Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (65 page)

Peter made the cover of
Time
on March 3. All six of him.

Backed by images of Chance, Quilty, Strangelove, Clouseau, and the
Grand Duchess Gloriana XII, the face of a well-known, little-known actor
looked inscrutably toward the camera. The headline was, “Who Is This
Man?” Peter was actually pleased by the article, which was written by the
critic Richard Schickel—so much so that he wrote an appreciative letter to
the editor: “I would like to thank you very much for taking the trouble to
probe accurately the deeper recesses of whatever the hell I am.”

At the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on the fourteenth, Jane Fonda strode
across the stage, opened the envelope, and announced that Dustin Hoffman
won the Best Actor award for
Kramer vs. Kramer
(1979). By that point
Peter had also lost the New York Film Critics Circle award to Hoffman,
too. (That one wasn’t even close. Hoffman got thirteen votes, Peter only
three.) He had to settle for a Golden Globe and a Best Actor award from
the National Board of Review, and he was bitterly disappointed.

He didn’t fare better in Europe. Nominated by BAFTA as Best Actor
in 1981, Peter lost to John Hurt for
The Elephant Man
(1980).

Peter was devastated not only by his failure to win an Oscar; he had
been just as upset when he saw the release print of
Being There
. Without
Peter’s approval, Ashby and Braunsberg decided to end the film not with
Chance walking on the surface of the lake, but with the outtakes of Peter
laughing hysterically, trying and failing to deliver the “now get this, honky”
line. The outtakes do pull some easy laughs—it’s hard not to break up
when listening to
anybody
suffering a laughing jag—but to Peter, the essence
of his most austere and technically controlled performance was utterly ruined. He sent an angry telex to Ashby:

“It breaks the spell, do you understand? Do you understand, it breaks
the spell! Do you hear me, it breaks the spell! I’m telling you how it breaks
the spell. . . .”

• • •

“I’ve got an illegitimate daughter running around somewhere,” he claimed
in April 1980. He was speaking of the baby he believed he and the unnamed
mystery woman had conceived while he was serving in the Royal Air
Force—the one Peg had invited to dinner while Anne was recovering from
her miscarriage. He had three children, whom he treated more or less
poorly, if at all, but thoughts of his maybe, maybe-not lost daughter only
intensified as his health deteriorated.

Of his three children, Michael Sellers enjoyed the least troubled relationship with his father. There had been periods of tension, but the two
males seemed to get along well enough. Michael had his mother for emotional support; his father was there for infrequent fun.

Michael and Sarah were each the beneficiaries of a one-time gift of
£20,000 when they turned twenty-one. It wasn’t much, considering Peter’s
wealth, but, as usual, it was all he had to give them.

Peter had never quite gotten around to setting up a trust for his third
child. Victoria Sellers had spent most of her life forced into playing the role
of pawn in a nasty chess game; Peter was the black king, Britt the blond
queen. With an unerring sense, the early-teenage Victoria once showed up
for a visit clad entirely in purple. Peter threw a typical fit, but soon whisked
her away on a shopping spree, both to make up for his rage and to ensure
that she wouldn’t wear the offending color in his presence. On another
occasion, Peter canceled Victoria’s planned visit to Port Grimaud at the last
minute, thereby enraging Britt, thus provoking Peter to tell Sue Evans to
write a letter to Victoria on his behalf and tell her, as Michael Sellers puts
it, “that she should no longer regard him as her father.”

That one blew over, slightly, but at the end of March 1980, the fifteen-year-old Victoria made the mistake of telling her father what she thought
of his work: “He asked me if I’d seen his latest film,
Being There
. I said
yes, I thought it was great. But then I said, ‘You looked like a little fat,
old man.’

“I didn’t mean to hurt him. I meant his character in the film looked
like a little old man. But he went mad. He threw his drink over me and
told me to get the next plane home.”

