Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (60 page)

“He had terrible feuds with other people,” Herbert Lom recalls with a
certain distaste, “for instance, Blake Edwards. They were not on speaking
terms. He used to send messages to Blake about the scene, and Blake used
to send messages through his assistant to Peter, and we all stood around
looking at the ceiling till they stopped playing their game.” Moreover, Lom
adds, “Blake showed me telegrams he had received: ‘You are a rotten human
being.’ ‘You are a shit and I can afford to work without you.’ ‘I don’t need
you to get work. Love, Peter.’

“Peter wouldn’t tolerate Blake, who needed to
direct
everybody. But
Peter wasn’t going to be directed by Blake. He didn’t like him as a person.
Peter thought at the time that Blake was a shit, and he wasn’t going to be
bossed around by a worthless human being, and all that kind of crap.”
Their relationship was like a screwball marriage—comedy and combat in
equal measure—and it was based on mutual need.

Still, Lom insists on one point: “
I
never found him to be difficult.
Never
.”

For his part, Blake Edwards offers a stark account of Peter’s troubles:
“He talked to God, what can I tell you? He called me up in the middle of
the night and said, ‘Don’t worry about how we’re going to do that scene
tomorrow. I just talked to God, and He told me how to do it.’ ”

• • •

“I’m very protective of Peter,” Burt Kwouk insists. According to Kwouk,
the reason is simple: “Respect. Respect for what he was. There’s too little
respect in our business. There are very few actors who are not troubled
people.” Asked if Peter Sellers was more troubled than most, Kwouk answers, “I happen to think that he wasn’t. He wasn’t any more fucked up
than I am.” For Kwouk, the difference was this: “When you’re somebody
like Peter Sellers, the media latch onto it and make it much bigger than it
seems. That’s what the media do. What the hell, they’ve got to make a
living.

“He was a complicated man. Some of us loved him, some of us hated
him.
Of course
. That’s true of
everybody
. There were people who didn’t like
Jesus Christ. They nailed him to a cross, for chrissake. The business of being
a human being is what it’s all about. It’s not about being a movie star, not
about being an actor, not about being world famous. It’s about being a human being. We all go to the toilet every morning, whoever we are.”

• • •

In the south of France in July, in London in August, in Los Angeles in
September, and with a side trip to the Seychelles sometime in between,
Peter, fifty, was beginning to keep company in the form and figure of Lynne
Frederick, a wild little thing of twenty-one. An actress (she appeared as
Catherine Howard in
Masterpiece Theatre
’s
Henry VIII and His Six Wives
)
and girl about town (by the time she hooked up with Peter, the precocious
Lynne had already enjoyed affairs with both the thirty-seven-year-old David
Frost and the fifty-year-old West End gaming club operator Julian Posner),
Lynne was a striking beauty, confident beyond her years. And ambitious.

Sellers himself described her as having what he called an “extrasensory
instinct” that told her precisely what he needed at any given moment. She,
in turn, provided it. She was four months younger than his son.

On December 15, 1976,
The Pink Panther Strikes Again
received its
Royal World Charity Premiere at London’s Odeon in Leicester Square. A
single invitation was sent to Mr. Peter Sellers, who was insulted at being
unable to invite his chosen date, specifically Lynne, since royal invitations
cannot be altered, even for close friends of the royals. “If Lynne is not
allowed to be there I’m bloody well not going myself,” he said. And so he
boycotted the British premiere of his own film, to much stir in the British
press.

Now it was Prince Charles’s turn to be offended. Charles was aghast
at his old friend’s behavior and the scandal it caused. It was still bloody: “I
was bloody annoyed that he didn’t turn up,” the Prince declared at the
time. “I wish I could take
my
girlfriend to functions, but I can’t. I’m going
to tell him how I feel when I see him.”

Peter, Lynne, and Victoria left for Gstaad two days later.

After eleven months passed, a reporter was curious. “Are you still in
the doghouse with Prince Charles?” Peter was asked. “Don’t know,” Peter
replied. “Haven’t seen him since.”

