Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (54 page)

Despite his insistence to
Esquire
that he wasn’t at all the sad, neurotic
clown that his first biographer, Peter Evans, had just gotten through portraying in
The Mask Behind the Mask
(a good book that Peter hated), Peter
was often quite morose. Siân Phillips recounts the melancholy nature of a
man adrift in a sea of material splendor: “He turned up in Rome in
O’Toole’s suite at the Excelsior and said, ‘Could I sleep on your couch?’
He wanted to come to England, but he wasn’t allowed—he’d be arrested
for tax or something, I don’t know—so he pitched his tent, as it were, in
O’Toole’s sitting room. O’Toole thought this was great fun for a bit and
then got very tired of it and said, ‘Go and stay with my wife in Hampstead.
I know she won’t tell anybody. You can just sneak in and hole up there,
and just don’t go out, and nobody will know you’re there.’

“Now, I had two children and a house full of people, and the only bed
was in the study on the ground floor, where all the phones were as well. So
I thought, ‘Right, okay, I’ll do this, he probably won’t be here for very
long.’ So he arrived with Bert, his trusty, chauffeur, companion, friend,
whatever, and they moved in with a mountain of luggage. I’ve never seen
more Louis Vuitton in my life—there were
trunks!
I couldn’t believe it. I
thought, ‘This is not very good.’

“I told my mother, who looked after the house for us. I said, ‘Peter
Sellers is coming to stay.’ ‘When’s he coming?’ ‘I don’t know. He’s sneaking
in under cover of darkness.’ ‘Never mind—I’ll make a big
boef bourguignon
.’ So she spent most of the day making a very authentic, exquisite
boef
bourguignon
, and Peter arrived, and she said, ‘Settle down, Mr. Sellers’—she was Welsh—‘and I will get you your supper. I’ve got a very good
boef
bourguignon
.’

“ ‘Oh, I’m a vegetarian.’

“
Consternation
.

“People were sent out to comb Hampstead for vegetables at that hour
of night, and from that moment on, the kitchen was piled high with
chopped vegetables. There were pyramids of vegetables all the way up and
down the work tops. Nobody could get anything done because my mother
was always making homemade soup for Peter Sellers. He said, ‘This is the
best soup I have ever tasted in my life.’ I said, ‘Well done, Mummy, you
know, but what is it?’ She said, ‘Well, I put bones in it, of course. And
marrow.’

“He was there for over a month, using both phones constantly, night
and day. Nobody could make a phone call. He had all these charts of
Eastern—I don’t know what they were, pictures of Buddhists. . . .

“He would just stay in his study communing with himself or with Bert
on the phone. He was just terribly, terribly sad. I have to say that as a house
guest he was the most depressing person I’ve ever had in the house. I used
to creep in at night and try to sneak past the study door so I could get to
bed without Peter intercepting me, because he would sit down and cry. He
would talk about his life, and, oh, it was so. . . . I was sorry for him, but it
was so depressing having him around. Not one joke from beginning to end.
Not a laugh.”

And so he married Miranda.

• • •

“I was the best man at that wedding, and the bridesmaids were the dogs,”
Bert later said. “Then they went off to their honeymoon. I accompanied
them. We were in the south of France on the yacht, and it’s honeymoon
time, and then one morning we couldn’t find him. The ship-to-shore phone
rang, and it was him. He’d booked himself into a hotel, and he’d left his
bride of weeks on the yacht with me, and we couldn’t work out why.”

Neither could he. As any actor knows, most entrances require an exit.
Even
with
Miranda he kept moving. For tax reasons, the newlyweds moved
to Ireland; they bought the coach house of a 1,000-acre manor near the
village of Maynooth in County Kildare, about an hour’s drive from Dublin.
Periodic privileges at the immense manor came with the deal.

He and Peg remained in touch. As he told the British entertainment reporter Roderick Mann, “When I was living in Ireland with Miranda, we kept chickens. And one day the hen got lost. I thought the
fox had got it, but as Miranda was distressed we held a séance. When
Peg came through I asked her, ‘Do you know where the hen has gone?’
‘Of course I do,’ she said. ‘It’s up in the rafters of the stable.’ ‘Hang
on,’ I said. ‘I’ll take a look.’

