Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (48 page)

Studio executives didn’t quite know what to make of Brooks’s stomach-hurting laughmaker, and
The Producers
was still looking for distribution
support. Sellers thought he could help: “The following day I got hold of as
many producers as I could, urging them to come and see this film. I got a
good turnout. I took out full-page ads in the
Hollywood Reporter
and
Variety
.
The movie is one of the greatest comedies that’s been made recently.” He
had been unable to listen to Brooks’s lines because of the distractions of
Bloomingdale’s, but once it was finished, he could
see
and
hear
it; even
through his spiked-brownie haze, Peter saw what Hollywood executives
were dismissing. His championing of
The Producers
gave it the industry
attention that turned it into a smash hit.

• • •

I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!
is a flower-power comedy, a classic of its genre
thanks almost entirely to Peter’s performance. Harold Fine (Peter), a
middle-aged, asthmatic, Lincoln-driving lawyer, undergoes a profound life
transition after his hippie brother’s breathy girlfriend, Nancy (Leigh Taylor-Young), bakes him some “groovy” Pillsbury brownies—“groovy” owing to
the pot she adds with a liberal hand. Harold himself becomes groovy. He
leaves his fiancée, Joyce (Joyce Van Patten) at the altar, outfits himself in
glorious hippie duds, grows his hair into a shaggy, John Lennon-ish cut (a
moderately less ludicrous version of Dr. Fassbender’s Prince Valiant in
What’s New, Pussycat?
), and takes to reading
The Psychedelic Experience
naked with the free-spirited Nancy.

While his histrionic mother (Jo Van Fleet)—her voice full of whining,
her hair full of bluing—consoles Joyce with such splendidly grating comments as “women are built for hurt,” Harold seeks the advice of a white-robed guru. It doesn’t quite work. They walk together on the beach. “But
how can you know what a flower is, Harold, if you don’t know who
you
are?” the guru asks. “I’m trying, guru, I’m really trying!”

“When you stop trying, then you’ll know who you are.”

Harold, meanwhile, is gingerly stepping over seaweed and bits of shell.
“Well, I’m trying to stop trying.” This is not coming easily to Harold.

Harold cringes at the touch of cold ocean water on his Jewish feet as the
guru goes on about flowers, energy, and life. Harold shivers and is pained.
The words are amusing; Peter’s gestures and expressions are extraordinary.

Harold’s transformation ends when a gang of freeloading hippies overrun his hippified apartment. He reunites with Joyce but walks out on their
marriage ceremony a second time. His life as a hippie has taught him nothing if not how to be even more selfish than he was at the beginning, but
in 1968 this appears to have been considered a happy ending, because as
he escapes down the sidewalk, a hippie calls out, “Hey! Where ya goin’,
man?” “I dunno,” Harold Fine replies, breaking into a run. “I don’t know.
And I don’t care!
I don’t care!
There’s got to be something beautiful out
there! There’s got to be! I know it!” Peter was still organizing his life through
his films’ dialogue. He still believed he could find solace somewhere.

• • •

Paranoia about his wife, paranoia about his performance. . . . At one point
in late December 1967, Peter demanded that the
Alice B. Toklas
set be
closed. Apparently it was for a love scene with Leigh Taylor-Young; Peter
may have worried about becoming overenthusiastic. But whatever the cause,
two police officers stood guard at the outer door of the sound stage as
nonrequired technicians were ushered away and screens were arranged
tightly around the set.

Photoplay
got the scoop: “Peter Sellers has his cast, crew, and friends
so confused with his demands. Sellers, I’m told, ‘is behaving like a brat.’
Most popular joke on the Warners lot is when someone asks, ‘Was that a
sonic boom?’ Answer: ‘No, that’s Sellers blowing his top.’ ”

While Peter was filming
I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!
in Hollywood,
Britt was in New York filming
The Night They Raided Minsky’s
, which left
Peter more than enough room to come on to Leigh Taylor-Young. And yet
Peter sent Britt at least twenty benevolent telegrams while they were separated. One was signed “Elizabeth and Philip,” another “Margaret and
Tony.” “Richard and Elizabeth,” “John, Paul, George, and Ringo,” “Carlo
and Sophia,” “Alec Guinness and Peter O’Toole,” and “Maharishi Yogi”
were also among the well-wishers.

