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By Root 1604 0

end of 1962, Peter had successfully created for himself a public persona based on blank peculiarity. The automobile fixation had become a journalistic cliché, but once in a while Peter would touch on something authentic when discussing his lists of cars. There were two factors behind his obsessive buying and selling of automobiles, he announced: “One is a search for perfection in a machine; the other stems from a great sense of depression at being unable to supply what I know I should be able to deliver.” He was himself the best sports car, the finest Rolls, the silkiest limousine, endlessly nicked by a siege of pebbles. Beyond, or behind, or in some way circling around the escalating nuttiness, Peter Sellers did know himself. Sometimes.

But, he immediately declared, everything had just changed.

“Now I’ve finally got what I want,” he swore. It was a Bristol 407.

“It’s perfect! I didn’t know such a car existed! The Bentley Continental wasn’t bad for room, for speed. But the 407 combines everything.”

TWELVE

Meanwhile, in Hollywood, the screenwriter Maurice Richlin was shopping for a collaborator. He approached Blake Edwards. “I have an idea about a detective who is trying to catch a jewel thief who is having an affair with his wife,” Richlin announced to the director of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and Days of Wine and Roses (1962). Together they carved out a script that featured a variety of gimmicks: two glamorous women, an urbane leading man, a piece of early sixties vealcake, fashionable European locales, and a wondrous gem with a tiny flaw. If one looked at it closely, the jewel would seem to have embedded deep within it the distinct image of an animal. The director knew one thing for certain: The Pink Panther (1964) would be a perfect vehicle for David Niven.

By late October 1962, casting was completed, financing had been secured from the Mirisch Company, the independent production company that made such critical and commercial hits as Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960)—both by Billy Wilder—and shooting was ready to commence at the Cinecittà soundstages in Rome. Niven would be the sophisticated thief, Robert Wagner his handsome playboy nephew. Claudia Cardinale would be Princess Darla, the owner of the jewel, a curvaceous but nevertheless deposed ruler of a necessarily vague Eastern sovereignty. The detective’s wife, who would be having the affair with the thief, would be the striking, one-named Capucine. The detective would be Peter Ustinov. (Brigitte Bardot once claimed to have been offered one of the two babe roles but turned it down. Ava Gardner may also have been sought, hired, and swiftly replaced because of her excessive demands.)

Edwards and his team flew to Rome, and Ustinov changed his mind. He didn’t want to be Inspector Clouseau after all. That he waited until three days before principal photography began wasn’t very nice. Blake Edwards was “ready to kill.”

“At the very last minute—we were in Rome, we were set to shoot the following Monday, it was Friday—Ustinov said, ‘I can’t do the movie.’ We all said, ‘Is there somebody we can recast?’ I couldn’t think of anybody at that time who could do that sort of thing. [The agent] Freddie Fields said, ‘I’ve got an actor who has a window. You’ve got to do him in four weeks.’ ” (Dennis Selinger was not Peter’s only agent; he had several working in tandem.) “All I could think of was I’m All Right, Jack. In desperation, I said, ‘Let’s go. We’ve got to do something.’ He got off the plane in Rome, we got in the car, drove back from the airport, [and] by the time we got to the hotel Clouseau was born.”

Peter himself later claimed to have turned down The Pink Panther originally because he hadn’t liked the part—“I didn’t want anything to do with it”—after which Edwards offered the role to Ustinov. But this account is doubtful. Graham Stark recounts Peter’s glee upon landing the part of Clouseau at the eleventh hour: “When he got the first Panther, he rang me up like a child—‘I’ve got five weeks in Rome . . . and I’m getting £90,000!’ ”

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