Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [193]
The wedding took place in Paris on February 18, 1977. They soon flew to their new summer house at Port Grimaud near Saint-Tropez.
Lynne’s mother, Iris Frederick, a Thames television casting agent, was pointedly not invited to the ceremony. “I wouldn’t have gone in any case,” Iris declared to reporters. “I will never, ever talk to him. There is the age difference, but more important, there is Mr. Sellers’s track record. He has three failed marriages behind him. Three women can’t be that wrong.” She and Lynne had stopped speaking three months earlier and remained estranged for quite some time.
As for the precise cause of the marriage itself—Peter and Lynne had been living together for months before tying the knot—it seems to have been a form of coercion on Peter’s part. It was he who demanded that she marry him; she’d been offered a five-month television job in Moscow, and he didn’t want her to go and leave him alone.
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As Spike Milligan once told Michael Sellers, Peter “was always searching for a bloody heart attack as if it were a letter he knew had been posted and hadn’t arrived.” The mail was delivered on March 20, 1977, on board an Air France Boeing 727 from Nice to Heathrow. The plane was about twenty-five minutes away from London when Peter’s chest seized; a flight attendant described him as looking “dreadful.” There was a doctor on board, and he made Peter comfortable and reassured him while air traffic controllers gave the plane top priority for landing. After a brief examination by a physician at Heathrow’s medical unit, he was rushed to Charing Cross Hospital.
“It is not a heart attack and there is nothing to worry about,” Lynne told the press. It was all the result of bad oysters in Saint-Tropez, she said. The senior cardiologist at Charing Cross took a different opinion.
Strangely, Peter had been quite friendly with the world’s best-known heart surgeon, the jet-setting Dr. Christiaan Barnard, since the early seventies. And yet Peter never allowed Dr. Barnard to operate on him, nor anyone else for that matter. He’s said to have considered open-heart surgery at Charing Cross, but he decided simply to go with a new electronic pacemaker instead. It was installed, after which he and Lynne flew back to Saint-Tropez.
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In May, they flew to Gstaad.
In June, Peter fired Bert Mortimer.
Sue Evans, Peter’s secretary, remembers the moment well: “I got a call really late one night. It was Peter, and he said, ‘I’m going to dictate a letter, and I don’t want you to say anything. Just take it down, and don’t say anything.’ He started dictating the letter, and it was dismissing Bert. His loyal chauffeur, personal assistant, and friend was gone.”
“I just could not understand why he would want to break that relationship,” says Bert. “Even today I can’t tell you.”
TWENTY-TWO
Kenneth Griffith recalls Lynne Frederick terribly well. He paid the couple a visit. “She was very friendly, pleasant, and nice, but I wasn’t convinced that he wasn’t in trouble. Serious trouble. Which proved to be correct. Because of my sense about her, I said, ‘Pete, you remember when you were living in the Dorchester?’ ”
Peter recalled precisely the occasion to which Griffith referred: Griffith was appearing in a West End play at the time and not making very much money at it. Griffith continues: “I’m sitting there eating wonderful food and feeling a lot better when he suddenly says, ‘Here, Kenny—something worrying you?’ ‘No, no, Pete,’ I said, ‘I’m feeling great. Lovely to see you and be here.’ Four minutes later: ‘Kenny, something is worrying you and I want to know what it is.’ I said, ‘I’ve had a bad time you know, I shouldn’t be doing this fucking play, it’s hard work, I do two performances six nights a week. . . . And I bought a house, it was a struggle to get the money to buy it on top of everything else, and I’ve been doing