Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (42 page)

When Finsbury returns later that night, he has to rouse the doctor once
again from his habitual slumbers. “I tell you the woman was already dead
when I came in!” Pratt frantically cries, flustered at the brutal exposure of
his own consciousness. Immediately after signing the death certificate to
Finsbury’s great relief, Dr. Pratt uses a squeaking kitten as his inkblotter.
“Particularly delirious are two passages with Peter Sellers,” Dilys Powell
raved in the
Sunday Times
; “Peter Sellers is a positive gem, the finest thing
in the film,” wrote Michael Thornton in the
Sunday Express
.

• • •

Near the end of the year, Peter filmed a segment of a Granada television
special,
The Music of Lennon and McCartney
, for the producer George Martin. After Lulu sang “I Saw Him Standing There,” Marianne Faithfull sang
“Yesterday,” and Henry Mancini played “If I Fell” on the piano—not to
mention the Beatles themselves performing (actually lip-synching) “Day
Tripper” and “We Can Work It Out”—another familiar British face appeared.

P
AUL:
What’s all this, John?

J
OHN:
It’s Peter Sellers!

Cut to a stark Shakespearean set with incidental madrigal music on the
sound track. Peter, dressed as Richard III, sits on an Elizabethan chair and,
in the voice of Laurence Olivier, begins reciting the lyrics of “A Hard Day’s
Night.” It is indescribably hilarious.

Peter had done the routine for release as a record earlier in the year,
with Martin acting as producer, but it’s the televised visuals that push the
bit onto the level of Olympian comedy. The combination of Sellers’s petulant, mad Olivier imitation with his near-instinctive talent for striking
wildly funny facial expressions, made Peter’s brief TV appearance in November not only the highlight of the program but also the best nugget of
work he did that year.

During the taping, he had had some difficulty with his lines and called,
rather saltily, for cue cards. No one seems to have minded, however, since
Peter lightened the mood by abruptly launching into “A Hard Day’s Night”
as recited by Spike Milligan’s goofy Eccles. Then he did it as Fred Kite.

The final, taped product, however, was pure, leering Olivier. With a
declamatory and nasal delivery, Sellers barks certain words and bites others,
glances out of the corners of his slitty eyes, and brings out in full force the
song’s underlying filth. The Beatles themselves couldn’t get away with it;
Peter could—and did:

A grumpy
dog
and
log
. A sly, insinuating
do
. A most self-satisfied
everything
. And, with a final smirk,
alright
.

Then Richard stands and delivers his outraged plea: “Can I do all this,
yet cannot get a hit?”

The wish was granted within a month. Peter Sellers’s recording of “A
Hard Day’s Night” reached number fourteen on the British pop charts in
December.

• • •

“He could write his own ticket with me if he’d write and direct
Casino
Royale
.”

This was Charles K. Feldman talking to
Variety
in June 1965. Feldman
had a dream—to produce a big, splashy James Bond spoof in Technicolor
and Panavision, with lots of gaudy sets and costumes and mid-sixties psychedelic wackiness and gorgeous babes and multiple 007s and a roster of
glamorous international movie stars. Peter would be perfect for it, he
thought.

They had been talking since late April. First it was on, then it was off,
then it was maybe—Peter kept changing his mind—and by June, Feldman
had taken to wooing his star in the press as well as through cajoling telephone calls and flattering letters. Peter wasn’t the only one to respond to
Feldman’s entreaties by hesitating. Bryan Forbes had been very close to
agreeing to be the film’s director, but he backed out before signing anything.

By late August,
Casino Royale
was on again. Columbia Pictures was
putting up the money, and Peter, in Rome, was finally agreeing to terms:
$750,000 plus $10,000 expenses. This time, Feldman got the insurance he
needed to cover Peter—$5 million worth—and Peter seemed happy. He
insisted that his friend Joe McGrath be the film’s director, and Feldman
approved. Peter had had an idea for a costar, too.

Sophia.

