Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (30 page)

Guillermin continues: “In
Toreadors
he started with the voice—it was
a neighbor of his, an old boy in his sixties, a retired Army man. Once he
got the voice, his whole body followed. But when I said, ‘Okay, it’s terrific,
Peter, but now we’ve got to talk about the makeup,’ he said, ‘I don’t want
any makeup.’

“ ‘Don’t worry about it, John,’ he said. He didn’t want to have to come
to the studio two hours early and have a lot of stuff put on his face. He
played the whole part with very, very little makeup—extraordinary, actually, because his skin is quite smooth, and yet he does convey very well the
feeling of a man in his late sixties.”

The strain of his disintegrating marriage took its toll during filming,
but it’s difficult to pin down whether Peter’s shattered emotional state was
due to his collapsing marriage or whether the marriage collapsed owing to
Peter’s mental deterioration. “Peter was breaking down into tears now and
again,” Guillermin recalls. “In fact, the scene when he’s about to commit
suicide—he gets a revolver and he’s going to blow his brains out—was a
very bad day for Peter. He said, ‘I can’t work.’ I finally persuaded him to
just sit down at the desk. He was in tears, but it worked for the scene,
which we shot. That was one of the tragic moments. He was tortured. A
very complicated man.”

Waltz of the Toreadors
was widely critiqued for being a kind of pratfall-ridden bowdlerization of Anouilh’s play. Guillermin himself agrees. “The
film was fucked up by the producers,” he declares. “They wanted to make
a slapstick comedy. And they ruined a wonderful scene that Anouilh wrote
for his play and I shot. It was a long take—a whole reel, ten minutes—of
Peter and Maggie Leighton in their quarters, and they tear each other apart.”

But Guillermin did not have the right of final cut. “I was thrown off
the editing of the film,” he says, still bitter. “They brought in a yes man,
and they intercut it with a light comedy scene of Dany Robin and John
Fraser larking about in the fields. There were doves fluttering about! They
intercut Peter and Maggie’s scene three or four or five times, and it totally
took the heart out of the film.”

Because Peter had such high expectations of his own talent, gripped by
idealized goals that were thus impossible to achieve, he was increasingly
struck by deep depression after seeing his films. “The whole thing looks
terrible, amateurish, bad,” he told a British reporter after seeing
Waltz of
the Toreadors
. “And you want to pack it all in and look round quickly for
a means of employment. Suicide? No, not that. But who can you talk to?
Who’d understand your problem?”

But of course there were multiple Peters. He was elated when he won
the Best Actor award at the San Sebastian Film Festival for
Waltz of the
Toreadors
. His press agent, Theo Cowan, found him to be “like a ten-year-old, going about with four cameras slung around his neck, taking
thousands of snaps. . . . His great joy was to mingle with the crowds outside the hotel where the stars were staying and do what he called ‘seeing
myself go in.’ ”

• • •

During the filming of
Waltz of the Toreadors
, the distance between Paris
and London hardly mattered as far as Peter’s marriage was concerned, since
fighting and begging could continue by long-distance telephone. David
Lodge tells of Peter sitting in his trailer one day stewing over his most recent
argument with Anne. “Everyone cooled their heels outside, including the
cavalry horses needed for the scene.” With his marriage in tatters, the mercurial star was being even more so; the film’s producer, Julian Wintle, “went
out of his mind as the costs climbed hourly.” Eventually Peter handed Lodge
a vast pile of pennies and told him to call Anne on his behalf and apologize.

Lodge did so. Anne refused to accept remorse by proxy.

As Lodge reports, “I couldn’t tell Peter that in his state of mind. So I
reported back, ‘She says she’ll talk to you tonight, so get on with your work
now.’ ”

Graham and Audrey Stark joined him for a weekend at the Raphael
hotel, where Peter was staying during the production, and the three of them
spent some time with Dany Robin. By that point, Peter’s heart had taken
the predictable turn: “I’m in love with her, and she’s in love with me,” he
confided to Graham. The fact of Dany Robin’s marriage was no deterrence.
After dinner one evening, they all adjourned to one of the suites for coffee
and conversation. Peter had to take a phone call, at which point Robin
whispered to the Starks (in Graham’s rendition of her charmingly broken
English), “Please, I beg you, do not leave me alone wiz Petair. ’E is so sweet,
but such a leetle boy. ’E think ’e love me. ’E think I love im.
Merde!
”

It was only after Peter returned from Paris that Anne told him that she
planned to move out. This was Peter’s cue to announce that he’d slept with
Anne’s best friend.

