Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (46 page)

Despite the fact that the Sellerses’ time in England now had to be
strictly limited for tax reasons—the jet set was largely a group of celebrity
tax refugees—Peter bought another new apartment, a four-bedroom affair
on Clarges Street in Mayfair. When the couple was together and not at
Brookfield, or Mayfair, or Los Angeles, or sailing in the Mediterranean,
they paused at Saint Moritz, where, in April, Britt and Peter threw a
birthday party for Michael. Spike Milligan came with his wife and children, and
everyone had a great time, except for Peter, who went to bed.

His behavior was finally becoming too much for Britt, so one day she
swallowed a fistful of sleeping pills. “It wasn’t a deliberate attempt to commit suicide, but I wanted to find oblivion.”

• • •

As with any big star, there were many blanks for every bullet. One of the
projects Peter was involved in that year was
The Russian Interpreter
, to be
directed by Michael Powell. They met at the Dorchester on March 4, 1967,
at which time Peter told Powell, the director of such classics as
The Red
Shoes
(1948) and
Peeping Tom
(1960), that he wasn’t the right director for
his own project. Powell asked him who he would suggest. Peter replied, “I
don’t know, but not you.” When Powell recorded the incident in his diary,
the entry was a single word: “Peterloo.”

The screenwriters Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker also proposed
The
Russian Interpreter
as a Peter Sellers project later in 1967. In fact, the three
men considered forming a production company called Peter, Paul, and
Larry. But neither the film nor the company ever came into being.

Peter wanted Graham Chapman and John Cleese to write a script called
The Future Began Yesterday
: a man uses a copying machine to duplicate his
wife. Peter wanted one particular actress to play the wife.

Sophia.

Peter also wanted to do Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist
Rhinoceros
set in
modern Hamburg; it was to be directed by
The Ladykillers
’ Alexander
Mackendrick, but his agent, David Begelman, talked him out of it.

There was
Pardon Me, Sir, But Is My Eye Hurting Your Elbow?
, a collection of skits that boasted an impressive lineup of talent: scripts by Allen
Ginsberg, Peter Cook, Gregory Corso, Terry Southern, Philip Roth, and
others; a score by Leonard Bernstein; direction by Arthur Hiller. At one
point Peter was said to be ready to play nine different roles in the omnibus
film, but the picture never came together. Several of the skits, later published in book form, would have been excellent vehicles for Peter. Southern’s entry, “Plums and Prunes,” is about a Westchester ad executive named
Brad, his wife Donna, and their nubile sixteen-year-old daughter, Debbie,
whose sexual attractiveness dawns all too disturbingly on Brad, who proceeds to punch, choke, and beat Debbie’s boyfriend to death. Ginsberg’s
“Don’t Go Away Mad” is a surreal farce about a bearded middle-aged man
who gets picked up by the cops in Central Park for not having an identity.
To cure him, he’s given electroshock therapy, drugs, a lobotomy, and an
exploding hydrogen bomb.

Peter got as far as offering Kenneth Griffith a role in yet another picture.
“Typical of Sellers,” Griffith declares, referring to their estrangement, “six
months later the phone rang. ‘How are you, Kenny? Look I’m doing this
film, and I’m playing two parts—brothers! Any other part in the film you
want, you can play. My dad!’ (I wasn’t all that old.) ‘Anything! Whatever
you want to play.
Please be in it
.’ So I went round and we read the whole
script and then I chose my role—because it went right through the film
and I would get more money. Suddenly I was told that Peter Sellers
wouldn’t do it.” (Griffith no longer recalls the name of the film, but it could
well be
The Bed Sitting Room
, 1969, directed by Richard Lester from a
script by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus and starring Ralph Richardson,
Rita Tushingham, Peter Cook, and Dudley Moore.)

In addition, there was an adaptation of Graham Greene’s story “When
Greek Meets Greek,” which Kenneth Geist optioned with an eye toward
producing the film. Geist wanted to cast Peter, Alec Guinness, John Lennon, and Lynn Redgrave. “I want to do it,” Peter told Geist, who asked
John Mortimer to write the script. “I’ll do it,” Mortimer told Geist. Then
Peter referred Geist to his accountant, Bill Wills. “It was a
Waiting for Godot
situation,” says Geist, who calls Wills “a great dullard.” The film never got
made.

