Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (41 page)

Peter had met Neil Simon the previous August, and, soon thereafter,
Simon showed him the first forty pages of his first screenplay. According
to John Bryan, Peter “flipped over it,” saying it was “the best screen material
submitted to him in years.” Peter’s enthusiasm grew when Simon suggested
a director: De Sica, whose groundbreaking
Bicycle Thieves
(1948) was one
of the cornerstones of Italian neorealism. (The union of a preeminent Italian
neorealist and a hot American comedy playwright was not quite as idiotic
as it may seem. De Sica had long since moved away from lyrical, black-and-white urban dramas to slick, candy-colored, international moneymakers like
Marriage Italian Style
, 1964.)

Sellers got along well enough with Simon and invited him at one point
to Brookfield for a script conference. After the meeting concluded, Simon
was surprised to find that Princess Margaret, Lord Snowdon, Harry Secombe, and Eric Sykes had been invited to join them for dinner and an
improvised
Goon Show
routine. Simon’s relationship with Sellers was
friendly enough, but there were tinges of tension. Simon reports that on
another occasion he, Peter, and Britt were sharing a limousine in London
when they passed the West End theater at which Simon’s latest hit stage
comedy,
The Odd Couple
, was running. Britt mildly suggested to Peter that
they see the show sometime, whereupon Peter turned hotly to Simon and
demanded to know “what the hell’s going on between you two?”

• • •

After the Fox
is a farce about an Italian thief, a master of disguises named
Aldo (Peter), who breaks out of prison to protect the morals of his loose
sixteen-year-old sister, Gina (Britt). “It will be quite a challenge playing my
husband’s sister in the picture,” Britt said at the time. “I hope I won’t find
it too strange.” Simon’s purposely farcical story requires Aldo to assume the
guise of an Italian film director, Federico Fabrizi, who purports to film the
actual smuggling of purloined gold bricks into Italy. Fabrizi then proceeds
to cast a pompous, long-past-his-prime Hollywood star (Victor Mature) in
the ersatz film along with Aldo’s sister, whom he rechristens Gina Romantica.

Filming began in June on the island of Ischia, where Peter and Britt
lodged at the Hotel Isobel Regina. For their residence in Rome, where the
production moved at the end of July, they rented an elegant villa on the
Appian Way, which Peter, true to form, had outfitted with multitudinous
gadgets. They included his-and-hers walkie-talkies so that he could stay in
touch with his wife when she was in a different part of the house.

With Peter assuming the role of de facto executive producer as well as
star, his tendency to second guess his directors became even more detrimental than usual, since De Sica had to contend not only with a demanding
star but a demanding financier as well, all wrapped up in the same moody
man. De Sica’s own attitude didn’t help; he started telling friends and
associates how much he detested Simon’s screenplay. He didn’t think too
highly of Peter’s performance, either.

The feeling was mutual; Peter grew equally disenchanted with De Sica.
“He thinks in Italian, I think in English,” Peter complained to Bert Mortimer. According to Hattie Stevenson, there was an even more intimate and
painful problem: Peter “wasn’t happy with Britt’s performance at all, and
so therefore that made home life very difficult.”

At first, Peter took his frustrations out only on the film’s unit publicist;
in a typically roundabout way, Peter had him fired. But to spare Peter his
characteristic spasm of remorse, he was told that the publicist had simply
gone away on his own accord.

It was then that the color purple became not just a problem but one of
the biggest and most long-lasting terrors of Peter’s life. A script girl showed
up one day in a purple outfit. Naturally she had no idea that this fashion decision would send Vittorio De Sica into an uncontrollable arm-waving
frenzy. “It’s the color of death!” De Sica revealed to Peter, who, suggestible
and superstitious as ever, was haunted by purple for the rest of his life.

On at least one occasion Peter attributed the superstition to Sophia
Loren, though he credited De Sica much more often. But no matter who
planted the notion that purple could kill, Peter latched onto the belief
fiercely. The mere hint of purple became a consistent trigger to Peter’s easily
erupting temper. In later years, publicists would scour Peter’s proposed
hotel rooms in search of the color of death; if they found it, the room would
be changed. For Peter Sellers, the color ruined everything it touched. Purple
was to life itself as Fred had been to Rembrandt.