Despite the violence and the grilling, Britt was still making an effort,
however doomed, to be the wife Peter wanted, or claimed to want, so she
shuttled back and forth between the
Minsky’s
shoot in New York and Peter
in Los Angeles. Some weekends, one of her costars, Elliot Gould, would fly
with her to Hollywood to spend two days with his wife, Barbra Streisand,
who was filming
Funny Girl
(1968). The two couples sometimes had dinner
together at Barbra’s beach house in Malibu.

• • •

On the set, Peter Sellers continued to live up to the gossip, but his brilliance
when the camera was running kept striking his colleagues as well. He was
“a magnificent artist,” declares the actor Salem Ludwig. “It was a pleasure
to be on the set with him. Once the camera was on, you wouldn’t want
more from an actor. He was really
with
you. He was so supportive on
camera—he did everything to make you comfortable.”

Then comes the inevitable caveat. Ludwig also had the opportunity to
view Peter at his temperamental worst when he caused an incident with Jo
Van Fleet on the day the pot brownies scene was scheduled to be shot.
Though no one realized it at the time, the contretemps had actually begun
brewing the day before. Knowing that one of the film’s key scenes would
occupy them the following morning and afternoon, the actors, director, and
crew wrapped up quickly, and everybody left the set except for the four
brownie principals (Peter, Van Patten, Van Fleet, and Ludwig), the director
Averback, and the two writers, Mazursky and Tucker. Ludwig recalls that
a vague conversation began to arise—few words but lots of implications—but nobody said anything explicit until finally it had to be spelled out for
Ludwig and Van Fleet: Everybody was supposed to head over to Peter’s
place and get stoned. The plan was to use their experiences when the cameras rolled in the morning.

Van Fleet and Ludwig each expressed concern about the illegality of
smoking marijuana. Van Fleet was especially nervous about it and begged
off, claiming to be allergic to the stuff. Besides, the two older actors said,
they were
actors
. They could
pretend
. As Ludwig made a point of observing
at the time, “You don’t have to actually explode an atomic bomb to get the
effect of a mushroom cloud.” And so neither Ludwig nor Van Fleet went
to Peter’s house to get high.

There was a 7:30
A
.
M
. call the next morning, but Peter didn’t show
up. Everybody sat around waiting until finally, at about 11:30, Peter surfaced, smiling very broadly and greeting almost everyone with unusual effusion. (Ludwig figures the delay cost at least $40,000, but Sellers was
characteristically unperturbed by that kind of expense.) The crew then
launched into what Ludwig describes as the standard routine of filming
with Peter, which is to say that Peter disappeared, the crew arranged everything precisely for him, and only then did they call him onto the set. Jo
Van Fleet was sitting on the couch when he arrived. Sellers appeared and
realized that she was the only person he hadn’t greeted yet.

What he didn’t understand was that she was in character already. And
unfortunately for Peter, her character was that of his mother. Clearly, she
had her own idiosyncracies.

In the manner of a six-year-old, Peter tiptoed up to the side of the
couch and whispered, in a little-boyish way, “Jo.” She didn’t respond. He
repeated it: “Jo.” And again she didn’t respond. He tiptoed around to the
other side of the couch and tried again. “Jo.” Then he blew up. “I hope
you’re feeling better this morning!” he shouted.

“Oh, good morning, Peter,” Van Fleet said matter-of-factly.

As Ludwig puts it, “Peter vituperated.” It was all directed at an astonished Jo. She was awful in the picture, Peter declared to the room, over and
over, and with increasing amplitude. She was ruining the whole film, he
roared. And by the way, she was ruining everyone else’s morale, too.

“I realized he was talking about himself,” Ludwig observes.

Joyce Van Patten slipped quickly away in a successful effort to distance
herself from the acrimony. But Hy Averback simply froze in place, as did
Mazursky and everyone else. Peter kept on yelling for a full twenty minutes.
No one made any attempt to calm Peter down, nor did anyone come to Jo
Van Fleet’s defense.