“Well, I couldn’t find the damn thing and I told her so. ‘It’s not there,’
I said. ‘Of course it’s there,’ she said. ‘Go and have another look. But don’t
be long. I’m not sodding about all night looking for a perishing hen.’ ”
They found the hen the next day. It was trapped in the rafters, just as
Mother promised.

But the tale is suspect because, on other occasions, Peter claimed that,
no, he did not actually speak to Peg directly but rather to an intermediary;
another departed soul relayed her messages. According to Peter, the medium
was the spirit of an American Indian named Red Cloud.

• • •

“I’ve been in pictures since Jesus was a lance corporal,” declares Rod Amateau, the director of Peter’s next picture,
Where Does It Hurt?
(1972). “I
never treated him with any reverence. Only respect.”

Where Does It Hurt?
is a gleefully sour comedy about a guy named
Hammond (Rick Lenz) who comes into Valley Vue Hospital for a chest X-ray but has no health insurance. It looks bad for him until he mentions
that he owns his own house. “You have a house!” the receptionist cries, her
eyes lighting up as she pushes the secret toe buzzer that alerts Albert Hopfnagel (Peter), the fast-talking hospital administrator, to the presence of an
easy mark. Hammond is whisked away and given a variety of procedures,
a good deal of which pertain to his anus—blood work, a high colonic, an
electrocardiogram, a rectal probe, urinalysis, and a barium enema, all leading up to a pointless appendectomy.

The comedy is raw, bitter, and misanthropic. “Let me add this up,”
Hopfnagel snaps at one of the doctors in Peter’s most pinched American
accent to date. “A) Your sister-in-law, Mrs. Manzini, needs a hysterectomy;
b) she wants you to operate; and c) she wants to pay for the hysterectomy
with S&H Green Stamps. Does she have any idea of how many S&H Green
Stamps this operation would take?” “She has,” the doctor replies. “She was
president of the Blessed Sacrament Ladies’ Auxiliary. They collected Green
Stamps. They broke up over birth control, and she kept the stamps.” Hopfnagel works with this information: “As you know, our customary charge
for a hysterectomy is $500. We shall have to charge her $2,000 because we
are taking Green Stamps.
Yes or no?!
”

Where Does It Hurt?
is an equal opportunity offender. “So much for
faggot power,” Hopfnagel mutters discontentedly after a gay informant fails
to provide precise information on the potential visit of the city’s hospital
commissioner. He then calls the hospital’s Japanese-American lab technician (Pat Morita) a “greedy little Buddha-head.” “If it hadn’t been for my
creative white cell count,” Mr. Nishimoto retorts, “that sore-ass Hebe
wouldn’t even
be
a patient.” (Patient Hammond has been confused with
patient Epstein and has been treated accordingly.) “So much for the Yellow
Peril,” says Hopfnagel after throwing Mr. Nishimoto out of his office. It’s
a nasty comedy, but that’s its aesthetic. In its bitterness, if not its political
incorrectness,
Where Does It Hurt?
was ahead of its time.

• • •

According to Rod Amateau, money was the key to understanding Peter
Sellers. In the director’s words, Peter was “economically determined.” (“The
word is
penurious
,” Amateau adds by way of clarification.) In a meeting in
Ireland at what Amateau calls Peter’s “drafty manor—it was terribly cold,”
they agreed to finance the film fifty-fifty and take equal shares of the profits.
(
Where Does It Hurt?
was coproduced by Josef Shaftel.) “This was an independent production done on the cheap,” Amateau bluntly states. “About
$600,000. I mean,
really low
.” “We can make this picture for short money,”
Amateau remembers telling Peter, which provoked the following reply. Peter (in Hopfnagel’s reedy American twang): “Rod, yer my kinda guy.”

There was a brief rehearsal period before shooting began in Los Angeles
on July 7, at which point Peter called and asked for his limousine. Rod
replied that he could certainly provide a limo for Peter if that was what
Peter wished, but since their deal was to split the costs evenly as well as the
profits, the car would cost Peter $50 a day. The following morning, Peter
left his rented Benedict Canyon house and arrived at the studio in the
passenger seat of the key grip’s pickup truck. “He lives near me,” was the
way Peter explained his transportation to Amateau, who adds that “from
then on there wasn’t one moment of delay on the whole picture. He
couldn’t have been nicer. He was watching the clock the whole time.”

