Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [159]
“When I sent Simon to pick up the honey, it was an extraordinary amount of money—something like $200. Simon was quite amazed and upset about it: ‘What is this stupid thing? What kind of honey is he eating?’ I said, ‘Simon, I really don’t know. He’s a health freak. Maybe it’s royal jelly. Just shut up and take it to London.’
“Poor Simon, shaking his head, carried it to London. Soon after, he realized that this honey was heavily laced with hashish. Peter was giving it out in tiny spoonfuls to his friends. When Simon found out what he’d carried past customs he was very upset.”
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Michael Sellers started smoking marijuana at age thirteen. Peter didn’t realize it at the time, but he was his own son’s drug connection, for the boy simply snitched it from his father’s stash, which Peter kept stored in empty film canisters around the house. “There was so much of the stuff that I knew he wouldn’t miss a little. . . . It was like his pills. He had thousands of them, and I would help myself to amphetamines or Mandrax sleeping pills.”
Sarah kept a defensive low profile. A cute, quiet child, she let her mother raise her. When Peter demanded her presence, she went along.
Victoria Sellers’s first memories are of Brookfield, its ducks and geese, the chicken coop, the trampoline Peter put up in the yard, and the pastel-pink bedroom in which she slept, always with the lights on, for she knew the house was haunted.
Peter sold Brookfield to Ringo Starr in 1969 for £60,000.
• • •
His offscreen concerns seem mostly to have been money and women. Peter could be as cheap as he was extravagant. It depended on his mood. He’d treat his friends to dinners, trips on his yacht, baubles; then, without warning, he’d make them foot the bills. A friend of his, the skiing instructor Hans Moellinger, got a taste of this after a trip with Peter to Vienna. “He was always telling me about buying property in the Seychelles, and this and that—he was obviously very rich—but in a way he was very stingy. Once we were staying at the Hotel Sacher with two beautiful girls, and. . . .” Asked who Peter’s companion was, Moellinger is vague. “I was with Miss Sweden at the time, and she always had five or six friends around. . . . And we went to the opera and did the usual sightseeing, and finally we left. The bill was the equivalent of about two or three thousand dollars nowadays. I thought he paid it. One or two weeks later I got an invoice. It said, ‘Mr. Sellers thought you should pay the bill.’ Can you imagine? At that time my monetary situation was not so good,” the ski coach notes.
As for the ideal woman, Peter had a dream—one of many. “These photographs you see of Gorky or Goethe,” Peter remarked to Joe McGrath one day.
“What are you talking about?” the confused McGrath replied. “He said, ‘Well, I don’t have any photographs of Goethe. But those Russian writers, and those early American writers—they’re all sitting there, and there’s a cottage in the background, and there’s always a woman, slightly out of focus, drying her hands on a towel. That’s what I want—that sort of woman. I really want somebody that’s going to be a cushion for me.’ ”
Peter did not go wanting for women after his second marriage ended, but most appear to have been cushions of a very different sort. He revealed to one girlfriend the secret of his success: as a pickup line he’d tell them he was descended from Lord Nelson, a throwback to his chubby childhood. But faking lineage can’t have been his only skill. Peter Sellers was a desirable man: funny, glamorous, rich, handsome (yes, he was handsome), and world-famous. His good looks were precise and curious, distinctly unconventional. He radiated on a physical level—the flashing smile, the slim frame he worked daily to carve from a naturally larger mass, sad eyes that pierced nonetheless. And he was sexy; and women knew it. Britt Ekland once revealed that Peter displayed what she called “extraordinary talents as a lover.” She knew his flaws better than almost