• • •

Everybody liked Joe McGrath, Feldman told Peter in the fall, but McGrath
wasn’t much help to Feldman in terms of convincing top-of-the-line performers like Sophia to sign onto the project since McGrath had never
directed a feature film before. (McGrath had considerable television
experience, but no movies.) If Feldman had been able to present McGrath to
Sophia as an important director, then some of her reluctance might have
been assuaged. But he couldn’t, he was sad to say, so Miss Loren had
declined the chance to appear with Peter in
Casino Royale
.

There were still script problems, too, Feldman told him. The first three
drafts had been written by the veteran screenwriter Ben Hecht (
Scarface
,
1932;
Notorious
, 1946; and many others), who had died the year before.
Feldman had acceded to Peter’s wishes when he’d hired Terry Southern to
write new dialogue and bits of comedy business. (According to Southern’s
son, Nile, Sellers specified in his contract that “he would have the exclusive
services of Terry Southern to write his dialogue. And a white Bentley.”)
Peter had asked Terry to meet with him in Rome, and at the time both
men thought they understood each other’s minds about the direction of
the script. But, it seemed to Feldman, they hadn’t really heard each other
as much as they believed they had. Still, Feldman said, he was certain that
they would have a great screenplay before shooting began.

In early September, Feldman flew to Rome to meet with Peter and
discuss casting. McGrath joined him. So did Peter’s Hollywood agent, Harvey Orkin. So did
Casino Royale
’s latest screenwriter—Wolf Mankowitz.

One scarcely had to be as superstitious as Peter Sellers was to see that
this was a distinctly bad omen, a human version of purple. Sellers and
Mankowitz had tried and failed, furiously, to form a production company
together in 1960, and Mankowitz distrusted Peter greatly. Still, their meetings appear to have gone smoothly enough—while they were actually happening, that is—and together the key members of the production team
began to come up with a cast list.
Casino Royale
, they all agreed, should
costar Shirley MacLaine and Trevor Howard.

A few days later, Feldman was back in Los Angeles meeting with
MacLaine over dinner at Trader Vic’s. They called Peter from their table
and spoke for half an hour about the film’s story and characters. The next
day, Peter called Feldman. He didn’t like the way Mankowitz was developing the script, he said; he suggested that they bring Terry Southern back.
Peter was also complicating matters by talking to Columbia about doing
another picture called
A Severed Head
, which was scheduled to shoot in
mid-February. Charlie Feldman knew that
Casino Royale
would take more
than a month’s worth of Peter’s time, and he was worried that his star was
overcommitting himself.

In November, with a late-January start date having been scheduled at
Shepperton, Feldman arranged for Dr. Rex Kennamer to check up on Peter,
just to make sure. Kennamer found Peter to be in good health, and
Casino
Royale
was on its way. Sort of.

Casting was still in flux. MacLaine and Howard were out. Orson
Welles, David Niven, and Ursula Andress were in. Eventually, of course,
so were a few others, including William Holden, Charles Boyer, Woody
Allen, Deborah Kerr, Joanna Pettet, Daliah Lavi, John Huston, Jacqueline
Bissett, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and George Raft.

Casino Royale
is categorically chaotic, but that was its nature all along.
David Niven plays Agent 007, but so does Peter Sellers. In fact, so does
Ursula Andress, and Joanna Pettet, and Terence Cooper. Niven’s Bond
reluctantly agrees to return to Her Majesty’s service after the death of agent
M (John Huston), whose fake widow (Deborah Kerr) fails to seduce him
and becomes a nun. The evil SMERSH has gone bankrupt, and the baccarat
mastermind Le Chiffre (Orson Welles) tries to win back funding in the
casino but loses to a man named Evelyn Tremble (Sellers), who has been
hired to play James Bond; Le Chiffre responds to the loss by torturing
Tremble/Bond, who meanwhile has been seduced by the voluptuous Vesper
(Ursula Andress), and on and on, until the purest evil on earth is found to
exist in the form of Woody Allen.

