Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [150]
Peter became friendly with Ravi Shankar, the world’s most famous sitar master. When Peter was in Los Angeles that year, he invited Shankar to his rented house to perform a private concert. Paul Mazursky, one of the guests, reports that Peter imitated Ravi’s accented voice directly to Ravi’s face—much to Ravi’s amusement. And in fact it was Shankar who demonstrated the elements of sitar technique for Peter on the set of The Party, when Hrundi, early in the film, sits alone and plays.
Sellers’s friendship with Shankar led to an even closer friendship with George Harrison. “I got to re-know him through Ravi Shankar,” Harrison says. “He liked Ravi a lot and became close friends with him, and at that time, you know, I was with Ravi all the time learning the sitar. We hung out together, the three of us, which was quite an unusual combination.”
Harrison also reports that Peter was quite immersed in his spiritual quest: “He was doing a lot of yoga and trying to hone in on ‘Who am I?’ ‘What is it all about?’ ” He hadn’t discovered any lasting answers.
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Peter could be social and outgoing if the mood suited him. He, Britt, Edwards, Edwards’s new and as-yet unannounced girlfriend, Julie Andrews, and other key Party people did, in fact, party in a grandiose, Hollywood sort of way—when Edwards and Peter were speaking, at least. As filming neared completion, Peter threw a fifty-guest cocktail do, after which everyone climbed onto the busses he had chartered and headed to the Greek Theater in Los Feliz, where Henry Mancini was opening that night. There was also a three-hundred-person wrap party thrown by the producers on the Party set, with music provided by the onscreen band (The Party Four). On a more sober note, Peter returned to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital to address a group of cardiologists about his experiences as a heart-attack survivor.
Peter made new friends, too. The closest by far was Roman Polanski. They met in an Italian restaurant near the Paramount lot, where Polanski was filming Rosemary’s Baby (1968) with Mia Farrow. “My first impression of him was of a sad, shy man who hid his essential melancholy behind a fixed smile that revealed his rather prominent teeth,” Polanski writes in his autobiography. “His manner conveyed profound depression.”
Asked to elaborate on this observation in person, however, Polanski is quick to clarify: “He was at that time in such a mood, but it doesn’t mean that it prevailed throughout the years that we knew each other. He had a lot of reasons to be depressed, like everybody else. I don’t think that he was particularly stricken by depression throughout his life.” Obviously bored by all the one-dimensional “Mad Peter” lore, Roman Polanski defends him. Still, Polanski acknowledges, “Peter’s idiosyncrasies could be a drag.” For example, Sellers tended to walk out of restaurants mid-meal. “This often happened at The Luau,” Polanski writes. “I grew to dread the moment when, after ordering, Peter would whisper, ‘Ro, I can’t stand it—bad vibes in here—let’s go somewhere else.’ ”
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Going somewhere else was Peter’s way of life. At the end of July, Peter and Britt flew to Paris, then to Marseilles, where they began a two-week cruise of the Mediterranean. “When the Sellerses discovered that they couldn’t get all their belongings they’d picked up during their Hollywood stay on their plane,” the columnist Dorothy Manners gasped, “they ordered a second freight plane just to transport the haul. The only thing they were forced to leave was Peter’s new car.”
It was a Corvette Stingray. There hadn’t been one available in Los Angeles, so Peter—who once described himself as being “auto erotic”—got his press agent to call Detroit and have General Motors ship one to him immediately so he could drive it around Beverly Hills during the filming of The Party. He had to have it.
“You tell them you want a car as soon as possible,” Peter said at the time, “and you’ll bloody