• • •

Filming in Rome one day in early September, Britt was playing a scene
with Victor Mature. Peter had stayed home that morning, but he just
couldn’t help himself but appear at Cinecittà later that day and, with the
camera rolling and De Sica miming the expression he wanted from his
leading actress, Peter came creeping up to his wife’s side, so close that he
was barely out of camera range, and whispered, “Play it as though you were
dreaming
of being beautiful!” De Sica took this usurpation in stride. To
placate his star, who was also his boss, De Sica asked him to serve as Mature’s stand-in for some close-ups of Britt that were taken later that day.
But Sellers was growing even more irritated by De Sica—his English was
too bad, his obvious distaste for the material too debilitating, and De Sica
was simply the most obvious target for Peter’s ire.

So he told John Bryan to get rid of him. Bryan resisted on financial as
well as artistic grounds. Then, bizarrely, Peter demanded that British sausages be flown in for the cast and crew, De Sica objected, and Peter responded by telephoning his friend Joseph McGrath in England and asking
him to take over the direction of the film. McGrath refused. De Sica appears
to have completed the shooting—barely—though Peter himself took on
the task of orchestrating postproduction work on the film.

Fed up, John Bryan terminated his relationship with Peter.
After the
Fox
was Brookfield’s first, last, and only production; the company dissolved.

At the beginning of filming
After the Fox
, Victor Mature was quoted
as saying that “if Sellers plays his cards right, I may let him steal the picture.”
By July, Mature was disenchanted. “I just saw my rushes,” the aging star
told Sheilah Graham, “and I suggest you sell your United Artists stock.”

When the film was released, the
New York Times
agreed with Mature:
“Mr. Sellers acts on the level of Mr. [Jerry] Lewis, which is to say broadly,
bluntly, and hoggishly.”
Time
was also scathing: “a garlicky farce that could
barely make the late late show on Sicilian TV.”

Still, Peter’s time in Italy was scarcely in vain. He bought a new Hasselblad camera, which he used to take a number of photos that ran in Italian
newspapers as well as in London’s
Daily Express
and
Daily Mirror
.

And he got his Ferrari Superfast at last.

Only five of the cars were made that year, but Peter managed to snag
one—a sand-colored number with matching butter-leather seats. It was
capable of revving up to 180 miles per hour, he was proud to say, though
he was also forced to acknowledge that there was no place in England where
he could actually drive that fast.

• • •

In public, Peter was buoyant, his marriage to Britt a visible success as long
as it was outsiders who were watching. Once again, he had married an
actress. Each member of the couple knew how to play a scene in front of
an audience. They played things differently at home.

Neil Simon and his wife were staying virtually across the street from
the Sellerses on the Appian Way during the production of
After the Fox
.
They were awakened one night when Britt, after a particularly nasty fight
with Peter—he threw a chair at her—climbed through a window in her
nightgown and sought refuge at the neighbors’. The Simons were aghast,
having had no idea Peter and Britt were anything less than fully content
with each other.

“I tried so hard to understand Sellers,” Ekland says in retrospect. “I
related his dark moods to the pressures and ambiguities of his genius. Where
was the warmth, humor, and humanity he generated on the screen? There
were interludes when he was truly a loving, gentle, and generous human
being, but these moments were like flashes of sunshine.”

A few months earlier, Peter had penned a reflective piece for, believe it
or not,
Seventeen
magazine. “Peter Sellers Talks to Teens” proved that on
some skewed but fundamental level he knew himself better than anyone
else did: “If I can’t really find a way to live with myself, I can’t expect
anyone else to live with me,” he wrote.

