Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [81]
Someone else involved with The Millionairess has another theory: “I’ve always felt that Sophia is one of those actresses who need to feel that their leading men love them before they can give a good performance. Peter had no experience playing romantic roles. He misread the signals and developed a delusion.”
Sophia herself said, some years later: “I was very close to him—as much as I could be. But love is something else. He is really a great, great friend. We have built up a fine relationship over the years and I think that is rare for a man and a woman, when the woman is married to someone else.”
Anne: “I don’t know to this day whether he had an affair with her. Nobody does.”
• • •
More important than the precise whereabouts of Peter’s penis during the production of The Millionairess was the effect that his emotional arousal had on his wife and children. According to Michael, he was already out of control when he confessed to Anne, who remembers the scene vividly: Peter “came in and straightened his shoulders like a politician about to make a major speech in the House of Commons and said, as though he had rehearsed the line all the way home from the studios, ‘Anne, I’ve got to tell you that I’ve fallen madly in love with Sophia Loren.’ ”
Despite her comment that she “didn’t take much notice at first” when Peter told her that he was in love with someone else, according to Graham Stark Anne packed her bags and showed up that very night at the Starks’ door, asking if she could stay in their guest room. She wasn’t in tears. She was in a rage, one that was made all the more fiery by the characteristic restraint with which she expressed it. “The bastard only told me because he couldn’t be bothered to have a bad conscience,” she told Graham.
“We had some terrible rows over it,” Anne does acknowledge. “One of them lasted fifteen hours.” But as Stark remembers it, Peter almost immediately began showing up at the Starks’ house asking for permission to take Anne out for the evening. He was all very proper and polite, so much so that the Starks felt as though they’d become Anne’s parents.
Of course Peter was contrite. That Anne had left him was what mattered, and it mattered because it hurt. Hurting could make him sweet. After a week or so Anne moved back to Chipperfield.
Still, according to Michael, his mother spent many of the ensuing nights in one of the guest rooms rather than the bedroom she once shared with her husband. She had good reason to keep a distance. As Michael describes his father at the time, “At home he became a crazed, manic figure.” One night was extra-special: “He hauled me from my bed at 3 A.M. ‘Do you think I should divorce your mummy?’ ”
• • •
If The Millionairess were a comic masterpiece, all the sordid behind-the-scenes turmoil might have served some lofty aesthetic purpose. But as it turned out, Peter’s agony of love was largely for naught. Sophia did not end up leaving Carlo Ponti for him, nor was The Millionairess one of Peter’s better films. It’s an extravagant but dull (for lack of a better word) affair. Sophia’s costumes are dazzling, her unnatural beauty even more so, her performance hammy. Shaw’s wit can be brittle, which may not be a bad thing, but in this case—or at least in Wolf Mankowitz’s adaptation—it’s impossible to accept without the lingering odor of smut. Why would a pious Muslim doctor who has devoted his life to the poor consent, even at the end, to spend the rest of his life with the world’s most spoiled and cutthroat heiress, other than to finally get his hands on her gigantic breasts? There’s just something fundamentally filthy about it. The closing scene, in which the heiress and the doctor finally declare their love and share a moonlit dance on a terrace, is lush but