Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (38 page)

When Britt returned to the bedroom she found Peter lying in the
damp bed.

“I know what it is. I’ve had a heart attack. Phone the doctor.”

Dr. Rex Kennamer, physician to the stars, arrived very shortly, gave
Peter a sedative, and told Britt to take him to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital
in the morning. Kennamer wasn’t alarmed enough to call an ambulance on
the spot, but he did decide to cancel his trip to New York, where he was
to join his other patients Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton for the
opening of
Hamlet
.

In the morning they did as they were told. Peter checked into Cedars
of Lebanon. Britt told the kids he just had “a bit of a cold.” A hospital
spokesman told the press it was a myocardial infarction. Peter rested comfortably in his private room.

Reporters and entertainment columnists in Hollywood covered the
story, of course—it’s always exciting when a thirty-eight-year-old international superstar suffers a mild heart attack—but British papers were quite
a bit more breathless. The
Daily Express
rushed to report that Peter phoned
“director William Wyler” from his hospital bed to say that he was sick.

Then, at 4:32
A
.
M
. on April 8, 1964, Peter Sellers’s heart stopped beating and stayed off. It had had enough.

“That
was
a narrow escape!” said Alice, a good deal frightened
at the sudden change, but very glad to find herself still in
existence.

T
hink of a whole area of blackness. Then imagine an arm—a bare arm,
but a very strong arm, pulling you. And this arm says, in its own way,
‘I won’t let you go, I won’t let you go.’ I held on to this arm, and I knew
that as long as I had that arm, I wouldn’t die.”

A doctor pounded on Peter’s chest, and the heart began to beat.

Some hours later, a boy recovering from open-heart surgery in the
intensive care unit cried for his mother. Peter suggested that the child be
wheeled next to him, whereupon he distracted the child with a Cockney
song: “I was walking down the Strand with a banana in my hand . . .” The
boy began to laugh, Britt began to cry, and Peter suddenly stopped
breathing. In came the doctors, who revived him again.

The heart stopped at least eight times during the next two days, only
to be startled back to life each time. Up, down, starting, stopping, all to
the tune of jolts from a defibrillator. It was a
Goon Show
routine. “You’ve
deaded him,” Bluebottle used to say.

In England, a national icon seemed about to die, and TV tributes were
already in production. “It was uncanny,” Ian Carmichael reports. “He was
on life support in the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, and a television station
called. They were preparing an obituary program for that night. They said,
‘We’ve got Spike Milligan, we’ve got this, we’ve got that, we’ve got the
others all standing by to come in if necessary, but we would like you to be
link man, and we’ve got to rehearse you to get the links right, so will you
come in this afternoon and run them with us?’ I said, ‘Yes, okay.’ So I went
in and was handed this script, and it started off, ‘Today the _______’
—the date was left blank—‘at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in California, Peter Sellers died.’ It was terrifying to have to do this. I knew the man
was still alive. As I left the corridors of power in that television station, I
got the feeling that if he didn’t die, for the executives it would be the
ruination of a bloody good show.”

The doctors installed a pacemaker. Peter himself described it: “Two
electrodes were sewn in the tissue on each side of my sternum. Doctors
watching my heart graph on an oscilloscope knew exactly how it was functioning. If my heart stopped, a warning buzzer sounded, an oscilloscope
flashed a report, and an electrical stimulus was sent through the wires directly to my heart to start it up again.” (This pacemaker was an earlier,
rarer, and obviously more cumbersome version of the tiny, fully-implanted
device in widespread use today.)

By 7
A
.
M
. on Thursday morning, the crisis was over. Alert, cheerful,
and propped relatively upright with pillows, Peter told the hospital staff
that he was worried about his appearance, so they gave him a shave and
combed his hair. By Friday morning Peter was off the critical list, Rediffusion Television had lost their special, and Billy Wilder had replaced him
with Ray Walston in
Kiss Me, Stupid
.

Britt Ekland, who had kept a near-constant vigil at the hospital, found
herself the object of morbid curiosity and fashion scrutiny. The press duly
reported that Peter’s twenty-one-year-old bride of less than two months had
arrived at Cedars of Lebanon on Friday morning cutting a “wistful figure”
in a tailored blue-green suit. Forced by circumstances into a brief news
conference that day, she thanked Dr. Kennamer; the chief of cardiology,
Dr. Clarence Agress; and a senior resident physician, Dr. Robert Coblin,
for saving her husband’s life. What she didn’t mention was that Peter, for
whom work was life, was already insisting on talking to his agents and
managers and accountants and had to be sedated.

• • •

Peter Sellers’s deaths in April 1964 were by far the most adult experiences
he had ever had, with the possible exception of facing hostile audiences as
a stand-up comedian. Involuntary though coronaries are, they evidence
more maturity than did Peter’s two marriages, in which he often behaved
like a child, or his forays into fatherhood, his love for his children being
solipsistic and abstract. Dying changed him.

The doctors told him that he’d suffered no discernable mental
deterioration despite the lack of oxygen to the brain when his heart kept stopping.
Peter himself wasn’t so sure.

