Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [158]
By midmorning of the following day, Peter had ordered the crew of The Bobo to throw all of Britt’s belongings onto the dock. Among the detritus were Scuff, Pucci, and Fred.
Britt served Peter with divorce papers. Peter convinced Britt to have lunch with him. “I know I can’t live without you,” he told her, but she pursued the divorce anyway. “For the first time in my life I was alone,” Britt writes, though her solitude didn’t last very long, for she soon took up with Count Ascanio “Bino” Cicogna, an Italian playboy who went out and bought a bigger yacht than The Bobo.
The divorce was finalized on December 18, 1968. Spike sent Britt a congratulatory telegram.
Two days later, Peter arrived at London’s fashionable Mirabelle restaurant for a dinner party with Roman, Sharon, Warren, Julie, and the producer Sam Spiegel. Not surprisingly, Peter’s date was a beautiful and fashionable blond film star. Oddly, she was Britt Ekland. The date ended at Peter’s place when Peter pulled down his £1,200 shotgun and threatened to shoot his ex-wife to death. “Don’t be silly, Peter,” was Britt’s adept reply. Knowing who she was dealing with, she kept talking to him in a soothing voice until she could slip the gun out of his hands. Then he burst into tears.
EIGHTEEN
On his own—at least away from Britt—Peter kept running with the fast-living Polanski crowd, which, in addition to Roman and Sharon and Warren and Julie, included Yul Brynner, Peter Lawford, Gene Gutowski, the playboy Jay Sebring, and the screenwriter James Poe.
As Polanski himself describes it, “There was quite a bunch of friends during this period; we were all usually in a very happy mood. Having had a few drinks or having just smoked a joint, we would start joking and kidding around, and it would develop into a kind of routine. We would start playing Italians, you know—just pretending we spoke Italian. There were always two arguing, and one other would sort of stand and observe, and then he would get involved in the argument of the other two. One of the two would start arguing with him, leaving the other one out. And it would go around like this—we could do it for hours. Sometimes we would do operas, make up singing. Often we would do Spaniards—whatever came to our minds. It was dependent on the kind of drink we had had and the extent of our drunkenness. It was really great fun.”
“There was a fabulous happening,” Gene Gutowski fondly recalls, “the premiere of Rosemary’s Baby in Paris. Peter was very much in attendance. We took over a whole hotel—the little place where Oscar Wilde had lived and died. It had become a showpiece, boutique-type hotel. We had a magnificent three-day party, the whole place reeking of, uh, substances, controlled or uncontrolled, mostly un-. Peter liked to indulge.”
Asked whether Peter’s drug use made his mood swings more drastic, Gutowski answers, “It’s difficult for me to judge. He definitely had mood changes, but I couldn’t tell you if it was under the influence of whatever he was taking or smoking or was just simply his nature. He would be quite happy and suddenly become very depressed and dark. That was typical of him.”
Peter took a casual attitude toward carrying drugs across international borders. “He was very friendly with a great friend of Roman’s,” Gutowski explains, “a Moroccan Jewish film director by the name of Simon Hessera. Simon was forever trying to make a picture, and he became very friendly with Peter. Peter spent some time in Rome, and before he left, he left me a note: Would I please collect a jar of honey from an English lady at an address