• • •

Malcolm McDowell was already acquainted with Lynne Frederick. “I’d just
worked with her on a film called
Voyage of the Damned
(1976) so I was
rather. . . . I would have warned him off, had I known. But you can’t, can
you?”

At a party, McDowell recalls, “Peter actually said to me, ‘I will walk
into a room of forty women, and there is one woman in that room that is
poisonous for me, and I will walk straight up to her and ask her to marry
me.’ ”

The wedding took place in Paris on February 18, 1977. They soon
flew to their new summer house at Port Grimaud near Saint-Tropez.

Lynne’s mother, Iris Frederick, a Thames television casting agent, was
pointedly
not
invited to the ceremony. “I wouldn’t have gone in any case,”
Iris declared to reporters. “I will never,
ever
talk to him. There is the age
difference, but more important, there is Mr. Sellers’s track record. He has
three failed marriages behind him. Three women can’t be that wrong.” She
and Lynne had stopped speaking three months earlier and remained estranged for quite some time.

As for the precise cause of the marriage itself—Peter and Lynne had
been living together for months before tying the knot—it seems to have
been a form of coercion on Peter’s part. It was he who demanded that she
marry him; she’d been offered a five-month television job in Moscow, and
he didn’t want her to go and leave him alone.

• • •

As Spike Milligan once told Michael Sellers, Peter “was always searching
for a bloody heart attack as if it were a letter he knew had been posted and
hadn’t arrived.” The mail was delivered on March 20, 1977, on board an
Air France Boeing 727 from Nice to Heathrow. The plane was about
twenty-five minutes away from London when Peter’s chest seized; a flight
attendant described him as looking “dreadful.” There was a doctor on
board, and he made Peter comfortable and reassured him while air traffic
controllers gave the plane top priority for landing. After a brief examination
by a physician at Heathrow’s medical unit, he was rushed to Charing Cross
Hospital.

“It is not a heart attack and there is nothing to worry about,” Lynne
told the press. It was all the result of bad oysters in Saint-Tropez, she said.
The senior cardiologist at Charing Cross took a different opinion.

Strangely, Peter had been quite friendly with the world’s best-known
heart surgeon, the jet-setting Dr. Christiaan Barnard, since the early seventies. And yet Peter never allowed Dr. Barnard to operate on him, nor
anyone else for that matter. He’s said to have considered open-heart surgery
at Charing Cross, but he decided simply to go with a new electronic pacemaker instead. It was installed, after which he and Lynne flew back to Saint-Tropez.

• • •

In May, they flew to Gstaad.

In June, Peter fired Bert Mortimer.

Sue Evans, Peter’s secretary, remembers the moment well: “I got a call
really late one night. It was Peter, and he said, ‘I’m going to dictate a letter,
and I don’t want you to say anything. Just take it down, and
don’t say
anything
.’ He started dictating the letter, and it was dismissing Bert. His
loyal chauffeur, personal assistant, and friend was gone.”

“I just could not understand why he would want to break that relationship,” says Bert. “Even today I can’t tell you.”

K
enneth Griffith recalls Lynne Frederick terribly well. He paid the couple
a visit. “She was very friendly, pleasant, and nice, but I wasn’t convinced that he wasn’t in trouble.
Serious
trouble. Which proved to be correct. Because of my sense about her, I said, ‘Pete, you remember when you
were living in the Dorchester?’ ”

Peter recalled precisely the occasion to which Griffith referred: Griffith
was appearing in a West End play at the time and not making very much
money at it. Griffith continues: “I’m sitting there eating wonderful food
and feeling a lot better when he suddenly says, ‘Here, Kenny—something
worrying you?’ ‘No, no, Pete,’ I said, ‘I’m feeling great. Lovely to see you
and be here.’ Four minutes later: ‘Kenny, something
is
worrying you and I
want to know what it is.’ I said, ‘I’ve had a bad time you know, I shouldn’t
be doing this fucking play, it’s hard work, I do two performances six nights
a week. . . . And I bought a house, it was a struggle to get the money to
buy it on top of everything else, and I’ve been doing such rubbish as an
actor in films. And,’ I said, ‘it nearly beat me.’ He said, ‘How do you mean
“nearly beat you”?’ I said, ‘Well, I think there’s about two thousand quid
left. It’s done.’

