Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (50 page)

“What are you talking about?” the confused McGrath replied. “He said,
‘Well, I don’t have any photographs of Goethe. But those Russian writers,
and those early American writers—they’re all sitting there, and there’s a
cottage in the background, and there’s always a woman, slightly out of
focus, drying her hands on a towel. That’s what I want—that sort of
woman. I really want somebody that’s going to be a cushion for me.’ ”

Peter did not go wanting for women after his second marriage ended,
but most appear to have been cushions of a very different sort. He revealed
to one girlfriend the secret of his success: as a pickup line he’d tell them he
was descended from Lord Nelson, a throwback to his chubby childhood.
But faking lineage can’t have been his only skill. Peter Sellers was a desirable
man: funny, glamorous, rich, handsome (yes, he was handsome), and world-famous. His good looks were precise and curious, distinctly unconventional.
He radiated on a physical level—the flashing smile, the slim frame he
worked daily to carve from a naturally larger mass, sad eyes that pierced
nonetheless. And he was sexy; and women knew it. Britt Ekland once revealed that Peter displayed what she called “extraordinary talents as a lover.”
She knew his flaws better than almost anyone, but, as she acknowledged,
“If some things disappointed me in our marriage, that was never one of
them.” Among the beautiful women he dated around this time were Zsa
Zsa Gabor’s daughter Francesca Hilton and Alice Joyce, a Pan American
Airlines flight attendant, to whom Peter actually proposed.

Emotionally, he was perpetually disappointed; sexually, he got what he
wanted. The paradox tore at him. “His intimate life, with the women . . . ,”
Polanski says, trailing off and beginning again. “It was not always what you
would call the happiest relationships.”

In the drawing rooms of London, Peter’s skills at seduction led to
increasing speculation about the precise nature of his friendship with Princess Margaret, particularly when her own marriage to Lord Snowdon became more publicly rocky. With Tony causing talk about his relationship
with Lady Jacqueline Rufus Isaacs, Margaret was rumored to be spending
time alone with Peter at his Mayfair apartment. According to Margaret’s
biographers, the source of the rumor was—guess—Peter himself.

Siân Phillips saw him in action one evening “at dinner when I was in
a show in the West End. I got there after my performance, and I thought,
well, I know everybody—except for one little woman I didn’t know at all.
‘She’s obviously not in the business, I’ll catch up with her later.’ ” And so
Siân Phillips sat down. “O’Toole was laughing, of course, because he didn’t
give a damn, but Sellers was looking absolutely ashen because I reserved
her for later. Of course, it was Princess Margaret. She was the only one I
hadn’t recognized. Sellers really wanted to impress her. He wanted everything to go really well; he didn’t want any hiccups.” Phillips notes, “You
had to be careful around her. I don’t know if those stories about him and
her are true or not, but certainly she was terrifying to be out with. She’d
be a nice little person singing songs and playing the piano, and then suddenly she was HRH and you had to grovel. You couldn’t overstep the
mark.”

“Well, I obviously don’t know how intimate they were,” Joe McGrath
states. “But they were very, very close. Oh yeah, very. They were
all
close.
I mean, so was Tony.”

As for Margaret’s feelings about Peter, she once remarked that he was
“the most difficult man I know.” He proved the point when he called her
on the telephone one day and did an excruciating imitation of her husband
describing in obscene detail one of his dates with Jackie Rufus Isaacs.

• • •

One day about twenty years earlier—he and Anne were still married—Peter Sellers looked across a London park and spied a pretty little three-year-old girl. He began dating her in 1968, when she was twenty-one.

Miranda Quarry was delicate but curvy, with long, straight hair and an
aristocratic bearing. Her stepfather was noble in the technical sense of the
word; he was Lord Mancroft, a former junior minister in Parliament. Miranda was a patrician hippie without any of the distracting dirt or politics.
She moved in the circles expected of her; her peers were literally so.

