Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [184]
The director Hal Ashby was also interested in directing Being There. Peter approached him while Ashby was doing postproduction work on The Last Detail (1973). Ashby met with Sellers in London in the summer of 1973, but the meetings were more or less futile because, as Ashby later admitted, “Neither one of us had the power then to raise the money for it.”
• • •
So he made one more dud, just to top it off. Like most of the others, The Great McGonagall (1974) was artistically well-intentioned, but it just didn’t work. Joe McGrath directed the picture for Spike Milligan; the two old friends were great admirers of the eponymous and dreadful Scottish poet. “Peter insisted on coming and guesting in it,” says McGrath. His role was that of Queen Victoria. “He played it all on his knees in a Victorian dress wearing roller-skates.”
A series of absurdist vignettes strung together as a kind of bitter vaudeville routine—as the end credits note, the film was shot “entirely on location at Wilton’s Music Hall, 1-5 Grace’s Alley, Cable Street, London E1”—the picture was meant to be a showcase for Spike, who plays the talentless bard. One fine exchange occurs when Spike, as McGonagall, takes the witness stand, where he is asked his trade by a prosecutor. McGonagall answers: “For twenty years now, I have worked patiently as an unemployed weaver, and I am currently training to be a poet.” “Who employs you, and what are your wages?” the prosecutor booms. “I am self-employed,” McGonagall calmly responds, “so there’s no wages. . . . It’s not what you’d call regular employment.” “What would you call it?” the prosecutor demands. “Unemployment!” McGonagall cries.
Victoria appears at the beginning of the film and returns later on wearing a black dress and white lace veil; she’s seated at a piano playing jaunty jazz. The visual gag is mildly funny, and Sellers’s comportment defies description, but then he turns around: Queen Victoria is wearing precisely the self-satisfied smirk of a cocktail lounge pianist acknowledging his nightly applause. It’s worth the whole movie.
The Great McGonagall flopped, like everything else had of late. Peter later said, “I had six or seven years of one flop after another—so much so that I just didn’t work. I was getting to the stage where people were crossing the road so they wouldn’t have to embarrass themselves by saying hello.”
His money was running out. After several quick moves around London, he ended up in a stark, almost Brutalist high-rise in Victoria; the building looked like the residential equivalent of the Bulgarian Ministry of Defense.
TWENTY-ONE
The money wasn’t gone, just dwindling. Unlike Daniel Mendoza, Peter Sellers wasn’t heading for debtors’ prison. But, like his great-great-grandfather, he did tend to spend.
He was on the run, as always. He went to the lush Seychelles in late December, but it turned out to be a little too lush—it rained for ten days straight—so he flew to Gstaad for New Year’s to do some skiing. He told the press that he didn’t like the sport and gave it up after a week of trying, but his ski instructor and friend, Hans Moellinger, disagrees. Moellinger had known Peter for years:
“I had met Peter with Roman in Gstaad. He was not a very good skier, so I gave him some lessons. (I’m sort of the ski instructor for famous people—Jack Nicholson, Yul Brynner, Prince Charles. . . . The oldest was Helena Rubinstein.) Roman was renting a beautiful chalet, where Jack, Peter, and a few others were staying for about two weeks. It was always a great time in Gstaad. The boys always expected me because I always brought along three or four girls. There was always a big hello when I arrived.
“He was not a good skier, but he kept listening. Skiing is a very easy thing to learn if you listen and are not nearsighted. It wasn