Mel Brooks approached Peter about starring in Brooks’s first film, a
comedy about a failed theatrical producer and a nebbish accountant who
put on a Broadway show, but Peter was too distracted to listen. Brooks
describes his experience of trying to interest him in
The Producers
(1967):
“I sent the script to Peter Sellers, and I told him about the project, and he
had to go to Bloomingdale’s. So we walked around Bloomingdale’s—he
was shopping, I was talking. I’d be in the middle of a very important
moment—where Bialystock says to Bloom, ‘Do you want to live in a gray
little world, do you want to be confined, don’t you want to fly?’—and he’d
say ‘You like this buckle? What do you think of this buckle?’ ”

As Brooks experienced the odd interaction, Peter didn’t mean to be
rude, or dismissive, or regal: “It was just a series of different focuses. Foci.
He’d focus on something and get lost in it.” It was Dennis Selinger who
ultimately responded to Brooks on his client’s behalf, saying that he really
didn’t know whether Peter had read
The Producers
or not, but the fact was
(as Brooks tells it, quoting Selinger), “He’s so meshuggeneh—so crazy—he’s locked into so many things now. . . . This is not the right time to
approach him with new material.”

And there was
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: or, Pearls Before Swine
, an
adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1965 novel. The movie was to have been
directed by Blake Edwards, but Edwards and Sellers made a different film
in the meantime and had a few difficulties with each other.
God Bless You,
Mr. Rosewater
, too, went by the boards.

• • •

In the spring of 1967, the Hollywood trade papers excitedly scattered details
of Peter Sellers’s imminent return to Tinseltown. “I’ve wanted to come
back here and make a film on happy circumstances,” Peter told Army Archerd. The circumstance was Blake Edwards’s
The Party
(1968).

Sheilah Graham reported that Peter and Britt were scheduled to sail to
New York on the
Queen Elizabeth
, then fly to Los Angeles. And once they
arrived in Hollywood, Graham remarked, the couple wouldn’t “be living
in separate houses as they have done recently in England.” (In addition to
Brookfield and what appears to have been a standing reservation at the
Dorchester, they’d taken yet another apartment—this one on Curzon Street
in Mayfair. Who knows who stayed where?) Britt was supposedly packing
twenty trunks of clothes along with one of the couple’s Yorkshire terriers.

In late April, Peter arrived in L.A. He alone had taken the
Queen
Elizabeth
after all. Britt had gone to Sweden to be with her mother, who
had just been diagnosed with cancer. He was accompanied by two-year-old
Victoria, with whom he made the traditional trip to Disneyland in her
mother’s absence.

• • •

An interviewer showed up one day at the Goldwyn Studios, where
The
Party
was being filmed. “Why do you have all that dark stuff on your face?”
he inquired of Peter. This was quite the wrong thing to say. “If you don’t
know why I have this stuff on my face you have no right to interview me!’
Peter roared before ordering the unprepared hack off the set. “Go ahead—print all the dirty things you want to!” he shouted after him.

Originally titled
R.S.V.P., The Party
is about a polite, inept Indian
actor, Hrundi V. Bakshi, whose name is mistakenly added to the guest list
of an exclusive Hollywood bash, which he inadvertently destroys. Peter
plays the role in blackface, and it’s very funny as long as one isn’t terribly
concerned about issues of race and representation. Clad in a pale lavender
suit, bright red socks, and white shoes, Hrundi Bakshi is essentially a one-man subcontinental minstrel show, though a sympathetic one. It’s the smug
white Hollywood types who are contemptible in
The Party
. Producers and
bimbos, studio executives and their shallow wives—they bear the brunt of
Edwards’s scorn, with Hrundi V. Bakshi being the object of both the director’s and the audience’s sympathetic identification. It’s more the pity
that
The Party
’s Deluxe color registers Peter’s dark-brown makeup so
poorly.

