Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (43 page)

“I said, ‘Who do you think you are? Peter Sellers?’

“He said, ‘Yes. I fucking
am
Peter Sellers!’

“I said, ‘This is getting out of control. We call you and you don’t come.
I’m not talking for Charlie Feldman, but Feldman did give you the chance
with
What’s New Pussycat?
, you know, and here you are, and Charlie is
frightened to ask you, to tell you, to get here on time.
He is the producer
.
And he is frightened to actually say, “Get here on time.”
He is saying to me,
“Would you tell him please to get there on time?”
So what game are you
playing? Either get here on time or don’t get here at all.’

“And then there was a break, and we went into the trailer to talk about
another scene, and he said, ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ and he swung a punch
at me.

“He hit me on the side of the jaw, and it sort of bounced off me, you
know—it was halfhearted—but I thought, What the hell? If you want to
hit me, come on. So I tried to hit him. Jerry Crampton, a stunt man, was
outside, and he opened the door. Peter and I were, as Terry Southern later
said, ‘aiming blows at each other like school girls trying to hit wasps.’
Crampton grabbed us and separated us and said, ‘I love you both; I do not
know which one of you to hit.’ Sellers and I started laughing, and that
was it.

“Then he disappeared again, and he was afraid to come back because
of embarrassment. If he came back and I was still directing, and he walked
onto the set and Orson was there, everybody was going to say, ‘Oh what a
shit you are.’ So he said to me, ‘I’ll come back if I don’t play any scenes
with Orson,’ and I said, ‘Get lost,’ and that was it.” And with that, Joe
McGrath left
Casino Royale
.

Actually, Feldman had been against McGrath from the beginning and
later claimed only to have hired him because Peter had demanded it.
Feldman claimed that he’d wanted multiple directors from the start. If that was
really the case, then the producer got exactly what he wanted.

As early as February, Feldman tried to get Bryan Forbes to come on
board again, but Forbes refused, particularly after he learned that Columbia executives, still stung by his refusal to accept the job originally, were
reacting to his tough financial demands by calling him a blackmailing
whore behind his back. Feldman turned to Blake Edwards, who said that
all it took was a million dollars. Feldman didn’t have a spare million dollars, so he turned to Clive Donner, whom Peter rejected. Feldman then
hired Val Guest. And Ken Hughes. And Robert Parrish. And Richard
Talmadge. And John Huston.

All in all, the filming of
Casino Royale
took place not only at Shepperton
but at the Pinewood studios and at MGM’s studios as well, with different
directors directing different actors in different scenes with three directors
of photography—Jack Hildyard, John Wilcox, and Nicolas Roeg. The
whole thing took eight months to shoot.

None of this was easy on Charlie Feldman. There were midnight meetings with Peter and Britt, whom Peter was at one time pushing to be cast
in the film. Phone calls and meetings with five new directors along with a
growing list of writers. More meetings with Peter and his slew of agents
and managers and lawyers—Harvey Orkin, Bill Wills, Freddie Fields, John
Humphries. . . . Explanations by letter and wire to Columbia executives in
Hollywood, who were becoming apoplectic at the rising costs. Then Orson
decided he’d had enough and left for Barcelona.

Feldman brought Robert Parrish onto the project not only because
Parrish was an experienced director (
Fire Down Below
, 1957, with Rita
Hayworth and Robert Mitchum, among others), but because he was an
experienced editor, too, having cut such films as John Ford’s
The Battle of
Midway
(1942) and Max Ophuls’s
Caught
(1949). (Parrish had also been
a child actor; he’s one of the mean boys who pitch spitballs at the Tramp
in Chaplin’s
City Lights
, 1931.) Feldman’s hope was that Parrish would
know what to do with the countless reels of disjointed footage into which
his multimillion-dollar baby, the still far from complete
Casino Royale
, had
degenerated. (The final cost was at least $12 million, at that time a very
high price tag.)

