Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (51 page)

Cleese, says McGrath, is “very funny in the Sotheby’s scene, but I had
to bring him back. The first day he was a nervous wreck. He couldn’t play
opposite Peter. He said, ‘My God, I never realized the heat that comes off
him.’

“At the end of the first day [of shooting Cleese’s sequence], Peter said
to me, ‘We’ve really got to get rid of him and cast somebody else. Surely
we can cast somebody else and bring him in tomorrow.’ He’d just blown
the first day, [so] I said, ‘Let me talk to him.’ Sellers said, ‘I’m going home—you obviously want to see yesterday’s dailies—so give me a call later.’

“I went up to see John in the dressing room. He was really in tears.
He said, ‘I know I have blown this, I understand if you don’t want me
back tomorrow, I understand what’s going on. . . .’ I said, ‘Now look.
Peter has gone home, so what we’ll do is we’ll have an early call tomorrow, and we’ll shoot some reverses on the scene we did today.’ We got
him in early, and we shot the reverses, and I sent that reel off immediately to be developed. Peter came in about 10:00
A
.
M
. and I showed it
to Peter, who looked at it and said, ‘Oh, yeah, we can use it. I think
he’s just very nervous.’ Peter and I went up to John’s dressing room,
and everything was okay.”

Gail Gerber, Southern’s companion, recalls chaos of a more literary
nature:

“Terry became nonplussed the
first
time when he realized that the producers had decided it was ‘episodic’ and needed something to tie it together.
They thought, or maybe Terry thought, that Guy Grand could adopt a son
or something. Terry always took suggestions in good faith.

“He was prepared to write in the son, which he did, and fortunately
Ringo got to do the part. He was great in it—weird and great. Of course
the book had nothing to do with any of that, but this was a pretty off-the-wall production anyhow.

“There were lots of phone calls. ‘You’ve got to get to London! You’ve
got to get to London!’ We were going to leave Burroughs in our apartment
on 36th Street [the poet William S. Burroughs, the author of
Naked Lunch
and
Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict
] and go to London,
but Terry kept dragging his feet for some reason until finally we got on a
plane and went. Meanwhile they’d already started shooting.

“Because Terry wasn’t there, Peter got all these other writers. They
went for a whole different sort of slapstick thing. By the time we got there,
several scenes were, in Terry’s estimation, ruined. There was the hunting
scene, where they were blowing away birds until they were charcoal, and
what mostly offended Terry was the scene at the auction house. Guy Grand
was a very kind person and a great connoisseur of art, and he would never,
ever
plunge a knife into a fine painting. But they got carried away in their
own funny way.”

One day, says Gerber, “Terry came back from the set and said, ‘You’ll
never believe what they said today. “We’ve got Raquel Welch!” ’

“Terry said, ‘I don’t have a
part
for Raquel Welch.’
“They said, ‘Well, write one.’ ”

• • •

Cameos abound in
The Magic Christian
.

Spike Milligan turns up as a traffic warden. He gives Guy Grand’s black
Mercedes limousine a parking ticket, only to be told by Grand that if he
eats the ticket he’ll get £500. So he eats it.

Michael Sellers appears as a teenage hippie.

Wilfrid Hyde-White plays the ship’s captain. (
The Magic Christian
is
the name of the oceanliner.)

Christopher Lee is the ship’s vampire.

Roman Polanski sits alone at the ship’s bar. A large, diamond-brooched
blond approaches him and asks, “Would you like to buy a girl a dwink?”
Through the haze of Polanski’s cigarettes, she begins to sing “Mad About
the Boy,” parades theatrically around the room, and pulls her wig off to
reveal the head of Yul Brynner.

Everyone adjourns to the engine room, where they find seventy bare-breasted women rowing the ship forward. Their slavemistress: Raquel
Welch. She’s “the Priestess of the Whip.” “In, out! In, out!
In, out!
” Raquel
cries. King Kong then kills Wilfrid Hyde-White.

Terry Southern wanted Stanley Kubrick to appear in a cameo, too, but
as McGrath notes, “Stanley was just never available.”

