Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [124]
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By that point, Britt was pregnant.
Not only had they started having sex while still in Los Angeles. They began immediately after his return from the hospital. An especially dogmatic home-care nurse had insisted on following doctor’s orders by remaining at Peter’s side constantly. Peter and Britt couldn’t even go to bed together without Peter’s nurse remaining in the room with them, so the only place the couple could have a bit of sexual privacy was under a blast of running water in the shower. They begged the doctor to tell the nurse to back off, and soon after she moved to a nearby bedroom at night, Britt found herself in what passed for a family way.
They told very few people. But near the end of the summer, during a brief trip to Costa Brava, Britt took an unexpected call from a British gossip columnist, who asked her to confirm the rumor that she was carrying Peter’s baby.
Britt’s marriage with Peter was, like Anne’s with Peter—and everyone’s, for that matter—punctuated by moments of tension and argument. But despite witnessing her husband’s irrational jealousy during their first weeks of matrimony, Britt once claimed not to have noticed anything truly out of the ordinary about his behavior until later that summer: “The first time I felt it was not normal was when Hugh Hefner called and said ‘We have nude photographs of Britt, but we feel that you are such a wonderful photographer, so why don’t you take some photographs of her?’ I said, ‘But Peter, I have never, ever posed for nude photographs.’ Peter said, ‘If Hugh Hefner says you have, you have.’ There was nothing I could say or do.”
Ekland was even more shocked and hurt when Peter suggested during one of their escalating fights that she abort the fetus. Britt sought the help of Bryan Forbes and Nanette Newman, who talked him out of it. With his quicksilver mood swings, he soon stopped mentioning abortion as a solution and began referring to an idea he claimed to have learned from Stanley Kubrick. There was an African tribe, Kubrick supposedly told Peter, a tribe that blended ancient ritual with modern Western medical practices and believed that the best and healthiest babies were produced only when a pregnant woman was strapped into a chair and placed in an oxygen tent. He suggested that Britt try it. According to Britt, only an increasing stream of calls from his agents and managers distracted him enough that he never forced her to go through with it.
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Before his ill-fated trip to Los Angeles, Peter had formed a new production company with a filmmaker of great experience. John Bryan was a former art director (Anthony Asquith’s Pygmalion, 1938, among others), and production designer (including David Lean’s Great Expectations, 1946, for which he won an Oscar, and Becket, 1964, with Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton, for which he won a BAFTA award). Bryan was also a producer, two of whose better known films starred Alec Guinness: The Card (1952) and The Horse’s Mouth (1958).
Calling their company Brookfield, Sellers and Bryan were quite active in terms of planning. Between March and October 1964, Brookfield announced five film projects that were in various stages of preproduction. First was The Borrowers, which was to be written by the screenwriter Jay Presson based on May Norton’s children’s book about a family of minuscule people who lived under the floorboards of somebody’s country home. They announced this one in March, before Peter’s heart attacks. In April, with Peter still in his hospital bed, Brookfield pledged to do a film version of Oliver!, Lionel Bart’s hit musical based on Oliver Twist, with Peter as Fagin. Then came My Favorite Comrade, written by Maurice Richlin; that, too, was announced with Peter still recuperating at