Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (56 page)

“ ‘I can’t, Peter.’

“ ‘You
must
.’

“So finally I arranged it so that the girlfriend stayed there and I flew
with him to Dublin, and I arrived back at about 9:30 in the morning, and
the whole trip cost about 170,000 [Swiss] francs. When I get back the
telephone rings, and Peter says, ‘Hans, I knew it. She was cheating on me.
She was in the arms of another man, I promise you.’ I said, ‘How did you
know?’ He said, ‘I
felt
it.’ ”

• • •

While living in Ireland, Peter and Miranda had renovated a house in the
county of Wiltshire, about sixty miles west of London. Stonehenge is in
Wiltshire, for example. But Miranda was now living there by herself.

With Miranda, or even without her, there seems never to have been
the ardor of his obsessive love for both Anne and Britt. Miranda was pretty
and amusing in a kicky, cusp-of-the-sixties sort of way, but her breeding
got in the way. It’s insensitive, not to mention inaccurate, to label Peter’s
interest in Lord Mancroft’s stepdaughter as nothing more than crass
social-climbing, as others have done; after all, a queen, a princess, and a prince
each trump the stepdaughter of a lord. But he does appear to have been
delighted, at first at least, to expand his social circle to include the established gentry. Still, as with all things Peter, it didn’t last long. (As Lady
Mancroft noted at the time, “I’m not surprised at anything to do with
Peter.”) He hated the Miranda-engineered parties at which half of
Burke’s
Peerage
would demand instantaneous comedy routines. Also, he later said
of his third wife, “She was my intellectual superior.”

• • •

On December 9, 1972, at the Rainbow Theater in London, The Who—Roger Daltrey, Keith Moon, Peter Townsend, and John Entwistle—backed
by the London Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Choir and joined by
an almost all-star cast, performed their rock opera
Tommy
onstage—twice—before live audiences as a charity event. An orchestra-backed studio album,
released two months earlier, had been a smash hit, but The Who wanted
to take it live.

Onstage at the Rainbow, Daltrey was Tommy, Moon the depraved
Uncle Ernie, Entwistle was Cousin Kevin, and Townsend served as the
narrator. Steve Winwood (of the groups Blind Faith and Traffic) played
Tommy’s father, Maggie Bell (of the Scottish group Stone the Crows) appeared as his mother, and Merry Clayton was the Acid Queen; Clayton is
the belting singer best known for her feverish backup vocals on the Rolling
Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” Peter Sellers played the doctor who attempts to
cure the legendary deaf, dumb, and blind boy in the song “Go to the
Mirror.” (Richard Harris performs the role on the album.) The show was
taped and broadcast in the United Kingdom later that month and raised
£10,000, for a group supposedly called the Stars’ Organisation for Spastics.

It was from the Who’s drummer, Keith Moon, that Peter felt the
strongest and most reciprocal pull of friendship. Moon was also, as the
critic Ira Robbins describes him, “an irrepressible adolescent, reckless, fearless and merciless in his need to entertain and be amused. His destructive
exploits—hotel rooms, cars, stages, drums—made The Who more dangerous than other groups,” though somehow, as Robbins points out, it all
seemed to be in harmless fun. In person, “Moon the Loon” lived big. He
was relentlessly inventive, openly friendly, and completely off his rocker.
In private, Keith Moon was, in Robbins’s words, “a sad, needy guy incapable of basic human experience.”

As a drummer, says Robbins, “Keith was less a timekeeper than an
explosive charge that detonated on time, every time.” Peter was much the
same as an actor, and the two became friends. Moon’s improvisations
weren’t those of a jazz drummer; he was too undisciplined for that. Who
concerts were more like open adventures than structured series of impromptu riffs. Robbins points out that as performers neither Moon nor
Sellers tended to do the same thing twice or follow a previously agreed upon
plan. “And that may be the key to Moon’s similarity to Sellers,” says Robbins. “In a sense, those anarchic characters improvised because that was the
only way they could function. They lacked the ability
not
to.”

