Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [123]
He issued a statement in Variety the following week—a full-page ad titled “Open Letter from Peter Sellers”: “There appears to be a feeling getting around in Hollywood that I am an ungrateful limey or rat fink or whatever, who has been abusing everything Hollywood behind its back. I must take this opportunity to correct this impression categorically.” Peter proceeded to thank the doctors and staff of Cedars of Lebanon, the Mirisch brothers, his friends at the Goldwyn Studios, and all the fans who sent him cards and letters. “I didn’t go to Hollywood to be ill,” he continued. “I went there to work, and found regrettably that the creative side in me couldn’t accept the sort of conditions under which work had to be carried out. . . . The atmosphere is wrong for me.”
Billy Wilder wasn’t sympathetic. “Heart attack?” he once remarked about Peter. “You have to have a heart before you can have an attack.”
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Peter’s convalescence in England was relatively serene. Mostly he and Britt stayed at Brookfield, but one weekend they were among the guests at Testbourne, the home of Jocelyn Stevens, the editor of Queen magazine. Others included Evelyn de Rothschild and Peter’s increasingly good friends Princess Margaret and her husband, Lord Snowdon.
Their friendship had been sparked by Alec Guinness. “I was the one who . . . ” Guinness said before changing his mind about the direction his sentence should take. “I spent the day with Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon’s sister and her husband, with whom Margaret was staying. I said, ‘You know, Mum, there’s someone who you ought to meet—Peter Sellers.’ She hadn’t met him yet. I read in the papers about a month later that they had become very friendly. [Later] I went to call at Kensington Palace. I was returning some photographs to Lord Snowdon; Peter turned up after dinner.”
In February, during the brief period of his engagement to Britt, Peter had managed to find time to introduce his fiancée to the princess and her husband, who himself had found time that week to conduct a photo shoot at Kensington Palace with Peter’s braless bride-to-be. Now they could spend more than a few hours together, and, sociably, Peter organized a comedy routine and filmed it. Peter began the act by doing impersonations and, as Stevens later described them, “getting them deliberately wrong, so that we all groaned. Then, of course, he produced this perfect version of Margaret.”
Footage of the escapade also reveals Margaret playing along with another of Peter’s stunts—a tasteful version of something he, Spike, and Richard Lester might have thought up for Idiot’s Weekly, Price 2d. Standing in front of a makeshift theatrical curtain, Peter announces that for his next trick he is going to do an impression of Princess Margaret. He darts behind the curtain, and, after a pause, Margaret herself comes out and takes a bow. It was a relatively intimate goof between friends, one of whom happened to be royal—a good-natured amusement on a weekend afternoon.
In another bit, Snowdon, in trenchcoat and hat, played what turned out to be a cross-dressing gangster sidekick to a gun-wielding, eventually-mincing Peter. But it’s “Riding Along on the Crest of a Wave” that best captures the spirit of Peter’s royal friendships. There’s the queen’s sister in a stylish black dress, gamely hopping up and down and waving her arms over her head in a line of mock WWII soldier-chorines.
There’s something poignant about this footage. As the British writer Alan Franks has observed, Peter’s intense need to photograph, film, and tape record the day-to-day events of his life was essentially a tragic enterprise, “a device for fixing into place the otherwise transient moment. It was as though he was trying to inject some permanence into a life which he knew was condemned to flit