• • •

He acted out.

“Peter used Mike as a punching bag,” says Anne Sellers Levy in retrospect, adding that she “drank more than I’ve ever done in my life,” alcohol
in her case being a material form of denial, a way for a mother to cope with
the regularized abuse of her children.

When she told him that she was leaving him, Peter “wrecked the entire
living room. I was sitting in a big chair trying to protect my head with my
hands. Have you ever seen a child lose its temper and go berserk and pick
up things and throw them? Imagine that on a grown-up scale in a very
beautiful living room.”

Threats were employed. One night he proposed to jump off the terrace.
Dangerous acts occurred. At one point he tried to strangle her. But Anne
had had enough of the melodrama and knew precisely what to do to stop
it. With his fingers clenched around her neck, she calmly told him just to
go ahead and do it, so of course he stopped.

Peter was in New York when Anne moved out. “It was a very cowardly
way of doing it,” she confesses, “but I’d never have got out otherwise.”
With the two kids being cared for by Frieda Heinlein, she paused long
enough in the garden to tell Michael that she was going to stay with her
mother for a while, and “please look after Sarah for me, won’t you?” and
with that she departed.

• • •

There were threats to assassinate Ted.

“Ted Levy has destroyed my life!” Peter yelled to the children. “He has
taken your mother away from me! I’ll kill him! I’ll kill him!”

When Peter showed up at Ted’s place at two in the morning and began
banging on the door, Ted considered the possibility that he might actually
follow through. According to Levy, “He wore an expression of hate, anger,
and frustration, the like of which I’d never seen on the face of any human
being before. . . . Suddenly he looked up and offered me a cigarette.”

• • •

One day while Anne was staying at her parents’ house, Peter appeared,
behaving, as Anne describes him, “very peculiarly.” He acted as though he’d
never met her mother; he seemed not to know who she was. Believing him
to be either drunk or deranged, she decided she’d better drive him home,
but when they got back to the penthouse, Peter announced, “You’re not
leaving” and locked her in. When it became clear to her that pleading wasn’t
going to help, she telephoned the family doctor and asked to be saved. The
physician showed up, sedatives in hand, and put Peter to bed. Anne left
again.

For a while she returned on weekends to spend time with Michael and
Sarah, who remained briefly under what passed for Peter’s care. Later she
took the kids during the week and Peter had them on Saturdays and Sundays. Eventually she got full custody. “In a way I was lucky,” Anne says,
“because he did spend a lot of time in America, so as the children got older
they were hardly with him at all. He wasn’t really interested in their schooling or how they thought or their welfare.” His moving Michael from school
to school was a form of abusive whimsy rather than a concerned attempt
to rectify an ongoing problem with the boy’s education or behavior.

After a period of fully justifiable bitterness, Sarah Sellers tries to see
the best in her father: “I think he had an idea of how he’d like family
life to be, but he couldn’t really live up to it. So we’d come along and
be with him—but once we were there he didn’t really know what to do
with us.”

• • •

Alone and miserable, Peter brooded. The dependable Bert Mortimer grew
fearful. “He was so isolated and lonely that I got scared for his safety. He
would sit in the penthouse—‘my bloody palace,’ he’d call it—and threaten
to tear ‘Ted Levy’s Teutonic look’ apart. ‘Overmasculine—it’s just not me,’
he’d say.”

The director Robert Parrish and his wife, Kathleen, stopped in to visit
Peter shortly after Anne left him. He had, says Kathleen Parrish, “lots of
toys,” one of which was a new electric organ, which he began to play.
Taking their cue, the Parrishes began to make a big fuss over it, at which
point Peter abruptly stopped playing. “Isn’t this bullshit?” he said.

Michael Sellers saw a more intimate despair. He remembers his father
muttering. “Who would want me? Who would want me?”

Well, Laurence Olivier, for one.