• • •

Peter was full of plans in the spring of 1973. For the Boulting brothers,
there was to be a six-role comedy set in France during the Occupation. He
mentioned to the press that he hoped to adapt Richard Condon’s latest
thriller,
Arigato
. (Condon wrote
The Manchurian Candidate
.) He was still
hoping to make
Being There
, too, as well as a film called
Absolute Zero
, to
be scripted by Ernest Tidyman (who had cowritten
Shaft
, 1971). Stanley
Kubrick also had something in mind for him, he said, but Peter had to be
secretive: “Stanley doesn’t want to mention what it’s going to be about.”

At the time, he was shooting yet another small and depressing film—
The Optimists
(1973)—in which he plays a decrepit busker. His character,
Sam, at one time a successful and popular music hall star, now lives in a
ratty flat with Bella, an elderly dog. Two children (Donna Mullane and
John Chaffey), regularly vacating their unhappy home, enter his life, and
Bella dies.

Directed by Anthony Simmons,
The Optimists
’ title is ironic, though a
new dog shows up at the end. Peter, of course, fully immersed himself in
his North Country character’s voice and mannerisms—so much so that
when he filmed his scenes as a street performer in the West End, he seemed
so authentic that passersby were oblivious to his identity and reportedly
donated money into his hat. (The camera was hidden across the street.)
There is even the tale of a real-life busker who became incensed that another
performing vagrant was horning in on his turf and angrily shooed the movie
star away. When filming was completed for the day, Peter simply rounded
the corner in costume, got into his red Mercedes, and drove away.

Peter modeled Sam on several old North Country comics he recalled
from his youth as well as the nineteenth-century variety clown Dan Leno,
whom Peter had met during a séance. “We went back to his writings for
some of the dialogue,” Peter said at the time. “Phrases like ‘this morning I
was in such a state that I washed my breakfast and swallowed myself’ are
lines Leno used in his act.” Peter had already revealed in the
Esquire
profile
that he’d been receiving career guidance through the years from the dead
Leno. To complete his characterization, Peter’s longtime makeup artist,
Stuart Freeborn, applied a prosthetic nose and strange, subtly disfiguring
teeth.

“Peter and I became friendly on that film,” recalls the cinematographer
Larry Pizer. “He was a guy who played games with people for inexplicable
reasons. He was a brilliant comedian, but not a happy one. Some people
enjoy being funny. He didn’t.”

At what point does peculiar behavior become so consistent that it ceases
to be erratic? For example, the cast and crew of
The Optimists
arrived on
location one day to find Peter standing on his head in the snow. Pizer found
it showy—private yogic devotion turned into a piece of public performance
art. Another day the prosthetic teeth went missing, but as Pizer says, “It
could have been a game.” Peter’s spur-of-the-moment inventions usually
achieved their artistic aim—dialogue changes, new bits of actorly dexterity—but they did tend to disrupt the shooting schedule. For instance, there
is a scene in which Sam returns to his flea-bitten home very drunk—so
much so that he can barely make it up the stairs. According to Pizer, it was
Peter who decided to add some small but important business: The staggering Sam methodically empties his coat pockets of drained liquor bottles
every few steps. “It took forever to shoot,” Pizer reports. “Hours were ticking by.” Then again, this was Peter’s craft, and it worked on film, where it
mattered.

• • •

After completing
The Optimists
, Sellers found himself in a nostalgic mood
and contacted his girlfriend from the 1940s, Hilda Parkin. “Peter phoned
me out of the blue,” Hilda reports, “and he told me about his film about
the busker. He said, ‘I think you would love it—I’d love you to see it.’ We
had a long chat. I said, ‘Hey, how about
you
? Haven’t you done well!’ ”

Hilda Parkin and her husband, Ted, were in show business, too, and
Ted was active in the benevolent British theatrical club the Water Rats;
Hilda was in the women’s auxiliary, the Lady Ratlings. “I told Peter I was
a Lady Ratling and that Ted was a Water Rat, and he said, ‘You know, Peg
always wanted me to be a Water Rat.’ Within no time at all he approached
the Water Rats to become one.”

He was accepted. “Ted went to his ‘making.’ When they introduced
him, he just looked up at the sky and cried. It’s what his mother wanted
him to do. Ted said it was a bit embarrassing, really, because he couldn’t
speak—he was just looking up and crying.”

