Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [160]
Emotionally, he was perpetually disappointed; sexually, he got what he wanted. The paradox tore at him. “His intimate life, with the women . . . ,” Polanski says, trailing off and beginning again. “It was not always what you would call the happiest relationships.”
In the drawing rooms of London, Peter’s skills at seduction led to increasing speculation about the precise nature of his friendship with Princess Margaret, particularly when her own marriage to Lord Snowdon became more publicly rocky. With Tony causing talk about his relationship with Lady Jacqueline Rufus Isaacs, Margaret was rumored to be spending time alone with Peter at his Mayfair apartment. According to Margaret’s biographers, the source of the rumor was—guess—Peter himself.
Siân Phillips saw him in action one evening “at dinner when I was in a show in the West End. I got there after my performance, and I thought, well, I know everybody—except for one little woman I didn’t know at all. ‘She’s obviously not in the business, I’ll catch up with her later.’ ” And so Siân Phillips sat down. “O’Toole was laughing, of course, because he didn’t give a damn, but Sellers was looking absolutely ashen because I reserved her for later. Of course, it was Princess Margaret. She was the only one I hadn’t recognized. Sellers really wanted to impress her. He wanted everything to go really well; he didn’t want any hiccups.” Phillips notes, “You had to be careful around her. I don’t know if those stories about him and her are true or not, but certainly she was terrifying to be out with. She’d be a nice little person singing songs and playing the piano, and then suddenly she was HRH and you had to grovel. You couldn’t overstep the mark.”
“Well, I obviously don’t know how intimate they were,” Joe McGrath states. “But they were very, very close. Oh yeah, very. They were all close. I mean, so was Tony.”
As for Margaret’s feelings about Peter, she once remarked that he was “the most difficult man I know.” He proved the point when he called her on the telephone one day and did an excruciating imitation of her husband describing in obscene detail one of his dates with Jackie Rufus Isaacs.
• • •
One day about twenty years earlier—he and Anne were still married—Peter Sellers looked across a London park and spied a pretty little three-year-old girl. He began dating her in 1968, when she was twenty-one.
Miranda Quarry was delicate but curvy, with long, straight hair and an aristocratic bearing. Her stepfather was noble in the technical sense of the word; he was Lord Mancroft, a former junior minister in Parliament. Miranda was a patrician hippie without any of the distracting dirt or politics. She moved in the circles expected of her; her peers were literally so.
She and Peter crossed paths since their earliest encounter in the park. A modern debutante, Miranda had once taken a come-and-go job creating floral arrangements in the Dorchester’s flower shop, where Peter used to buy bouquets for Britt. They met again on the set of his new picture, The Magic Christian—she was a publicity assistant at that point—and soon began dating. It was an affair of convenience. She liked to hang around with Peter and his movie people, Peter enjoyed romancing a delicious aristocrat, and they got together when it was convenient.
Peter’s first wife and two daughters comment on his relationships with women during this period:
Victoria: “As any man would be who is no longer married, he went out with a lot of different women, and traveled here and there, and decided to rent a house in this country for a few months, and then, no, no, we’re going to rent a house here, and then we’re going to stay in that hotel. . . . It was all mixed up and jumbled but, I would say, interesting.”
Sarah: “That’s how