Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [114]
Of much more interest were the contestants in the Miss Universe pageant held in Miami Beach, where Peter served as one of the judges. Indeed, the playboy Sellers appeared to be turning the judging of beauty contests into something of a sustained hobby; a few months later he worked the Miss World pageant at the Lyceum Ballroom in London.
• • •
He bought another estate—Brookfield, located in Elstead, Surrey. (Surrey is just southwest of London.) It was his first adult home south of London; even with the out-there Chipperfield, Peter kept his geographical bearings secure. Apart from the fact that the Hampstead penthouse obviously had been contaminated by Ted Levy, Peter simply felt the familiar urge for newness. This time, it took the form of a fifteenth-century redbrick house with stone floors, lead-latticed windows, and thick-beamed ceilings. In place of Hampstead’s rosewood walls and leather-paneled window treatments came inglenooks. There was a lake, some paddocks, and a walled garden. There were several barns, one of which Peter turned into a gymnasium in one part and a movie theater with a retractable screen in the other. In the yard he kept a donkey. Its name was Fred.
Peter was thirty-eight. He weighed less than ever, smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, and popped a variety of prescription drugs to combat frequent insomnia and depression. “I was getting into the pill area in a big way,” he later admitted. At the time, the movie star described his experience of life starkly: “ghostly and unreal” were the words he used.
• • •
Peter Sellers was always going to be the star of A Shot in the Dark (1964), but Clouseau, surprisingly, was something of an afterthought. The Mirisch brothers—Harold, Walter, and Marvin—owned the rights to Harry Kurnitz’s one-set, dialogue-heavy stage play, which was itself an adaptation of a French play by Marcel Achard. With The Pink Panther safely in the can after a smooth production, they signed Peter to play the lead—a French magistrate leading a pretrial murder investigation. Anatole Litvak would direct.
But Peter found Litvak to be uninspiring, as have many film critics over the years, and he threatened to quit. (To be fair to Litvak, he did direct some good pictures in his long and commercially successful career, among them Sorry, Wrong Number and The Snake Pit, both released in 1948.) So to keep their star happy, the Mirisches fired Litvak and brought in Blake Edwards, who already had a multifilm contract with their company. Edwards then hired a new writer, William Peter Blatty, and together they turned A Shot in the Dark into a Clouseau comedy. In the process, two actors dropped out—Walter Matthau and, of all people, Sophia Loren.
And yet, despite all the preproduction commotion, A Shot in the Dark turned out to be a much finer film than The Pink Panther. On the narrative level, the stakes are higher. People die. And they die just as Clouseau’s level of competence sinks even lower. From the fluid, carefully orchestrated pre-credits sequence to the equally calibrated interrogation scene at the end, A Shot in the Dark is one of the richest, most fully realized films of Peter’s career.
Elke Sommer is Maria Gambrelli, the maid accused of shooting the chauffeur. George Sanders is Maria’s employer, Benjamin Ballon. For the role of Chief Inspector Dreyfus, whom Clouseau’s incompetence drives insane, Edwards chose Herbert Lom. And as was often the case, Peter suggested his best friends for two of the smaller roles: Graham Stark would be Clouseau’s laconic assistant, Hercule, and David Lodge would show up briefly as a gardener. Shooting took place between November 1963 and January 1964 at Shepperton, and once again, Peter got the best suite at the Dorchester for the duration of the production as part of