Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [100]
It turned out to be the fault of the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in disharmonious concert with the Walt Disney Company. Peter Pan’s creator, the playwright James Barrie, had left the rights to the play to the hospital. Disney wished to make the film on its own terms. Thus did Sick Children wage war against the mouse, and by the fall of 1962 the project was in full collapse.
• • •
Billy Wilder had more luck than George Cukor. At first.
Producers were practically dumping scripts on Peter’s doorstep during his stay in Hollywood, but very few of them caught his attention. Wilder’s idea did, however, as did Wilder himself. It was to be an adultery comedy, and it would be directed by the acerbic and blazingly funny writer-director of such films as Double Indemnity (1944), The Lost Weekend (1945), Sunset Boulevard (1950), and Some Like It Hot (1959). The costars Wilder managed to mention were also enticing. If he accepted the role, Peter was told, he might be playing opposite Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Shirley MacLaine.
Wilder’s films generally bore a bitter edge with raunchy undertones, but by the early 1960s, with the Production Code seemingly in full retreat, Wilder was itching to push things a little further. In the new film he was thinking about making, Peter would play an insanely jealous husband. Sinatra would be a Sinatra-like star who gets headaches if he doesn’t get laid once a day. MacLaine would be Peter’s long-suffering wife. Marilyn would be the local hooker. Irresistible.
The movie wouldn’t be filmed right away, however; the as yet untitled comedy wouldn’t go before the cameras for at least another year.
Other directors, writers, and producers could scarcely compete with the package of Wilder, Monroe, Sinatra, and MacLaine. Peter turned down twenty-seven other film roles in the first week he spent in Hollywood.
But there was one other idea that interested him: Ulysses.
This was neither a joke nor a fabrication: Peter Sellers wanted to play Leopold Bloom. Jerry Wald would produce the picture, Jack Cardiff would direct it. “Bloom could be the ultimate in characterization,” Peter told Hedda Hopper. “I have great faith in Jack Cardiff’s intuition and good taste, and he can do it if anyone can.” Unfortunately, Jerry Wald died of a heart attack two months later.
Peter was upbeat about his trip, but there was a dark foreshadowing. “I shall enjoy working in Hollywood,” he told the British scribes upon his return to London, “but I could never live there.”
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Even in the context of Peter Sellers’s previously frenetic work schedule and tension-filled private life, 1962 was ridiculous. The year his marriage collapsed and he was jettisoned out on his own for virtually the first time in his life (David Lodge and others shepherded him through the war), six of his films played in the United States: Only Two Can Play (which opened in March), Mr. Topaze (May), Lolita (June), Road to Hong Kong (June), Waltz of the Toreadors (August), and Trial and Error (November). These were accompanied by the personal interlude of Peter and Anne officially announcing their separation in July.
He had an overly spacious den-like penthouse in Hampstead and an office on Panton Street in Soho. He had Bert, Hattie, and two children he saw less and less. He had his cars, the charlatan psychic Maurice Woodruff, a lot of publicity, and an enormous amount of money. He became so depressed that Bert Mortimer, fearing for his boss’s life, moved into the penthouse to be at his side all the time. As Bert recalls it, Bryan Forbes and Nanette Newman used to come over and “hold his hands as he went to sleep.”
Forbes is succinct: “In many cases, Peter was, uh, slightly mad, shall we say?”
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Peter was back in New York at the end of September and continued to be starstruck. “Peter Sellers, who claimed to have always ‘dreamed’ of knowing me, finally arranged