Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [171]
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“I really don’t know if he fell in love with me,” says Goldie Hawn, Peter’s costar in his next picture, There’s a Girl in My Soup (1970). “I only know that I gave him a surprise party in my home some time after the film. He spent all evening looking at my things and said, ‘This is the kind of house I’ve always dreamed of having, with all the warmth and stability that I feel here.’ Afterwards he sent me this absolutely gorgeous armoire, which I still have.”
The project carried with it certain ominous specters. There’s a Girl in My Soup was made by the Boulting brothers, John and Roy, who had had increasingly rough times with Peter on the four films they made together—Carlton-Browne of the F.O.; I’m All Right, Jack; Only Two Can Play; and Heaven’s Above!, the last having been made seven years earlier, even before the debacle of Casino Royale. There’s a Girl in My Soup was financed by Columbia Pictures, which made Casino Royale. And finally, There’s a Girl in My Soup was coproduced by Mike Frankovich, who declared after Casino Royale that Peter would never be permitted to make another picture for Columbia Pictures.
Despite its catchy title, the film is a pretty dreary exercise. In London, the amorous, patrician, middle-aged Robert Danvers (Sellers), the host of a televised gourmet show, picks up a promiscuous nineteen-year-old American girl (Hawn) who is in the process of breaking up with her handsome, oafish, more or less worthless boyfriend (Nicky Henson). A free spirit with a smart mouth and a hard, cruel edge, Marion is scarcely the kooky dumb blond Goldie Hawn played so triumphantly on Laugh-In. Marion is mean. And Danvers, for his part, is selfish and singular, consumed by his career, resistant to intrusions, obsessed with sex—in short, and despite his wealth, an ordinary middle-aged male.
The sexual revolution of the late 1960s, along with its concomitant dismissal of censorship regulations, gave free rein to the Boultings’ love of smut. At one point, Danvers makes love to a beautiful girl while watching himself on television talking about impaling a piece of meat, the video Danvers completing the joke with a matching finger gesture. Later, when a Frenchman employs the word “happiness,” he accents the second syllable. And so on.
Still, Sellers is quite accomplished at conveying the depressing trials of masculinity in middle age. He knew what he was doing. With his own hair thinning, he covered it with a toupee to go with his capped teeth, exercises, and constant dieting. Onscreen, when he flexes, shirtless, in front of a triple mirror, he manages to look both virile and pathetic. It’s a shame that the character as written is so colorless; Terence Frisby’s script, based on his own stage play, lacks wit and verbal flair. What saves There’s a Girl in My Soup is Goldie Hawn, who lends her unpleasant character an air of relaxed prepossession. Aside from his short bit with Shirley MacLaine in Woman Times Seven, Peter Sellers had never before played opposite such a deft and naturalistic actress.
Roy Boulting later wrote of Peter that “during the making of There’s a Girl in My Soup, the relationship had been a very abrasive one. I emerged from it, worn, shaken, and swearing that I would never endure such an experience again.” According to Boulting, Peter was “nervy, irritable, and deeply unhappy,” during the production, characteristics that Boulting attributed to his relationship with Miranda.
Nineteen seventy does appear to have been a particularly strange, strained year for Peter. In the late spring, the time during which There’s a Girl in My Soup was shooting, Peter announced that he was in the market for a new house in a very particular location. A friend had told him, as Sellers put it, that “when the great nuclear blow-up occurs, and the Earth is shifted on its axis, there