Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [151]
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If it weren’t for the tremendous talent, the domestic horrors, and the periodic fits of public charm, Peter Sellers’s life could be described in the form of a warehouse inventory and an accompanying list of the stamps on his passport. He had commissioned a new yacht while on a side trip to Genoa during the production of The Bobo—a fifty-foot number, which he christened The Bobo—and in August 1967, he and Britt sailed to Sardinia to spend a little time with the Aga Khan. The couple, divorce postponed, were accompanied by Margaret and Tony Snowdon; the Aga was tossing the princess a birthday bash. Kirk and Anne Douglas were there, too; Peter had met them in Monte Carlo on the way. Margaret’s cousin, Princess Alexandra, and her husband, Angus Ogilvy, came along as well. So did Michael, Sarah, and Victoria Sellers, the youngest being cared for by her Swedish nanny, Inger.
“It was the real jet set period,” Roman Polanski declares. “It was, like, one day in Rome, one day in L.A., then we’d suddenly be in London. Our jobs would take us to various places, and we would meet like that, you know.” Paris, Rome, London, Los Angeles, Monte Carlo; Peter, Margaret, Roman, Kirk, the Aga; films, income, houses, taxes, luggage. . . . It was rather like a progressive dinner, where guests go from house to house for each new course, only in 1967 they were jetting, not driving, and the food was better, and there was unlimited champagne and lots of drugs, and everybody was famous. Through Roman, Peter met Warren (Beatty). Warren introduced him to Julie (Christie). “You have to look back at what London was like in the ’60s,” says Peter’s friend Gene Gutowski, who had been Polanski’s producer on Repulsion (1965), Cul de Sac (1966), and The Fearless Vampire Killers, or: Pardon Me But Your Teeth Are In My Neck (1967). “We were young, we were successful, and everybody’s star was on the rise. It was limited to much more of a select group than today. Let’s put it this way: there were not as many celebrities around in those days.”
With Roman, Peter enjoyed playing an odd game of their own invention: Sellers, assuming the personality of a cretin, would climb into the driver’s seat of his latest Rolls Corniche, and Roman would give a driving lesson as though to the mentally handicapped. “Press the right-hand pedal, gently—no, too hard! . . .” And so on, through the busy streets of London. According to Polanski, it was especially amusing to play the game stoned on hashish.
In the late fall of 1967, the Polanski circle got together to plan a communal Christmas holiday in Cortina. Roman and his magnificent girlfriend, Sharon Tate, took Peter out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant to talk about the trip and introduce him to some of the other guests. A physician named Tony Greenburgh—described by Gene Gutowski as “a society doctor”—was seated across the table from Peter. The talk turned to the question of whether doctors bore any moral responsibility to patients who seemed driven to self-destruction. Not knowing Peter at all, Greenburgh all-too-calmly stated his opinion: that doctors were unable to stop hell-bent patients from killing themselves, whether it was through drinking, drugging, smoking, or overwork, and therefore he bore absolutely no responsibility for his patients outside of the particulars of his practice.
Peter became wildly enraged, his reaction so abrupt and extreme that the other guests naturally assumed it was one of his impromptu comedy routines. Their amused disbelief continued even after Peter got up from the table, marched around to Greenburgh’s side, shrieked “You’re wrong, Doctor—you’re wrong, you’re fucking wrong!” and grabbed the physician by the throat and began to choke him. Someone at the table giggled and casually told Peter to stop acting silly. Greenburgh, for his part, was turning blue.
Polanski sprang to the doctor’s defense and pried Peter’s fingers