Their friends thought she looked smashing, so much so that by the time they got home Peter was in such a white
rage of jealousy that he physically ripped it off of her and shredded it.

After almost ten years of marriage, the word
divorce
began to be used
with some frequency in the halls and rooms of Chipperfield, even as he
began earnestly to confine Anne to the house. Shopping trips were cause
for the third degree. From whatever studio at which he happened to be
filming, Peter would place two, three, four telephone calls to Anne every
day, just to check her whereabouts. When she mentioned to him one evening that she’d like to get out of the house a bit more, Peter destroyed
everything in sight—porcelains, a Chippendale chair, bookcases. He also
threatened to kill her, but he didn’t follow through. He beat her up instead.
Today, the intake desks of women’s shelters accept wives and girlfriends
with fewer bruises than Anne sustained.

Another day, a small flock of doves nested under one of Chipperfield’s
many gables. They cooed. So Peter brought out his double-barreled shotgun
and massacred them.

• • •

When Peter was first approached to appear as an Indian doctor in an adaptation of a George Bernard Shaw satire, he was decidedly underwhelmed
despite the potential acquisition of a literary pedigree.
The Millionairess
(1960) simply didn’t interest him. Then they told him who his costar would
be: Sophia Loren, the most unearthly beauty in all cinema. He accepted
the role.

A high fee helped as well. Carried away by Peter Sellers’s exponentially
increasing popularity, the agent Leonard Urry (representing the producer,
Dimitri de Grunwald) is said by Terry-Thomas to have made Sellers an
offer of £85,000. Terry, who was a friend of Urry’s, asked Urry why on
earth he’d offered so much. Urry answered, “I only offered what I thought
was a fair price.” Terry then told Urry that he could probably have gotten
Peter for £50,000, since he, Terry, knew “exactly what Peter had been
earning up to then. After that his price soared.” It certainly did, though
Alexander Walker reports that Sellers actually
was
paid a flat fee of £50,000,
“of which £17,000 went to Wolf Mankowitz” as part of the formation of
the production company he and Mankowitz were trying to put together at
the time. (As a point of comparison and a measure of their relative statures
at the time, Sophia got $200,000 and a percentage of the profits.)

The film was to be directed by the respected Anthony Asquith, produced by de Grunwald and distributed, they all hoped, by Twentieth
Century-Fox, though Fox executives tried to talk de Grunwald out of
Sophia Loren in favor of Ava Gardner. De Grunwald had been friendly
with Peter for several years already. Some time earlier, in fact, he’d taken
Peter to a Russian nightclub in Paris. The émigré producer was dazzled by
Peter’s disarming nature as a changeling: “We’d only been there two
minutes when Peter became one hundred times more Russian than I am—and I’m very Russian. He went absolutely wild—nostalgic, sentimental,
gay, tragic, romantic—
everything
a Russian is. The gypsies came over to
our table, and Peter sang with them and cried during all the sad songs, and
in half an hour he was dancing madly all over the place and smashing empty
vodka glasses against the wall.”

Now they wanted him to be the love interest in a lavish Sophia Loren
comedy. And so he did it. In Technicolor.

• • •

Sophia’s arrival in London, on a boat train from Paris, was heralded long
in advance; the press was primed. On the day of the event, the producers threw a party for the express purpose of recording the meeting of
Europe’s most voluptuous star with Britain’s funniest comic, both set to
star in a gown-filled but artistically respectable top-of-the-line motion
picture.

Sophia was on one side of the ballroom, glorious; Peter, armed with
flowers and champagne, was on the other, a nervous wreck. “I don’t normally act with a romantic glamorous woman,” he told a fellow guest. “You’d
be scared, too. She’s a lot different from Harry Secombe.”

The moment had to happen, though—the press were getting itchy—and when it did it was forced and stilted. Only after the photographers
demanded it did Peter provide Sophia with a kiss on the cheek. Later that
evening, when he got home, Anne asked him what she was like; “Ugly,
with spots,” he said.

• • •

Filming began. In an early scene in
The Millionairess
, Peter’s character, the
selfless Dr. Kabir, minister to the wretched of the earth, rubs lotion on the
naked back of the world’s richest and most beautiful woman. By the time
Anthony Asquith called “cut,” Peter was wildly in love.

Starring with Sophia Loren in a romantic comedy appealed so greatly
to Peter because by 1960 he wanted to be someone he never imagined he
could be: a romantic lead.
The Millionairess
provided the flip side of Lionel
Meadows in
Never Let Go
. “I was there at the time,” his friend Bryan Forbes
declares. “It stemmed from the moment he opened a paper and it said,
‘Mastroianni—Peter Sellers with Sex Appeal.’ And that plunged him into
a deep sorrow and angst and he immediately went on a crash diet and
changed his whole personality. He was a fat boy struggling to get out.”
Richard Lester puts it even more bluntly: “Once he was on the yogurt,
things began to alter.”

Peter himself once remarked on his own metamorphosis: “I fell in love
with Sophia, and when I took a look at myself in the mirror I felt sick.”

Having had enough of the pink plastic wrap, Peter went on a diet of
hard-boiled eggs and oranges. He’d already had his teeth capped.

As private affairs go, this one was public. Observing him on the set,
Anthony Asquith said, “He looks like a boy with a pinup in his bedroom.”
Peter took Sophia out to the elegant Fu Tong restaurant in Kensington,
where he taught her the intricacies of Cockney rhyming slang. His friends
began to hear stories of a rather more intimate nature. Graham Stark recalls
the would-be private incidents Peter excitedly related to him: “I was given
details of furtive meetings, of passion in the dressing room and even awkward (I would have thought totally impossible) gymnastics in the back seats
of parked cars. I got it all. It was, to say the least, embarrassing.”

