Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [118]
Peter was smitten as only Peter could be, and Britt gave him very good reason to be so. Charming, young, fresh, and willing, she also happened to be mind-bogglingly beautiful. “Darling,” he said to her at one point early on, “you’re so unspoiled, so pristine, and so very dishy.” Bert Mortimer, who saw Peter in his blackest moments, later said that he “had never seen him so happy. . . . It made life a lot easier for everybody around him.” Peter’s mother, on the other hand, wasn’t impressed. Peg showed up at her son’s wedding this time, but behind Britt’s back she tended to call Peter’s sweet young bride “the bleeding Nazi.”
Four days after the wedding Peter flew to Los Angeles and checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel and Bungalows. He was there to film Kiss Me, Stupid, Billy Wilder’s feel-bad comedy about a nebbish Nevada husband and the fantastic jealousy he sports over his pretty blond wife. Sinatra was out, Dean Martin was in. Monroe was out, Kim Novak in. Shirley MacLaine was out, Felicia Farr (who was married to Jack Lemmon) was in.
Britt stayed in London to begin filming Guns at Batasi with Richard Attenborough and John Leyton. David Lodge and Graham Stark both had roles in the film, so naturally Peter asked them to spy on Britt and report back to him any suspicious behavior.
Capucine threw a party for him on February 25. Blake Edwards was there; so were Jack Lemmon and Felicia Farr, Billy and Audrey Wilder, the director William Wyler, and Swifty Lazar.
Peter taped The Steve Allen Show on March 20 and brought the house down. “It was a very interesting period in my life,” Peter said in response to Allen’s question about The Goon Show. “I worked with a very brilliant colleague called Spike Milligan, who wrote the show. Who unfortunately is in a mental home at the moment. [Laughter.] No. He gets a bit under the weather. [Laughter.] But anyway. . . .”
Allen asked him what he called his mother-in-law: “Well, I think the English have quite a good way out of it. They just say ‘Hallo!’ [Laughter.] But Britt’s mother is called Mai-Britt, and I call Britt my Britt, you see, because she belongs to me.”
After keeping Allen unusually entertained and playing drums with the band on “Honeysuckle Rose” (complete with a show-stopping solo), Peter finished off his appearance with an extended improvisation in which he placed a prank call to Scotland Yard. (This was not Peter’s invention. Random phone calls were a standard routine on The Steve Allen Show; Jerry Lewis, Mel Brooks, Johnny Carson, and Jack Lemmon had each placed one during their guest appearances on the show.)
Given the American premiere of The Pink Panther, the L.A. papers were also full of Peter:
“I don’t enjoy playing multiple parts at all. I know Alec Guinness doesn’t either. But they do have a sort of showcase value.”
“I feel I’m the only one who really knows basically that I’m a phony and eventually it will all be found out.”
“Only my children have given me any real happiness. What is wrong with me? What am I looking for?”
Meanwhile, Peter’s spies not having anything to report, he proceeded to grill Britt over the phone. What scenes did she film that day? Who with? Did she have to kiss him? “Britt, just tell me.”
He sent telegrams. On March 10, he sent five. “Ying,” read the first. “Tong,” read the second.
“Iddle.”
“I.”
“Po. Love, Bluebottle.”
He also wrote letters. In one, he described having just attended a screening of The Great Escape (1963): “I was getting deeply engrossed when somebody said, ‘Who’s that fellow?’ Someone else said, ‘That’s John Leyton.’ I thought, ‘John Leyton? He’s in the film that my Britt’s doing. She kissed him. Oh, but that’s nothing, that’s just acting.’ Then I thought of something an actor once said to me, that he always had to become involved with the women he worked with, otherwise it