She and Peter crossed paths since their earliest encounter in the park.
A modern debutante, Miranda had once taken a come-and-go job creating
floral arrangements in the Dorchester’s flower shop, where Peter used to
buy bouquets for Britt. They met again on the set of his new picture,
The
Magic Christian
—she was a publicity assistant at that point—and soon
began dating. It was an affair of convenience. She liked to hang around
with Peter and his movie people, Peter enjoyed romancing a delicious aristocrat, and they got together when it was convenient.

Peter’s first wife and two daughters comment on his relationships with
women during this period:

Victoria: “As any man would be who is no longer married, he went out
with a lot of different women, and traveled here and there, and decided to
rent a house in this country for a few months, and then, no, no, we’re going
to rent a house
here
, and then we’re going to stay in
that
hotel. . . . It was
all mixed up and jumbled but, I would say, interesting.”

Sarah: “That’s how he operated. Once he got bored with one toy, he
wanted the next. It was a constant quest, really, and I think the women
were just a part of that. . . . I think he found it very difficult to have a
decent relationship. It probably boils down to his mother.”

Anne: “He used to bring me all his new acquisitions in the way of girlfriends, so that ‘Mum’ could see them and tell him what I thought of them.”

If some men seem unable to deal with women apart from the categories
of the virgin and the whore, Peter Sellers, as usual, provided a novel twist.
His
classifications were the virginal sexpot and his own mother. Anne, never
either, now found herself hideously transformed into a woman she despised
and thus had no desire to emulate for her ex-husband. Peter wasn’t able to
help himself, and she was unable to stop him.

• • •

“It started off with Terry Southern,” says Joe McGrath. “We were going to
do
Flash and Filigree
, his other novel, but Peter said, ‘No, let’s do
The Magic
Christian
[1969]’.”

Given Peter’s recent history with directors, McGrath found himself the
object of warnings from friends and associates. “Some people said, ‘You
accepted the poison chalice.’ I said, ‘I don’t really see it like that, you know.’

“He could be very depressive. If you got him on a bad day he could
fuck up the day’s filming for you. But I got to know him well enough that
I could say to him, ‘You’re obviously exhausted’ and just send him home.
He had this great thing that comedy
is
—energy. And if you are not feeling
fit or good, you can’t be funny.

“He always avoided confrontations, so I think an awful lot of people
thought him devious. He would never face up to confrontation. He would
say, ‘Excuse me’ or something and go somewhere else, then have a minion
tell the person, ‘This is what we’re doing.’ I got past that with him. He
would
have
a confrontation with me. Not on the floor. He would say, ‘Can
we go to the dressing room?’ or something, and then we would figure it
out and argue it and discuss it and then he would come back and do it. By
that time I knew Peter well; I could tell him what I thought. As Spike
Milligan always said, ‘Once you go past that barrier with Peter, you’re a
friend. But if you don’t, he’ll always look on you as some servant he’s telling
what to do.’ ”

Peter was in Hollywood on January, 22, 1969, when he held a combination cocktail party and press conference for
The Magic Christian
at the
Beverly Hills Hotel. But it was his costar who fielded many of the questions,
and they mostly didn’t have to do with
The Magic Christian
. Ringo Starr
was about to join the other Beatles for their final public performance on
the roof of the Apple building in London the following week.

John Lennon had been the first choice for the role, but Lennon wasn’t
able to do it. Hence Ringo. The good-natured drummer’s last picture,
Candy
(1968), called on him to play a Latino gardener in hot pursuit of
the title character, a nubile female Candide. (
Candy
, scripted by Buck
Henry, is based on Terry Southern’s novel of the same name.) In
The Magic
Christian
, he plays Peter’s character’s adopted son. It was less of a stretch.

Ringo found the experience of acting with Sellers to be particularly
strange, owing to the two men having known each other for years without
cameras rolling in the background. “I knew [him] quite well, but suddenly
there he was going into character, and I got confused,” said Ringo.

“The amazing thing with Peter was that, though we would work all
day and go out and have dinner that night—and we would usually leave
him laughing hysterically, because he was hilarious—the next morning we’d
say, ‘Hi, Pete!,’ and we’d have to start again. There was no continuation.
You had to make the friendship start again from 9 o’clock every morning.
We’d all be laughing at 6 o’clock at night, but the next morning it would
be, ‘Hi, Pete!,’ then ‘Oh, God!’ We’d have to knock the wall down again
to say ‘hello.’ Sometimes we’d be asked to leave the set, because Peter Sellers
was being Peter Sellers.”