Sarah Sellers usually knew enough to keep her distance. She tried to
please her father, but for reasons she never understood, she kept on failing.
“When I was a student and rather poor,” she says, “I didn’t know what to
give him and Lynne for Christmas, so I got her some lace doilies and him
an old print. I got a letter back from him saying, ‘I know it’s the thought
that counts, but what a thought. Yours, Dad.’ I was devastated. But then
he turned up a few months later as if nothing had happened.”

But when Sarah put her two cents in over Victoria and the drink-throwing episode, she received the following telegram: “Dear Sarah, After
what happened this morning with Victoria, I shall be happy if I never hear
from you again. I won’t tell you what I think of you. It must be obvious.
Goodbye, Your Father.”

• • •

Entertainment writers’ conventional wisdom, if one can call it that, holds
that movie stars demean themselves by appearing in television commercials.
It’s considered far more honorable for stars to demean themselves on celluloid. But when Barclay’s Bank offered Peter £1 million for a series of four
commercials, he accepted, and rightly so. It was a great deal of money. He
may not have needed it to survive, but he needed it nonetheless. After all,
he certainly wasn’t acting for his health.

The commercials were shot in Dublin, with Joe McGrath directing.
Peter’s character is a con man called Monty Casino, who bilks the unsuspecting out of their quid, the suggestion being that Barclay’s Bank offered
protection against such shady scams. (The name plays not only on Monte
Carlo’s casinos but also Monte Cassino, where Spike Milligan nearly got
blown up during World War II.) In the first, Monty swindles a young
musician out of his money; in the second, he cons a stately manor’s aristocratic owner. The third featured Monty gulling a student out of his rent
money. The fourth was never filmed.

“He had a heart attack, and we couldn’t finish,” McGrath relates. “He
started to get palpitations and said, ‘My God.’ I said, ‘Is it your heart?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s the Pacemaker—it’s gone into top gear. Quick—give me
that bag!’ He took out this tiny leather case which had green and red things
on it. I said what is it? He said, ‘It’s Gucci jump leads, you can start me
up. What are friends for?’

“He said, ‘We’ve got to get a specialist.’ So, I phoned downstairs and
said we needed a specialist for Mr. Sellers. They said, ‘You can’t get a
specialist unless an MD comes and examines him.’ So I said to Peter that
an MD would come up and then we’d get him into a hospital. He was
lying in bed. I had come in from my room and was still in a dressing gown,
and I had dark glasses on, and there was a knock on the door. This guy
was standing there, and he said, ‘You look terrible, Mr. Sellers! You should
get to bed!’ Peter said, ‘That’s what I need—an Irish doctor.’

“I took him into intensive care. The last thing he said was, ‘I’ll see you
in London.’ He was in there for a couple of days, and then he was out.
And, like the fool he was, he went to Cannes.”

• • •

McGrath is getting ahead of the story.

Nurse Lynne flew into Dublin from Los Angeles and announced to the
press that it was just a false alarm and not a heart attack at all. This time
it wasn’t oysters but a bicycle. Peter had had to ride a bike in one of the
Barclay’s commercials, she explained, and he’d simply overdone it. Her
motive seems clearly to have been commercial in nature; she was trying to
protect his insurability.

Nevertheless, shortly after leaving the hospital and flying down to
Cannes for the film festival, Peter endorsed an advertisement for the British
Heart Association. The ad, printed in London newspapers, featured a photo
of Peter; it was captioned “Heart Attack Survivor.” Accompanying the pictures was a quote:

“I’m lucky—I survived!”

• • •

Lynne accompanied Peter to Cannes, where
Being There
was in competition
for the Golden Palm. He kept a fairly low profile, except for the little garden
party arranged by Lorimar for about 450 guests. “I’m fine, thank you, I’m
feeling very fit; I’m fine, thank you, I’m feeling very fit,” Peter kept repeating as he made his way through the horde. But the journalists kept
asking.

“Please, I am not an invalid,” he insisted to the crowd of reporters, who
were legitimately confused by his remarks because they were being told
simultaneously by Lorimar staffers that Peter was “not a well man.”