Peter himself performs an eerie sort of cameo in
The Magic Christian
.
McGrath explains: “He plays the part of a nun. You just see this nun
occasionally in the back of the train.” With a demented smile on her face,
the good sister shoots photos during the strobe-light sequence. “That’s Peter. He had the nun outfit on, and he called up and said ‘Joe, quick,
quick!
Come up to the dressing room!’ Of course I rushed up there. I thought
there was something wrong with him.

“He had the wimple on and said, ‘Who am I?’

“I said, ‘You’re Peg.’ ”

“ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m Peg.’ He looked exactly like her.”

• • •

“The last scene in the movie is a shit vat, where everybody goes into the
shit for money,” observes McGrath. “Terry and I insisted that we do this
in the States under the Statue of Liberty.”

So the cast and crew finished up in London and prepared to go to New
York to film rich people wallowing for dollars in a tank full of feces.

“We were having this wrap party in London,” Gail Gerber looks back.
“There were about thirty of us at a giant round table. Peter was dating
Miranda Quarry at the time, and we’re onto coffee and, well, you know
how a hushed silence can fall? Well, it fell. And my voice rang out saying
that I had never had an ocean voyage. Peter picked up on it immediately
and said, ‘Yes! We must take the
QE2
to New York! Don’t you think,
Miranda?’ ”

It was not an idle question. At the time, Lord Mancroft, Miranda’s
stepfather, was a director of the Cunard Line, of which the
Queen Elizabeth
II
was the flagship. Luxury transatlantic passage was swiftly arranged. “We
all got a free trip,” says McGrath.

Gail Gerber recites the passenger list on the
QE2
: “There was Peter,
and Miranda, and a BBC crew following them, and the producer, and his
wife, and Derek Taylor (because of Ringo), and his wife, and five children,
and nanny, and Ringo, and Maureen, and was it one or two kids?, and a
nanny, and Terry and me. Allen Klein was on the ship as well. What the
hell was he doing there?” McGrath adds, “John Lennon was supposed to
come with us, but he got turned back at Southampton because of the visa
thing. He’d come down from London with us. In fact, we’d all gone down
in the big Mercedes limo we used in the film.” (Derek Taylor was the
Beatles’ friend and press agent; Maureen was Ringo’s wife; Allen Klein was
in the process of becoming the Beatles’ manager, a relationship that soon
soured and ended in protracted litigation. John Lennon was denied a visa
by the United States Embassy in London because of his arrest and conviction for marijuana possession in October 1968.)

“Hash oil, tobacco, cannabis, dynamite-like opium. . . .” Terry Southern is reciting the drug list on the
QE2
. “Peter became absolutely enthralled—he couldn’t get enough. For five days we were kind of in a dream
state.”

“They were all out of their heads,” McGrath notes. “There were blankets being rolled up and stuffed under doors.”

On the first night, there came a rap on McGrath’s door. He opened it
to find Peter dressed as the leader of a gang of nineteenth-century London
street urchin pickpockets. “Good evening,” said Peter. “I am the ship’s
Fagin. Tomorrow I shall be the ship’s purser, but tonight I am the ship’s
Fagin!” All night long he knocked on people’s doors and greeted them
singing “You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two.”

The stabilizers weren’t working properly—those of the
QE2
—and not
only Gail Gerber but some members of the crew became violently seasick.
Luckily, Sellers had brought along a remedy. “Peter had a great big jar of
honey,” Gerber relates, “and a big, long-handled spoon. It was laced with
hash oil. And with everybody he would meet, he’d dip the spoon in and
pass it around. He thought it was absolutely wonderful. He saw me all
green, and he dipped the spoon in and gave me some. I felt a lot better.”

An advance team had flown across the Atlantic and, as McGrath continues, “set up to do the shit vat on the island under the statue. At the last
minute Commonwealth United, which put the money up, said no. ‘We’re
not going along with this—it’s making it too hot for us.’ ‘You mean hot
for the money men,’ Terry said. Sellers then paid out of his own pocket,
and we shot it down on the banks of the Thames with St. Paul’s and all
that in the background. Sellers paid for that himself, and later on Commonwealth United gave him back the money. But they wouldn’t do it under
the Statue of Liberty. They wanted the movie, they wanted Peter Sellers,
‘We’ll give you anything, do it, do it, do it. . . .’ But, when it came to that,
as Terry said, it was too hot for them.”

