Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [132]
Fed up, John Bryan terminated his relationship with Peter. After the Fox was Brookfield’s first, last, and only production; the company dissolved.
At the beginning of filming After the Fox, Victor Mature was quoted as saying that “if Sellers plays his cards right, I may let him steal the picture.” By July, Mature was disenchanted. “I just saw my rushes,” the aging star told Sheilah Graham, “and I suggest you sell your United Artists stock.”
When the film was released, the New York Times agreed with Mature: “Mr. Sellers acts on the level of Mr. [Jerry] Lewis, which is to say broadly, bluntly, and hoggishly.” Time was also scathing: “a garlicky farce that could barely make the late late show on Sicilian TV.”
Still, Peter’s time in Italy was scarcely in vain. He bought a new Hasselblad camera, which he used to take a number of photos that ran in Italian newspapers as well as in London’s Daily Express and Daily Mirror.
And he got his Ferrari Superfast at last.
Only five of the cars were made that year, but Peter managed to snag one—a sand-colored number with matching butter-leather seats. It was capable of revving up to 180 miles per hour, he was proud to say, though he was also forced to acknowledge that there was no place in England where he could actually drive that fast.
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In public, Peter was buoyant, his marriage to Britt a visible success as long as it was outsiders who were watching. Once again, he had married an actress. Each member of the couple knew how to play a scene in front of an audience. They played things differently at home.
Neil Simon and his wife were staying virtually across the street from the Sellerses on the Appian Way during the production of After the Fox. They were awakened one night when Britt, after a particularly nasty fight with Peter—he threw a chair at her—climbed through a window in her nightgown and sought refuge at the neighbors’. The Simons were aghast, having had no idea Peter and Britt were anything less than fully content with each other.
“I tried so hard to understand Sellers,” Ekland says in retrospect. “I related his dark moods to the pressures and ambiguities of his genius. Where was the warmth, humor, and humanity he generated on the screen? There were interludes when he was truly a loving, gentle, and generous human being, but these moments were like flashes of sunshine.”
A few months earlier, Peter had penned a reflective piece for, believe it or not, Seventeen magazine. “Peter Sellers Talks to Teens” proved that on some skewed but fundamental level he knew himself better than anyone else did: “If I can’t really find a way to live with myself, I can’t expect anyone else to live with me,” he wrote.
A more Goonish (but no less honest) bit of self-knowledge came out on The Ed Sullivan Show in the fall of 1966, when Peter appeared in the guise of his After the Fox character Federico Fabrizi. (For the purposes of historical placement, Sullivan’s other guests that night were Judy Garland, Sophie Tucker, Tom Jones, Topo Gigio, and the Marquis Chimps.) Asked by Sullivan to explain the symbolic meaning of his film No More Pasta, in which a beautiful woman drowns in a vat of minestrone, Fabrizi waxed poetic: “We are all in a thick soup, swimming around in our own vegetables! With our arms outstretched, calling for human compassion! And—come formaggi?—a little cheese.”
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Habitually, many of the films Peter wanted to make were either made by other actors or not made at all. In April 1965, the Mirisch Brothers—who evidently bore no grudge over the Kiss Me, Stupid debacle—bought the rights to Kingsley Amis’s new novel The Egyptologists; Bryan Forbes was to develop the film with Peter. Soon there was a deal for Peter as well: $600,000 for a ten-week shoot; living expenses of $1,000