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When the Beatles won two Grammy awards that year—Best New Artist(s) and Best Vocal Performance by a Group (for “A Hard Day’s Night”)—it was Peter who presented it to them in a videotaped sequence. John, Paul, George, and Ringo could not attend the proceedings in person because they were in London filming Help, 1965, with Richard Lester.

After Sellers gave the Beatles their awards, John Lennon responded Goonishly by launching into a speech in nonsense French; the others followed suit, and the whole thing ended up slipping into “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”

• • •

Although Peter had filmed his scenes in Dr. Strangelove two years earlier, the film was still very much in the news in the spring of 1965. It had been Columbia’s biggest hit of 1964, pulling in the then-sizable sum of $5 million in the United States alone. Now it was up for four Oscars, all in top categories: Best Actor (Peter), Best Director (Kubrick), Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium (Kubrick, Southern, and George), and Best Picture.

It lost all four.

My Fair Lady was named Best Picture, Becket Best Screenplay, George Cukor Best Director (for My Fair Lady), and Rex Harrison Best Actor (also for My Fair Lady).

Dr. Strangelove fared better at the BAFTA gala, where it won the BAFTA Film Award, the award for Best British Film, and the award for Best Film from Any Source.

Peter, however, lost again in the category of Best Actor—to none other than Richard Attenborough for Guns at Batasi.

FIFTEEN

A script by Neil Simon, direction by Vittorio De Sica, a flamboyant and multi-personality role for himself, sunny Italian locations filmed in Technicolor, and even a featured part for Britt. Peter’s next film project looked promising. After all of Brookfield’s fits and starts, After the Fox (1966), a heist spoof, would be Brookfield’s first actual production.

Given her glamour, Britt Ekland was continually offered film roles, but Peter, in a mix of professional expertise and jealousy, tended to talk her out of them. One nixed project, for example, was to star Dean Martin. “Do you really want Dean Martin breathing bourbon fumes all over you?” he asked his wife. Britt’s role in the De Sica film had one distinct advantage: Peter was the star of the film and would therefore have to be there all the time.

Peter had met Neil Simon the previous August, and, soon thereafter, Simon showed him the first forty pages of his first screenplay. According to John Bryan, Peter “flipped over it,” saying it was “the best screen material submitted to him in years.” Peter’s enthusiasm grew when Simon suggested a director: De Sica, whose groundbreaking Bicycle Thieves (1948) was one of the cornerstones of Italian neorealism. (The union of a preeminent Italian neorealist and a hot American comedy playwright was not quite as idiotic as it may seem. De Sica had long since moved away from lyrical, black-and-white urban dramas to slick, candy-colored, international moneymakers like Marriage Italian Style, 1964.)

Sellers got along well enough with Simon and invited him at one point to Brookfield for a script conference. After the meeting concluded, Simon was surprised to find that Princess Margaret, Lord Snowdon, Harry Secombe, and Eric Sykes had been invited to join them for dinner and an improvised Goon Show routine. Simon’s relationship with Sellers was friendly enough, but there were tinges of tension. Simon reports that on another occasion he, Peter, and Britt were sharing a limousine in London when they passed the West End theater at which Simon’s latest hit stage comedy, The Odd Couple, was running. Britt mildly suggested to Peter that they see the show sometime, whereupon Peter turned hotly to Simon and demanded to know “what the hell’s going on between you two?”

• • •

After the Fox is a farce about an Italian thief, a master of disguises named Aldo (Peter), who breaks out of prison to protect the morals of his loose sixteen-year-old sister, Gina (Britt).