Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [59]
“I had had surgery on my leg,” Max Geldray reports. (The Goon Show, of course, was still running to national acclaim and amusement.) “Harry Secombe started calling everybody and telling them I was in the hospital. Harry sent me flowers and fruit—typical of him—and I had telegrams from people. When Peter heard about it, he immediately came over and saw all the flowers and said ‘My God, I’m so stupid.’ He was very angry that he hadn’t sent things first.
“I’m sitting there not able to walk. He said, ‘What do you want?’ I said, ‘Peter, I can’t go anywhere. I can’t walk.’ He said, ‘I have a new car!’
“That meant absolutely nothing to me, since he had a new car once a week. ‘It’s a new Rover, and you’ve got to see it! I have to take you for a ride!’ So he carried me, physically, bodily, into the car. We drove away. We went for a five-minute drive and stopped. He said, ‘Just sit there. I’ll be back.’
“After a long time sitting there, I see him coming down the street with another guy who was carrying a lot of packages. He said, ‘That’s yours.’ What it was I had no idea. We drove back home, he carried me inside, and there was a whole new sound system.
“I said, ‘Peter, I have a sound system. I don’t need one.’ He said, ‘Yes, you do. This is a newer system.’ ”
Things were always important to Peter Sellers. What he missed by lacking a stable or even single self he tried to make up with possessions. Like Charles Foster Kane, he collected himself by collecting buyable objects—cars, cameras, stereo systems, toys, radios, recorders, expensive suits—things that proved to himself something so fleeting that he inevitably had to buy something else as soon as possible. Buying and giving was Peter’s way of expressing love. Empty and needy, he bestowed what he wanted—to himself as well as to his friends and family.
“He was impatient if he wanted something,” Geldray says. “He was definitely an ‘I want it now’ kind of person. There used to be a saying—we all said it: ‘You’ve got to have it.’ The whole cast of The Goon Show said it, but it came from him: ‘You’ve got to have it!’
“There was a Ford Zephyr, an English car, that had won the Monte Carlo rally. I got a call from him: ‘Did you hear? The Ford Zephyr won the Monte Carlo rally!’ ” Geldray told Peter that he’d already ordered one from a dealer they both knew. “I had ordered the car, and it was going to take a long time because it was a very popular car. Peter said, ‘I’ve got to have it.’ To make a long story short, he had it two or three months before I got mine, because he went crazy. He had to have it!
“He said ‘Let’s go to the car show.’ So he, and Anne, and I went. All of a sudden, Anne and I see him talking to the Bentley people. Anne said, ‘Uh-oh.’ I saw it from afar, this Bentley, and to me it looked like it sagged in the middle. It obviously didn’t, but it appeared to. I said to Anne, ‘You know, I don’t think I like that car. It looks like it’s sagging in the middle.’ So she goes over to him and says, ‘Peter, Max thinks it sags in the middle.’ He said, ‘What? Oh. Okay.’ He said to the salesman, ‘Never mind,’ and he walked away. All I had to do was say something negative, and he would immediately act upon it.
“However, several weeks later he had a Rolls-Royce.”
But as Wally Stott kindly reflects, “He was fond of all those things, but there was no harm in that. I hate to believe that there was any harm in Peter. He was a very likeable person.”
Anne was always the first to acknowledge her husband’s likability, but for her, marriage to Peter Sellers “was like living on the edge of a volcano.” On October 16, 1957, she got burned. That was the night she gave birth to their daughter.
Sarah Jane Sellers always had her mother, but beginning in a literal way at the instant of her birth and continuing metaphorically throughout her life, Peter simply wasn’t there. On that particular night he simply had to see Judy Garland open at the