Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (55 page)

“That was Mr. Sellers practicing his comeback.”

Down, down, down. Would the fall
never
come to an end?

H
e hoped to solve his career problems by making a movie about a cretin.
Shortly after Jerzy Kosinski’s newest book hit the stands in 1971,
the émigré novelist received a brief and cryptic telegram: “Available my
garden or outside it. C. Gardiner,” followed by a telephone number. Curious, Kosinski dialed it. Peter picked up. Kosinski had created
Being There
’s
Chauncey Gardiner to express the life and soul of Peter Sellers, Peter Sellers
said. As Kosinski later described it, “He sees his life as dictated by chance.”
They met at an Italian restaurant in London. “He was responsible for the
worst diarrhea of my life,” Kosinski later declared.

Gene Gutowski took an option for the film rights. “I had a deal with
MGM—a very quick one I made when the book was a bestseller. Kosinski
gave me the rights because he thought I had done such a good job with the
Polanski pictures, and he trusted me. Through a social friendship with Kirk
Kerkorian, I was able to get it right through the management of MGM,
and very quickly I had an okay to go ahead with the picture. It was then
on the basis of Gore Vidal writing the screenplay. Gore was happy to do
so. It all happened in forty-eight hours. Then Kosinski changed his mind
under the influence of a friend of his, a Polish cameraman who wanted to
direct the picture and said to Kosinski, ‘Look, with Gore Vidal writing the
screenplay, you’ll never have full control.’ It was very self-serving, because
he wanted to direct the picture. The project disintegrated, and of course
MGM stepped out.”

• • •

What Peter made instead was another filmed production of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
(1972), which consisted entirely of famous featured
performances with lots of animal heads. Peter plays the March Hare. He
filmed his rather short sequence at Shepperton in June 1972.

Despite its all-star cast—including Michael Crawford, Spike Milligan,
Dudley Moore, and Ralph Richardson—
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
turned out to be, in Peter’s words, “a lousy film.” He was publicly enthusiastic about the movie’s prospects while it was still being shot, but as he
announced to the press after seeing the thing, “We all feel—I’m speaking
on behalf of all the actors because we all spoke about it—that it’s a poorly
constructed piece of movie.” Fortunately for Peter, or at least for Peter’s
art, he left London soon after completing his work on
Alice
and went off
to the Channel Islands to film one of the best but least-known movies of
his career.

• • •

The Blockhouse
(1973) is about a group of Allied prisoners of war who
happen to be building fortifications on the northern coast of France when
D-day hits. With bombs falling all around them, their Nazi guards flee,
leaving the prisoners unsupervised. They dive into a well-stocked bunker,
where a perfectly targeted Allied bomb seals them in, and they die, one by
one, over time.

“It’s based upon a true story,” the director Clive Rees explains.
“Actually, they were German soldiers who were looting a warehouse when the
Red Army was coming. The entrance was blown up by the Germans, who
trapped their own people inside. Years later the place was opened up. Two
people were found alive, four or five dead and bathed in flour, and of the
two people who came out alive, one died ten minutes after rescue, the other
thirty-six hours later, blind and insane.”

Sellers plays the Frenchman, Rouquet, a quiet former teacher. There
was little difficulty in piquing his interest in the role. “Oddly enough, we
just rang him up,” says Rees. “Anthony Rufus Isaacs, who was the producer,
knew him greatly. He was in Ireland and married to Miranda, who was a
bit ill—she was recovering from meningitis—and we went over to see him.
She
liked it a lot and told him to read it, and he should do it, and we talked
briefly, and he said yes.

“Dennis Selinger then got on to us, and said that Peter had changed
his mind and wouldn’t do it at all, because obviously the kind of money
we had would only be enough for a bit part. So we rang Peter up and said,
‘You don’t want to do it?’ He said, ‘That’s rubbish. I
do
want to do it. I
will
do it.’ So he did it.” Always a Goon at heart, Peter evidently appreciated
the ultimate absurdity of being buried alive by the greatest liberation army
in human history.

