So down we went to the location, in an open field where there were tents for dressing rooms, tents for offices, and tents for two different grades of dining hall, one for the dogsbodies, and the other, a hundred yards further away, for the director and the star. One glance at the film’s prospectus told me that it was a tired old spy drama that would be released only into oblivion, like a blob of spit aimed at a hot stove. But I had no reason to despise Michael Winner and indeed I still don’t today. Death Wish might be a favourite movie among gun nuts but it is not without a measure of narrative drive, and at least Winner got his movies made, when so many other British directors were sitting around moaning about their wounded artistic purity, which they didn’t mind compromising by making commercials anonymously. Recently I read Winner’s autobiography and it wasn’t half bad. It was three-quarters bad, but only because of its many thousands of superfluous exclamation marks. Clear those out into a skip and the book would be a fascinating, if much shorter, story of diligence rewarded, told in a prose admirably forthcoming if not always edifying. One of the sub-stories in the book concerns Winner’s love–hate relationship with Burt Lancaster. You might wonder why it wasn’t hate–hate. Once, on location in Mexico, Lancaster had grasped Winner by the throat and hung him out over a high cliff. It’s either kind or craven for Winner to remember this behaviour as somehow an indication of Lancaster’s lovable volatility, because it sounds exactly like homicidal mania.
On location near Shepperton, things were more restrained, but still very weird. The unit was between set-ups when we arrived. Sitting intensely in a canvas-backed folding chair marked BURT LANCASTER, the star stuck a cigarette in his mouth and waited. He had to wait only a few seconds before Winner shouted, ‘A light for Mr Lancaster!’ A factotum bounded forward with a cigarette lighter already spouting flame. After the next shot, lunch was called. The smaller mess tent for the star and the director was in plain sight, about two hundred yards away. Lancaster stood up from his chair, but that was as far as he went by himself. He stared at Winner with a weary impatience. Winner took the cue and shouted, ‘A car for Mr Lancaster!’ A black Mercedes 600 longer than a school bus loomed across the grass and stopped precisely so that the action hero could step directly into it after the back door had been opened by the assistant director, the PR attaché, and other members of the door-opening party that I could not identify. The Mercedes set off on its epic journey across two hundred yards of grass, arriving at the sacred tent only a short time before the rest of us arrived on foot. Lancaster’s door remained firmly closed until it was opened by the chauffeur, the assistant director, the PR attaché, the other members of the door-opening party, and Winner himself. Winner congratulated Lancaster on his successful voyage in terms which would have embarrassed Lindbergh after his arrival in Paris. It was a graphic demonstration of the perennial need for the institution of monarchy: because there is a total, ineradicable potential for subservient ceremonial bullshit in the universe and it all has to go somewhere.
I would have been open-mouthed if Arthur had not conveyed to me in a whisper the vital necessity of keeping my trap shut. I already knew that Lancaster had not attained his position as one of Hollywood’s most powerfully creative figures by self-denial and humility. His company Hecht, Hill and Lancaster had changed the industry, making it possible, for the first time, for a star to be in full charge of his career. Lancaster had not only starred in more than his share of important movies, he had produced them, and often developed them from the initial idea. To do all that, he had to get some respect, and had frequently got it by imposing his personality with the full force of his improbably gleaming teeth, sometimes implanting them in the outstretched neck of a courtier he found insufficiently supplicatory. But this stuff on the Scorpio location went beyond self-assertion. This was megalomania. Lancaster wasn’t precisely carried into the tent, but its flaps were held aside by two men who had clearly learned their flap-holding skills at the court of Hailie Selassie, and the business of making sure that Mr Lancaster sat down safely would have been familiar to Louis XIV. As Lancaster, once a champion acrobat and still in superb physical shape, lowered himself from the standing to the sitting position, Winner, from the other side of the table, flung out one hand in a gesture of caution, as if the star might be putting his life in peril from the speed of transition and change of altitude. You could see the instruction hovering on the director’s lips: ‘A parachute for Mr Lancaster!’ From our position in one corner of the tent, I watched Mr Lancaster eat. Chesterton once said, on the subject of innate human dignity, that it all depended on the presence of the holy spirit, and that it was otherwise hard to take the human body seriously, belonging as it did to a creature that nourished itself by pushing food into a hole at the bottom of its face. But everybody at Lancaster’s table watched him eat as if their fate depended on the proper functioning of his digestive system. I was disappointed that there was nobody to taste his food first, in case of poison, but would not have been astounded to learn that his excrement was weighed afterwards, in the same way that the output of the Chinese emperors was examined for portents.
