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“At the end of the first day [of shooting Cleese’s sequence], Peter said to me, ‘We’ve really got to get rid of him and cast somebody else. Surely we can cast somebody else and bring him in tomorrow.’ He’d just blown the first day, [so] I said, ‘Let me talk to him.’ Sellers said, ‘I’m going home—you obviously want to see yesterday’s dailies—so give me a call later.’

“I went up to see John in the dressing room. He was really in tears. He said, ‘I know I have blown this, I understand if you don’t want me back tomorrow, I understand what’s going on. . . .’ I said, ‘Now look. Peter has gone home, so what we’ll do is we’ll have an early call tomorrow, and we’ll shoot some reverses on the scene we did today.’ We got him in early, and we shot the reverses, and I sent that reel off immediately to be developed. Peter came in about 10:00 A.M. and I showed it to Peter, who looked at it and said, ‘Oh, yeah, we can use it. I think he’s just very nervous.’ Peter and I went up to John’s dressing room, and everything was okay.”

Gail Gerber, Southern’s companion, recalls chaos of a more literary nature:

“Terry became nonplussed the first time when he realized that the producers had decided it was ‘episodic’ and needed something to tie it together. They thought, or maybe Terry thought, that Guy Grand could adopt a son or something. Terry always took suggestions in good faith.

“He was prepared to write in the son, which he did, and fortunately Ringo got to do the part. He was great in it—weird and great. Of course the book had nothing to do with any of that, but this was a pretty off-the-wall production anyhow.

“There were lots of phone calls. ‘You’ve got to get to London! You’ve got to get to London!’ We were going to leave Burroughs in our apartment on 36th Street [the poet William S. Burroughs, the author of Naked Lunch and Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict] and go to London, but Terry kept dragging his feet for some reason until finally we got on a plane and went. Meanwhile they’d already started shooting.

“Because Terry wasn’t there, Peter got all these other writers. They went for a whole different sort of slapstick thing. By the time we got there, several scenes were, in Terry’s estimation, ruined. There was the hunting scene, where they were blowing away birds until they were charcoal, and what mostly offended Terry was the scene at the auction house. Guy Grand was a very kind person and a great connoisseur of art, and he would never, ever plunge a knife into a fine painting. But they got carried away in their own funny way.”

One day, says Gerber, “Terry came back from the set and said, ‘You’ll never believe what they said today. “We’ve got Raquel Welch!” ’

“Terry said, ‘I don’t have a part for Raquel Welch.’ “They said, ‘Well, write one.’ ”

• • •

Cameos abound in The Magic Christian.

Spike Milligan turns up as a traffic warden. He gives Guy Grand’s black Mercedes limousine a parking ticket, only to be told by Grand that if he eats the ticket he’ll get £500. So he eats it.

Michael Sellers appears as a teenage hippie.

Wilfrid Hyde-White plays the ship’s captain. (The Magic Christian is the name of the oceanliner.)

Christopher Lee is the ship’s vampire.

Roman Polanski sits alone at the ship’s bar. A large, diamond-brooched blond approaches him and asks, “Would you like to buy a girl a dwink?” Through the haze of Polanski’s cigarettes, she begins to sing “Mad About the Boy,” parades theatrically around the room, and pulls her wig off to reveal the head of Yul Brynner.

Everyone adjourns to the engine room, where they find seventy bare-breasted women rowing the ship forward. Their slavemistress: Raquel Welch. She’s “the Priestess of the Whip.” “In, out! In, out! In, out!” Raquel cries. King Kong then kills Wilfrid Hyde-White.

Terry Southern wanted Stanley Kubrick to appear in a cameo, too, but as McGrath notes, “Stanley was just never available.”

Peter himself performs an eerie sort