Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [190]
Peter prepared for his role by flying to Los Angeles—on TWA, of course—to see as many Charlie Chan pictures as Raystar, Ray Stark’s production company, could find for him. Murder By Death went into production in the fall of 1975 and concluded just before Christmas.
“He behaved very peculiarly,” Alec Guinness said shortly before his death in 2000. “I think he was a little bit round the bend then. He had a ring with some sort of crystal in it that changed color with his mood,” said Guinness, who found such things baffling. “One day he didn’t turn up at all. Everyone sat around, sat around. . . . Then we all went home. David Niven went back to his hotel and saw Peter having lunch with someone. He was fine.”
Guinness related another whimsy: “We all had identical caravans [dressing room trailers], set up in alphabetical order. Peter insisted on having a bigger caravan than everyone else. Eventually they did find him one—a hideous thing—that was six inches longer. David Niven and I saw him out with a tape measure measuring it.”
Peter also got into a pissing match with Peter Falk—as Guinness described him, “that one-eyed actor.” “Neither would come on to the set before the other one. The whole thing had to be timed with stopwatches so they would arrive at the same time.” The dueling Peters simply couldn’t deal with having to wait for the other to show up. “It was just a stupid game they were playing,” Maggie Smith declares.
Dame Maggie also found Peter to be difficult, unpredictable, and strange. One evening, she relates, he corralled everyone in the cast and the key members of the creative team to watch one of his films; Smith cannot recall which one—only that it was very long and very dull. After it was over, Neil Simon turned and said, “I hate to sleep and run. . . .”
Smith also remembers the day Eileen Brennan showed up in one of the snazzy outfits the film’s costume designer, Ann Roth, had fashioned for her—a brilliant purple gown with matching boa. Peter flipped out on the spot and insisted that the deadly gown be stricken from the wardrobe and remade in another color. “Poor Ann Roth had to stay up all night making a new costume,” Smith sighs. It ended up being apricot.
“David Niven finally cracked,” Dame Maggie comments. “He became very irritated and upset and said to Sellers, ‘How dare you behave this way?’ It was so unlike David.” Niven had always been so even-tempered, quiet, and polite that, according to Smith, “Peter did listen to him,” however briefly.
His friends found him easier to bear than his costars. The actor Malcolm McDowell, with whom Peter shared the agenting services of Dennis Selinger, describes it well: “Peter’s thing was, you never knew whether he’d be talkative or not because he was a manic-depressive. But I knew not to worry if he didn’t say anything—just to ignore it, and eventually he’d come round, which he invariably did. I remember a private dinner in a restaurant called Julie’s [in London], for Dennis Selinger’s sister—she was 70—and all the clients were there. Roger Moore, Michael Caine, all those people. . . . I sat next to Peter, and he was completely silent through the whole dinner. And at the end of it, one of the ladies got up and said, ‘Oh! I’ve lost my diamond earring!’ Everyone started to look for it, whereupon Peter stood up and did a whole Inspector Clouseau thing. Everybody was in tears laughing. It was incredible, a mark of genius. It was the first time he’d spoken all night.”
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In February, Peter and his newest costars—Colin Blakely, Leonard Rossiter, and Lesley-Anne Down—began the production of Blake Edwards’s The Pink Panther Strikes Again, in which Clouseau inadvertently prevents the now-mad (and now-former) Chief Inspector Dreyfus from destroying the world. The critic Jim Yoakum observes that the fifth Panther’s storyline bears more than a passing