Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [194]
“He gave me a check for $2,500. I said, ‘No, Peter—out of the question.’ ‘Aw Kenny,’ he said, ‘Don’t, don’t, don’t tear it up, don’t, because it would give me great pleasure, and I’ll speak to Bill [Wills] in the morning. All I’ll do is tell Bill to lose it—who will know? No one will know, but it will give me great pleasure.’ I did tear it up.
“Now—with his new wife there, I said, ‘You know how memory can play tricks with you, Pete?’ ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said. But I wasn’t really speaking to him; I was speaking to her. And I said, ‘Was that true? You put a check for $2,500 in my pocket?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You probably tore it up, didn’t you?’ That’s all. But it was information that I felt she ought to know about her husband. I don’t think she cared at all.” In short, Griffith saw Sellers’s generosity; according to him, Lynne saw his bank accounts.
• • •
Sarah Sellers recalls Lynne very well, too: “We were told that she would like to take me and Michael out for a meal and get to know us. She seemed quite nice to begin with. She came across as very bubbly and friendly and warm. Once they got married things definitely changed.”
“Lynne was like the nurse,” Victoria Sellers maintains. “He needed help doing things—he had pill-taking times, and we couldn’t do this, or that, because we couldn’t get Dad all excited.” Sue Evans agrees: “She took over the running of his life. He had alienated so many people by this point that he saw Lynne as the one person who was there.”
Except for Bert, whom Peter fired. That he did so within months of marrying Lynne explains it.
• • •
Army Archerd mentioned Peter’s newest film project, Curse of the Pink Panther, in August. Lynne Frederick would appear with him in it, Peter told another Hollywood columnist a few weeks later, fresh from a trip with Lynne to Disneyland. “In fact,” he said, “I think her role should be enlarged.” Then they left for London.
Curse of the Pink Panther, soon retitled Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978), began shooting in Paris in November. Lynne played no role onscreen.
Clouseau goes in pursuit of the drug lord Douvier (Robert Webber), whose turf (the world) is threatened by rivals; Douvier’s secretary-lover, Simone (Dyan Cannon) helps him until she turns on him and aids Clouseau. They all end up in Hong Kong.
Clouseau shows up at the costume shop of Professor Balls (Graham Stark) to try on his new disguise—a leg-shortened Toulouse-Lautrec number complete with blue smock, beard, and straw hat. At first, he stumbles and totters, unused to the absence of tibia, but then he gets it. It’s the end of Dr. Strangelove:
BALLS: That’s it, Chief Inspector! You can walk!
CLOUSEAU: I ken . . . ! I ken’a weuk!
At which point he tips his hat and launches into “Zank ’eaven for Leettle Girls.”
A henchman at the front door hands him the requisite bomb. Clouseau accepts it, reaches into his pocket for a tip, and announces his dismay: “I’m sorry. I’m a little short.”
Then: “A beum? Wear yeu expicting weune? A beaum!” He tosses it, as is his habit, away from himself and toward the nearest person—Balls.
December found the cast and crew in a Shepperton soundstage, where, just before Christmas there was a friendly reunion when Princes Charles, Andrew, and Edward paid a visit. (They watched Peter film the scene in which Clouseau and Cato attempt to gain entrance to a drug speakeasy-disco, Le Club Foot.) By the first week of February, the production had moved to Hong Kong for extended location shooting, and the film wrapped in April on the French Riviera.
Peter and Lynne seem to have been getting along well at the time. “It’s a whole new second-stage rocket,” Peter said of his marriage around that time. “Mind-boggling and marvelous . . . ! I knew that we had met before in a previous incarnation, and I know we shall meet again after this.”
• • •
With each passing Panther, Burt Kwouk