Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [157]
Still, Peter did return, however briefly, to the familiar in the summer of 1968 when a televised Goon Show aired in Britain in early August. Written by Spike, directed by Joe McGrath, and produced by Peter Eton, the program was not an attempt to present Crun, Bluebottle, Minnie, Eccles, and Seagoon in action, as one might expect from a visual medium, but rather simply to film the three veteran Goons standing at microphones doing their voices, just as they had done on BBC radio. (Strangely, this TV Goon Show was not produced by the BBC but by Thames for ITV.)
The show was not terribly successful. Milligan, who had originally been hired to write a new script, failed to be inspired to do so, and the Goons were forced to revert to the already late in the game “Tale of Men’s Shirts” from 1959. As a result, what might have been a promising television series was cut short by a weak pilot.
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Richard Lester once observed that the trouble with Peter Sellers having reached and sustained international superstardom was that he stopped coming into contact with ordinary people. Lester’s point is not simply that he was emotionally isolated. More at issue for his work was that Peter’s luxurious detachment, punctuated by parties with the glitter bunch, left him without everyday models on whom to draw for character development. “If you’re in limousines all the time you don’t meet many people,” Lester said.
According to Siân Phillips, Kenneth Griffith “used to try and get him to travel on the underground. He used to say to Sellers, ‘I honestly think it would give you a lot of interest in life—and peace of mind—if you mingled more and went on the subway with people.’ But you know how Sellers was. He was completely insane and had absolutely no intention.”
At the same time, the benefits of interactions with the ordinary are thoroughly overrated as far as celebrities themselves are concerned. Movie stars’ lives can quickly turn grotesque whenever fans barge in. Peter told of his experience on a plane from Barcelona to Rome during the production of The Bobo. He was in first class when a group of tourists, in coach, learned there was a star on board: “For an hour they came in shifts of three to look at me. One man told me his brother-in-law had done the titles on one of my films and seemed offended when I didn’t know him. He asked me to write a note to his brother-in-law on a menu card saying I bumped into Ethel and George on the plane. Then Ethel and George argued about what I should say.” And at a Hollywood get-together, Peter once told, “a long, thin thing glided up to me at a party and said, ‘I do find all of your films terrifyingly boring.’ ”
Robert Parrish was an independent witness to another such deformed encounter between Peter and his so-called fans. The two men were on a plane together—heading to Barcelona this time—when a group of Americans got on. They were each wearing a lapel button that read, “We smile more!” One of the smilers marched right up to Peter and said, “Mr. Sellers! I just saw one of your pictures recently, and it wasn’t very good, and I didn’t think your performance was very good either.”
Sellers froze. “Thank you for pointing that out to me,” he muttered.
As Spike Milligan once put it, “He sees himself as a clean person in a colony of lepers—can’t afford to mix with them too much if he’s to come out alive.”
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For reasons with which only bitterly divorced people can perhaps fully sympathize, Peter and Britt flew to Venice for another reconciliation. Accompanied by Britt’s three terriers—Scruff, Pucci, and Fred—they sailed The Bobo through the Gulf of Trieste and down the Adriatic, ending the cruise at Brindisi. They flew over to Rome, checked into the Excelsior, and proceeded to have such a vicious fight