“William Morris told us that Charles Aznavour (who plays Visconti)
didn’t want to do it either,” Rees adds, “and yet he
did
want to do it. We
flew over to Paris, where his agent met us early in the morning and took
us out to lunch. When she asked what was the budget of the film, we said,
‘About £75,000.’ She presumed that that was Charles’s fee.” Then Rees
and Rufus Isaacs met with Aznavour himself. “The agent made it quite
apparent that she thought that Anthony and I were from Warner Brothers—serious film-type people, which we weren’t. Then she said, ‘What is
the budget for this film?’ We said ‘£75,000,’ and she said, ‘I think you
should leave.’ ” They were at the front door of Aznavour’s house, Rees says,
when Aznavour assured them, “ ‘Don’t worry. I’ll do your film.’ In fact, he
did it for seven grand. When we ran out of money during the film he never
asked for it. He never pushed us at all. Peter, on the other hand, did.

“I got a call from Peter saying, ‘I’m not coming to your fucking rehearsal until I get my fucking money.’ Well, we didn’t have very much, so
Anthony got on to my bank manager and said, ‘We’ve got Peter Sellers, we
owe him ten grand, he wants it now, or he’s not going to continue.’ So he
lent us
twenty
grand. When we got it, we asked Peter who we should pay
it to, and he said, ‘Pay it to Hare Krishna in Geneva, Switzerland.’ That’s
what happened, and I haven’t the faintest idea.”

• • •

The Blockhouse
is about being buried alive and yet remaining alive. Stocked
plentifully by the Gestapo, the bunker is a cavernous warehouse full of
water, canned food, sacks of flour, wine, and candles, so the men can survive
for quite some time, knowing all the while that they must die there. It’s a
social drama, cerebral but raw—part Samuel Beckett, part Samuel Fuller.
“I’ve been studying these candles,” Rouquet gently announces early in the
film. “They last about five hours each. Since we have been in this room we
have burned exactly twelve. My pulse rate is normally seventy-two beats
per minute. If you multiply that by sixty it will give you four thousand
three hundred twenty beats per hour. We had been down here about
twenty-four hours before we came to this room. That makes three days in
all, exactly. It seems a pretty reliable way of keeping time—provided we
have candles and my heart doesn’t stop.”

Clive Rees describes another moment: “There’s a kind of ridiculous
party scene. Rouquet thinks he’d like a drink, so he asks Visconti at the bar
to give him some brandy, and being a typical kind of Nepalese rat, Visconti
says, ‘Get it yourself.’ So Lund (Per Oscarsson) offers to get him something.
Rouquet is so childishly grateful that he looks over, food falling out of his
mouth, and tears are running down his face. That’s genuine—Peter just
cried. He was an extraordinary man to work with.

“To me there’s a humanity in it. I don’t expect anybody else to see it,
but I think there’s a kind of poetry. As I say, I’m very pretentious, but it
starts off very conventionally, and gradually it gets more and more interior;
there’s more and more silence, and people’s thoughts and feelings are expressed not by what they say but by what is registered in their faces. To me
it was like a series of icons, and therefore there was a sort of beauty. Harry
Crafton, the makeup person, contributed a great deal to that film because
although they’re getting more and more wrecked, they’re actually getting
rather beautiful. At least that was the idea.

“The whole film was shot underground. We were seventy feet down,
and it was so incredibly quiet and depressive. And what with the nature of
the story, it kind of got to people. Sellers could really feed on that. It enabled
him, I think.

“It was filmed in Guernsey, a small island just off the French coast,”
says Rees. “Peter would be standing on his head in the morning, eating his
special macrobiotic food and all that,” and causing no difficulties. “The fact
was,” Rees notes, “we were virtually trapped on an island. No one had
anywhere to go, so we sort of
lived
it, in a way. There weren’t any night
clubs to go off to; there weren’t any distractions.”

Still, there was the obligatory Sellers-as-bad-boy incident. One morning, Rees relates, “He told the makeup and hair people what they should
put him in. He turned up in this incredible wig. Peter had designed a
punk show, and he looked ridiculous. He was also stoned out of his
head. He’d been smoking dope like nobody’s business, and he was writing stuff like ‘Bruce Sucks’ all over the walls. I really didn’t know what
to do.

