Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [83]
The writer Peter Evans once described the producer-screenwriter with whom Peter tried to form a business: “Mankowitz is a phlegmatic, cultivated East End Jew whose bulk lends his look of supine disdain a threatening authority. His face, even in repose, seems a network of subtle sneers.” “I have found in Wolf a person who really understands me,” Peter said. A portrait of Daniel Mendoza was to be their logo.
By summer, however, Mankowitz was becoming annoyed with the slow pace of his negotiations with Peter, or, better, the slow pace with which Peter conducted his side of the negotiations. “I can’t understand why Peter’s and my contracts with one another are taking so long to draw up,” he wrote to Bill Wills.
Mankowitz scheduled a meeting on August 30 with some financiers who were almost ready to back the company to the tune of £124,000. That morning, Peter sent him a letter, delivered by hand, in which he told Mankowitz that the deal was off; Peter had decided to keep his focus on acting. Mankowitz was thus forced to show up at the meeting and tell the financiers, “I think you should put your money back in your pockets.” Peter had closed his letter by calling Mankowitz “muzzel,” a Yiddish term of endearment. Mankowitz didn’t feel especially endearing in return.
Peter then proceeded to shoot his now-former friend in the back. Mankowitz, Sellers told the press, “is a very strange person with so many things on his mind. He should concentrate more on one thing, like screenwriting, and leave the impresario business alone.”
As for himself, Peter had a different employment option in mind that year, or so he said. Beyond the constant onslaught of cars, Peter also purchased a life-size mechanical elephant. One could ride atop it on its howdah. Peter was captivated. To him, the peculiar contraption represented a sort of safety net for his career: “I was thinking of things I could fall back on—it was a security if I ever failed,” he told the Observer. Apparently he believed that advertisers would flock to it for use in product promotion.
“Peter’s not a genius,” Spike Milligan declared in 1960. “He’s something more. He’s a freak.”
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The movie star took a reporter on a tour of Chipperfield, which the star had filled with antiques. He proudly pointed out the remarkable early Victorian (as he put it) “commode”: “You must admit they disguised them well.” With the “Emperor Waltz” playing on the high-end hi-fi, the Sellerses’ butler silently walked in and poured tea while Peter told the reporter that he had owned fifty-two cars in the last six years. Presents for friends, toys for the kids, clothes, cameras, pets, collectibles, cars, more cars, all the result of deepening despair.
Stardom demanded upkeep. Peter enjoyed some of it. There were film premieres at which to show his face, charity events, theater openings, parties. At the Royal Film Show at London’s Empire Cinema in 1959, he and Anne celebrated in the company of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, Maurice Chevalier, Alec Guinness, and Lauren Bacall. At the Lord Taverners’ Ball the following year, he mingled with Prince Philip, if a prince can be said to mingle. He nabbed the Film Actor of 1960 award at the Variety Club. At the 1961 Evening Standard Drama awards (held in January 1962), he presented the award for Best Musical to the antic masterminds of Beyond the Fringe—Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and Jonathan Miller. The Queen herself showed up at the Odeon, Leicester Square, in March 1962, along with Princess Margaret, Claudia Cardinale, Yul Brynner, Pat Boone, Leslie Caron and her husband Peter Hall, Peter Finch, and Melina Mercouri. Peter enjoyed a few moments of conversation with the queen in the theater’s foyer.
Personality profiles were appearing at a furious pace. “In relaxed