Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [195]
Given the huge financial successes of The Return of the Pink Panther and The Pink Panther Strikes Again, the whiff of another enormous blast of cash was in the air in the offices of United Artists, so the company arranged another lavish press junket, just to make sure. At a cost of $300,000—nearly triple the price of the Return affair—UA invited three hundred guests including seventy-five reporters, their spouses, Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters, and Don Ho, to Kahuku, Oahu, to celebrate the Fourth of July. Only a week before the extravaganza, with studio executives giddily preparing to buy favorable worldwide press, Blake Edwards was seized with misgivings about a portion of the fireworks scene, so he summoned Peter and Dyan Cannon to an MGM studio set on June 24 and 25 and hastily reshot the sequence.
Despite the strain of orchestrating what one disgruntled publicist called “this goddam junket”—“Blake and Tony [Adams] are scum and I really don’t give a shit anymore how it turns out,” the publicist privately opined—it was a big success. Media coverage of the film was most extensive.
At the press conference with Edwards, Dyan Cannon, Burt Kwouk, and Herbert Lom, Peter was asked about his heart attacks. “I’m trying to give them up,” he replied. “I’m down to two a day now. It’s about time for one now! It all began when I met Sue Mengers.” (Sue Mengers was the powerful, notoriously abrasive Hollywood agent later parodied by Blake Edwards in the form of Shelley Winters’s character in S.O.B., 1981.) Blake quickly diverted the conversation in another direction: “The only thing I worry about is mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It might excite him too much.” Peter and Lynne flew to London for the British premiere the following week.
Revenge of the Pink Panther was highly successful at the box office. Like The Pink Panther Strikes Again, it took in an estimated $100 million in revenues.
Since both Sellers and Edwards had repeatedly said that each would never work with the other again, the occasion of the fifth Pink Panther (and, with The Party, their sixth collaboration) necessitated some sort of explanation for the radical change of heart. Edwards took his pragmatic, workhorse stance: “I guess it’s the old Hollywood thing—‘I’ll never work with the guy again—until I need him.’ ” Edwards also provided an astute evaluation of Peter’s physical comedy style: “Peter is not really a physical comedian in the sense that Chaplin or Keaton were. He is not that kind of an acrobat, and he is not trained that way. But he has a mind that thinks that way.”
With his combined share of all the Pink Panther revenues reported to have been $4 million, Peter was rich again. And he’d reached his limit: “I’ve honestly had enough of Clouseau myself. I’ve got nothing more to give.”
• • •
On the small screen, Peter stands in a straggly brown wig topped by a horned Wagnerian helmet and performs a brief imitation of Queen Victoria to a fascinated Kermit the Frog. The Muppet Show, with Peter as the week’s guest star, aired during the last week of February 1978.
Kermit tells Peter that while he really loves all of Peter’s funny characters, it’s perfectly okay for him to just relax and be himself:
PETER: (in the stentorian voice of a very old, very grand British thespian) But that, you see, my dear Kermit, would be altogether impossible. I could never be myself.
KERMIT: Uh, never yourself?
PETER: No. You see, there is no me. I do not exist.
KERMIT: (uncomfortable) Er, I beg your pardon?
PETER: (leaning in close and looking nervously around