“It was a scene in which each of the actors had, by that time, established
his own little section of the room. So I decided, Sellers was
here
, so I’d start
there
and work my way around the room and get to him last. When I finally
got around to him, he’d fallen asleep. I woke him up and said I wasn’t
feeling too well and we’d continue it tomorrow.

“At 3:00 o’clock that morning, I got a phone call from Peter saying,
‘You didn’t like my wig, did you?’

“I said that, no, I thought it was wrong in the circumstance, and I
explained the thing about the aging and the changing and the icons and
that kind of stuff, and he agreed, and that was the end of it. He was
amazingly helpful and sympathetic, once we got his money off to Hare
Krishna.”

• • •

In the film, Rouquet eventually commits suicide. Rees describes the long
take in which he filmed the scene: “He does it in such a careful, methodical,
considerate, kind sort of way. He’s a schoolteacher—a compassionate and
careful man. The candles are running. He looks at his photograph. (That’s
his old school, you see. I mean, you don’t know that, but
he
knows it.)
He’s very tidy. He puts everything back in the little box, thinks a bit,
carefully rolls his sleeve back, opens his box, and gets from it a knife. He
puts his hand into a sack of flour; he’s neat—he doesn’t want to bleed
anywhere. He puts the knife in, pauses, and winces as he’s cutting himself.
His hand comes out, and you can just see a little blood and flour, and he
just puts his hand on the candle, and it fizzles out.”

Bert Mortimer, who witnessed the filming, later said that “he was so
wrapped up in the part I believed he actually might do it. And Peter was
so nervous himself that it might actually have come about.”

Clive Rees sums up his association with Peter: “I knew him very well
as the man who played Rouquet—as an actor who was fantastic to work
with, who was very sympathetic, polite, and physically quite touchy. I mean,
he would hold you. I don’t mean
hug
you, like we do today. But he would
touch you. We had a close relationship, but it was about what we were
doing, and that’s where it began and ended. I was aware that I was working
with a genius—not just a great actor. A genius. He was
different
. Aznavour
is, I think, a really good actor. He’s an entertainer, a really wonderful bloke.
But I wouldn’t use the word
genius
. Peter had that.”

• • •

By the time
The Blockhouse
was being filmed in the summer of 1972, Peter’s
marriage to Miranda was essentially over, though it took a long time for
the legal formalities to be arranged. Hans Moellinger recalls Peter’s emotional state, the ambivalence of a paranoiac: “We were in Munich. He was
still with Miranda then and was always speaking in cheerless terms that he
was afraid that she was cheating on him. All of a sudden, in the middle of
the night, he said, ‘Hans, I must go back to Dublin!’ I said it was impossible—night flights are forbidden in Munich. But he said, ‘You
must
get
me a plane, I have to go back immediately, Miranda is cheating on me!’ I
said, ‘Wait until morning, you’ll fly back and you’ll see that. . . .’ ‘No no
no no!’ he said. ‘Get the plane!’

“We tried to get a plane in Munich, in Berlin—it was impossible.
Finally we got one in Geneva. The plane came to Munich at 2:00
A
.
M
.—for about 37,000 Swiss francs. I called the director of the airport and told
him that Peter Sellers, who had had a heart attack—everybody knew he
had a weak heart—had to get to his doctor in Dublin. He said, ‘I’ll try to
organize something.’ At about 4:00 or 4:30 in the morning, I went with
my girlfriend and Peter to the airport. We were sort of dragging him into
the hall, left and right, holding him, schlepping him through to the plane.
But now the problem came: ‘Hans, I can’t fly alone.’ ”

Moellinger’s girlfriend at the time was nineteen years old and still in
school, and she didn’t happen to have her passport with her at the airport.
Moellinger hadn’t thought to bring his along either. “Peter said, ‘It doesn’t
matter. We’ll fly to Dublin and the plane will fly you back.’