Parrish was also known for being a gentleman, someone who could
handle a temperamental movie star—or two—so at Feldman’s behest, Parrish flew to Barcelona to meet with Welles and convince him to return.
Delicately and with characteristic charm, he told the director of
Citizen
Kane
(1941),
The Magnificent Ambersons
(1942), and
Touch of Evil
(1958)
that he and Charlie Feldman would be very grateful to him if he would
please come back to London so that they could finish filming
Casino Royale
.
He’d be delighted to return, Orson replied. He’d just gotten bored waiting
for Peter to show up on the set and thought he’d take a holiday in Spain.

There was just one thing, Parrish then mentioned. “Peter doesn’t want
to film any more scenes with you.” And with that, Parrish later declared,
“Orson got up from the table, came over, kissed me—square on the lips—and said, ‘That’s the best news I’ve ever heard!’ ”

The two men returned to London, but shooting still didn’t proceed on
schedule. According to Parrish’s wife, Kathleen, Peter would drive around
in his car and constantly call the studio on his car phone to see whether
Welles was on the set. For his part, Welles would start drinking champagne
at nine in the morning and continue all day long. The hours went by—Orson was quite the life of the party—and then Peter would stick his head
in the door and Orson would immediately and loudly needle him and
nothing would get done that day.

• • •

Charlie Feldman’s contracts alone were creating a massive pile on his desk.
John Huston, the director of such films as
The Maltese Falcon
(1941) and
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
(1948) turned up in March as one of the
Casino Royale
’s directors as well as one of its actors. Huston had not only
just finished directing
The Bible
(1966). He’d played Noah, the narrator,
and the Voice of God, too. Maybe Feldman thought that only He could
control Peter Sellers.

The screenwriter John Law began work in March, too. Peter insisted
on it. Law was a television writer who worked, along with Graham Chapman, John Cleese, and Denis Norden, on David Frost’s program,
The Frost
Report
. Peter thought he’d be great for
Casino Royale
, and so Law was added
to the lengthening list of rewriters.

John Law was just the latest in what was to be a very long line of
scribes; at least eleven people wrote dialogue for, restructured the story of,
tinkered with, and destroyed the work of others on the script of
Casino
Royale
. Only Mankowitz, Law, and Michael Sayers got screen credit.
Woody Allen, Val Guest, Terry Southern, and Peter himself contributed
to it as well, uncredited. (On top of everything else, Peter and Feldman
spent March and April going back and forth with each other over whether
Sellers would get a writing credit. He didn’t.) The novelist Joseph Heller
(
Catch 22
), the television writer Lorenzo Semple, Jr. (
Batman
), and none
other than Peter’s Hollywood nemesis Billy Wilder were also brought on
board by Feldman at one point or another to try and salvage this great,
wobbling behemoth, but nobody has ever really sorted out exactly what any
of them wrote or whether any of it managed to find its way into the finished
film.

John Huston was ensconced in style at Claridge’s when the screenwriter
Nunnally Johnson, also in London, tried to get into the act as well. He sent
over to Huston some new script pages for
Casino Royale
with a little note
that might have just as easily applied to the whole fiasco: “If you can use
the enclosed, help yourself. If not, tear it up.”

By springtime, rumors of the conspicuous catastrophe were raging
through Hollywood and London like two clouds of loud mosquitoes. They
continued to bite until well after the film’s release. Peter “got hung up on
safety,” a Hollywood reporter divulged, “and his constant calls from his
Rolls squad car to Scotland Yard to report traffic violations frequently made
Page One. He insisted on immediate police action and often got so carried
away [that] he would make the arrest himself. Several afternoons of production were lost when Sellers appeared in court with his civilian arrests.”
This was an exaggeration, though it is true that on one occasion Peter did
bring a reckless driving charge against another driver, and he only seems to
have had to appear in court once (on April 1). After some protracted discussions with Feldman’s assistant, Jerry Bressler, he agreed to give the production a free day of shooting to make up for the day lost to the court
appearance.

Ursula Andress was growing so weary of the interminable production
that she started complaining to the press hounds. “I started the film on
January 11,” she sighed to Sheilah Graham in April. “It was to be just a
few weeks. It is already three months, and we can’t finish before June. Why?
There are so many things. If Peter feels tired, we must slow down. We are
never allowed to rush because of him. . . . [And] he writes a lot.”

