Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [164]
“He had the wimple on and said, ‘Who am I?’
“I said, ‘You’re Peg.’ ”
“ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m Peg.’ He looked exactly like her.”
• • •
“The last scene in the movie is a shit vat, where everybody goes into the shit for money,” observes McGrath. “Terry and I insisted that we do this in the States under the Statue of Liberty.”
So the cast and crew finished up in London and prepared to go to New York to film rich people wallowing for dollars in a tank full of feces.
“We were having this wrap party in London,” Gail Gerber looks back. “There were about thirty of us at a giant round table. Peter was dating Miranda Quarry at the time, and we’re onto coffee and, well, you know how a hushed silence can fall? Well, it fell. And my voice rang out saying that I had never had an ocean voyage. Peter picked up on it immediately and said, ‘Yes! We must take the QE2 to New York! Don’t you think, Miranda?’ ”
It was not an idle question. At the time, Lord Mancroft, Miranda’s stepfather, was a director of the Cunard Line, of which the Queen Elizabeth II was the flagship. Luxury transatlantic passage was swiftly arranged. “We all got a free trip,” says McGrath.
Gail Gerber recites the passenger list on the QE2: “There was Peter, and Miranda, and a BBC crew following them, and the producer, and his wife, and Derek Taylor (because of Ringo), and his wife, and five children, and nanny, and Ringo, and Maureen, and was it one or two kids?, and a nanny, and Terry and me. Allen Klein was on the ship as well. What the hell was he doing there?” McGrath adds, “John Lennon was supposed to come with us, but he got turned back at Southampton because of the visa thing. He’d come down from London with us. In fact, we’d all gone down in the big Mercedes limo we used in the film.” (Derek Taylor was the Beatles’ friend and press agent; Maureen was Ringo’s wife; Allen Klein was in the process of becoming the Beatles’ manager, a relationship that soon soured and ended in protracted litigation. John Lennon was denied a visa by the United States Embassy in London because of his arrest and conviction for marijuana possession in October 1968.)
“Hash oil, tobacco, cannabis, dynamite-like opium. . . .” Terry Southern is reciting the drug list on the QE2. “Peter became absolutely enthralled—he couldn’t get enough. For five days we were kind of in a dream state.”
“They were all out of their heads,” McGrath notes. “There were blankets being rolled up and stuffed under doors.”
On the first night, there came a rap on McGrath’s door. He opened it to find Peter dressed as the leader of a gang of nineteenth-century London street urchin pickpockets. “Good evening,” said Peter. “I am the ship’s Fagin. Tomorrow I shall be the ship’s purser, but tonight I am the ship’s Fagin!” All night long he knocked on people’s doors and greeted them singing “You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two.”
The stabilizers weren’t working properly—those of the QE2—and not only Gail Gerber but some members of the crew became violently seasick. Luckily, Sellers had brought along a remedy. “Peter had a great big jar of honey,” Gerber relates, “and a big, long-handled spoon. It was laced with hash oil. And with everybody he would meet, he’d dip the spoon in and pass it around. He thought it was absolutely wonderful. He saw me all green, and he dipped the spoon in and gave me some. I felt a lot better.”
An advance team had flown across the Atlantic and, as McGrath continues, “set up to do the shit vat on the island under the statue. At the last minute Commonwealth United, which put the money up, said no. ‘We’re not going along with this—it’s making it too hot for us.’