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I once exchanged correspondence with the actor Peter Sellers. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I wrote him a fan letter and he replied to it.
The event would have been around July 1970, and I was a young teenager on summer holidays from my English boarding school. More to the point, Sellers was then aged 44—born on Sept. 8, 1925, in, like me, the English naval town of Portsmouth—a veteran of some 50 films, including Stanley Kubrick’s “Lolita” and “Dr. Strangelove,” as well as several budget-conscious early comedies and at least the first two of the Inspector Clouseau franchise, which I confess I can take or leave alone.
My favorite Sellers performance at that time was in 1959’s “I’m All Right Jack,” in which he played one Fred Kite, a Marx-quoting labor union organizer who dominates his factory floor but spectacularly fails to keep order in his own household. There was something both pathetic and dangerous about his characterization; and the film itself, while extremely funny, was closely based on the notoriously troubled British industrial landscape of the day.
When I wrote my fan letter to Sellers, he not only sent back a note of thanks but also enclosed a glossy photograph, showing him posed in a crested blue blazer and a striped cravat, as if illustrating yet another stage or screen role, a slightly clenched smile playing on his lips.
“To Master Sandford…I wish you Peace and Happiness, and Hoping You Find whatever it is You Seek in Life, Love from Peter Sellers” he wrote, which was effusive, certainly, if also slightly overdone as a response to a schoolboy whose initial inquiry had read, “Dear Sir, My friends and I all think you are a top actor. I loved you in ‘I’m All Right, Jack.’ Please may I have your autograph?”
I remember showing the photo to my parents, neither of whom were entirely approving. “It seems a bit much,” my father remarked. My mother sagely added her opinion that the peace and happiness Sellers had wished for me were “probably the two things most missing from his own life.
A curious search
I thought of the whole matter again 10 years later, following Sellers’s death from a heart attack in July 1980 at the age of 54. Speaking at the subsequent memorial service in London’s St. Martin-in-the-Fields church, the actor David Niven remarked upon his co-star in 1963’s “The Pink Panther,” the first and arguably best of the 11 offerings of the Inspector Clouseau franchise to date.
“Peter was expensive, difficult, ungracious, despotic, a man who would fire directors and turn scripts upside down, bitter, depressed, lonely, in a constant state of turmoil, vexatious, quarrelsome, distrustful, self-destructive and arrogant,” Niven informed the standing-room-only crowd of family members and ordinary admirers who packed the church. I was there, and remember wondering if this might be the moment when Niven would pause for effect before going on to dismiss all the above as a mere tabloid-press caricature and offering his own heartfelt tribute to his late colleague.
Not quite.
“The truth is, Peter was some of these things some of the time,” Niven remarked, before adding: “People outside our profession have no conception of the blind fear an actor has of being a failure in public.”
Niven himself had his fair share of actorly neuroses, whatever his superbly unruffled image. He once told me the story of having volunteered for service on the outbreak of war in September 1939, and finding himself on Christmas Eve billeted in a rural English stable with 40 other soldiers prior to shipping out to France. “It was a tough room,” Niven recalled. A practicing Roman Catholic, he remembered the men’s reactions to one circumstance in particular:
These were hard-bitten troops, and the air was thick with comment about my bravery in various motion pictures. I realized that kneeling down to pray that night was to risk even more scorn from the enlisted men under my command. On the other hand, I made it a rule never to avoid saying my prayers just because the circumstances might be inconvenient. So I got down there and then and did what I did every night. There was complete silence, but when I finished I looked rather sheepishly around the room and saw at least half the platoon similarly kneeling down and praying in their own way.
The occasion, Niver concluded, “was not the first time God had entered a stable and touched men’s lives at Christmas.”
From catechism to clairvoyants
Peter Sellers, by contrast, remained on a permanent search for spiritual purpose. It has to be said that it took him in some slightly curious directions.