After lunch, the interview took place in another tent at the edge of the compound. Once again, Lancaster was transported by limousine. But in our preliminary conversation he seemed to like my references to his early career as a gymnast. Flying on the high bar, Lancaster had forged in a touring circus the magnificent athleticism that made him, on screen, so beautifully poised even when he was standing still. It is always a plus, when warming up a difficult subject, to get him or her talking about their formative skills. This gives them a chance to instruct you. I hadn’t yet formulated this as a principle: I had got it right merely by luck. It was flattery, of course, a version of ‘A light for Mr Lancaster!’ But it worked. He scaled down the hauteur considerably. Instead of being Louis XIV, suddenly he was merely Napoleon Bonaparte. By the time our cameras rolled he was practically mortal. From The Crimson Pirate onwards, I got a good story out of him about every movie that counted, and from each story he emerged as a model of reason, taste, and judgement. There was only one moment when he seemed insane. When I made the mistake of praising Alexander Mackendrick, director of The Sweet Smell of Success – by common consent the greatest film that Lancaster was ever in – the star said that Mackendrick had been so slow with the set-ups ‘we almost fired him’. By ‘we’, of course, he meant ‘I’, and my jaw, against strict instructions, dropped. But my moment of revulsion could be cut out of the finished interview, and forty years later, from a detailed biography of Lancaster, I found out that he had been telling the truth. Mackendrick’s slow shooting threatened to put the masterpiece a mile over its budget, thus threatening Lancaster’s finances. His film company was the biggest of the independents, but it was still betting the farm on every project. He really was a brave, intelligent, and original man, although I always thought him a ham actor until time forced him to commit less energy. But I left that unmentioned, and at the end of the interview he indicated his satisfaction in a way that had been lighting up the screen for decades. His teeth looked like tombstones anyway, and when he bared them in a smile it looked like a carnival in a graveyard. Film stardom has more to do with presence than with acting, and Lancaster had always had so much presence that everyone else felt absent. He still had it. Getting away from him as far as possible seemed the only thing to do. As Lancaster, once again surrounded by his entourage, prepared to enter the limo for the awe-inspiring journey to the tent next door, and I followed our crew towards our humble van, Arthur muttered, ‘Don’t say anything. He might be listening.’
The Lancaster interview looked good on screen, but it made me wonder if I was really cut out for soothing the frailties of these fabled beasts. The mild-looking ones could be as dangerous as the known killers. Riding a tiger was one thing, but stroking an antelope could cost you your eyesight if the creature rounded on you and stuck out its tongue. Already I was wondering if I wanted to go on much further with Cinema. P
ete was about to go into studio with the first album of our songs, the Review and the TLS were hungry for copy, the Observer TV column was nominally a full-time job anyway, and there was always Louis MacNeice showing up in my troubled dreams like Banquo’s ghost. Did I really need the anxiety of talking to madhouse people with household names? The question was settled by my next big Cinema special, an interview with Peter Sellers.
Universally acclaimed as a comic genius, Sellers, after Dr. Strangelove and A Shot in the Dark, was still on a high plinth, but the cracks were starting to show. There were stories that he was driven by his own version of Tony Hancock’s fatal reluctance to admit that a comic star might be to a certain extent dependent on those who supplied the words he said. As I mentioned earlier, but always feel bound to mention again, when Hancock heard too often that the scripts provided for him by Galton and Simpson were essential to his screen persona, he met the threat by firing them. His final destruction duly followed. Sellers wasn’t as stupid as that, but he had already reached the dangerous state, for a comedian, of wanting to be cast as a romantic lead, as if he had more than comedy to offer. Successful comedy is already ‘more than’ almost anything else, but there will always be comedians who regard their reputation for getting laughs as a cruel diminishment of their real qualities. It had become known that Sellers was one of these. It had also been attested that his famous range of mimicry included no character that could reliably be identified as Peter Sellers himself. He bought a new car every week, changed women every few months – usually after giving a press conference to declare that the latest tie was eternal – and generally showed all the signs of someone short of an identity trying to supply it with a sufficiency of fancy toys, ranging from the latest automatic camera to Princess Margaret. All of these things I had read about but most of them I had discounted, on the assumption that he had attracted journalistic envy.
