Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [136]
“He was terrified of playing with Orson and converted this into an aversion for Orson before he even met Orson,” Mankowitz went on. There are a number of stories of bad behavior regarding Sellers and Welles: Peter overheard a young woman comment, about Welles, “Isn’t he sexy?” and immediately became jealous. Peter, together in his suite with Orson, tried to get Welles to laugh, failed, and never got over his resentment. Peter met Orson in a Dorchester Hotel elevator. Sellers was coming down from his penthouse, and Orson and Mankowitz got on on a lower floor and Peter remarked that he hoped the elevator wouldn’t collapse from the weight.
Princess Margaret was the last straw. Welles had developed a friendship with Margaret some years earlier when he was in London directing his stage production of Othello. Sellers, having no idea that she and Welles even knew each other, invited her to stop by the already greatly troubled set on February 18 for lunch. He made the mistake of crowing about it to Welles. “Then Princess Margaret came,” Welles later gloated, “and passed him by and said, ‘Hello, Orson, I haven’t seen you for days!’ That was the real end. ‘Orson, I haven’t seen you for days!’ absolutely killed him. He went white as a sheet because he was going to get to present me.”
“That’s been blown up to ridiculous proportions,” Joe McGrath retorts. “Peter never resented Orson at that lunch. I think the problem was really that Britt left and Sellers just got the scent and chased. When he came back, Orson was just sitting there sort of smiling. And Peter lost his courage. I talked to Milligan, and Milligan said, ‘Well, yeah—he’s obviously so ashamed that he just doesn’t want to face up.’ ”
In fact, Peter had already decided the weekend before the fatal Margaret luncheon to issue a new demand to Feldman. He insisted that his scenes with Welles be shot in what Feldman’s production log calls “single cuts—thereby avoiding having both of them working together.”
Whatever the reason for his attitude and conduct, Peter proceeded to make the filming of Casino Royale substantially more difficult than such a heaving, overproduced extravaganza was already destined to be. At one point he departed the set and simply left a sign that said “Yankee Go Home.”
Describing the Welles imbroglio, McGrath says that Peter informed him that “ ‘as long as I’m not in the same setup I’ll go back.’ I said, ‘No! What are we doing, a home movie? This is Orson Welles you’re talking about. And not only that, Peter, but you wanted Orson Welles. You said, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we got Orson Welles?” And we get him and suddenly this happens.’ ” McGrath also pointed out to Peter that from a technical perspective alone it would be ridiculous to shoot a Panavision film with two stars in different setups; the point of any widescreen process, after all, is to shoot wide. Keeping Sellers and Welles in separate spaces and cutting back and forth between them would look, in a word, dumb.
Peter’s sharp aversion to Orson was not the only problem for McGrath. “At one point he said to me, ‘Sorry, I was a bit late coming back when you called me. I had something important to do. I was trying to get a new stylus for my record player.’ I said, ‘Oh, that’s very funny. Don’t treat me like you treat everybody else. Come on. What’s going on?’ ‘No,’ he said.
“I said, ‘Who do you think you are? Peter Sellers?’
“He said, ‘Yes. I fucking am Peter Sellers!’
“I said, ‘This is getting out of control. We call you and you don’t come. I’m not talking for Charlie Feldman, but