Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [204]
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His fourth marriage’s denouement seemed inevitable to the point of redundancy. Just before Being There began shooting, Peter was asked about Lynne. “I’m so lucky,” he answered. “She’s a beautiful girl in every sense. I just wish I’d met her long ago. It’s been a long, bumpy road to find her, but God at last has smiled on me. . . . Lynne is exactly the kind of girl whom Peg would have wanted for me. She [Peg] is always around, always giving me help and advice. . . . She loves Lynne and wants us to be happy together.”
Lynne’s own mother, Iris, still hadn’t spoken to her daughter since the marriage, though she did continue speaking to the press. “What mother can be expected to approve of the marriage of her daughter to such a man?” Mrs. Frederick declared to the Los Angeles Times in late January. “Their marriage was doomed from the start.”
Iris was right.
Lynne saw a shrink. The doctor’s diagnosis was one to which Peter failed to cotton. “A psychiatrist she went to was crazy enough to suggest that because I loved my mother I was still looking for another mother figure!” he declared in exasperation. “When my mother was alive,” he explained, “she did everything she could in her life to help me. She was content and always there, both for my father and me. I said to Lynne one day that because of her kindness, she reminded me of my mother. . . . Sometime later she went to a psychiatrist in Hollywood. Those shrinks are awful! What he told Lynne was that the trouble between us—the strain which I hadn’t noticed—was caused by my looking for another mother figure. And it was that incestuous feeling that prevented us from having children. Now that is mad, isn’t it? Quite mad!”
Peter wanted a divorce. Typically, he told a reporter about it first. “That was what hurt,” Lynne said, “reading in a newspaper that our marriage was finished. It’s true we had discussed divorce, but no decision had been reached when he left. We’ve both consulted lawyers, but nothing’s happened yet.”
It seems that in the third week of April, just after Being There wrapped, Peter left Los Angeles for Barbados, alone and in a rage, because Lynne had refused to accompany him on the vacation. He stayed in Barbados a single day and then flew to London. “From there he telephoned me to announce that his marriage was over,” Roderick Mann wrote in the Sunday Express on April 28. “A few days later he made the same statement to London newspapermen.”
The whole thing continued to be played out in newspapers and, in a secondary sense, in daily telephone calls between the two aggrieved parties, who clung to each other long distance. In early May, Peter was in his room at the Inn on the Park in London and sleeping in until 4 P.M. He was “haggard and bleary-eyed” when he answered the door, found a reporter, tried to slam the door in the reporter’s face, and ended up slamming it on his own foot.
“I don’t mind being alone,” he told still another scribe. Yet in mid-May, he mentioned to a third journalist that he’d asked Lynne to fly to London for what he called a “love summit”; he himself having left London briefly to make an appearance at the Cannes Film Festival. “For tax reasons I cannot work in London,” he said to a fourth reporter, “but I can certainly go there to save my marriage.” To a fifth he added that “up till now all the discussions regarding our future life together have been on the telephone.”
“Really,” he said, “I am a romantic, so I can’t rule out getting married again. But this time it will be to an older woman—someone who is thirty-one or thirty-two.”
One of Lynne’s friends told the Daily Mail that “she doesn’t appear upset about anything.”
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In May, Peter announced that he