Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (62 page)

By that point, Lynne had moved into her own house. As Roderick
Mann put it, the move occurred “with Sellers’s blessing.”

He hadn’t found lasting, unconditional love, and he hadn’t found
spiritual contentment either. Michael Sellers takes a harsh tone when describing his father’s religious life: “If someone offered a cut-price, special-offer,
gift-wrapped religion that guaranteed miracles and a personal audience
with the Maker, then Dad would apply for instant enrollment.” Peter
was scarcely alone in trying to fashion a spiritual quilt out of appealing
and available scraps without worrying too much about how the seams
would fit. But few people other than the half-Jewish, Catholic-educated,
Buddhist- Hindu- yogic- Castanedaesque Peter Sellers would go so far as to
fly a wondrous Catholic priest from Mexico to Gstaad, install him briefly
in a hotel, and get him to offer him Holy Communion. Michael dutifully
knelt alongside.

Peter had also paid a visit to a Beverly Hills numerologist, he told a
friend. “She said that in one incarnation I had been a priest in Roman days.
You know—it’s the old déjà vu thing, but every time I’ve been to Rome
I’ve felt it—especially one night in the Circus Maximus. It’s now a car park.
About three in the morning I was sitting right in the center thinking about
all the Christians who had been sacrificed to the lions and feeling that I
must have been there.”

• • •

For most of the 1970s, Peter Sellers was obsessed with playing a nobody
who became a somebody nobody could really know. As his secretary Sue
Evans once said, “You have to understand that
Being There
was a daily
conversation” from the time Peter hired her in 1973 until 1979, when the
film was shot and released. Jerzy Kosinski concurred: “For seven and a half
years, Peter Sellers became Chauncey Gardiner. He printed calling cards as
Chauncey Gardiner. He signed letters Chauncey Gardiner.” Peter often
made a point of acting like Chauncey Gardiner, too. At a mid-seventies
meeting with Kosinski in a Beverly Hills hotel room, Peter ordered champagne to be sent up. When the waiter arrived, Peter was staring at the
television set. Only it wasn’t on. “Would you mind not stepping in the
way?” he kindly asked the mystified waiter, who stepped gingerly all around
the room in a strained effort not to block Peter’s view of an empty screen.

At one point a year or two later, Peter was in Malibu renting Larry Hagman’s beach house. “Jerzy Kosinski came over all the time,” Victoria Sellers
remembers. “He and my dad hit it off really well.” Conveniently for Peter,
the thin, white-haired, white-bearded director Hal Ashby lived in Malibu,
too. Ashby was still interested in making the picture, and by that point,
Ashby himself was becoming most bankable; his 1978 film
Coming Home
ended up winning three Oscars—for Jon Voight, Jane Fonda, and the screenwriters Waldo Salt and Robert C. Jones—and was nominated for six more.

In late 1978, Peter was renting an expansive blue and white house on
Summitridge Place in Beverly Hills, where he flew the Union Jack above
the driveway, just to make a point: He wasn’t one of
them
. After years of
frustration and disappointment, and after a preparatory face-lift, he reached
a joint agreement with Ashby, the producer Andrew Braunsberg, and the
film and television production company Lorimar to make his most cherished project as a big-scale feature film. In 1973, the entire proposed budget
for
Being There
had been $1,946,300. By the time production began on
January 15, 1979, Peter alone was getting $750,000 for sixteen weeks’ work,
plus a percentage of the gross, plus living expenses of $2,500 per week
during the shoot, plus first star billing above the title, with nobody else
getting credit in larger type. Through his agent Marty Baum at Creative
Artists, Peter also tried to make it impossible for any other star to share
billing space above the title.

“I did it just to see a genius at work,” said Shirley MacLaine, explaining
why she agreed to take what she called a supporting role at that stage of
her spectacular career (
The Trouble With Harry
, 1955;
The Apartment
,
1960;
Irma La Douce
, 1963;
Sweet Charity
, 1969;
The Turning Point
,
1977). Still, MacLaine’s agent successfully played the bad cop in negotiations with Braunsberg, Ashby, and Lorimar and made sure that his client
got her name above the title immediately below Peter’s. Jack Warden and
Melvyn Douglas’s agents followed suit, so by the time everything was said,
signed, printed, and screened, a total of four movie stars’ names preceded
the words
Being There
in the opening credits.

Finally, in mid-January 1979, Peter Sellers began to make the film of
his life. Literally, he thought.

• • •

Being There
is the story of a man named Chance, a mindless, nearly emotionless middle-aged fool forced by the death of his ancient benefactor to
leave the mansion and small garden in which he has spent his life and,
alone, to take to the streets, where, quickly, and luckily, he is hit by a
limousine owned by the wife of one the richest men in the world, who
doctors him, houses him, feeds him, and sets him up for superstardom.

MacLaine plays the wife, Eve Rand. Hal Ashby originally considered
Laurence Olivier for the role of Eve’s dying husband, Benjamin Rand, but
Lord Olivier turned it down. As Shirley MacLaine explained during the
production, “I called Larry about it the other day. He didn’t like the idea
of being in a film with me masturbating.” After briefly considering Burt
Lancaster, Ashby ended up with Melvyn Douglas.

As for the role of Chance, Peter once explained facetiously that “Jerzy
Kosinski wanted the part himself. That’s why he wrote it for a young man
of Olympian, god-like beauty.” (In fact, Kosinski was a slight and rather
rat-faced man—not ugly, but not Olympian either.) “I saw Chauncey Gardiner as a plump figure, pallid, unexercised from sitting around watching
television. [Am I] too old? A lot of people said that. I just told them, ‘You’re
wrong, I’m right.’ ”

Given the fact that Peter had spent most of the last decade trying to
embody Chauncey Gardiner, it hurt to be told that he was now too old to
play him. The face-lift helped. It eliminated the haggard quality that had
begun to creep in with
The Pink Panther Strikes Again
. Owing to his heart
condition and the lack of a sustainable treatment, Peter was fundamentally
unhealthy, though he didn’t look it onscreen.

To create Chance’s voice, Peter said that he had, as usual, “messed
around a long time with sounds. I have a whole sound set-up, and I spoke
into a tape recorder and then listened. I compared one sound with another
until I found the one I was happy with.” The result was a voice with “very
clear enunciation, slightly American, with perhaps a little Stan Laurel mixed
in.” David Lodge maintains that in Chance’s voice there’s a touch of Peter’s
old, taciturn gardener from Chipperfield as well.

• • •

Peter had been a problematic figure in the world of big-budget motion
pictures for quite some time by the time
Being There
was filmed, and he
required no small degree of personal handling, let alone public explanation.
Andrew Braunsberg felt the need to make excuses for some of Peter’s recent
(and not-so-recent) work, but Braunsberg handled the awkward issue deftly
and accurately by saying simply that “he knows he’s done some junk, but
everyone who makes a lot of films has.” (As if there was any doubt about
Braunsberg’s theory, it is proven by Laurence Olivier’s
Inchon
, 1981, and
Katharine Hepburn’s
Olly Olly Oxen Free
, 1978, to name only two of the
hundreds of crummy films made by fine performers.) And his weirdness
was by that point an old cliché that tinkered on the edge of grand myth.
Inevitably, for example, Peter announced to the cast and crew of
Being
There
that he refused to work with anyone who wore purple, leaving the
explanation to Hal Ashby, who dutifully obliged.

Peter kept to himself most of the time during the production. At Peter’s
insistence, reporters were turned away left and right, although two—Mitchell Glazer of
Rolling Stone
and Todd McCarthy of
Film Comment
—were
allowed to visit the set with the promise of interviews at a later time. Shirley
MacLaine later wrote that she repeatedly invited Peter to lunch or dinner,
but that he kept refusing, despite their shared interest in what Shirley
herself itemized as “metaphysics, numerology, past lives, and astrology.”
Peter himself said that “Shirley used to have a go at me for always going
off into a corner. But I had to. I didn’t want to break my gardener for the
day.”

On the other hand, Melvyn Douglas told of a more genial and social
Peter. “Jack Warden and Peter Sellers are theatre raconteurs as well as wonderful actors,” Douglas later wrote in his autobiography. “The two of them
hardly ever left the set. Shooting on their scenes would end and they would
retire to another part of the room and go on telling stories, gesturing and
laughing until tears ran down their faces.”

In early February, Peter was filming on location in Washington,
D.C.—Chance wandering the streets of the ghetto; Chance walking down
the median strip of a crowded artery, seemingly headed for the brilliantly
lit Capitol. By mid-February, the cast and crew had moved to another
location—Biltmore, a 10,000-acre estate owned by George W. Vanderbilt
in Asheville, North Carolina. The producers made a point of setting aside
one of the mansion’s vast rooms to serve as Peter’s dressing room, but Peter
took one look at it and hurried back to his own trailer.

On Valentine’s Day, Peter sent Shirley five dozen red roses—anonymously, but she knew. Shirley thanked Peter for them, but he refused to
acknowledge the gift.

• • •

“You’re always going to be a little boy, ain’t you?” says Louise, the black
maid, as her parting words after the old man dies and leaves the helpless
Chance to fend for himself. And so, to the tune of Eumir Deodato’s souped-up, synthesizer-ridden “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” the overgrown infant
opens the front door for the first time in his life, closes it behind him,
negotiates the few steps down to the sidewalk, and enters the world. Later
that morning, when a young black gang leader pulls a knife on him, Chance
responds by yanking his television remote control device out of his pocket,
pointing it at the street tough, and trying to change channels to someone
more pleasant.

In front of an electronics store, Chance stands dumbfounded before a
big-screen TV that plays images of the sidewalk in front of it. He backs up
in horrified confusion at finding himself to be a video image and is immediately hit by Eve Rand’s immense Cadillac. In the limousine’s backseat,
Eve gives him a drink. Assuming that the liquid is water or some form of
juice, Chance drinks alcohol for the first time and promptly chokes just as
Eve asks him his name:

“Chance—achhkk—achkg—actgk’he gardner.”

“Chauncey Gardiner?”

Chance has a new name. “Are you related to Basil and Perdita Gardiner?” the luxurious Eve asks in a hopeful tone. “No,” Chance replies in the
flat near-monotone that expresses the full extent of his emotional life. “I
am not related to Basil and Perdita.”

It’s not that Chance has
no
affect. Sellers periodically knits the muscles
of his forehead to create an expression of mild and regular bewilderment.
Chance appears at those moments to think, but it is thinking without
thoughts, a kind of vestigial reasoning that leads nowhere. He is a mental
earlobe trying to be a fin. It’s not surprising that American audiences accepted the plot of
Being There
, in which an idiot becomes a national hero,
for after all, they elected Ronald Reagan to the presidency the following year.

• • •

Ben Rand suffers from aplastic anemia; steroids, transfusions, a fully
equipped personal intensive care unit, and a live-in physician (Richard Dysart) struggle to keep him alive in his American palace on the outskirts of
Washington. While Ben gets his daily dose of fresh blood, an orderly wheels
Chance into the mansion’s clinic so that Ben’s doctor can examine the leg
that Eve’s car came close to crushing. Chance spies an African-American
medical attendant, whose skin calls the gang leader to what passes for
Chance’s mind. Chance asks the man if he knows Rafael, the shadowy figure
to whom the gangster had urged Chance, at knifepoint, to relay a message.
Chance proceeds to repeat the message in his vacant, colorless tone, the
antithesis of the vivid communiqué itself:

“ ‘Now get this, honky. You go tell Rafael that I ain’t taking no jive
from no Western Union messenger. You tell that asshole that if he got
something to tell me, to get his ass down here himself.’ Then he said that
I was to get my white ass out of there quick or he’d cut it.”

The problem was, Peter couldn’t get the speech out without breaking
into uncontrollable laughter; as
Hoffman
’s Alvin Rakoff and others have
noted, Peter could be a giggler. Ashby ordered take after take as Peter
attempted vainly to compose himself. The cast and crew couldn’t help
laughing, too, and so the scene never worked as written, and the entire
speech had to be cut. In the finished film, Chance simply lies back down
on the hospital gurney and keeps his mouth shut.