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into the seemingly unending forest of the Rand estate. As Ashby himself described Being There’s original ending, “Shirley MacLaine goes after Peter Sellers when he leaves the funeral and goes into the woods. She finds him and she says she was frightened and was looking for him. He says, ‘I was looking for you, too, Eve.’ And they just walk off together.” Ashby had already filmed that scene when a friend of his, the screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer, asked him how the Being There shoot was progressing. “It’s wonderful,” Ashby replied. “Peter Sellers and Melvyn Douglas are achieving such clarity, such simplicity, it looks like they’re walking on water.” It was a moment of inspiration.

Ashby shot a new ending.

Chance wanders through the snowy woods while the president continues with his platitudes and Ben’s pallbearers whisperingly agree to nominate Chance for the presidency. On the edge of a lake, Chance straightens a sapling that has been weighed down by an old, broken branch. He moves toward the shoreline and walks into—rather, on top of—the lake. He pokes his umbrella gently in, plunges it down, looks up and around in characteristic incomprehension, and continues strolling on the surface of the cold winter water. What choice did Peter Sellers have, let alone Chauncey Gardiner?

TWENTY-THREE

Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise

than what it might appear to others that what you were

or might have been was not otherwise

than what you had been

would have appeared to them to be otherwise.

On April 18, 1979, the last day of shooting Being There, MacLaine and Sellers were filming the scene set in the backseat of Eve Rand’s limousine. “Peter had been to a numerologist the night before,” Shirley reports. “Looking into my eyes, he told me that the numerologist had warned him that his wife’s numbers didn’t match his own numbers. Peter was clearly most concerned about this information.”

He was worried about his mind as well as his heart; the actual, blood-pumping muscle was giving him as much cause for concern as his love life. He found himself musing over the possible effects of his two minutes of clinical death in 1964. “I think I’m probably going a little soft in the head,” he told Time magazine a little later, “which is why I have something in common with Chance.”

Peter’s renewed obsession with Sophia Loren did not help his deteriorating marriage with Lynne. Thoughts of Sophia had resurfaced because Sophia had just published her memoirs, and the name “Peter Sellers” had not appeared therein. Peter was shocked and hurt. “Our relationship was one of the things that helped break up my first marriage!” he complained to the columnist Roderick Mann. Referring to Sophia with icy formality, Peter continued: “Miss Loren was always telephoning me, and I’d go rushing all over Italy to be with her. It’s odd that someone who apparently meant so much in her life—or so she said—should not figure in her life story. The only reason I can think is that she was married at the time. But it’s not as if her husband didn’t know. Carlo knew very well.”

Peter’s remarks became a scandal, one which did not please Sophia, who was swiftly pestered to respond to Peter’s public despair. “I could not write about every partner I have had in the movies,” she told one reporter. “It would have taken volumes. I only wrote about the most important events of my life. Peter lived in Los Angeles and it was too far to go to see him from Italy.” At this point Sophia became angry: “I will not answer any more questions about Peter Sellers! I wrote the book to tell the truth about my life, not for gossip columnists!”

“I know the men I’ve slept with,” Sophia told Shirley MacLaine privately. “And Peter, bless his phantasmagorical mind, was not one of them.”

MacLaine was soon surprised to find herself in the same phantasmagorical boat. During the production of Being There, she later wrote, “He did tell me in detail of his love affairs with Sophia Loren and Liza Minnelli. I wondered about his lack of discretion but sometimes found his reenactments very funny.