Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [209]
The commercials were shot in Dublin, with Joe McGrath directing. Peter’s character is a con man called Monty Casino, who bilks the unsuspecting out of their quid, the suggestion being that Barclay’s Bank offered protection against such shady scams. (The name plays not only on Monte Carlo’s casinos but also Monte Cassino, where Spike Milligan nearly got blown up during World War II.) In the first, Monty swindles a young musician out of his money; in the second, he cons a stately manor’s aristocratic owner. The third featured Monty gulling a student out of his rent money. The fourth was never filmed.
“He had a heart attack, and we couldn’t finish,” McGrath relates. “He started to get palpitations and said, ‘My God.’ I said, ‘Is it your heart?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s the Pacemaker—it’s gone into top gear. Quick—give me that bag!’ He took out this tiny leather case which had green and red things on it. I said what is it? He said, ‘It’s Gucci jump leads, you can start me up. What are friends for?’
“He said, ‘We’ve got to get a specialist.’ So, I phoned downstairs and said we needed a specialist for Mr. Sellers. They said, ‘You can’t get a specialist unless an MD comes and examines him.’ So I said to Peter that an MD would come up and then we’d get him into a hospital. He was lying in bed. I had come in from my room and was still in a dressing gown, and I had dark glasses on, and there was a knock on the door. This guy was standing there, and he said, ‘You look terrible, Mr. Sellers! You should get to bed!’ Peter said, ‘That’s what I need—an Irish doctor.’
“I took him into intensive care. The last thing he said was, ‘I’ll see you in London.’ He was in there for a couple of days, and then he was out. And, like the fool he was, he went to Cannes.”
• • •
McGrath is getting ahead of the story.
Nurse Lynne flew into Dublin from Los Angeles and announced to the press that it was just a false alarm and not a heart attack at all. This time it wasn’t oysters but a bicycle. Peter had had to ride a bike in one of the Barclay’s commercials, she explained, and he’d simply overdone it. Her motive seems clearly to have been commercial in nature; she was trying to protect his insurability.
Nevertheless, shortly after leaving the hospital and flying down to Cannes for the film festival, Peter endorsed an advertisement for the British Heart Association. The ad, printed in London newspapers, featured a photo of Peter; it was captioned “Heart Attack Survivor.” Accompanying the pictures was a quote:
“I’m lucky—I survived!”
• • •
Lynne accompanied Peter to Cannes, where Being There was in competition for the Golden Palm. He kept a fairly low profile, except for the little garden party arranged by Lorimar for about 450 guests. “I’m fine, thank you, I’m feeling very fit; I’m fine, thank you, I’m feeling very fit,” Peter kept repeating as he made his way through the horde. But the journalists kept asking.
“Please, I am not an invalid,” he insisted to the crowd of reporters, who were legitimately confused by his remarks because they were being told simultaneously by Lorimar staffers that Peter was “not a well man.”
Paparazzi, kept out of the affair by a wrought-iron fence, simply poked their lenses through the iron bars while a string quartet played in the background. The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner’s Wanda McDaniel described the turmoil: “When Sellers arrived, the roots of garden party etiquette got severed to smithereens. At one point, the crush took on shades of panic until bodyguards convinced the curious that there are better ways to go than getting trampled to death at a garden fete.”
The garden party certainly helped the film’s publicity, but it scarcely mattered as far as the awards were concerned. The Golden