Paparazzi, kept out of the affair by a wrought-iron fence, simply poked
their lenses through the iron bars while a string quartet played in the background. The Los Angeles
Herald-Examiner
’s Wanda McDaniel described
the turmoil: “When Sellers arrived, the roots of garden party etiquette got
severed to smithereens. At one point, the crush took on shades of panic
until bodyguards convinced the curious that there are better ways to go
than getting trampled to death at a garden fete.”

The garden party certainly helped the film’s publicity, but it scarcely
mattered as far as the awards were concerned. The Golden Palm went to
two films that year: Bob Fosse’s
All That Jazz
(1979) and Akira Kurosawa’s
Kagemusha
(1980).

And the Best Actor? Michel Piccoli for
Salto nel vuoto
(1979).

• • •

“The only rocks in this marriage are the rocks other people are throwing,”
Lynne declared at the end of May. And furthermore, she made a point of
noting, “My mother and I are enjoying a very good relationship once again
because she now approves of Peter. She assumed our marriage would last
only a couple of months. Instead we have been together almost five years
and we celebrated our third wedding anniversary in February. We are proving my mother wrong, so she has finally had to accept Peter.”

“My mother still hasn’t met him,” Lynne went on to say. “One of the
reasons is that she lives in Spain and we have no plans to go there.”

Instead, Peter and Lynne went in precisely the opposite direction. They
embarked on a yachting trip to the Aegean Sea.

• • •

It was probably wise of both Peter and Lynne to stay away from Iris Frederick, but even a luxurious sail could only do so much. The effects of the
face-lift were wiped away by Peter’s worsening heart condition. His face
was taking on a gaunt quality; the precise shape of his skull emerging more
clearly with every pound of weight he lost, not to mention every added line
of worry and stress. And yet, typically, and despite his increasing frailty, he
continued to develop new film ideas. It was the only therapy he trusted.

The writer Stephen Bach, then an executive with United Artists, flew
to Gstaad in June. “Peter Sellers was wraithlike,” Bach later wrote. “The
smile he wore seemed paralyzed in place, and I thought I had never seen
so delicate a man. His skull, his fingers, the tightly drawn, almost transparent skin—all seemed frail, infinitely fragile  . . . . [He was] a spectral presence, a man made of eggshells.”

Peter had been working on the script of
The Romance of the Pink Panther
with a writer named Jim Moloney; the film’s producer, Danny Rissner,
had sent Peter some script notes, and Peter, after reading them on the yacht
in the Aegean, had threatened to jump overboard. He insisted that Lynne
be named as executive producer. If UA balked, he would walk.

It must be said that Lynne Frederick had her hands full with Peter,
as did each of his other wives. The difference was that none of his friends
could stand this one. They knew
him
too well, for one thing. And they
trusted neither her motives nor her personal performances—the ones she
gave privately for them. It was relatively distant business associates who
got the full treatment. Bach, for instance, believed Lynne’s benevolent
routine on his trip to Gstaad to salvage the project. “The atmosphere was
uneasy only until Lynne Frederick came into the room, exuding an aura
of calm that somehow enveloped us all like an Alpine fragrance. She was
only in her mid-twenties but instantly observable as the mature center
around which the household revolved, an emotional anchor that looked
like a daffodil.”

At the same time, Lynne Frederick deserves a bit of compassion herself in retrospect. It was the helpless Peter she nursed, the dependent
and infantile creature of impulse and consequent contrition. Patiently,
she ministered to him. And eventually, as Bach observes, Peter was
moved to cooperate. At the end of the meeting, Bach observes, “I noticed, as he rose, that not once in the long, talkative afternoon had he let
go of Lynne’s hand, nor had she moved away. She transfused him simultaneously with calm and energy and the hand he clung to was less a hand
than a lifeline.”

• • •

The Romance of the Pink Panther
was not the only project on Peter’s mind.
Marshall Brickman’s
Valium
, now called
Lovesick
, was still in development.
Brickman still possesses a tape recording of Peter practicing his scenes as
a Viennese psychiatrist.
Unfaithfully Yours
, too, was moving forward, as
was a sort of reunion project with Terry Southern. The proposed title:
Grossing Out
.