There could be no safer assumption than that, but within minutes of meeting him I realized that the press had been giving him an easy run. The encounter took place at some swish restaurant whose name I have repressed: it might have been Odin’s. Sellers and his latest agent were in position at the table before Arthur and I arrived. While Sellers was regaling Arthur with a superb imitation of John Gielgud, the agent leaned in my direction and said, ‘He’s a vegetarian this week.’ The implication was that the star didn’t want even to smell meat, so Arthur and I ended up eating a small pile of vegetables each while Sellers became Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Richard Burton, and Alec Guinness. In broad daylight, it was a jamboree of spectres. When a student, I had loved his Alec Guinness routine in ‘The Bridge on the River Wye’ sketch, and here it was again, the replica of a replica. He went on to become Field Marshal Montgomery, President Nixon, Bing Crosby, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, and Marlene Dietrich. The only dud in the range was when he was pretending to be himself. His beautifully produced standard BBC English had the unmistakable gleam of a freshly forged banknote. But it was what he was actually saying, in this voice purportedly his own, that rang the alarm bells. He launched into an account of how Blake Edwards, the director of A Shot in the Dark, had screwed up the billiard-room scene. As his agent studied the ceiling while looking down at his plate – the trick needs a practised pair of eyeballs – Sellers moved pieces of cutlery about to demonstrate that whereas on screen the sequence had gone like that, it should have gone like this. Edwards, apparently, had deviously seemed to agree with Sellers’ suggestions on the sound stage, but had double-crossed him in the cutting room. As the well-modulated tirade went on, Arthur and I exchanged the glance shared by two coal-miners when they hear water coming down the tunnel. Arthur told me later that this was the moment when he started thinking about the relative ease of dealing with Burt Lancaster. I was thinking of A Shot in the Dark. Sellers had come up with the perfect face, voice, and set of movements for Inspector Clouseau, but he was everywhere abetted by well-planned scenes that could only have been the work of the director, because they were the product of concentration, and Sellers was clearly incapable of concentrating on anything for five minutes, except, probably, on Sophia Loren in the passenger seat of his new Ferrari.
According to him, however, the movie was all his. Transparently untrue, this contention was a sign that he was already far gone in the fatal delusion that the people who helped him to succeed were conspiring to his downfall. The sure sign of a weak man who ascends to glory is that he can’t tolerate having strong men around him. But it would be a long time before I figured that out as a general principle. At that moment, I was too busy remembering the scene in which Clouseau hurls himself at the door of the upstairs concert room in the castle, hurtles across the room in long shot, and is then seen, in the exterior shot, bursting through the window and falling, still running, into the moat below. Out of those three shots, his stunt double could have done the second and almost certainly did the third. In The Pink Panther, also directed by Edwards, Clouseau, preparing for a rare night of passion with his wife, heads into the bathroom while holding a bottle of pills. Of course, being Clouseau, he will spill them. But when he does, we don’t even see him. We just hear the pills hit the tiled floor. The camera is looking at Capucine, who doubles the laugh by putting her hand over her eyes in resignation. Clouseau is present only as an idea. The joke emerges from the character, who has been created not just by the actor but by the writers and the director. How could Sellers be so ungenerous as not to concede that? He could even have been proud of it, because without his talent at the centre, none of all these other talents would ever have formed around him. The answer was not long in coming. He was ungenerous because he was unrealistic. When Charles Chaplin thought he could do everything, he could provide the evidence to back up the claim, although the evidence ran thinner when sound came in and it turned out that his touch with a story did not extend to its dialogue. But Sellers had always needed other people. The need, however, conflicted with his nature, which was that of a solipsist. To be a solipsist is to be deluded about the world, which would not be worth living in if it did not exist independently from the self.
