Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [104]
Looking back on it, Robert Wagner attributes Sellers’s performance to his disruptive interior life. Sellers was able to achieve so much variety in his art because, as Wagner puts it, he “had such a circus going on within his head.”
Blake Edwards is even more succinct: “I think he lived a great part of his life in hell.”
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Peter Sellers was at the top of his game, his fame, his taste in projects, and his luck, and he was visibly miserable much of the time, so through the guidance of Harry Secombe, he sought spiritual advice from a priest.
The sanest and best-natured Goon, Secombe was active in the Actors’ Church Union and, seeing his old friend in increasing distress, made a point of introducing Peter to Canon John Hester. This priest’s particular ministry was to men and women whose shifting identities earned them their daily bread, and still, Peter Sellers presented a special case. “Peter never really settled, and he seemed aware that this was a real problem,” Hester later said, referring to Sellers’s spiritual life more than to his locale. “He was never baptized, and a lot of our sessions were about the possibility of this happening.” (That a Jew would not have been baptized ought to go without saying, so Hester, in his restrained Anglican way, left it unsaid that Peter considered converting to Christianity.)
“He never came very near to settling on any single manifestation of faith,” Hester continued. “He was looking in all sorts of directions, just as if he were playing with one of those cameras of his.” The baptism failed to occur, then or ever—though another equally sacred Roman Catholic ritual later did—and Peter continued on his unsteady course, ceaselessly seeking and unable to rest.
Peter’s theological beliefs resembled his relationships with women. He was a spiritual compulsive whose piety carried with it an attendant poison, the latter bringing about another upsurge of the former. “He made great demands,” Peter’s priest acknowledged. “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.”
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He craved the spiritual strength he lacked, and he thought the same should apply to his money. To be “financially impregnable”—that was Peter’s goal in the material world.
“If one has money one should spend it wisely,” Peter told the Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky. “There are things that give me pleasure, and it’s only fair to me to lavish them on myself. After all, I’ve earned the money. I didn’t steal it, though a lot of people who have seen my pictures may think so.”
He told another eager interviewer, “And only seven years ago, I practically had less pounds in the bank than I had in my body. I got rich by working hard and not following Socrates’s advice. ‘Know thyself.’ I couldn’t follow it even if I wanted to.”
By 1963, he was earning an annual income of £150,000. In order to manage it to its best advantage, his accountant Bill Wills tried once again to enforce an allowance: Wills began doling out Peter’s spending money in £20,000 installments, the rest to be stashed in a Swiss account. It was the same system as the £12 per week Wills had given Peter in the old days, but as though on cue, Peter rendered the matter moot by purchasing a seventy-five-foot, £75,000, custom-built yacht. (An American newspaper valued the yacht at $215,000.)
A string of new apartment rentals also cut into Peter’s balance sheet. These flats were not for Peter himself but rather for a string of girlfriends. He scarcely wanted to live with these young women, after all, but he felt he