• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

As a funeral cortege makes its incongruous way through the park beneath the Eiffel Tower, a physician (Peter, looking very much like Auguste Topaze) comforts the widow, Paulette (MacLaine). The doctor’s comfort slides into a passionate declaration of love, prompting Paulette to cry all the harder—briefly. Soon they’re discussing where they’re going to live together, and before the casket has even reached the cemetery they diverge from the funeral route and walk off in each other’s arms.

• • •

On Monday, October 17, Peter arrived on The Bobo’s Cinecittà set at 4:10 P.M., having just watched all the rushes to date. “I’ve just seen the most wonderful film!” he exclaimed enthusiastically. “It’s marvelous!” He shot a scene or two with Parrish and finished at 7 P.M. At 8:30 P.M. Parrish picked up his ringing telephone. “I’m low on the film,” Peter told him. It was Britt’s fault. “Her reading of lines is amateurish,” her husband opined.

It got worse.

“Peter called Britt ‘a cunt’ in front of the entire cast and crew,” Kathleen Parrish states. Everyone froze, but the Italian crew members were especially mortified at Peter’s vulgar treatment of a woman—his own wife, a Scandinavian bombshell to top it all off, a lady whose toes they would gladly have kissed.

A gregarious group, The Bobo’s crew enjoyed fixing a fairly elaborate lunch for themselves and a few select guests. They liked Robert Parrish—everyone did—and they invited him to join them once or twice. But they never wanted to have much to do with Peter at all, let alone share a meal they cooked themselves. And Peter, as always, wanted very much to be invited. According to Kathy Parrish, the “cunt” incident only served to cement the crew’s enmity, and afterward they became even more open in giving Peter the cold shoulder.

So, in a grossly misguided effort to get the crew to like him and invite him to lunch, Peter bought a dozen knockoff Rolex watches and began doling them out as gifts.

He approached the camera operator and handed him one of the cheap watches. The camera operator literally spat on it and threw it on the ground at Peter’s feet.

At one point, Kathy Parrish invited Peter to lunch, and he was completely at ease and low-key. “Peter could be charming,” she notes. They did a jaunty strutting dance together, the Lambeth Walk, and had a fine time in each other’s company. But as far as the production of The Bobo was concerned, she says, “it was ugly from beginning to end. Everything around Peter was awkward.”

Peter and Britt had returned to the Appian Way—to a somewhat smaller villa than the one they’d rented during the production of After the Fox—but by this point the marriage was in even more drastic trouble. More (and bigger) furniture was hurled. During one rage Peter actually flipped the bed over. One of the castors hit Britt in the mouth and chipped a tooth. She proceeded to leave the production for several days—the mirror opposite of her behavior during Guns at Batasi, for this time she was fleeing from her husband.

In the middle of it all, Peter got a phone call from London. Peg had suffered a heart attack.

Robert Parrish asked Peter if he wanted to fly back to be with her. Peter replied that it wasn’t necessary, he spoke to her all the time. She died a few days later, without him.

• • •

“He used to be quite terrible to her at times,” Dennis Selinger once said of Peter and his mother, “and yet, probably she was the only woman in his life who really meant anything to him.”

Peter and Britt flew to London for the funeral, after which Peter sent his mother’s ashes to North London to be interred with Bill’s at the Golders Green cemetery and columbarium. There is a plaque there, placed by Peter, who nonetheless did not visit the cemetery until 1980. As for Peg’s clothes, Peter gathered them from her apartment, took them to Brookfield, and burned them in the garden.

Peg had moved on, but the mother-and-son heart-to-hearts are said by some to have continued from beyond the grave. “After she’d gone,” Selinger claimed, “he used to