Sellers’s mother Peg, a domineering music-hall actress, came from a nonpracticing Jewish family, and his father Bill, a musician and all-round entertainer, was an equally nonobservant Anglican. Peter was sent to a fee-paying Protestant school in London at the age of 7, before entering St. Aloysius, a Roman Catholic junior college run by the Brothers of Our Lady of Mercy. It seems likely that he would have been the only student of part-Jewish descent enrolled there at a time when the spirit of ecumenism was less pronounced in British life than it is today.
One of Sellers’s many biographers has said that he not only dutifully read his catechism while at St. Aloysius, but that he did so by mastering its cadence and pitch, all in perfect imitation of the Brothers of Our Lady of Mercy. If so, it was the first recorded instance of Sellers’s gift for mimicry that some thought ultimately reduced him to a mere vessel into which characters and personas manically flowed. It seems fair to say that at the very least he might have qualified as what we would now characterize as a sufferer of bipolar disorder.
Sellers would go on to develop a lifelong interest in mediums, astrologers and clairvoyants, and regularly sought advice from them. In later years, he was attracted to aspects of Eastern philosophy, and his home life in the rolling countryside outside London reflected this. The carpets of Sellers’s mock-Tudor house were earth-colored, and the walls were painted saffron to match his swami’s robes. He took to receiving visitors there while sitting cross-legged and barefooted on the floor, and asked representatives of the film industry to adopt a similar posture when they came to call on him. That was a significant challenge in the case of the 340-pound Orson Welles.
Producers attempting to interest him in their projects were required to first submit their scripts to the actor’s “spiritual advisers” in India, which frequently proved to be the death knell for the proposal in question. During his sadly recurrent bouts of depression, Sellers took to wearing all-black, adorned by gold medallions bearing mystic inscriptions. Unsettled was the word habitually used to describe him, eventually upgraded in the more polite obituaries to “tortured genius.”
If there was a discernible through-line to Sellers’s spiritual journey it was embodied in the person of the Rev. John Hester, a canon of the Church of England. Born in January 1927 in the industrial north of the country, Hester served in the British Army before receiving Holy Orders in 1954. There followed two curacies in London, where over time his ministry came to embrace a large number of those in the theatrical and other entertainment professions. In the words of his eventual 2008 obituary in the London Times:
[Hester’s] was an unusual, even somewhat esoteric, ministry. It was nevertheless one entailing long hours of work and engaging with an exceptionally wide range of people. At one time he was chaplain to no fewer than 50 strip-clubs. The times at which parishioners might call were as unforeseeable as their race and language, and they spread themselves over all professions including the oldest of all.
Hester evinced a particular sensitivity to the strains of an actor’s life, and could frequently be found offering a nervous leading lady a first-night blessing or celebrating Holy Communion with the cast and crew of a West End production. He first met Peter Sellers in March 1964, shortly after the release of “The Pink Panther”—and Sellers’s subsequent proposal of marriage to the Swedish actress Britt Ekland, 17 years his junior, an event that occurred just 10 days after he had met her. Hester’s chosen pastoral specialty lay in his ministry to the gifted but often neurotically insecure thespians who forever tread the narrow line between fiction and reality. Even so, Sellers presented a special challenge.
“Peter never really settled, and he seemed aware that this was a real problem,” Hester later recalled. “He was never baptized. He never came very near to settling on any single manifestation of faith. He was looking in all sorts of directions, just as if he was playing with one of those cameras of his.”
Over the 16 years of their friendship, Hester more than once found himself embarked on the emotional roller coaster that constituted the essential fabric of life for those making the actor’s acquaintance. “Peter made great demands,” Hester allowed, demonstrating a gift for understatement. “Having been your best friend, he could then turn on you and be quite vile. I have some letters from him which are really beastly. He would stab you in the back and then be very penitent.”
In October 1964, the 39-year-old Sellers and his young bride took up residence in a penthouse suite at the Plaza Athenée hotel in Paris. The actor was in town in order to appear in the screwball comedy “What’s New Pussycat?,” a film that wavered between the unreal and the surreal in its attempt to say something new about the battle of the sexes, and which if nothing else can take credit for having helped to introduce Woody Allen to the wider world.
