Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [161]
Anne: “He used to bring me all his new acquisitions in the way of girlfriends, so that ‘Mum’ could see them and tell him what I thought of them.”
If some men seem unable to deal with women apart from the categories of the virgin and the whore, Peter Sellers, as usual, provided a novel twist. His classifications were the virginal sexpot and his own mother. Anne, never either, now found herself hideously transformed into a woman she despised and thus had no desire to emulate for her ex-husband. Peter wasn’t able to help himself, and she was unable to stop him.
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“It started off with Terry Southern,” says Joe McGrath. “We were going to do Flash and Filigree, his other novel, but Peter said, ‘No, let’s do The Magic Christian [1969]’.”
Given Peter’s recent history with directors, McGrath found himself the object of warnings from friends and associates. “Some people said, ‘You accepted the poison chalice.’ I said, ‘I don’t really see it like that, you know.’
“He could be very depressive. If you got him on a bad day he could fuck up the day’s filming for you. But I got to know him well enough that I could say to him, ‘You’re obviously exhausted’ and just send him home. He had this great thing that comedy is—energy. And if you are not feeling fit or good, you can’t be funny.
“He always avoided confrontations, so I think an awful lot of people thought him devious. He would never face up to confrontation. He would say, ‘Excuse me’ or something and go somewhere else, then have a minion tell the person, ‘This is what we’re doing.’ I got past that with him. He would have a confrontation with me. Not on the floor. He would say, ‘Can we go to the dressing room?’ or something, and then we would figure it out and argue it and discuss it and then he would come back and do it. By that time I knew Peter well; I could tell him what I thought. As Spike Milligan always said, ‘Once you go past that barrier with Peter, you’re a friend. But if you don’t, he’ll always look on you as some servant he’s telling what to do.’ ”
Peter was in Hollywood on January, 22, 1969, when he held a combination cocktail party and press conference for The Magic Christian at the Beverly Hills Hotel. But it was his costar who fielded many of the questions, and they mostly didn’t have to do with The Magic Christian. Ringo Starr was about to join the other Beatles for their final public performance on the roof of the Apple building in London the following week.
John Lennon had been the first choice for the role, but Lennon wasn’t able to do it. Hence Ringo. The good-natured drummer’s last picture, Candy (1968), called on him to play a Latino gardener in hot pursuit of the title character, a nubile female Candide. (Candy, scripted by Buck Henry, is based on Terry Southern’s novel of the same name.) In The Magic Christian, he plays Peter’s character’s adopted son. It was less of a stretch.
Ringo found the experience of acting with Sellers to be particularly strange, owing to the two men having known each other for years without cameras rolling in the background. “I knew [him] quite well, but suddenly there he was going into character, and I got confused,” said Ringo.
“The amazing thing with Peter was that, though we would work all day and go out and have dinner that night—and we would usually leave him laughing hysterically, because he was hilarious—the next morning we’d say, ‘Hi, Pete!,’ and we’d have to start again. There was no continuation. You had to make the friendship start again from 9 o’clock every morning. We’d all be laughing at 6 o’clock at night, but the next morning it would be, ‘Hi, Pete!,’ then ‘Oh, God!’ We’d have to knock the wall down again to say ‘hello.’ Sometimes we’d be asked to leave the set, because Peter Sellers was being Peter Sellers.”
For his part, Sellers had only positive