The Magic Christian
, shit scene and all, was given a Royal Charity world
premiere at the Kensington Odeon Theater in London on December 11,
1969, to benefit Britain’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Children, Princess Margaret, president.

Spike Milligan provided the last word some years later: “It’s a very funny
film. I loved every inch of it. You’ve really got to hate people to love this film.”

• • •

Throughout 1969, as the Beatles’ personal behavior toward one another
deteriorated—Paul was getting bossier, John wanted the group to break up,
George resented Paul telling him how to play the guitar, Ringo was very
nice—they recorded an anthem not of mere tolerance but of a more genuine
acceptance
, touched as it was with resignation. “Let It Be,” they sang. Some
of their recording sessions—not only for “Let It Be” but other songs as
well, along with their rooftop concert—were filmed for inclusion in the
film
Let It Be
(1970).

Peter turns up in a scene that wasn’t used in
Let It Be
’s final cut, for
obvious reasons. The band is sitting on couches taking a break when their
good friend Pete shows up and pleasantly offers them some knockout grass.
It’s a facetious conversation punctuated by a lot of merry laughter, but it
still doesn’t seem terribly far off the mark in terms of Peter’s habits at the
time, not to mention the Beatles’ own drug use.

Alas, the deal doesn’t go down. Paul claims that he’s stopped smoking
pot; to be precise, Paul claims that a fictitious biographer has claimed that he
has stopped smoking pot. Peter expresses great disappointment at this news,
especially, he says, because he so fondly recalls the fantastic weed they’d once
shared. As the dejected Peter makes his exit, Paul pushes things a little too
far by advising Peter not to leave any syringes on the floor of the studio on
his way out. Paul explains that he’s worried about the band’s notoriety since
John Lennon’s 1968 drug bust. Cut to a close-up of Lennon sitting apart
from the others. John is noticeably displeased at Paul’s little joke.

• • •

Peter helped three other friends make another film in 1969—the disastrous
A Day at the Beach
(1970). Simon Hessera directed and Gene Gutowski
produced, from a script by Roman Polanski.

“We wanted Hessera to make his debut as a director,” Polanski relates.
“That’s what
he
wanted to do, and he was really fantastic at acting and
imitations, and we were convinced that he could do a good picture. Simon
sat down with Gérard Brach, a writer with whom I wrote several scripts,
and wrote a script called
The Driver
. [Brach cowrote the screenplays for
Polanski’s
Repulsion
(1965),
Cul-de-sac
(1966), and
The Fearless Vampire
Killers
(1967).] Peter wanted to play a lead in the film—whatever he could
do—[but] when I read that script I didn’t believe there could be a movie
made out of it. I thought we’d better find something else. I read a book by
a guy called Heere Heeresma, a Dutch writer, did an adaptation of it, and
suggested that Hessera do the film. Peter volunteered to do a cameo, and
that was it.

“We were having a little party or dinner or something like that at the
home of my partner at that time, Gene Gutowski, and [the producer]
Robert Evans was there with Charlie Bludhorn, the head of Paramount; we
were pushing for Paramount to finance the picture. Simon was there, and
Peter was there, too, and of course we started doing one of our routines.
They were tremendously amused—particularly Charlie—at what Simon
and Peter were doing, and somehow started the notion that they were going
to give some money for this film to be made.”
A Day at the Beach
was
reportedly financed at a cost of $600,000. “In those times that was a lot of
money,” Polanski comments. “I mean, it was sufficient to make a low budget movie.”

As Gutowski describes it, “
A Day at the Beach
is the story of the relationship between an alcoholic and his little daughter. He tries to have an
outing at the beach and promises his ex-wife that he will not drink. Of
course he falls apart and gets blind drunk. We shot it in Denmark—on the
beach and in Copenhagen. Peter spent about a week or two with us. We
had a very good time. He was always in pursuit of amorous adventures,
always in pursuit of being introduced to the woman of his life and, you
know, always in love or falling in love. That was Peter.”