Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [121]
In the morning they did as they were told. Peter checked into Cedars of Lebanon. Britt told the kids he just had “a bit of a cold.” A hospital spokesman told the press it was a myocardial infarction. Peter rested comfortably in his private room.
Reporters and entertainment columnists in Hollywood covered the story, of course—it’s always exciting when a thirty-eight-year-old international superstar suffers a mild heart attack—but British papers were quite a bit more breathless. The Daily Express rushed to report that Peter phoned “director William Wyler” from his hospital bed to say that he was sick.
Then, at 4:32 A.M. on April 8, 1964, Peter Sellers’s heart stopped beating and stayed off. It had had enough.
PART THREE
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
1964–80
FOURTEEN
“That was a narrow escape!” said Alice, a good deal frightened at the sudden change, but very glad to find herself still in existence.
Think of a whole area of blackness. Then imagine an arm—a bare arm, but a very strong arm, pulling you. And this arm says, in its own way, ‘I won’t let you go, I won’t let you go.’ I held on to this arm, and I knew that as long as I had that arm, I wouldn’t die.”
A doctor pounded on Peter’s chest, and the heart began to beat.
Some hours later, a boy recovering from open-heart surgery in the intensive care unit cried for his mother. Peter suggested that the child be wheeled next to him, whereupon he distracted the child with a Cockney song: “I was walking down the Strand with a banana in my hand . . .” The boy began to laugh, Britt began to cry, and Peter suddenly stopped breathing. In came the doctors, who revived him again.
The heart stopped at least eight times during the next two days, only to be startled back to life each time. Up, down, starting, stopping, all to the tune of jolts from a defibrillator. It was a Goon Show routine. “You’ve deaded him,” Bluebottle used to say.
In England, a national icon seemed about to die, and TV tributes were already in production. “It was uncanny,” Ian Carmichael reports. “He was on life support in the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, and a television station called. They were preparing an obituary program for that night. They said, ‘We’ve got Spike Milligan, we’ve got this, we’ve got that, we’ve got the others all standing by to come in if necessary, but we would like you to be link man, and we’ve got to rehearse you to get the links right, so will you come in this afternoon and run them with us?’ I said, ‘Yes, okay.’ So I went in and was handed this script, and it started off, ‘Today the _______’ —the date was left blank—‘at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in California, Peter Sellers died.’ It was terrifying to have to do this. I knew the man was still alive. As I left the corridors of power in that television station, I got the feeling that if he didn’t die, for the executives it would be the ruination of a bloody good show.”
The doctors installed a pacemaker. Peter himself described it: “Two electrodes were sewn in the tissue on each side of my sternum. Doctors watching my heart graph on an oscilloscope knew exactly how it was functioning. If my heart stopped, a warning buzzer sounded, an oscilloscope flashed a report, and an electrical stimulus was sent through the wires directly to my heart to start it up again.” (This pacemaker was an earlier, rarer, and obviously more cumbersome version of the tiny, fully-implanted device in widespread use today.)
By 7 A.M. on Thursday morning, the crisis was over. Alert, cheerful, and propped relatively upright with pillows, Peter told the hospital staff that he was worried about his appearance, so they gave him a shave and combed his hair. By Friday morning Peter was off the critical list, Rediffusion Television had lost their special, and