A more Goonish (but no less honest) bit of self-knowledge came out
on
The Ed Sullivan Show
in the fall of 1966, when Peter appeared in the
guise of his
After the Fox
character Federico Fabrizi. (For the purposes of
historical placement, Sullivan’s other guests that night were Judy Garland,
Sophie Tucker, Tom Jones, Topo Gigio, and the Marquis Chimps.) Asked
by Sullivan to explain the symbolic meaning of his film
No More Pasta
, in
which a beautiful woman drowns in a vat of minestrone, Fabrizi waxed
poetic: “We are all in a thick soup, swimming around in our own vegetables!
With our arms outstretched, calling for human compassion! And—
come
formaggi?
—a little cheese.”

• • •

Habitually, many of the films Peter wanted to make were either made by
other actors or not made at all. In April 1965, the Mirisch Brothers—who
evidently bore no grudge over the
Kiss Me, Stupid
debacle—bought the
rights to Kingsley Amis’s new novel
The Egyptologists
; Bryan Forbes was to
develop the film with Peter. Soon there was a deal for Peter as well:
$600,000 for a ten-week shoot; living expenses of $1,000 per week; and
10 percent of the gross after the break-even point. Peter was no longer
concerned about putting in long days; the contract specified studio days
lasting nine hours and location days of ten hours. Peter would get top
billing, script approval, and the right to make changes in the film after it
was shot. Shooting was to start on or around October 1. But October
passed, and by the end of the month Peter was still holding off on
The
Egyptologists
pending another rewrite. It never got made.

In August, he mentioned to the Hollywood columnist Army Archerd
another project in which he was most interested in participating. Charles
Chaplin would direct the picture; Sophia Loren would costar. He hadn’t
seen a screenplay yet, he said, but he was confident that it would be there
when the time came. One month later, Chaplin began filming
A Countess
from Hong Kong
(1967) with Sophia and Marlon Brando.

Then came
Waterloo
. “Is there any truth in Mike Connelly’s report that
you want me to play Napoleon?” Peter cabled John Huston from the Hotel
Maurice in Paris in late October. “If so, very interested.”

The next day Peter returned to Brookfield, where he received Huston’s
unpunctuated reply a few days later: “Information is news to me but nevertheless a fine idea we have however already contacted Richard Burton
regarding the role stop in case anything should go wrong may I please get
in touch with you?”

Disappointed, Peter responded kindly but with a touch of self-protection: “Agree Burton would be marvelous casting and on second
thoughts am not sure I would be right stop.” He tagged on a marvelously
absurd philosophical conclusion: “However what is to be will be even if it
never happens.”

• • •

To the handsome tune of $25,000 a day, Bryan Forbes convinced Peter to
appear for three days’ work on
The Wrong Box
, Forbes’s adaptation of a
novel by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne. Sellers’s role was,
as the
Financial Times
described it, that of the “befuddled, cat-ridden abortionist.”

Dr. Pratt (coughing): “Yes, I’m . . . I’m . . . I’m all right. It’s just a fur
ball, it’s nothing. Strange, I haven’t had fur for a fortnight.”

Forbes had asked Spike Milligan to appear in a small role as well for
only a token fee, but Spike would have none of it. “Suddenly last year I
woke up to the fact that everybody else was driving a Rolls Royce while I
was driving a Mini Minor,” Spike told Forbes, “so I decided to put an end
to it and go into this business strictly for money like everybody else. When
I have got a Rolls Royce and money in the bank I will start doing it for
kicks again, but not till then.”

Peter was in Rome when he got the script on June 10, but he didn’t
go before the cameras until mid-November, when, as planned, he worked
for three full days, sharing the doctor’s cramped attic office set with twenty-five hired cats. He plays his two all-too-brief scenes with Peter Cook, whose
character, Morris Finsbury, turns to the decrepit and disreputable Dr. Pratt
for a blank death certificate, which Finsbury intends to fill in later with the
pertinent details. “All I want is the
death certificate
, Doctor,” Finsbury
stresses impatiently. “Don’t we all,” Pratt replies while pouring himself
another drink. Under a bulbous makeup nose and hideously pallid complexion stare two weary, vacant eyes. “I was not always as you see me now,”
Pratt explains.