“Peter?” Ludwig finally broke in. “Is there some grievance? Let’s go into
your dressing room and talk about it.” “
Yes
,” Peter snapped. “It’s something
very specific. It’s her general attitude!” And with that he marched off
the set.

Ludwig began to follow him but was restrained from doing so on the
grounds that Peter needed no further encouragement. “If you do this,”
someone said, “he’ll get on his yacht and we’ll never see him again.”

Jo Van Fleet “went to pieces.” Distraught, she called her psychoanalyst
and discussed it with him over the phone, after which she invited Ludwig
to dinner that night and talked it through with him as well, at which point
Mazursky telephoned and invited himself over for more conversation about
Peter and his perceptions and what it all meant and what they were going
to do about it. Mazursky expressed regret. “You did something I should
have done,” he told Ludwig.

The problem was easily but awkwardly solved the following day. The
scene was shot in two parts. Peter and Joyce Van Patten performed on one
side of the soundstage, while Jo Van Fleet and Salem Ludwig performed
on the other. The editor Robert C. Jones pieced it all together later. (In
fact, there is a single shot of the four characters all in the same space; the
rest is done in close-ups and two-shots.)

Sad to say, grudges were held. When
I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!
was
about to open, Salem Ludwig was left conspicuously uninvited to the cast
and crew screening. He called the production office and was told just to
show up. He did so—and was promptly snubbed by Paul Mazursky.

Sellers went on to bad-mouth the film in the press. “You should have
seen it before they got at it. . . . They set up this marvelous Jewish wedding
ceremony and at the last moment they lost their nerve and dubbed the
rabbi into English! Now if the audience hadn’t gathered by then that he
was a rabbi speaking Hebrew, I don’t see that there’s much hope for the
human race.” (In fact, the brief shot of the rabbi’s lips moving proves that
indeed Warner Bros. did embrace the lowest common denominator by
overdubbing Hebrew into English.)

A more outlandish complaint came much later, in 1980, when Peter
expressed what appeared to be his long-standing outrage in a
Rolling Stone
profile:

“I wish you’d seen the original one with the interviews with Allen
Ginsberg and Tim Leary. Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker and myself, we
got into the lab at night and
we
cut the film. Can you believe it? We bribed
the guard, we spent all night with an editor, and when the schmucks came
in the following day, we were there bright and early as though we’d just
arrived, and we said, ‘Listen—we don’t like the finished film. We think
you should see our attempts.’ So they see it and they say [impersonating a
crass Hollywood executive] ‘Too weird. Who the
fuck
is Ginsberg? Who
the
fuck
is Leary? People are going to know about Ginsberg and Leary in
Orange County? I mean, dat’s ridiculous!’ I said, ‘They’re not for Orange
County! They’re for the world!’ ”

One must wonder one of two things: At what points were the narrative
of
I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!
disrupted by interviews with two reigning
gurus of the counterculture, or at what point did Peter fabricate the tale?

• • •

With Britt in New York, London, or Sweden, and with Peter never being
one for monogamy and Roman having introduced Peter to Mia Farrow,
the two couples—Peter and Mia, Roman and Sharon—went into the desert.

Their destination: Joshua Tree, California, a lunar terrain with parched,
desolate earth punctuated by bizarre cacti, all conveniently located within
a few minutes’ drive of Palm Springs. “Because of its reputation for UFO
sightings,” Polanski recounts, “it was very much in vogue.” Necessarily,
they all smoked some pot, after which Peter and Mia wandered into the
dry wasteland holding hands. Unknown to them, Roman followed. He
eavesdropped as they engaged in a deeply spiritual, mystical, ludicrous, and
entirely appropriate dialogue about eternity, stars, and alien life forms. The
puckish Polanski then tossed a stick at them from the darkness. “Did you
hear that?!” Peter whispered. “What
was
it?” Mia asked.

“I don’t know,” Peter replied, “but it was fantastic.
Fantastic!
”