I was wrong, however, to suppose that Sellers thought the world revolved around him. He thought the cosmos did too, and history, and the fates. After the endless lunch had ground to its conclusion, we headed off around the corner to the hotel in which our crew had taken over a room to rig the cameras and lights. The moment that Sellers saw which hotel it was, the really weird stuff started. He had drunk nothing during lunch except some special water that had to be brought in by courier from high in the Himalayas, where it had been strained through the loincloth of a swami. So he couldn’t have been drunk. But suddenly he was staggered. ‘Oh no,’ he said, in a version of the Sellers voice that sounded like his cockney accent in The Wrong Arm of the Law. I suspected that these might be his true tones, to the extent that they could be resurrected. Resurrected was the right word, because he looked like living death. ‘Oh no. No. Can’t go in there.’ While he stood staring paralysed at the hotel’s front door, his agent whispered to us fiercely: ‘Jesus, what made you pick this place? He can’t go through the door.’ It turned out that we had chanced on the very hotel where Sellers had begun his liaison with Britt Ekland. Their eternal alliance having ended with the usual bitter abruptness, bad karma had gathered around the doorway of the place where the universal catastrophe had begun under the guise of bliss. Evil spirits walked and groaned. Voodoo tom-toms, inaudible to us, pulsed. Negative feng shui enveloped the building. All of it, apparently, except the roof. When Arthur explained that there was no time left to hire another venue and reposition the camera, agent asked client if there was any way of getting into the building that would not offend its incorporeal guardians. Blinking as if called upon to assent to the sacrifice of his immortal soul, Sellers whispered that an indirect approach might be all right. ‘We could go in over the roof.’ It took ten minutes to navigate upwards through the building next door, Sellers giving autographs all the way, with th
e terrible smile of the condemned. You could imagine Christ ascending Golgotha, asking the autograph hounds to hold their books still so that he could sign one-handed while dragging the cross. The transition over the rooftop would have been quicker if Sellers had not been bailed up by a particularly hostile spiritual presence speaking Swedish. Sellers spent several minutes negotiating with thin air. Inside the hotel, certain corridors had to be avoided. Our small party was exhausted when it finally attained the room full of lights, cameras, and technicians.
The interview itself could have been worse. Sellers decided to impersonate a normal, even reasonable, human being. In a position, by now, to realize that this was the most remarkable acting feat of his life, I managed, while the magazines were being changed, to keep him occupied by proving myself familiar with the details of his more off-trail achievements, the ones we weren’t talking about on camera. I was further struck, however, by the way he was not in the least surprised to encounter someone in possession of all this knowledge. He thought everyone knew it. Like every egomaniac, he behaved as if everybody else spent their day being as interested in him as he was. Even at the time, I had enough sense to mark this down as a lesson for life. Self-regard would get out of hand, if it were given the power, so watch for the symptoms. Sanity would be hard to get back if it were ever let go of. At the end of his career, Sellers would show signs of wanting to get it back. After a long and progressively disastrous series of scripts chosen on the grounds that they presented him as an irresistible sexual object, he elected to star in Being There, a movie about a man minus a personality who rises to prominence because people can read their dreams into him. Perfect for the part, he was able to go out on a high note. His whole career might have been like that if he had always been so judicious. But it would have been a lot to ask. He had a conspicuous individual talent, but it was interpretive, not directly creative. He could never have emulated Chaplin, Keaton, or Jacques Tati and set up a whole project by himself, controlling its every detail even if the task took years. But there is no point carping. He had such a protean capacity that it would have been a miracle if he had been in full command of it. Those of us with less to offer earn no points for ordering our lives better. Wagner couldn’t compose unless he was living in Byzantine luxury, worshipped as a living god. You and I aren’t quite that nuts, but we didn’t write the Magic Fire music in the last pages of Die Walkure, either. When Sellers was far gone on the road to self-destruction, I tried to remember him as Dr Strangelove, strangling himself with one black-gloved hand. It was all too symbolic. But it was also his idea, a moment of brilliant improvisation. He just thought of something perfectly expressive on the spot, and hardly anybody can do that.