Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [64]
Unfortunately, it wasn’t just a single night’s worth of Beaujolais that was talking. By the first week of December, having appeared in Brouhaha steadily for five months—not to mention the fact that he was already shooting his next picture, in which he starred as three different characters, the male lead and two supporting roles—Peter had grown sick of the theater. He casually mentioned this fact to the press.
“Very bored” were the precise words Peter chose to describe his experience as the star of a West End hit. He went on to add that he was only giving “about two good performances a week” and was thinking about leaving the show.
Brouhaha’s presenters, the International Playwright’s Theatre, Ltd., were most displeased by this interview, having put up with Sellers’s lack of theatrical discipline all along. Dennis Selinger later said that he “used to get two or three phone calls a week from the management, saying ‘Come down here, he’s done something terrible.’ ” This time it was different, though. Peter had gone public.
The firm quickly issued a multipronged statement: Peter Sellers had signed a run-of-the-play contract for Brouhaha; Peter Sellers, under the terms of his contract, could give four-weeks notice beginning in February 1959; Peter Sellers had not given, and at that time was not in a position to give, four-weeks notice to end his participation in Brouhaha; and, finally, Peter Sellers’s contract stated that “he shall appear at all performances and perform . . . in a diligent and painstaking manner and shall play the part as directed by the manager.”
Peter Sellers was contrite, at least in public. “What I meant,” he told the press, who were only just beginning to sniff the first wisps of an aroma that promised to ripen over the years, “was what any West End actor will tell you—that you are only at your best two nights a week. You do your best every night, but it doesn’t always come over.”
He gave notice on February 1 and the show closed four weeks later.
Peter Hall, who had accommodated as best he could his one-time-only star’s tendency to make unscheduled entrances whenever he was fatigued by the nightly routine of stage acting, described Peter in retrospect: “He was as good an actor as Alec Guinness, as good an actor as Laurence Olivier. And he had the ability to identify completely with another person—to get physically and mentally and emotionally into their skin. Where does that come from? I have no idea. Is it a curse? Often.
“It’s not enough in this business to have talent,” Hall continued, knowing the end of the story. “You have to have talent to handle the talent, and that, I think, Peter did not have. I think he was a genius. And I think his perfectionism made him extremely neurotic, extremely selfish.”
Hall, who was later knighted, believes that a director can only throw up his hands in the face of such a psyche. Many other directors would find themselves in the same situation in the years to come.
“I mean, I’m sure the play or the film was always about him in his view. It’s no good arguing with that.”
EIGHT
Walter Shenson, the London-based head of European publicity for Columbia Pictures, ran into Tyrone Power on the street one day in 1958. Power mentioned the novel he happened to be reading at the time and recommended it to Shenson, who read it, bought the film rights, and thereby turned himself into an independent producer. The Mouse That Roared (1959) was his first picture.
There was something odd about Peter Sellers’s interest in signing onto this particular production. Having never produced a film in his life, Walter Shenson was not exactly in the top ranks of the profession when he approached Sellers through Dennis Selinger. But as Shenson recalled, “Peter said he wanted to meet me. The first thing he said to me was, ‘Are you a producer?’ I said, ‘Well, if I make this picture I’ll be a producer.’
“What I found out