Sellers was already sufficiently taken by Hester’s ministry to fly his adviser in each week to talk about matters of the spirit. They typically met while sitting in the approved cross-legged fashion on the floor of the actor’s sumptuous suite. The American actress Paula Prentiss, still clad in a diaphanous dress of sparing cut, the better to illustrate her role in the movie as a sexually omnivorous siren named Liz Bien, frequently joined them. Hester later recalled that at this time Sellers was especially intrigued by the Biblical story of Jesus walking on water, a feat the actor himself simulated in his penultimate and perhaps finest film, 1979’s “Being There.”
Once again, though, Sellers seems to have avoided the lure of conventional, or organized, religion, with its implicit threat of effort and self-denial. Insofar as a consistent pattern ever emerged to his spiritual beliefs, it was that of a mélange of utopian mystical mumblings with a distinctively Eastern flavor to them. The musician Ravi Shankar once told me that he, Sellers and the Beatles’ George Harrison had become close around 1967, and that at that time Sellers was utterly committed to the Beatles’ sometime guru Maharishi Yogi. “Meditation saved my life,” the actor announced in an interview.
He continued to maintain his association with the transcendental movement, and joined with Harrison to help underwrite Britain’s Natural Law political party, which briefly aroused hopes that yogic flying would enliven the proceedings of the Houses of Parliament.
Multiple incarnations
Sellers’s spiritual quest continued to the very end of his life. By 1978, he and his fourth wife, a model named Lynne Frederick who was 29 years his junior, were living in a well-upholstered apartment at Roebuck House in central London, a luxurious mansion block also favored by a number of the city’s leading business professionals. In contrast to his neighbors’ own premises, Sellers furnished his home with a prominent carved Buddha, several vintage Japanese woodblock prints and dozens of pairs of lotus-embossed stone incense holders, all set somewhat incongruously beside the actor’s collection of high-end electronics and photographic equipment, in its way a snapshot of Sellers’s own dualism.
His son Michael later observed: “If someone had offered a cut-price, special-offer, gift-wrapped religion that guaranteed miracles and a personal audience with the Maker, then Dad would apply for instant enrollment.”
Sellers was hardly alone among actors in trying to make sense of an industry whose practitioners could effectively, if not literally, starve, or else be almost obscenely well rewarded for their ability to impersonate other people. But surely few can have passed through quite as many incarnations as he did—the plump-faced young song-and-dance man, the gaunt Hollywood hippie who embraced Indian mysticism, the swinging superstar who maintained his affiliation to both Catholicism and Judaism while thinking nothing of flying his favorite London-based Anglican vicar halfway around the world so that he could offer him Communion on the balcony of a hotel suite in the Seychelles or on a film set in North Carolina.
Even John Hester himself once fell foul of Sellers’s rather precise—and lengthy—list of enthusiasms and matching taboos when he arrived inadvertently wearing the pair of purple socks with which he had left home in response to his friend’s urgent summons to join him on location in Los Angeles. “Peter refused to have anything to do with anyone who wore purple, so I was hurriedly sent to the wardrobe department to change.”
In October 1965, Sellers appeared by the miracle of satellite on an episode of “The Ed Sullivan Show,” in which he spoke to Sullivan in the character of one Federico Fabrizi, the fictional movie director he was then playing in the heist caper “After the Fox” on location in Rome. The interview is memorable for its comic inventiveness, not to mention being one of the first instances where the new space technology allowed audiences to see a conversation of this sort being conducted by two parties some 4,000 miles from one another. But there would be a perhaps unintended serious note to the proceedings, too, when Sullivan asked the Fabrizi character to explain the meaning of the scene in one of his films in which a beautiful woman drowns in a large bowl of minestrone.
“We are all in a thick soup,” Fabrizi—or, possibly in this instance, Sellers himself—explains. “We stand with our arms outstretched, calling for some human compassion. And—del formaggio—a little cheese.”
No greater insight into the real Sellers, the lonely soul under the comic facade, can top that.
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