• • •

Joe McGrath recalls his close friend Peter with a refreshing lack of malice:
“There was a kindness there—a soft kindness, do you know what I mean?
It was a side of him a lot of people never saw. So, I would forgive him most
things. I mean, we had a bad time on
Casino Royale
because he went off
and disappeared for three weeks. He was chasing Britt. They had trouble,
and she went back to Sweden. But meanwhile Orson Welles and two thousand extras were waiting. Orson said, ‘Where’s your thin friend, Joe?’ ”

Wolf Mankowitz was not as forgiving of Peter. In fact, he was downright nasty: “He was a treacherous lunatic,” the screenwriter later swore.
“My advice to Charles Feldman was not in any circumstances to get involved with Sellers. But Sellers was at his peak at that time. I told Charlie
that Sellers would fuck everything up—he wanted different directors, he
wanted to piss around with the script. He knew nothing about anything
except going on and doing funny faces and funny voices, and he wasn’t
really a great actor.

“He was
terrified
of playing with Orson and converted this into an
aversion for Orson before he even met Orson,” Mankowitz went on. There
are a number of stories of bad behavior regarding Sellers and Welles: Peter
overheard a young woman comment, about Welles, “Isn’t he sexy?” and
immediately became jealous. Peter, together in his suite with Orson, tried
to get Welles to laugh, failed, and never got over his resentment. Peter met
Orson in a Dorchester Hotel elevator. Sellers was coming down from his
penthouse, and Orson and Mankowitz got on on a lower floor and Peter
remarked that he hoped the elevator wouldn’t collapse from the weight.

Princess Margaret was the last straw. Welles had developed a friendship
with Margaret some years earlier when he was in London directing his stage
production of
Othello
. Sellers, having no idea that she and Welles even
knew each other, invited her to stop by the already greatly troubled set on
February 18 for lunch. He made the mistake of crowing about it to Welles.
“Then Princess Margaret
came
,” Welles later gloated, “and passed him by
and said, ‘Hello, Orson, I haven’t seen you for
days!
’
That
was the real end.
‘Orson, I haven’t seen you for days!’ absolutely killed him. He went white
as a sheet because
he
was going to get to present
me
.”

“That’s been blown up to ridiculous proportions,” Joe McGrath retorts.
“Peter never resented Orson at that lunch. I think the problem was really
that Britt left and Sellers just got the scent and chased. When he came back,
Orson was just sitting there sort of smiling. And Peter lost his courage. I
talked to Milligan, and Milligan said, ‘Well, yeah—he’s obviously so
ashamed that he just doesn’t want to face up.’ ”

In fact, Peter had already decided the weekend before the fatal Margaret
luncheon to issue a new demand to Feldman. He insisted that his scenes
with Welles be shot in what Feldman’s production log calls “single cuts—thereby avoiding having both of them working together.”

Whatever the reason for his attitude and conduct, Peter proceeded to
make the filming of
Casino Royale
substantially more difficult than such a
heaving, overproduced extravaganza was already destined to be. At one
point he departed the set and simply left a sign that said “Yankee Go
Home.”

Describing the Welles imbroglio, McGrath says that Peter informed
him that “ ‘as long as I’m not in the same setup I’ll go back.’ I said, ‘No!
What are we doing, a home movie? This is
Orson Welles
you’re talking
about. And not only that, Peter, but you
wanted
Orson Welles. You said,
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we got Orson Welles?” And we get him and
suddenly
this
happens.’ ” McGrath also pointed out to Peter that from a
technical perspective alone it would be ridiculous to shoot a Panavision
film with two stars in different setups; the point of
any
widescreen process, after all, is to shoot
wide
. Keeping Sellers and Welles in separate
spaces and cutting back and forth between them would look, in a word,
dumb.

Peter’s sharp aversion to Orson was not the only problem for McGrath.
“At one point he said to me, ‘Sorry, I was a bit late coming back when you
called me. I had something important to do. I was trying to get a new stylus
for my record player.’ I said, ‘Oh, that’s very funny. Don’t treat me like
you treat everybody else. Come on. What’s going on?’ ‘No,’ he said.