Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [152]
• • •
These were trying times for certain people with whom Peter Sellers came into contact; some had it easier than others. Many years after inspiring mutual unpleasantness during the production of I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! (1968) Peter and one of the film’s writers, Paul Mazursky, ran into each other at the Beverly Hills Hotel. They greeted each other warmly after their long estrangement. “I was wrong, Paul,” Sellers is said to have confessed. “Will you ever forgive me?” “There’s nothing to forgive,” Mazursky benevolently replied, only to chronicle the whole ugly thing later, lavishly and at Peter’s expense, in his autobiography.
They met while Peter was filming The Party. Freddie Fields, Peter’s Hollywood agent, had read the script, which Mazursky wrote with his collaborator, Larry Tucker, and forwarded a copy to Peter, who agreed overnight to do the film. They were all taken aback by Peter’s first suggestion for director. “Hello, Freddie,” Peter said into the phone during one of his early meetings with Mazursky and Tucker. “I’m here with the boys, and we all agree that our first choice is Fellini.” If Fellini was too busy, Peter added, then they’d “move on to Bergman.” Fields is said to have told Tucker and Mazursky privately that he had no intention of approaching either the director of Juliet of the Spirits (1965) or the director of Persona (1966) with a film that centered on pot brownies.
Somebody suggested George Roy Hill. Peter responded by saying that he refused to work with Hill again after The World of Henry Orient. Mike Nichols’s name came up and was shot down. Jonathan Miller was proposed. Miller actually flew to Los Angeles for a meeting, but when he brought up the subject of the film’s musical score, Peter went pale and terminated the conversation. In Mazursky’s account, Peter is said to have then suggested Mazursky.
But Peter rejected him, too, supposedly after the writer gave Britt a kiss on the cheek and Peter accused him of having sex with her. Mazursky to Freddie Fields: “The only thing I did was tell Peter The Bobo stank!” Fields to Mazursky: “That’s almost as bad as telling Sellers you fucked his wife.”
Peter eventually chose Hy Averback to direct I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! and barred Mazursky from the set until the day he asked him back.
At one point during the production, which occurred in December 1967 and January 1968, Mazursky was summoned to Peter’s rented house in Beverly Hills, where he was greeted warmly by a smiling Peter, who then burst into tears. “The ship is sinking, Paul. Sinking, I tell you.” And on and on.
Peter’s strange sociability—ebullient one moment, despondent the next—led him to launch an informal cinema club to keep him focused on the art he loved, with other pleasures on the side. The first film he chose to screen was Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955), to be screened with an accompanying dinner of lamb curry. And hash brownies. With Britt having left for New York to shoot William Friedkin’s The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968)—in which she plays an Amish burlesque dancer—Peter eagerly invited his pretty young costar, Leigh Taylor-Young, on whom he had developed the predictable crush.
During the screening, “Peter sat in the back of the small screening room holding hands with the exquisite Leigh-Taylor,” Mazursky writes, referring to Taylor-Young.
The club’s next film was to be Fellini’s I Vitelloni (1953), to be accompanied by Betsy Mazursky’s spaghetti Bolognese and more brownies, but when the guests showed up, there was no film. According to Mazursky, nobody remembered to order it. As Mazursky tells it, Peter’s response was something on the order of “I don’t want spaghetti, and I don’t want Vitelloni! I don’t ever want Vitelloni! Never, ever, never!” “Fuck you, Peter,” Mazursky said. “Fuck you,” said Peter. The projectionist saved the day by screening The Producers.
As an afterthought, Mazursky mentions that