Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [182]
Like a vast Venus flytrap snapping shut on two desirable and helpless flies, the British media fed. Peter grew annoyed by the frenzy and called his friend Joan Collins (whose husband, Ron Kass, had been The Optimists’ executive producer) to arrange an escape to her house. He traveled incognito. Collins describes the disguise: “an SS officer’s uniform, complete with leather jacket liberally festooned with swastikas and an SS armband, [and] a steel helmet covering his whole head.” At the end of the visit, Collins says, he sped away in his Mercedes holding his arm stiffly out the window and shouting “ ‘Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler! Sieg Heil’ in his most guttural German.”
One day, BBC radio featured one of Maurice Woodruff’s competitors, the psychic Frederick Davies, who divined that Peter Sellers and Liza Minnelli would in fact never marry. Liza’s response to this intrusion on her intimate life was to call and make a personal appointment with Davies. “I read the Tarot cards for her [and] told her that the romance was ill-fated,” Davies reveals. “She became slightly emotional.”
Magical cards were not the only issue in the relationship. According to Theadora Van Runkle, a friend to both Peter and Liza, “Peter was mad about Liza. He told me she was really sexy. But he got really angry with her one night at dinner because she crept up behind him and pulled off his toupee. He was livid with her, and that was the end of the relationship.”
Michael Caine thought the couple was very much in love at the luncheon party he threw at his house. Peter brought along his Polaroid camera and took many pictures; at one point, he handed the camera to Caine, who took a snapshot of Peter and Liza.
There was another party the following Tuesday; Peter and Liza had split the day before. Either Kay Thompson or Marlene Dietrich—Caine says Dietrich, logic says Thompson—advised Caine that he should tell his good friend Peter that she thought “he is a rotten bastard for the way he has treated my beautiful Liza.” Liza herself showed Caine the Polaroid, which Peter had given her as a memento. “Thanks for the memory, Pete,” he wrote on the back. She flew back to New York on June 20.
Peter told the Daily Mail, “I don’t think marriage is my bag.” A few days later he jetted to Paris to photograph Marisa Berenson.
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“I’m going back to the Boultings after this film,” Peter told the press during the production of The Blockhouse. “We always brought each other good luck.” The film in question was Soft Beds, Hard Battles.
Roy Boulting seems not to have seen his association in quite in the same way. For one thing, Boulting had found their most recent collaboration, There’s a Girl in My Soup, to be especially trying because of Peter’s moody whims. For another, that movie flopped.
Based on a verbal commitment from Peter, Soft Beds, Hard Battles was scheduled to go before the cameras in the late summer of 1972, but whatever luck the Boultings may have had with Sellers ran out when he suffered one of his inexplicable changes of mind and the production had to be called off. A few weeks later, Peter was considering doing the movie after all. This time, his agent Denis O’Brien put it in writing. Filming began in mid-April, 1973, at Shepperton.
The first scene: 1940, a Parisian bordello. As a narrator (Peter doing his broadly American “Balham—Gateway to the South” voice) provides background, an old man dresses after an encounter with a pretty prostitute. General Latour (Peter with the voice of a hoarse French geezer) looks like Marshal Pétain and General de Gaulle’s superannuated love child. Cut to another room in the whorehouse, where a British officer (Peter doing David Niven) puts on his clothes after a similar romp. Peter proceeds through the course of the film to play four more roles—another French officer, the head of the Paris Gestapo, the Crown Prince of Japan, and Hitler.