Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [156]
One must wonder one of two things: At what points were the narrative of I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! disrupted by interviews with two reigning gurus of the counterculture, or at what point did Peter fabricate the tale?
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With Britt in New York, London, or Sweden, and with Peter never being one for monogamy and Roman having introduced Peter to Mia Farrow, the two couples—Peter and Mia, Roman and Sharon—went into the desert.
Their destination: Joshua Tree, California, a lunar terrain with parched, desolate earth punctuated by bizarre cacti, all conveniently located within a few minutes’ drive of Palm Springs. “Because of its reputation for UFO sightings,” Polanski recounts, “it was very much in vogue.” Necessarily, they all smoked some pot, after which Peter and Mia wandered into the dry wasteland holding hands. Unknown to them, Roman followed. He eavesdropped as they engaged in a deeply spiritual, mystical, ludicrous, and entirely appropriate dialogue about eternity, stars, and alien life forms. The puckish Polanski then tossed a stick at them from the darkness. “Did you hear that?!” Peter whispered. “What was it?” Mia asked.
“I don’t know,” Peter replied, “but it was fantastic. Fantastic!”
Peter and Mia were of their time and place, and it is only because their extraordinary talent and celebrated friends enabled them to remain famous for the next thirty or thirty-five years that their behavior during the sixties remains mock-worthy while the rest of us maintain our comfortable anonymity as though we never did anything similar at the time.
Like anyone who could afford it, Peter and Mia enjoyed, as Polanski describes it, “dressing up as rich hippies, complete with beads, chunky costume jewelry, and Indian cotton caftans.” The Mamas and the Papas’ John Phillips recalls that Peter once walked in on a very stoned Mia and John and declared, colorfully, that he would get Mia “down from that drug if I have to pull you down by the pubic hairs.”
At Christmastime 1967, Roman and Sharon invited Peter for a skiing holiday in Cortina. On Christmas Day, Sellers insisted on dressing as Santa Claus and handing out the gifts. Sharon helped him fashion the outfit—her fox fur coat, a red ski cap as a hat, and a white ski cap as a beard. But by the next day he had become so depressed and miserable that he left.
On January 20, 1968, Peter was one of Roman and Sharon’s wedding guests at London’s Playboy Club; the club was run by Victor Loundes, who, as Gene Gutowski describes him, “had a very open house.” Naturally Warren Beatty, Rudolf Nureyev, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Sean Connery, Vidal Sassoon, Kenneth Tynan, and Laurence Harvey came to the party, too.
Also that year Sonny and Cher hosted a party for Twiggy in their house in the Hollywood Hills; among the guests were Peter, Steve McQueen, Marlon Brando, Robert Mitchum, Tony Curtis, and Kirk Douglas.
In 1968, Peter Sellers was surveying the world from a very lofty perch. The air at the top may have been growing thinner by the month, but it was still exceedingly fresh—if you didn’t notice the smoke.
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The Mirisch brothers put another Pink Panther film on the drawing boards. But Blake Edwards wasn’t directing; the job went to Bud Yorkin.
Inspector Clouseau (1968) “was first offered to Peter, and he refused it,” Edwards later said. Instead, the role went to Alan Arkin. “In all the years I knew Peter, in spite of all the times when he swore he was never going to do another Panther, he never stopped complaining about the fact that the Mirisch Company had chosen Arkin. Peter was a collector of grievances, but he seemed