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Peter was devastated not only by his failure to win an Oscar; he had been just as upset when he saw the release print of Being There. Without Peter’s approval, Ashby and Braunsberg decided to end the film not with Chance walking on the surface of the lake, but with the outtakes of Peter laughing hysterically, trying and failing to deliver the “now get this, honky” line. The outtakes do pull some easy laughs—it’s hard not to break up when listening to anybody suffering a laughing jag—but to Peter, the essence of his most austere and technically controlled performance was utterly ruined. He sent an angry telex to Ashby:

“It breaks the spell, do you understand? Do you understand, it breaks the spell! Do you hear me, it breaks the spell! I’m telling you how it breaks the spell. . . .”

• • •

“I’ve got an illegitimate daughter running around somewhere,” he claimed in April 1980. He was speaking of the baby he believed he and the unnamed mystery woman had conceived while he was serving in the Royal Air Force—the one Peg had invited to dinner while Anne was recovering from her miscarriage. He had three children, whom he treated more or less poorly, if at all, but thoughts of his maybe, maybe-not lost daughter only intensified as his health deteriorated.

Of his three children, Michael Sellers enjoyed the least troubled relationship with his father. There had been periods of tension, but the two males seemed to get along well enough. Michael had his mother for emotional support; his father was there for infrequent fun.

Michael and Sarah were each the beneficiaries of a one-time gift of £20,000 when they turned twenty-one. It wasn’t much, considering Peter’s wealth, but, as usual, it was all he had to give them.

Peter had never quite gotten around to setting up a trust for his third child. Victoria Sellers had spent most of her life forced into playing the role of pawn in a nasty chess game; Peter was the black king, Britt the blond queen. With an unerring sense, the early-teenage Victoria once showed up for a visit clad entirely in purple. Peter threw a typical fit, but soon whisked her away on a shopping spree, both to make up for his rage and to ensure that she wouldn’t wear the offending color in his presence. On another occasion, Peter canceled Victoria’s planned visit to Port Grimaud at the last minute, thereby enraging Britt, thus provoking Peter to tell Sue Evans to write a letter to Victoria on his behalf and tell her, as Michael Sellers puts it, “that she should no longer regard him as her father.”

That one blew over, slightly, but at the end of March 1980, the fifteen-year-old Victoria made the mistake of telling her father what she thought of his work: “He asked me if I’d seen his latest film, Being There. I said yes, I thought it was great. But then I said, ‘You looked like a little fat, old man.’

“I didn’t mean to hurt him. I meant his character in the film looked like a little old man. But he went mad. He threw his drink over me and told me to get the next plane home.”

Sarah Sellers usually knew enough to keep her distance. She tried to please her father, but for reasons she never understood, she kept on failing. “When I was a student and rather poor,” she says, “I didn’t know what to give him and Lynne for Christmas, so I got her some lace doilies and him an old print. I got a letter back from him saying, ‘I know it’s the thought that counts, but what a thought. Yours, Dad.’ I was devastated. But then he turned up a few months later as if nothing had happened.”

But when Sarah put her two cents in over Victoria and the drink-throwing episode, she received the following telegram: “Dear Sarah, After what happened this morning with Victoria, I shall be happy if I never hear from you again. I won’t tell you what I think of you. It must be obvious. Goodbye, Your Father.”

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Entertainment writers’ conventional wisdom, if one can call it that, holds that movie stars demean themselves by appearing in television commercials. It’s considered far