Peter’s family heard about it, too, since he would come home from the
day’s shooting and report on Sophia’s every move in infatuated detail. One
day she’d treat him badly, the next day she’d be charming, and Anne,
Michael, and baby Sarah would be treated to it all over dinner. Oblivious
to the role his family ought to have played in his life—that of his family—he
shared with them his unbridled enthusiasm for his costar, the stupefying
bombshell from Rome. Anne offers a simple explanation for her husband’s
behavior: “He treated me as his mother: I should allow him to do whatever
he wanted to do.”

He brought Sophia to Chipperfield, first for a large catered party in her
honor, then for smaller gatherings. At one of them she played Ping-Pong
with Michael, who didn’t like her very much. After all, even a child could
plainly see what she was doing to his father and what he was doing to
himself and his family.

Anne recalls that Peter “brought her to the house quite often, usually
with her husband, Carlo Ponti, and she was absolutely stunning and extremely charming. I didn’t take much notice at first when he told me he
was in love with her. But then he’d be lying in bed and say her spirit was
coming into the room.”

• • •

One Saturday night during the production of
The Millionairess
£750,000
worth of Sophia’s jewels were stolen from the house in which she was
staying in Hertfordshire. The police summoned Pierre Rouve, one of the
producers of the film, to the studio on Sunday, and he stayed there dealing
with the ensuing media turmoil and legal complications all the way through
until Monday morning, at which point Sophia arrived on schedule in her
Rolls Royce promptly at 7
A
.
M
., ready for the day’s work. Everyone knew
how upset she was—the jewelry was uninsured—but according to Rouve
she was a complete professional and “carried on as though nothing had
happened.” But, Rouve continues, “Later that morning somebody else’s
nerves cracked—Peter Sellers’s. He fainted and had to be taken to the
hospital.”

Asquith and his team spent the rest of the day taking close-ups of
Sophia, who, despite the trauma she had just suffered, never looks anything
short of magnificent in the final cut. But Peter, when released from the
hospital, didn’t go back to the studio, nor did he return home. He went to
Asprey and bought his love a £750 bracelet with which to begin her new
collection.

• • •

Sophia had a bodyguard named Basilio. Peter described him years later:
“He was a sort of watchdog. . . . He said to me, ‘When the husband he
finds out about this there will be trouble!’ ”

But the question lingers unanswered to this day: What exactly did Carlo
Ponti have to find out about? Some of Sellers’s friends, Spike Milligan
among them, believed his stories at the time and swore that he and Sophia
Loren enjoyed a torrid affair during the filming of
The Millionairess
. Others,
like Graham Stark, think it was all in Peter’s head.

Dimitri de Grunwald: “There is nothing that will convince me that
Sophia returned his passion with anything more than the mutually narcissistic feelings such stars go in for when the limelight is on them, and the
romantic content of the film may have helped. . . . The nice way of describing her attitude is to say that she was kind to him. The other way is to say
that her attitude gave him greater hope than was warranted.”

Someone else involved with
The Millionairess
has another theory: “I’ve
always felt that Sophia is one of those actresses who need to feel that their
leading men love them before they can give a good performance. Peter had
no experience playing romantic roles. He misread the signals and developed
a delusion.”

Sophia herself said, some years later: “I was very close to him—as much
as I could be. But love is something else. He is really a great, great friend.
We have built up a fine relationship over the years and I think that is rare
for a man and a woman, when the woman is married to someone else.”

Anne: “I don’t know to this day whether he had an affair with her.
Nobody does.”

• • •

More important than the precise whereabouts of Peter’s penis during the
production of
The Millionairess
was the effect that his emotional arousal
had on his wife and children. According to Michael, he was already out of
control when he confessed to Anne, who remembers the scene vividly: Peter
“came in and straightened his shoulders like a politician about to make a
major speech in the House of Commons and said, as though he had rehearsed the line all the way home from the studios, ‘Anne, I’ve got to tell
you that I’ve fallen madly in love with Sophia Loren.’ ”

Despite her comment that she “didn’t take much notice at first”
when Peter told her that he was in love with someone else, according to
Graham Stark Anne packed her bags and showed up that very night at
the Starks’ door, asking if she could stay in their guest room. She wasn’t
in tears. She was in a rage, one that was made all the more fiery by the
characteristic restraint with which she expressed it. “The bastard only told
me because he couldn’t be bothered to have a bad conscience,” she told
Graham.

“We had some terrible rows over it,” Anne does acknowledge. “One of
them lasted fifteen hours.” But as Stark remembers it, Peter almost immediately began showing up at the Starks’ house asking for permission to
take Anne out for the evening. He was all very proper and polite, so much
so that the Starks felt as though they’d become Anne’s parents.

Of course Peter was contrite. That Anne had left
him
was what mattered, and it mattered because it hurt. Hurting could make him sweet. After
a week or so Anne moved back to Chipperfield.

Still, according to Michael, his mother spent many of the ensuing
nights in one of the guest rooms rather than the bedroom she once shared
with her husband. She had good reason to keep a distance. As Michael
describes his father at the time, “At home he became a crazed, manic figure.”
One night was extra-special: “He hauled me from my bed at 3
A
.
M
. ‘Do
you think I should divorce your mummy?’ ”