Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [167]
One month later, Roman and some friends offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrests of the killers. Polanski himself doesn’t remember the details anymore: “Peter Sellers . . . ? I don’t recall—not enough. I remember putting up the reward, and I know that the reward led to the capture of the people because it was paid out. Somehow no one mentioned it afterwards. If it was reported there must be some truth in it—I just don’t remember. I mean, that period, I never go back to it, you know, voluntarily, and if you don’t refresh your memory by going back to it, it fades out much faster.”
Gutowski, however, is very clear about Peter’s help. He did put up part of the reward money, Gutowski says, and “he was motivated by pure friendship and his desire to help find the guilty.” Polanski, Beatty, Brynner, and others provided the rest.
At the time, Peter spoke out in public: “Someone must have knowledge or suspicions they are withholding or may be afraid to reveal. Someone must have seen the blood-soaked clothing, the knife, the gun, the getaway car. Someone must be able to help.”
By December 1969, Charles Manson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle, Tex Watson, Leslie Van Houton, and Linda Kasabian had all been charged with the murders. Charges against Kasabian were dropped when she agreed to be the star witness for the prosecution. The rest were convicted and are spending their lives in jail. A biker named Danny DeCarlo, who was familiar with the defendants and who felt the need to extract himself from a host of legal problems by sharing what he knew, evidently got some of the reward money; so, it seems, did Ronni Howard, a.k.a. Shelley Nadell, a.k.a. Connie Schampeau, to whom Susan Atkins had spilled some gory details in prison.
NINETEEN
Peter Sellers was capable of enormous compassion, tenderness, and love—so much so that you thought you were going to be friends for life. And then hours, days, weeks later, the scale would tip the other way, and a very unlikable, aggressive person would emerge.”
The director Alvin Rakoff is describing his experience of making the small scale, too-little-known Hoffman (1970). “I look back at Peter with great affection, and love, and puzzlement. He was an extraordinary firecracker, and yet you were in danger of being burnt.”
Filmed in the fall of 1969 in seven weeks at Elstree Studios, with one additional week on location (Wimbledon Common, the Thames Embankment), Hoffman is the story of a middle-aged man who blackmails a pretty young woman into letting him dominate her, potentially sexually, for a one-week period after he discovers that her boyfriend, his employee, has been cheating him at work. The comedy-drama—of which there is substantially more unnerving drama than comedy of any sort—introduced the twenty-one-year-old Irish actress Sinead Cusack, the daughter of the actor Cyril Cusack, to the screen.
Rakoff had directed an earlier, shorter version of Hoffman for television, but as the project headed for the big screen, he found himself in some trouble. Donald Pleasance had played the role on TV, but he wasn’t considered big enough for the silver screen. So Peter was hired, thanks to Bryan Forbes, who had become head of production at Elstree Studios, then controlled by EMI. But after a meeting at Peter’s apartment on Clarges Street, Mayfair, Peter decided, as Rakoff describes it, that “he and I would never get on with each other, and I should leave the picture. I left the meeting.
“But Bryan Forbes said to Peter, ‘I’m not paying him off. If you want him to go, you pay him off.’ And the next thing I know, there’s a call from Peter, saying ‘I’m sure we can get on with each other—shall we try?’ So there I was—fired from the picture by the leading man and reluctantly taken back. But then