Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [162]
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The story goes: Sir Guy Grand, KG, KC, CBE (Peter), a lonely but immensely wealthy aristocrat, meets a homeless youth (Ringo) and immediately adopts him. (KG stands for Knight, Most Noble Order of the Garter, and CBE for Commander, the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. There is no KC in the British system of honors, so let’s call it an informal abbreviation of KCB, which stands for Knight Commander, the Most Honourable Order of the Bath.) “Well, then, Youngman Grand,” Guy states after the brief ceremony. “Father!” Youngman cries. Together they spend a lot of money in a series of colorful, seemingly pharmaceutically oriented, more or less disconnected adventures.
Guy and Youngman attend a performance of Hamlet; the lead, Laurence Harvey, performs the soliloquy as a strip show routine, getting down to—and past—the Danish prince’s bodkin, in this case a black leather jockstrap. (“You’ve got to hand it to that Laurence Harvey,” Youngman Grand remarks to Guy. “He really knows his job.”) A train trip turns into a psychedelic burlesque show with a strobe light sequence. A shooting expedition becomes a World War II battlefield complete with machine guns, artillery, and tanks. (They barbecue a bird with a flame-thrower.) At a fine art auction, Guy notices a dark portrait and engages a Sotheby’s representative (John Cleese) in conversation. The rep tells him that while the painting has not been specifically attributed to the master himself, it is decidedly of the school of Rembrandt:
GUY: (in Peter’s parody-Eton-ish lockjaw voice) I like “School of Rembrandt.” Yes, I enjoy all the French painters.
SOTHERBY’S REPRESENTATIVE: (without the parody) Uh, well, Rembrandt was, in a sense, Dutch.
Guy purchases the painting out of auction for £30,000, cuts out the nose, which he keeps, and orders Sotheby’s to burn the useless rest. With its purposeful incoherence and stabs at druggy social satire, The Magic Christian is, like Peter and Mia’s cosmic walk in the desert, distinctly of its time and place.
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According to Terry Southern’s son, Nile, “Peter would get agitated when he wasn’t working. He would just get really eager and impatient and just start working on the material, and he’d bring in his other friends to start working on it, and it ended up that, like, nine people ended up working on that script.” Terry used to joke that Peter would just run into someone at a cocktail party and the next thing anyone knew, that person was rewriting the script of The Magic Christian.
Graham Chapman and John Cleese were among them. Chapman once declared that the future Monty Python stars—Monty Python’s Flying Circus premiered on the BBC a few months later in October 1969—had originally been hired “to write in a part for Ringo Starr. The reason given was so that the financiers could find the money to make the movie.” Joe McGrath remembers the situation rather differently: “Cleese and Chapman were pretty unknown at the time, but Peter wanted them. Terry resented them quite a lot, [but] Peter insisted on bringing them in because he was going to play Guy Grand as an Englishman. We got the money in this country, so it was set in England.” McGrath adds, “At one point, before he could find his voice, he was actually playing it like Groucho Marx.”
In any case, Chapman described his experience on The Magic Christian as “an ordeal-by-fire.” According to him, he and Cleese wrote a scene in which a very nervous man was to sit on a hostess’s Pekinese and kill it. Sellers “laughed hysterically at it, but the next day when we came back to see Peter, he’d gone off it totally. He’d actually read this piece of script to the man who delivered his milk, and he hadn’t laughed. So it was out.”
Cleese, says McGrath, is “very funny in the Sotheby’s scene, but I had to bring him back. The first day