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By Root 1565 0

very nice man. . . . No, said Peter. Amateau doesn’t remember precisely what they argued about—there was wine involved—but he does recall that Fellini’s tendency (as Amateau describes it) “to direct by the numbers” made no sense to Peter, who found it offensive to actors. (Fellini, with whom Amateau had worked, often directed his actors to move around the set in a series of numbered positions, and he rarely gave them dialogue when they shot but instead filmed them without sound and dubbed in the dialogue later. Sellers, who never worked with Fellini, found the director’s habits to be obnoxious.)

“Fuck him,” said Peter.

As the Fellini argument escalated, Bert began to make silent no-no gestures on the sly. Rod changed the subject. The men parted when dinner was over. Peter was a little chilly. Rod returned to his hotel, took a shower, and the doorbell rang. “It’s not me,” said Bert. “You’ve got to understand Peter. You won’t like it, but he wants the encyclopedia back. He’s mad at you. Don’t say he’s childish! I’ve told him that. And don’t say no or you’ll get me in trouble.” Amateau gave Bert the encyclopedia. Bert left.

A little while later, the phone rang. “In other words,” said Peter’s voice through the receiver, “you thought so little of my gift that you gave it back without protest. If you’d have really liked it you’d have fought for it.”

Rod: “I don’t fight for anything except women and money.”

Peter: “You’re off my list.” Then he hung up.

For the next few months, Peter kept calling from wherever he happened to be—Switzerland, England, Italy, Ireland—and begging Amateau to please let him send it back. “Don’t send it, Peter,” said the amiable Amateau. “Bring it with you the next time we get together.”

Eventually they found themselves in London at the same time, whereupon Bert arrived at Rod’s door bearing the encyclopedia. “He’s downstairs,” said Bert. Amateau went to the window and saw Peter sitting in his car, waving up to him in the queenly manner.

“I had the best of him because I appealed to his worst nature,” Amateau fondly concludes. “And lemme tell you, it takes one to know one. He was a lot more talented, but what the hell?”

• • •

Where Does It Hurt? was lucky. Many projects didn’t pan out at all. “Spike Milligan and I are working on an idea now,” Peter had declared in 1970. “I can’t tell you what it is, but it’s similar to spiritualism and that sort of thing. Not spiritualism, but in a similar area.” Spike was less circumspect. It was to be, in Spike’s words, “a comic version of the Bible.” Lo, it did not come to pass.

The Last Goon Show of All was sufficiently antediluvian to make up for any missing biblical tale. Recorded on April 30, 1972, at the Camden Theatre (to be broadcast on radio May 10 on Radio 4 and televised on BBC1 at Christmastime), it marked a reunion between Peter, Spike (who wrote the script), Harry, Ray Ellington, Max Geldray, and the announcer Andrew Timothy, who had been onboard for the first Crazy People in 1951. “When I announced the first Goon Show I was thirty,” Timothy declares in the opening moments. “I am now ninety-three.”

“I will now whistle the soliloquy from Hamlet,” Peter announces in stentorian tones to the assembled studio audience, which included Prince Philip and Princess Anne. (Prince Charles was in the navy at the time and telegrammed that he was “enraged” that he couldn’t attend.) And the soliloquy Peter did whistle, trailing off after the first few recognizable bars and moving slightly away from his microphone, at which point Andrew Timothy dryly breaks in:

“That was Mr. Sellers practicing his comeback.”

TWENTY

Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end?

He hoped to solve his career problems by making a movie about a cretin. Shortly after Jerzy Kosinski’s newest book hit the stands in 1971, the émigré novelist received a brief and cryptic telegram: “Available my garden or outside it. C. Gardiner,” followed by a telephone number. Curious, Kosinski dialed it. Peter picked up. Kosinski had created Being There’s Chauncey Gardiner