For his part, Sellers had only positive comments about Starr’s performance. “Ringo is a natural mime,” said Peter. “He can speak with his eyes.”
Ringo said of Peter, “He would always say, ‘It’s your eyes, Ring. It’s your
eyes. They’ll be two hundred feet big up there, you know.’ ”

• • •

The story goes: Sir Guy Grand, KG, KC, CBE (Peter), a lonely but immensely wealthy aristocrat, meets a homeless youth (Ringo) and immediately adopts him. (KG stands for Knight, Most Noble Order of the Garter,
and CBE for Commander, the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.
There is no KC in the British system of honors, so let’s call it an informal
abbreviation of KCB, which stands for Knight Commander, the Most Honourable Order of the Bath.) “Well, then, Youngman Grand,” Guy states
after the brief ceremony. “Father!” Youngman cries. Together they spend
a lot of money in a series of colorful, seemingly pharmaceutically oriented,
more or less disconnected adventures.

Guy and Youngman attend a performance of
Hamlet
; the lead, Laurence Harvey, performs the soliloquy as a strip show routine, getting down
to—and past—the Danish prince’s bodkin, in this case a black leather
jockstrap. (“You’ve got to hand it to that Laurence Harvey,” Youngman
Grand remarks to Guy. “He really knows his job.”) A train trip turns into
a psychedelic burlesque show with a strobe light sequence. A shooting expedition becomes a World War II battlefield complete with machine guns,
artillery, and tanks. (They barbecue a bird with a flame-thrower.) At a fine
art auction, Guy notices a dark portrait and engages a Sotheby’s representative (John Cleese) in conversation. The rep tells him that while the painting has not been specifically attributed to the master himself, it is decidedly
of the school of Rembrandt:

G
UY:
(in Peter’s parody-Eton-ish lockjaw voice) I like “School of Rembrandt.” Yes, I enjoy all the French painters.

S
OTHERBY
’
S REPRESENTATIVE:
(without the parody) Uh, well, Rembrandt was, in a sense, Dutch.

Guy purchases the painting out of auction for £30,000, cuts out the
nose, which he keeps, and orders Sotheby’s to burn the useless rest. With
its purposeful incoherence and stabs at druggy social satire,
The Magic Christian
is, like Peter and Mia’s cosmic walk in the desert, distinctly of its time
and place.

• • •

According to Terry Southern’s son, Nile, “Peter would get agitated when
he wasn’t working. He would just get really eager and impatient and just
start working on the material, and he’d bring in his other friends to start
working on it, and it ended up that, like, nine people ended up working
on that script.” Terry used to joke that Peter would just run into someone
at a cocktail party and the next thing anyone knew, that person was rewriting the script of
The Magic Christian
.

Graham Chapman and John Cleese were among them. Chapman once
declared that the future
Monty Python
stars—
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
premiered on the BBC a few months later in October 1969—had originally
been hired “to write in a part for Ringo Starr. The reason given was so that
the financiers could find the money to make the movie.” Joe McGrath
remembers the situation rather differently: “Cleese and Chapman were
pretty unknown at the time, but Peter wanted them. Terry resented them
quite a lot, [but] Peter insisted on bringing them in because he was going
to play Guy Grand as an Englishman. We got the money in this country,
so it was set in England.” McGrath adds, “At one point, before he could
find his voice, he was actually playing it like Groucho Marx.”

In any case, Chapman described his experience on
The Magic Christian
as “an ordeal-by-fire.” According to him, he and Cleese wrote a scene in
which a very nervous man was to sit on a hostess’s Pekinese and kill it.
Sellers “laughed hysterically at it, but the next day when we came back to
see Peter, he’d gone off it totally. He’d actually read this piece of script to
the man who delivered his milk, and he hadn’t laughed. So it was out.”