Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [187]
With its larger, seventies-era budget came a certain lack of old-fashioned narrative coherence; set pieces took the place of a coherent narrative. A critical commonplace has it that the Clouseau films got worse as the money increased, but that’s not the case, though The Return of the Pink Panther does work best not as a tightly wrought comedy but rather as a series of exemplary, often morbid moments.
Sellers and Edwards got along well enough that they were also planning to make Zwamm, to be written and directed by Blake. According to Variety, Zwamm was going to be about a “comic space odyssey excursion . . . in which Sellers would play a space creature who comes to Earth.” And as Variety frighteningly added, “Pair would like Mickey Rooney to join ’em.” Zwamm never got made.
Prince Charles was in Montreal when he saw The Return of the Pink Panther. It was his favorite Sellers film to date, he wrote to his friend. In fact, Charles claimed, he’d laughed so hard that he wet the dress of the woman in the next seat.
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Peter spent his birthday, September 8, in the Seychelles, where he was buying land for possible real-estate development. Miranda Quarry’s present to him, delivered the following day, was the initiation of divorce proceedings. Peter later joked that his epitaph should read: “Star of stage, screen, and alimony.”
By the beginning of November, he was back in London, lodging in a suite at the Inn on the Park in Mayfair. The high rise in Victoria was history; he’d leased a house in Chelsea near King’s Road. (Miranda got the Wiltshire house as part of the divorce settlement.) He and some old friends—Spike, Michael Bentine, Prince Charles—got together the following week for a private dinner at the Dorchester to celebrate the publication of The Book of the Goons, a collection of Spike’s scripts and drawings, photographs of the Goons in various guises, and a series of private letters and telegrams among the Goons themselves. The book reveals, for example, that in 1952 Peter had had letterhead printed for the law firm of Whacklow, Futtle, and Crun just to write an absurd letter to Spike. Spike, meanwhile, was representing himself as the solicitors Wiggle and Fruit to supervise the public auction of Harry Secombe, who was to be sold in lots at the Sutcliffe Arms at Beaulieu. Also from Spike, the Messers Chew, Threats, and Lid (“Chemists and Abortionists by Appointment”) prescribed a remedy for Peter’s constipation. Harry, meanwhile, sent a single-word telegram to Milligan:
“Fire.”
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With The Return of the Pink Panther approaching its release, but not yet certain of the fortune it would earn him, Peter signed a deal with Trans-World Airlines to make a series of commercials. At first he was to play three characters—an aristocratic Brit named “Piggy” Peake-Tyme; an open-shirted Italian playboy, Vito D’Motione; and a parsimonious Scotsman named Thrifty McTravel. Stan Dragoti directed the series, to which was eventually added a fourth character—a genial American businessman. His deal included provisions for him to appear in a taped TWA trade show short as well.
At the time, Peter himself was flying with Titi Wachtmeister. The daughter of Count Wilhelm Wachtmeister, who was the Swedish ambassador to the United States for a time, the perky blond countess was introduced to Peter two years earlier by Bengt Ekland, Britt’s brother, at which point he and Titi began their on-and-off affair.
Titi was already well known in London. A top model in the late 1960s—“a blonde Jean Shrimpton” is how the London Times described her—Titi sparked some notoriety in 1970 when George Harrison tried to rename his nightclub, Sybilla’s, in her honor. For some reason, the Crown Estates office found a nightclub named Titi’s to be objectionable—their word was “vulgar”—and they insisted that Harrison drop the plan. He settled on renaming his nightclub