Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [96]
It was only after Peter returned from Paris that Anne told him that she planned to move out. This was Peter’s cue to announce that he’d slept with Anne’s best friend.
• • •
He acted out.
“Peter used Mike as a punching bag,” says Anne Sellers Levy in retrospect, adding that she “drank more than I’ve ever done in my life,” alcohol in her case being a material form of denial, a way for a mother to cope with the regularized abuse of her children.
When she told him that she was leaving him, Peter “wrecked the entire living room. I was sitting in a big chair trying to protect my head with my hands. Have you ever seen a child lose its temper and go berserk and pick up things and throw them? Imagine that on a grown-up scale in a very beautiful living room.”
Threats were employed. One night he proposed to jump off the terrace. Dangerous acts occurred. At one point he tried to strangle her. But Anne had had enough of the melodrama and knew precisely what to do to stop it. With his fingers clenched around her neck, she calmly told him just to go ahead and do it, so of course he stopped.
Peter was in New York when Anne moved out. “It was a very cowardly way of doing it,” she confesses, “but I’d never have got out otherwise.” With the two kids being cared for by Frieda Heinlein, she paused long enough in the garden to tell Michael that she was going to stay with her mother for a while, and “please look after Sarah for me, won’t you?” and with that she departed.
• • •
There were threats to assassinate Ted.
“Ted Levy has destroyed my life!” Peter yelled to the children. “He has taken your mother away from me! I’ll kill him! I’ll kill him!”
When Peter showed up at Ted’s place at two in the morning and began banging on the door, Ted considered the possibility that he might actually follow through. According to Levy, “He wore an expression of hate, anger, and frustration, the like of which I’d never seen on the face of any human being before. . . . Suddenly he looked up and offered me a cigarette.”
• • •
One day while Anne was staying at her parents’ house, Peter appeared, behaving, as Anne describes him, “very peculiarly.” He acted as though he’d never met her mother; he seemed not to know who she was. Believing him to be either drunk or deranged, she decided she’d better drive him home, but when they got back to the penthouse, Peter announced, “You’re not leaving” and locked her in. When it became clear to her that pleading wasn’t going to help, she telephoned the family doctor and asked to be saved. The physician showed up, sedatives in hand, and put Peter to bed. Anne left again.
For a while she returned on weekends to spend time with Michael and Sarah, who remained briefly under what passed for Peter’s care. Later she took the kids during the week and Peter had them on Saturdays and Sundays. Eventually she got full custody. “In a way I was lucky,” Anne says, “because he did spend a lot of time in America, so as the children got older they were hardly with him at all. He wasn’t really interested in their schooling or how they thought or their welfare.” His moving Michael from school to school was a form of abusive whimsy rather than a concerned attempt to rectify an ongoing problem with the boy’s education or behavior.
After a period of fully justifiable bitterness, Sarah Sellers tries to see the best in her father: “I think he had an idea of how he’d like family life to be, but he couldn’t really live up to it. So we’d come along and be with him—but once we were there he didn’t really know what to do with us.”
• • •
Alone and miserable, Peter brooded. The dependable Bert Mortimer grew fearful. “He was so isolated