What's up, pussycat?

Or in this case, more specifically, the Pink Panther. Going back to my youth, I was always a big fan of that series of movies, as well as the other work of Peter Sellers. That's why it comes as a bit of a shock to me to find out that he was widely considered to be a bit of a bastard. James Wolcott has a long piece on the life of Sellers and the new HBO show about his life, 'The Life and Death of Peter Sellers."

Peter Sellers was a monster, and a hollow one at that. We see him stomp on his son's train set in an infantile fury, pursue Sophia Loren in a fugue of self-delusion and fling the non-affair in his wife's face (the wife is played by Emily Watkins in one of those thankless, stalwart roles), wreck film projects through sheer pique (Tom Nolan has an excellent personal memoir in today's Wall St Journal of how Sellers arrogantly loused up Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid by playing The Star and then giving himself a heart attack after popping amyl nitrates while romping with Britt), publicly humiliate Blake Edwards for the crime of helping Sellers become a comic icon as Inspector Clouseau, and leave his children with practically nothing in his will...yet by the end of two hours, we're no wiser as to the pathology that drove him. Yes, he had a doting Jewish father and a weak father, but a lot of showbiz performers did and do without turning into such petty, ungrateful destroyers.

Interestingly, Wolcott also touches on another old favorite of mine, John Lennon, and takes a few bricks out of his larger myth.

What the movie needed was the sort of psychological exam Albert Goldman brought to John Lennon, who, like Sellers, was a genius who, when alone and out of character, felt like nothing--a "Nowhere Man," to quote one of his song titles. "Dissociation was written all over John Lennon, whose portrait could be laced with cracks or comprised liek those computer-generated pictures out of countless little frames or facets. Normally, John held himself together through the force of his manias, his obsessions, which by focussing his whole being on a single, passionately desired goal, reduced his incoherence to a minimum." But when he had no manias or obsessions to govern his energy, no mask to wear, he went blank, telling an interviewer that after a few days by himself, "I can see my hands and realize they're moving, but it's a robot doing it." Or a ghost. As Goldman says, Lennon had the Beatles to incorporate the shards of his fragmented personality into a kaleidoscopic whole.

This is a great pop culture piece. Give it a look.