“Larry asked me to play Lear at the Chichester Festival,” said Peter to
the journalist Roderick Mann. “It’s one of the great parts,” he explained.
“And Larry said, ‘You’d be good, Peter. You must do it. The best Lears
have nearly always been new to Shakespeare.’

“But I turned it down. It was too big a risk. In my heart I hadn’t the
confidence, and that’s the place you’ve got to have it. I’m always seeking
perfection, and that makes me difficult to live with. I’m sure it’s a nagging
thing.”

• • •

A less risky choice, and so a less exciting one,
The Dock Brief
(1962) is a
sad comedy, a courtroom drama that is played out almost entirely in the
minds of a pathetic defendant (Richard Attenborough) and his inept lawyer
(Peter). Based on John Mortimer’s play, the film takes place in a prison
holding cell, with several flashbacks and flash-forwards breaking up the
deliberate claustrophobia. Wilfrid Morgenhall, the barrister assigned to the
hopeless case of Herbert Fowle, uses his creative intellect to imagine ways
of getting his client off the hook; the client, meanwhile, is a pitiful sap who
did, indeed, kill his indefatigably laughing wife (Beryl Reid, in flashback).
David Lodge plays, of all things, a lodger; the twist is that Fowle kills his
wife not because she launched an affair with the lodger but because she
didn’t.

As always, Peter required a vocal hook into his character. Mortimer
dined with him just before shooting began and found Peter to be
“desperately uncertain” about his performance of Morgenhall. Then a plate of
cockles arrived at their table. Memories flowed; the little mollusks cast
Peter into a disastrous lost-time reverie of a youthful visit to Morecambe
on the Lancashire coast. The cockles, Mortimer was horrified to witness,
“brought a faded north-country accent and the suggestion of a scrappy
mustache. He felt he had been thrown the lifeline of a voice and work
could begin.”

Mortimer was appalled because the character he’d written was not from
the North, did not speak with a Lancashire twang, and bore no scrappy
mustache. “It took a great deal of patience and tact by the director, James
Hill, to undo the effect of the cockles.” (There
is
a mustache on Morgenhall’s lip, but it’s a trim, linear number tinged with gray.)

Mortimer also claims that Peter told him that he feared for his safety.
The Mafia was after him. Sophia.

• • •

Work might have provided some steadiness, but it did not. It was merely
constant.

In
The Wrong Arm of the Law
(1962), Peter played opposite Nanette
Newman, the glamorous, almond-eyed wife of Peter’s war buddy, Bryan
Forbes. “I want to marry Nanette,” Peter confided to Forbes one day. Taking Forbes aside, he admitted to his old friend that he hadn’t broached the
subject with Nanette herself, but his attitude on this point was one of
forthright honesty. He wanted to clear it with Bryan first; it was a matter
of fair play.

“The scene had taken on the characteristics of a Pinter play,” Forbes
later wrote. “But I knew it would be a mistake to appear outraged or to
mock him: that was not the way to handle Peter.” So Forbes simply proceeded with the conversation, adopting the same patient, solicitous tone
that Peter was employing. Bryan Forbes was one of those who sympathized
with Peter’s nature: “He was so patently sincere and desperate to do the
right thing according to his unique code of ethics.”

F
ORBES:
Of course there’s the children to take into account.

S
ELLERS:
You’d always be able to see them. . . . You’re not angry,
are you?

When Nanette Newman learned of her imminent divorce and remarriage, she gently convinced Peter that
any
intimate relationship with him
was impossible, let alone marriage. According to Forbes, “On two occasions
he bought a gun and threatened suicide, and both times Nanette somehow
calmed him and talked him out of it.”

And remarkably, work continued. In
The Wrong Arm of the Law
, Peter
greets us as a couturier wearing a smoking jacket collared in silver quilt;
he’s also adorned with a precise, thin mustache and a pronounced French
accent. “Exquiseet! Byeautiful!” Monsieur Jules cries as he flounces a bride-to-be’s poofy net veil. “I weesh you every ’appiness,” he purrs as he kisses
the bride’s hand in a manner
très Continental
, “and my felicitations to the,
uh [his eyebrows arch],
greum
.” Monsieur Jules swiftly devolves into lower-class London when the buyers leave. The fashion house is a front; he’s
actually the criminal “Pearly” Gates.