Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [125]
With characteristic enthusiasm and verve for work, Peter explained why he wanted to become a producer. “I love this medium so much,” he said, “I thought it might be ideal if and when I begin to slip in popularity as an actor. And there’s such a dearth of really good acting material—so much bad stuff. My hospitalization was a time of reflection for me.”
As far as playing Fagin was concerned, Peter was acutely conscious of the material’s inherent racism. What had been acceptable to Dickens and his readers in the late 1830s was no longer so in the mid-1960s, especially not to Jews. There had been some uproar when Alec Guinness played the role in David Lean’s 1948 drama, the first production since the Holocaust; this time, the New York Times reported, it would be different: “From the start, [Sellers] said he would play Fagin simply as an old rogue. After all, he argued, he was part-Jewish himself and would not be a party to any hint of anti-Semitism.”
But the question of how Peter would play Fagin in Oliver! was permanently tabled because Sellers and Bryan weren’t allowed to make the film. A legal dispute with a rival production company ended badly for Brookfield. As it turned out, Ron Moody played Fagin in Oliver! (1968), The Borrowers was eventually produced as a made-for-television movie in 1973, and My Favorite Comrade, Don Quixote, and Maggie May were never made at all.
In late October, Peter went before the cameras for the first time since his last day on the set of Kiss Me, Stupid. It was charity work. He agreed to spend four days in New York shooting a United Nations–sponsored plea for world peace called Carol for Another Christmas (1965). The project did boast a prestige director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who made the brilliant comedy of theater ill-manners, All About Eve (1950), among other fine films. But Peter agreed to appear in Carol for Another Christmas, he told the press, because Adlai Stevenson had asked him personally. Also, he said, “After an illness like this, you wonder if you can work again.” The possibility of brain damage nagged at him. He worried about whether he could even remember dialogue any more, so he thought he’d start back to work with something small.
They paid him $350, total, and chauffeured him each of the four days of filming from his suite at the Regency to the studio, which was actually a converted hangar at Long Island’s Roosevelt Field. Peter’s American fans were anxious to see him, and a number of them showed up clamoring at the gate. Newsweek rather cruelly reported the excitement at the old airport: “ ‘We want Pete! We want Pete!,’ shrieked the gaggle of middle-aged, fruit-hatted females outside the studio fence. ‘Come on out, Pete!,’ they shouted, clutching at the wire like frenzied monkeys.”
Carol for Another Christmas was a relatively low-budget, made-for-television, post–atomic holocaust parable with good intentions and a (mostly) reputable cast: Sterling Hayden, Eva Marie Saint, Ben Gazzara, Richard Harris, Peter Fonda, and Steve Lawrence (who played the Ghost of Christmas Past). The script was by The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling, who provided even more arch irony than usual—so much so that it verged on clairvoyance. Peter played the head of a band of fanatical individualists. “The Individual Me’s” have survived a devastating atomic bomb blast only to devote their lives to eliminating everyone else—except, of course, for the perfect Me, who would be allowed to live. Clad in a gaudy Wild West show outfit complete with a ten-gallon hat emblazoned with the word “Me” in sequins, Peter’s charismatic character addresses his cult: “If we let them seep in here from down yonder and cross river—if we let these do-gooders, these bleeding hearts, propagate their insidious doctrine of involvement among us—then my dear friends, my beloved Me’s” [dramatic pause] “we’s in trouble.” His eyes glistening with the thrill