• • •

Nine years earlier, in late 1964, Peter and Britt had spent some time in the
company of Judy Garland, her companion Mark Herron, and her eighteen-year-old daughter, Liza Minnelli. In May of 1973, Liza, twenty-seven, was
back in London and starring at the Palladium. Peter was in the audience,
entranced, at Liza’s Friday evening performance, and three days later they
were engaged to be married.

Billie Whitelaw reintroduced them after Friday’s show. She remembers
that Peter was in one of his peculiar moods that night: “Liza kept looking
at me, as if to ask, ‘Hey, is this guy putting me on?’ I told her I wasn’t sure,
but if I were her, I’d watch it. Anyway, they went home together.” On
Saturday night the giddy couple dined at Tratou and adjourned to the piano
after dinner, where Liza soloed on “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man.” It was
true; she couldn’t help it. On Sunday, Liza held a press conference at the
Savoy to announce their love. “I’m going to marry Liza,” Peter said on
Monday.

This news came as a surprise to Liza’s other fiancé, the one in Hollywood. “My engagement to Desi Arnaz [Jr.]—well, the relationship has been
deteriorating for some time. There is no engagement,” Liza told the press.
Desi’s mother, Lucille Ball, responded by exclaiming, “
Peter Sellers?
Who’s
kidding who? Liza must be
crazy!
”

Liza showed up one day at Shepperton, where Peter was shooting his
new comedy,
Soft Beds, Hard Battles
(1973). During a break, they talked
again to the press. “I’m in love with a genius,” Liza stated. Peter mentioned
that his and Miranda’s divorce “would go through the courts in its own
time.” Liza was asked if she was worried about becoming Peter’s fourth
wife. She replied in the voice of Sally Bowles: “Oh, no! Four is my lucky
number, my dear.”

Peter and Liza—and Charles Chaplin, Laurence Olivier, Lord Snowdon, David Niven, Ralph Richardson, and David Frost—were among the
mourners at Noel Coward’s funeral May 24, 1973, at St. Martin in the
Fields. Niven recalled Peter’s mood at the end of the service—an inexplicable one, given the extraordinary interest his new romance was generating
at the time. “As we walked out into the sunshine, Peter said, ‘I do hope no
one will ever arrange that sort of thing for me.’ Niven asked why. ‘Because
I don’t think anyone will show up.’ ”

Liza had to return to the States briefly at the end of May for a scheduled
concert, but in less than a week she was back in London and moving into
Peter’s Eaton Muse house, where she competed for space with Peter’s multimedia equipment and toys as well as pictures of his children and Sri Swami
Venkatesananda. Liza’s godmother, the irrepressible actress and author Kay
Thompson, moved in, too. (Kay Thompson appeared with Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire in Stanley Donen’s
Funny Face
, 1957, and wrote the
children’s book
Eloise
and its several sequels.)

Eccentricity reigned. One night, at three o’clock, Liza declared that she
simply had to see the gravesite of the fictional dog Bella from
The Optimists
,
so Peter picked up a bottle of chilled champagne and off they went to a
cemetery. Peter led Liza to the tiny burial ground in Hyde Park, where they
climbed over the fence and prowled. “Where is it?” Liza kept crying out in
the darkness.

Like a vast Venus flytrap snapping shut on two desirable and helpless
flies, the British media fed. Peter grew annoyed by the frenzy and called his
friend Joan Collins (whose husband, Ron Kass, had been
The Optimists
’
executive producer) to arrange an escape to her house. He traveled incognito. Collins describes the disguise: “an SS officer’s uniform, complete with
leather jacket liberally festooned with swastikas and an SS armband, [and]
a steel helmet covering his whole head.” At the end of the visit, Collins
says, he sped away in his Mercedes holding his arm stiffly out the window
and shouting “ ‘Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler! Sieg Heil’ in his most guttural
German.”

One day, BBC radio featured one of Maurice Woodruff’s competitors,
the psychic Frederick Davies, who divined that Peter Sellers and Liza Minnelli would in fact never marry. Liza’s response to this intrusion on her
intimate life was to call and make a personal appointment with Davies. “I
read the Tarot cards for her [and] told her that the romance was ill-fated,”
Davies reveals. “She became slightly emotional.”