“He gave me a check for $2,500. I said, ‘No, Peter—out of the question.’ ‘Aw Kenny,’ he said, ‘Don’t, don’t,
don’t
tear it up, don’t, because it
would give me great pleasure, and I’ll speak to Bill [Wills] in the morning.
All I’ll do is tell Bill to lose it—who will know?
No one
will know, but it
will give me great pleasure.’ I did tear it up.

“Now—with his new wife there, I said, ‘You know how memory can
play tricks with you, Pete?’ ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said. But I wasn’t really speaking
to him; I was speaking to
her
. And I said, ‘Was that true? You put a check
for $2,500 in my pocket?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You probably tore it up, didn’t
you?’ That’s all. But it was information that I felt she ought to know about
her husband. I don’t think she cared at all.” In short, Griffith saw Sellers’s
generosity; according to him, Lynne saw his bank accounts.

• • •

Sarah Sellers recalls Lynne very well, too: “We were told that she would
like to take me and Michael out for a meal and get to know us. She seemed
quite nice to begin with. She came across as very bubbly and friendly and
warm. Once they got married things definitely changed.”

“Lynne was like the nurse,” Victoria Sellers maintains. “He needed help
doing things—he had pill-taking times, and we couldn’t do this, or that,
because we couldn’t get Dad all excited.” Sue Evans agrees: “She took over
the running of his life. He had alienated so many people by this point that
he saw Lynne as the one person who was there.”

Except for Bert, whom Peter fired. That he did so within months of
marrying Lynne explains it.

• • •

Army Archerd mentioned Peter’s newest film project,
Curse of the Pink
Panther
, in August. Lynne Frederick would appear with him in it, Peter
told another Hollywood columnist a few weeks later, fresh from a trip with
Lynne to Disneyland. “In fact,” he said, “I think her role should be enlarged.” Then they left for London.

Curse of the Pink Panther
, soon retitled
Revenge of the Pink Panther
(1978), began shooting in Paris in November. Lynne played no role onscreen.

Clouseau goes in pursuit of the drug lord Douvier (Robert Webber),
whose turf (the world) is threatened by rivals; Douvier’s secretary-lover,
Simone (Dyan Cannon) helps him until she turns on him and aids Clouseau. They all end up in Hong Kong.

Clouseau shows up at the costume shop of Professor Balls (Graham
Stark) to try on his new disguise—a leg-shortened Toulouse-Lautrec number complete with blue smock, beard, and straw hat. At first, he stumbles
and totters, unused to the absence of tibia, but then he gets it. It’s the end
of
Dr. Strangelove
:

B
ALLS:
That’s it, Chief Inspector! You can
walk!

C
LOUSEAU:
I ken . . . !
I ken’a weuk!

At which point he tips his hat and launches into “Zank ’eaven for
Leettle Girls.”

A henchman at the front door hands him the requisite bomb. Clouseau
accepts it, reaches into his pocket for a tip, and announces his dismay: “I’m
sorry. I’m a little short.”

Then: “A beum? Wear yeu expicting weune?
A beaum!
” He tosses it,
as is his habit, away from himself and toward the nearest person—Balls.

December found the cast and crew in a Shepperton soundstage, where,
just before Christmas there was a friendly reunion when Princes Charles,
Andrew, and Edward paid a visit. (They watched Peter film the scene in
which Clouseau and Cato attempt to gain entrance to a drug speakeasy-disco, Le Club Foot.) By the first week of February, the production had
moved to Hong Kong for extended location shooting, and the film wrapped
in April on the French Riviera.

Peter and Lynne seem to have been getting along well at the time. “It’s
a whole new second-stage rocket,” Peter said of his marriage around that
time. “Mind-boggling and marvelous . . . ! I knew that we had met before
in a previous incarnation, and I know we shall meet again after this.”

• • •