Andress, for example, was originally supposed to have performed a
scene with Peter atop an elephant, but Peter nixed it and decided that the
scene should really feature bagpipers. The deleted elephant had, however,
provided Peter with an opening, which he seized, in one of his early battles
with Orson Welles. Welles and Sellers were shooting the key scene in which
LeChiffre and Tremble play the crucial rounds of baccarat. Welles decided
it was time for
him
to do a little improvising, so instead of going along
with the script, which required his character to lose the game, he performed
some off-the-cuff card tricks and won. Sellers is said to have blown a gasket.
“No!” Peter shouted in front of the assembled crowd of technicians and
extras. “I’ve had enough from
one
elephant.”

The stories keep coming. According to McGrath, there was to have
been a scene with “a giant roulette wheel when Sellers had a dream.
And he’s the ball, spinning around on this giant roulette wheel, and the
red and black divisions of the roulette wheel are girls’ legs in dresses—they’re in black and red. He’s spinning around the rim, and then he
rolls into someone’s crotch.” The sequence was shot but discarded; Peter
didn’t like it.

Then, in what Jacqueline Bisset recalls as a “sick joke,” Peter shot her
in the face with a blank. In the scene in question, Tremble creeps into a
window with his gun drawn and is most surprised when the occupant, Miss
Goodthighs (Bisset) recognizes him and calls out his name. Tremble was
supposed to turn and fire the gun in her general direction, but Peter pointed
it right at her and pulled the trigger. “First I thought I had actually been
actually shot,” Bisset later said. “Then, when I realized it had been a blank,
I thought I had been blinded. My face looked like a shower spout of pinpricks leaking blood. To get shot in your first scene with a big star—that’s
a nightmare.”

And day after day, everybody was kept waiting for everybody else to
show up on the set. In the annals of
Casino Royale
, Peter has taken the
brunt of the blame for the delays. But the production logs tell a more
nuanced story: “Waiting for Mr. Sellers.” “Waiting for Mr. Welles.”
“Waiting for Miss Andress.” “Waiting for Mr. Welles.” “Waiting for Mr. Sellers.”
“Waiting for Crowd . . .” By mid-March, with
Casino Royale
already running weeks over schedule, Peter was calling in sick. “Only able to shoot
fifteen seconds.” “Only able to shoot twenty seconds.” “Only thirty seconds
possible.” By the beginning of April, Feldman had calculated the total of
Peter’s delays at fourteen-and-a-half days at a cost of $705,000. Peter simply
left the production sometime in May or June, which is the reason Terence
Cooper suddenly takes over as yet another 007. At that point, somebody
had to replace Peter, and it didn’t much matter who.

• • •

Casino Royale
was the biggest, most overproduced mess of Peter’s career,
but even
it
has a few good moments, one of which features Peter in a
ridiculous striped outfit of no discernable category—a one-piece affair with
shorts and a revealing V-neck (in the back), a sort of Matelot pajama—spinning with Ursula Andress on a round and revolving fuschia-covered
bed surrounded by mirrors. Andress’s character, Vesper, is filming home
movies at the time, after which, meaninglessly, she shoots still photos of
Evelyn Tremble as Hitler, Napoleon, an anonymous flaming queen (“Hello,
sailor!”), and Toulouse-Lautrec.

Peter’s card game with Orson is pretty much the disaster it promised
to be, given that the two actors appear together in only one setup, with the
rest of the sequence being filmed in individual shots. The characters look
like they’re worlds apart; even with the flagrantly artificial mise-en-scène of
Casino Royale
the camera doesn’t lie. And despite some marvelous special
effects, the subsequent scene in which Le Chiffre tortures Tremble is obviously filmed not only in separate shots but in separate
sets
. “The most
exquisite torture is all in the mind,” Le Chiffre tells Tremble before pulling
the switches. He may be right, but by the time the spaceship lands in
Trafalgar Square, one just doesn’t care anymore.