Peter was very well liked by the cast and crew. He was efficient, helpful,
and methodical in getting the film completed on schedule. Asked if he was
doing any drugs at the time, Amateau replies, “Who
didn’t
do drugs?”

“It wasn’t a very good picture,” Amateau acknowledges, but it did end
up in the black. “It made money not because it was a great picture but
because it was cheap. Peter was very happy to go home with a full wallet.”

For a birthday present, Peter gave Amateau a copy of the
Encyclopedia
Britannica
in two condensed, microprinted volumes, along with an accompanying magnifying glass. “You want to know everything,” Peter told his
director, “here’s your chance to know everything else.” Soon thereafter,
Peter and Amateau happened to be in Rome at the same time, and the
three of them—Rod, Peter, and Bert—went out to dinner in Trastevere,
where Peter and Rod launched into an argument about Fellini. “He’s great,”
said Rod. “You’re crazy,” said Peter. “You like everybody.” No, Rod
protested, Fellini is a very nice man. . . . No, said Peter. Amateau doesn’t remember precisely what they argued about—there was wine involved—but
he does recall that Fellini’s tendency (as Amateau describes it) “to direct by
the numbers” made no sense to Peter, who found it offensive to actors.
(Fellini, with whom Amateau had worked, often directed his actors to move
around the set in a series of numbered positions, and he rarely gave them
dialogue when they shot but instead filmed them without sound and
dubbed in the dialogue later. Sellers, who never worked with Fellini, found
the director’s habits to be obnoxious.)

“Fuck him,” said Peter.

As the Fellini argument escalated, Bert began to make silent no-no
gestures on the sly. Rod changed the subject. The men parted when dinner
was over. Peter was a little chilly. Rod returned to his hotel, took a shower,
and the doorbell rang. “It’s not me,” said Bert. “You’ve got to understand
Peter. You won’t like it, but he wants the encyclopedia back. He’s mad at
you. Don’t say he’s childish! I’ve told him that. And don’t say no or you’ll
get me in trouble.” Amateau gave Bert the encyclopedia. Bert left.

A little while later, the phone rang. “In other words,” said Peter’s voice
through the receiver, “you thought so little of my gift that you gave it back
without protest. If you’d have really liked it you’d have fought for it.”

Rod: “I don’t fight for anything except women and money.”

Peter: “You’re off my list.” Then he hung up.

For the next few months, Peter kept calling from wherever he happened
to be—Switzerland, England, Italy, Ireland—and begging Amateau to
please let him send it back. “Don’t send it, Peter,” said the amiable Amateau. “Bring it with you the next time we get together.”

Eventually they found themselves in London at the same time,
whereupon Bert arrived at Rod’s door bearing the encyclopedia. “He’s
downstairs,” said Bert. Amateau went to the window and saw Peter sitting
in his car, waving up to him in the queenly manner.

“I had the best of him because I appealed to his worst nature,” Amateau
fondly concludes. “And lemme tell you, it takes one to know one. He was
a lot more talented, but what the hell?”

• • •

Where Does It Hurt?
was lucky. Many projects didn’t pan out at all. “Spike
Milligan and I are working on an idea now,” Peter had declared in 1970.
“I can’t tell you what it is, but it’s similar to spiritualism and that sort of
thing. Not spiritualism, but in a similar area.” Spike was less circumspect.
It was to be, in Spike’s words, “a comic version of the Bible.” Lo, it did
not come to pass.

The Last Goon Show of All
was sufficiently antediluvian to make up for
any missing biblical tale. Recorded on April 30, 1972, at the Camden
Theatre (to be broadcast on radio May 10 on Radio 4 and televised on
BBC1 at Christmastime), it marked a reunion between Peter, Spike (who
wrote the script), Harry, Ray Ellington, Max Geldray, and the announcer
Andrew Timothy, who had been onboard for the first
Crazy People
in 1951.
“When I announced the first
Goon Show
I was thirty,” Timothy declares
in the opening moments. “I am now ninety-three.”

“I will now whistle the soliloquy from
Hamlet
,” Peter announces in
stentorian tones to the assembled studio audience, which included Prince
Philip and Princess Anne. (Prince Charles was in the navy at the time and
telegrammed that he was “enraged” that he couldn’t attend.) And the soliloquy Peter did whistle, trailing off after the first few recognizable bars
and moving slightly away from his microphone, at which point Andrew
Timothy dryly breaks in: