Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (64 page)

Peter wanted a divorce. Typically, he told a reporter about it first. “That
was what hurt,” Lynne said, “reading in a newspaper that our marriage was
finished. It’s true we had discussed divorce, but no decision had been
reached when he left. We’ve both consulted lawyers, but nothing’s happened yet.”

It seems that in the third week of April, just after
Being There
wrapped,
Peter left Los Angeles for Barbados, alone and in a rage, because Lynne had
refused to accompany him on the vacation. He stayed in Barbados a single
day and then flew to London. “From there he telephoned me to announce
that his marriage was over,” Roderick Mann wrote in the
Sunday Express
on April 28. “A few days later he made the same statement to London
newspapermen.”

The whole thing continued to be played out in newspapers and, in a
secondary sense, in daily telephone calls between the two aggrieved parties,
who clung to each other long distance. In early May, Peter was in his room
at the Inn on the Park in London and sleeping in until 4
P
.
M
. He was
“haggard and bleary-eyed” when he answered the door, found a reporter,
tried to slam the door in the reporter’s face, and ended up slamming it on
his own foot.

“I don’t mind being alone,” he told still another scribe. Yet in mid-May, he mentioned to a third journalist that he’d asked Lynne to fly to
London for what he called a “love summit”; he himself having left London briefly to make an appearance at the Cannes Film Festival. “For tax
reasons I cannot work in London,” he said to a fourth reporter, “but I
can certainly go there to save my marriage.” To a fifth he added that “up
till now all the discussions regarding our future life together have been on
the telephone.”

“Really,” he said, “I am a romantic, so I can’t rule out getting married
again. But this time it will be to an older woman—someone who is thirty-one or thirty-two.”

One of Lynne’s friends told the
Daily Mail
that “she doesn’t appear
upset about anything.”

• • •

In May, Peter announced that he was starting work on a new record album.
Sellers Market
, which was recorded in France in June. It was originally going
to feature a conversation between Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and
I’m All Right, Jack
’s Fred Kite; it would have been a classic, but the final
selection includes no such cut. Instead,
Sellers Market
includes among its
highlights an unusual rendition of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day”—it’s
done in Morse code—and an equally warped version of Freed and Brown’s
“Singin’ in the Rain” done as a military march.

The best track, though, is “The Cultural Scene: The Compleat Guide
to Accents of the British Isles,” in which an American professor, Don Schulman (Sellers) tours the United Kingdom and finds a wide variety of rhythms
and inflections, all done by Sellers: London (Cockney), Surrey (Russian),
Birmingham (Indian), Wales (lilting singsong), Edinburgh (kilty), and
Glasgow (virtually incomprehensible and belligerently drunk).

He kept himself occupied in other ways, too. He had several new film
projects in mind:
The Romance of the Pink Panther
, to be directed by Sidney
Poitier;
Chandu the Magician
for Orion;
The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu
, also for Orion; and a remake of Preston Sturges’s classic 1948 screwball
comedy
Unfaithfully Yours
for Twentieth Century-Fox. He even talked
about making a science-fiction film with Satyajit Ray.

The Romance of the Pink Panther
would be different than the other
Panther
s, Peter told the Hollywood columnist Marilyn Beck. Clouseau will
“expose a side of himself no one has seen. He’s going to be involved with
a woman who’s deeply in love with him, and we’ll see his reaction to that.”
There was still no word on who would play the woman, Anastasia Puissance.
In fact, the script was not yet completed at the time. According to Peter,
production wouldn’t begin until August 1980, at the earliest. Reportedly,
Peter would be getting $3 million up front for the film—half of which, he
claimed, had already been paid. He would also get 10 percent of the gross.
Estimating from the financial success of the last
Panther
,
The Romance of
the Pink Panther
alone might earn him $8 million.

That Sidney Poitier rather than Blake Edwards was set to direct
The
Romance of the Pink Panther
seems not to have been the result of animosity
between Peter and Blake. He’d filmed a cameo for Edwards’s latest picture,
10
(1979), which starred Dudley Moore, Julie Andrews, and Bo Derek.
Peter played drums in a jazz band, but the scene was cut before the film’s
release.

• • •

In the beginning of August,
Rolling Stone
’s Mitchell Glazer conducted his
interview with Peter in Gstaad. He found the words “Om Shanti” inscribed
over the front door of Peter’s chalet and an autographed photo of Stan
Laurel hanging on the wall. “It’s nice to walk around here and get stoned,”
Peter told Glazer for publication. “This place is so beautiful even
I
can
relax.”

• • •

In December 1979, when the latest issue of Britain’s
Club International
magazine hit the stands, readers and gossip columnists were delighted to
find what the magazine billed as “exclusive” nude photos of Britt Ekland
and Lynne Frederick. Britt’s were full-frontal, Lynne’s simply bare-breasted.
“It’s gossiped that Sellers himself snapped the pics, but not for publication,”
the
Hollywood Reporter
noted.

• • •

In January 1980,
Being There
was screened for President Jimmy Carter and
the first lady, Rosalynn, at the White House. President Carter particularly
enjoyed the exchange between Chance and the president—the one during
which the president thinks he is getting political advice but in fact is receiving the basic facts of plant life. “That’s better advice than I get,” said
President Carter.

• • •

Before embarking on
The Romance of the Pink Panther
,
Unfaithfully Yours
,
Chandu the Magician
, or the unlikely space alien picture for Satyajit Ray,
Peter made
The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu
(1980) with Helen Mirren
and Sid Caesar.

Roman Polanski had once been mentioned as a director for the film,
but nothing came of it. John G. Avildson spent a week with Peter discussing
the possibility of his directing it, after which Orion paid Avildson $100,000
to walk away. Richard Quine was approached; he too dropped out after
arguing with Peter about the direction the film should take. Piers Haggard
was finally hired. Haggard had directed such films as
The Blood on Satan’s
Claw
(1970).

Filming began at the Studios de Boulogne in Paris at the end of September.

Fu Manchu, the eponymous fiend, had long held a special appeal for
Peter: “I listened fanatically to the Fu Manchu radio serials on the BBC.
They were more terrifying than the BBC’s light musical programs.” Now,
in performing the role himself, Peter strove to avoid what he called “the
stilted stereotype of swapping
r
s for
l
s. It’s demeaning, it’s been done to
death, and it’s not funny.” (In other words, it
had
been funny in
Murder
By Death
, but now he was bored with it.) Instead, Peter provided Fu Manchu with the backstory of an English prep-school education—in Peter’s
words, “where he learned the meaning of torture, like any proper British
schoolboy”—and then claimed to have based Fu Manchu’s British accent
on Lord Snowdon. Peter swore that he’d asked Snowdon for his permission,
which Snowdon is said to have swiftly granted, but in point of fact the
fiend’s voice sounds a good bit too Chinese for the tale to be true.

Peter also claimed that he was focusing on Fu Manchu’s astounding
sex appeal. “After all,” Peter explained, “if you’ve devoted 150 years to
depravity, you’re bound to get good at it.”

His makeup: a spray-applied rubber that hardened into crow’s feet and
wrinkles; twelve molded sponge devices to create Asiatic features; tinted
contact lenses; a beard; and long black plastic fingernails. It was all painful.
“The bloody lenses made my eyes run, my skin itched from the spirit gum
on the beard, and the fingernails were a bore. I kept poking myself in odd
places. I don’t know how women manage with them,” Peter remarked.

In early November, the production moved to St. Gervais, the Alpine
resort, for some location work, after which
The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu
Manchu
moved back to the Studios de Boulogne. Just before Christmas,
Peter flew to Gstaad for some rest, promising to return after the holidays.
He did return, whereupon he promptly fired Piers Haggard, whom, like
several other directors over the years, he had grown to hate for reasons of
his own. Peter took over the filming himself.

In January, Peter summoned David Lodge to Paris, where Lodge found
Lynne to have become “very hard—not the same person” he had met earlier. In some sense they were back together, but since their relationship had
always included long separations followed by intense reunions, their current
togetherness was simply par for the course.

According to Lodge, Peter retained the contractual right to reshoot
anything he wanted, and he could reshoot any given scene
as often
as he
wanted. So to Lodge’s amazement, Peter reshot Lodge’s scene entirely in
close-ups. (A scene shot entirely in close-ups would produce a rather avant-garde effect.) Lodge tried to just sit there and let Peter film him, but, from
Peter’s perspective, Lodge just couldn’t seem to get it right. “Your eyebrows
are popping up and down like a fiddler’s elbow!” Peter told him before
insisting that they retake the scene yet again.

“Do what Gene Hackman does,” Peter advised his oldest continuous
friend. “Fuck all.” (By this Peter meant something on the order of “don’t
do anything—just sit there.”)

Lodge concludes his tale by noting that despite Peter’s right to reshoot
anything he pleased, Orion was under no obligation to
use
any of it, so
Lodge’s scene ended up on the cutting room floor.

• • •

The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu
has two remarkable performances,
both by Peter, some beautiful set designs by Alexandre Trauner (who designed
The Apartment
, 1960, for Billy Wilder, among other films), no
script, and few laughs. The film opens with Fu’s minions singing “Happy
Birthday to Fu” on the occasion of his 168th birthday. He prepares ritualistically to drink the
elixir vitae
that keeps him alive, but a servant
drops the bottle. (“You look familiar,” Fu remarks to the servant, played
by Burt Kwouk.) Fu spends the rest of the film assembling the exotic ingredients, all the while pursued by a retired Scotland Yard inspector,
Nayland Smith (Peter), and alternatively thwarted and aided by Inspector
Alice Rage (Helen Mirren).

Michael Caine had once been mentioned as a possible Nayland Smith,
but Peter took the role himself, and his Nayland Smith couldn’t be more
opposed to anything Caine could have produced. Peter’s Nayland is a peculiarly flat-voiced old man—Henry Crun with no affect, having had it
tortured out of him by previous encounters with Fu Manchu. In fact, there
is something oddly cerebral about both of Sellers’s performances in this
lackluster film. Because of the film’s basic storyline, it isn’t a stretch to say
that both Fu Manchu and Nayland Smith spend much of the time meditating on their own mortality. The result is weirdly affecting—a badly
written, practically undirected comedy played as warped eulogy.

“Peter was fucked up,” his costar Helen Mirren acknowledges. “He
could be very cruel, but he was also incredibly vulnerable, like a child.” But
like most other of the sensitive people with whom Peter Sellers worked,
Mirren adds a crucial filip: “He was very, very nice to me. He did the
sweetest thing—he laughed at my jokes. That’s such a kind thing to do to
anyone. Especially [for] a great comedian.”

• • •

March 1980 saw the usual swelling tide of pre-Oscars jockeying, handicapping, and hype. Peter flew from Gstaad to London, and from London to
New York, where, on March 12, he appeared on the
Today
show to promote
Being There
, for which he was nominated for a Best Actor award. “I’m
looking for a girl with a sick mind and a beautiful body,” he told Gene
Shalit, though he was, of course, still married.

He told Marilyn Beck that he had no plans to appear at the Oscars
ceremony at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles on April 14.
“I’ll be busy in London editing
The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu
. But
even if I weren’t, I wouldn’t attend the Oscars. I never go to those do’s,
never go to anything. I’m very anti-social.”

He was also by that point engaged in a public feud with Jerzy Kosinski,
who for his part was running around informing everyone about Peter’s face-lift. Peter, meanwhile, was claiming that Kosinski had not actually written
the shooting script of
Being There
; instead, Peter said,
Being There
had really
been significantly rewritten by Robert C. Jones, who had won an Oscar for
Coming Home
. This may seem to be an outlandish claim, given Kosinski’s
international stature, but in point of fact Hal Ashby, too, supported Jones
when Jones took the matter to Writers Guild arbitration after Kosinski
refused to share the credit. Unfortunately for Jones, Ashby, and Sellers, the
Guild supported Kosinski and awarded him sole credit for the cowritten
script.