Peter’s Indian accent features prominently, as it should, but
The Party
is largely about physical, cinematic sight-gag humor. Hrundi’s shoe floats
away on a preposterous stream that runs through the ultramodern house.
A drunken waiter (Steve Franken) wreaks havoc with the salad. Hrundi’s
Rock Cornish hen flies off his plate in one shot and impales itself on a
woman’s pronged tiara in the next, all in less than two seconds. The
drunken waiter proceeds to retrieve it, along with the woman’s blond beehive wig, which he places on the dismayed Hrundi’s plate. The wracking
tensions of dinner party etiquette are the scene’s main focus, and even under
the blackface Peter expresses them charmingly, naturally. One would never
guess that he and Blake Edwards were once again said to have stopped
speaking to each other at some point during the production. Assistants
relayed messages: “Ask Mr. Sellers if he’s comfortable crossing to the phone
while he’s doing the dialogue.” “Tell Mr. Edwards I’m very comfortable . . .”

In
The Party
, Edwards gives Leo McCarey’s comedic “pain barrier”
theory a literal twist in a meticulously constructed ten-minute sequence in
which Hrundi cannot find a proper place to urinate. The most accessible
bathroom is occupied by several women. His hands clasped in front of him,
he finds another; it’s taken up by a group of men smoking pot. Still another
is used by a waiter in red bikini briefs enthusiastically flexing in front of
the mirror. All the while, Sellers is tensing his body, his gait becoming more
and more warped and constricted. Hrundi wanders out to the lawn and
sets off the sprinklers. Then a waif-like aspiring starlet (Claudine Longet)
decides to sing a Henry Mancini song just as Hrundi rushes, dripping,
through the living room.

Politely, he waits for her to finish. With a wretched grin plastered on
his face, he leans against the wall, crosses his legs, clenches his fists, torques
from the waist, and looks to heaven for salvation. As the song concludes,
he creeps away in baby steps.

The sequence goes on for two more excruciating minutes. Hrundi tears
frantically from room to room to no avail before he finally gets to pee, and,
at the moment of relief, the look on Peter’s sweaty face is inimitable. In
close-up, his head lolls around in coarse ecstasy while his facial expression
suggests the more beatific joy of a martyred saint at the moment of ascension, and it’s still not the end of the sequence. An entire roll of toilet paper
unspools by itself, Hrundi stuffs it all in the toilet, breaks the toilet’s lid,
flushes, stops up the plumbing, and floods the bathroom before Sellers and
Edwards’s tour-de-force of bladder agony concludes.

• • •

As fundamentally visual as this film is, it’s nevertheless in
The Party
that
Peter Sellers, in his exquisite front-of-the-mouth Indian accent, utters one
of the choicest lines of his career, the immortal “Birdie num-num.” The
birdie is a parrot in a vast bamboo cage. The num-num is its seed.

“Birdie num-num,” Hrundi V. Bakshi announces, gazing at the feathered thing. “Birdie num-num. Birdie num-num!”

Seed by seed, he feeds the parrot for a few moments and then pitches
in a fistful. “I give you a lot,” he explains before wandering away. He spies
an elaborate electronic contraption built into the wall and flips a switch.
“Num-num. Num-
num
! Birdie num-num!” Hrundi V. Bakshi proclaims
to all the guests through the whole-house intercom. Then he makes an
impromptu series of chicken noises.

This is quintessential Peter Sellers—silly, insane, brilliant. “Birdie num-num” is funny for reasons that remain entirely obscure: a phrase verging
on meaninglessness, an accent both accurate and farcical, a bland and indefinable comportment that manages somehow to register as purely hilarious. For no apparent reason, the bit coalesces into something precise and
emblematic. It is impossible to imagine anyone other than Peter Sellers
achieving glory with “birdie num-num.” He remains to this day the master
of playing men who have no idea how ridiculous they are.

• • •

When
The Party
opened in April 1968,
Time
was snide: “This party, in
short, is strictly for those who don’t get around much.” The
New York
Times
was offended: “When, eventually, Sellers is reduced to mugging the
poor Indian’s pain at not being able to empty his bladder, the picture
hits a low point from which it never recovers.” When the British royal
family watched
The Party
together at Balmoral Castle, however, Elizabeth II laughed so hard that tears rolled down her face. The queen got
it right.