Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [101]
But Peter was himself a star trying to navigate a course toward international superstardom, and the split between shyness and celebrity was becoming nearly impossible for him to sustain. The fault lines scraped more noticeably.
He was getting tired of being hammered by British journalists, who, then as now, enjoyed the moist sensation of blood on their fangs. “The more success you have,” he complained, “the more people want to have a go at you in the press. And I just haven’t got the confidence to shrug off what is said about me.” He was making £150,000 a year, but money itself didn’t seem to help.
To be more precise, Peter’s wealth didn’t help his emotional state. It did, however, aid Harold Pinter. In December, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Noel Coward, Leslie Caron, and Peter Sellers announced that they were among the unlikely financiers of Pinter’s The Caretaker (1962).
Peter spent money on less flashy causes as well. According to Bert Mortimer, he liked to prowl London’s parks at night looking for homeless people. When he found an appropriate one, he’d stuff a £5 note in his pocket. Bert witnessed these transactions: “You’d see the man flinch back, thinking he was going to be hit, then fish out the note and stare in utter disbelief at it.”
Nothing was simple. For Peter, this type of generosity came at a price. As Kenneth Tynan reported, “Sellers is a self-accusing man who incessantly ponders ethical questions. Once, driving home from the studio, he saw a ragged old woman standing on a street corner, and ordered his car to stop. ‘I got out and gave her some money, without telling her who I was. And then, just as I was getting back into the car, I heard myself thinking, “This’ll do me good later. This’ll make God like me.”
“ ‘ “That’s wrecked it,” I said to myself. “That’s absolutely wrecked it.” ’ ”
There was some degree of paranoia involved in Peter’s erratic behavior. Peter himself labeled it “intuition.”
Roy Boulting remembers that Peter “would keep you up half the night on the telephone, then when you yawned out of sheer fatigue, it would be interpreted as an unfriendly attitude. It got to be a killer, his ‘intuition.’ ”
Maurice Woodruff played right into it, and so, surprisingly, did Dennis Selinger—in secret collaboration with the quack Woodruff. As Selinger later told it, “Maurice used to phone me and say, ‘Peter’s coming. Is there anything you want me to tell him? Should I say ‘yes’ or ‘no’?” Selinger was only too happy to oblige. This way, everyone was happy: Woodruff’s bogus predictions turned out to be sound, Peter made responsible career choices, and Selinger got his cut.
• • •
Bill Sellers died in October. He was sixty-two.
“My father died following three coronary attacks,” Peter later said, “but it was trouble with his prostate that killed him.”
Echoing just about everyone else who knew him, two of Bill’s nephews describe their uncle as a shadow man who “wouldn’t say boo to a goose.” What gives Dick Ray and Ray Marks’s observations about their uncle their bite is their follow-up contention: that this was Peter’s essential nature as well—half of it, anyway.
According to Dick Ray, Peter took after both of his parents—the aggressive, performing mother and the quiet and aloof father. But then, says Ray, “the minute the camera stopped he’d go back to himself again—”
Ray Marks finishes the sentence: “. . . to Bill Sellers.”
• • •
Peter Sellers was asked that year what he saw when he looked into a mirror. His answer: “Someone who has never grown up, a wild sentimentalist, capable of great heights and black, black depths—a person who has no real voice of his own. I’m like a mike—I have no set sound of my own. I pick it up from my surroundings.”
And this: “I don’t know who Peter Sellers is, except that he’s the one who gets paid.”
By the