“He told me that he wasn’t afraid of dying after that,” David Lodge
declares. “Obviously it did have something to do with his way of life, with
his attitude. It did affect him. I’m not saying he was mental, but it mentally
affected him.”

Harry Secombe agreed: “Perhaps he realized his own mortality then
and decided to make the most of life before it happened again. That could
have been some of the reason behind his behavior afterward.”

The Goons, of course, took a jocular approach to Peter’s health crisis.
Secombe claimed that “when he was getting better, Spike and I sent him a
wire saying ‘You swine! We had you heavily insured.’ ”

Peter and Britt necessarily had to cancel their appearance at the Oscars
party Harold Mirisch planned to throw in their honor on April 13. In fact,
Peter remained at Cedars of Lebanon for a solid month, only making his
exit, in a wheelchair, on May 7. The crowd of reporters and photographers
swarming around outside the hospital noted that he was wearing a yellow
T-shirt, jeans, and a blue-denim jacket. He was also chewing gum. Peter
said very little on his way to the waiting ambulance that took him back to
the rented mansion, but he did toss off one good line: “When you come
out of the hospital, you want to look as nonchalant as possible.”

His recovery was quiet and uneventful over the next four weeks, and
on June 3, he was ready for his first public appearance. With Britt at his
side, he stuck his hands and shoes in wet cement at Grauman’s Chinese
Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. Privately, he also ventured out to a Santa
Monica apartment to pay a visit to an aging star he had long admired. He
signed Stan Laurel’s guest book “To Dear Stan—with my greatest admiration. Peter Sellers, June 1964.”

On June 7, Peter and Britt ended their catastrophic trip to Hollywood
and flew back to London; they were accompanied by a British physician
who had flown to California specifically to be at Peter’s side for the duration
of his flight home.

• • •

A week and a half later, from the apparently safe distance of 5,500 miles,
Peter casually mentioned to Alexander Walker of the
Evening Standard
that,
in his opinion, the Hollywood studios “give you every creature comfort
except the satisfaction of being able to get the best work out of yourself.”
He didn’t like all the hangers-on who had crowded around the
Kiss Me,
Stupid
soundstages, he said. He hadn’t had a good time in L.A.

It was a mild interview, but it hit a nerve back in Hollywood. Billy
Wilder, Dean Martin, Kim Novak, and Felicia Farr sent him a terse and
testy wire: “Talk about unprofessional rat finks.”

The following day, Peter announced that he had officially dropped out
of Wilder’s proposed Sherlock Holmes film. “I’m surprised they should
be so sensitive,” he commented. “I made my criticisms in public and in
America and I only told the truth.” He also defined the expression
rat fink
for the British: “someone who says something you don’t like.”

He issued a statement in
Variety
the following week—a full-page ad
titled “Open Letter from Peter Sellers”: “There appears to be a feeling
getting around in Hollywood that I am an ungrateful limey or rat fink or
whatever, who has been abusing everything Hollywood behind its back. I
must take this opportunity to correct this impression categorically.” Peter
proceeded to thank the doctors and staff of Cedars of Lebanon, the Mirisch
brothers, his friends at the Goldwyn Studios, and all the fans who sent him
cards and letters. “I didn’t go to Hollywood to be ill,” he continued. “I
went there to work, and found regrettably that the creative side in me
couldn’t accept the sort of conditions under which work had to be carried
out. . . . The atmosphere is wrong for me.”

Billy Wilder wasn’t sympathetic. “Heart attack?” he once remarked
about Peter. “You have to have a heart before you can have an attack.”

• • •

Peter’s convalescence in England was relatively serene. Mostly he and Britt
stayed at Brookfield, but one weekend they were among the guests at Testbourne, the home of Jocelyn Stevens, the editor of
Queen
magazine. Others
included Evelyn de Rothschild and Peter’s increasingly good friends Princess Margaret and her husband, Lord Snowdon.

Their friendship had been sparked by Alec Guinness. “I was the one
who . . . ” Guinness said before changing his mind about the direction his
sentence should take. “I spent the day with Princess Margaret and Lord
Snowdon’s sister and her husband, with whom Margaret was staying. I said,
‘You know, Mum, there’s someone who you ought to meet—Peter Sellers.’
She hadn’t met him yet. I read in the papers about a month later that they had
become very friendly. [Later] I went to call at Kensington Palace. I was returning some photographs to Lord Snowdon; Peter turned up after dinner.”

In February, during the brief period of his engagement to Britt, Peter
had managed to find time to introduce his fiancée to the princess and her
husband, who himself had found time that week to conduct a photo shoot
at Kensington Palace with Peter’s braless bride-to-be. Now they could spend
more than a few hours together, and, sociably, Peter organized a comedy
routine and filmed it. Peter began the act by doing impersonations and, as
Stevens later described them, “getting them deliberately wrong, so that we
all groaned. Then, of course, he produced this perfect version of Margaret.”

Footage of the escapade also reveals Margaret playing along with another of Peter’s stunts—a tasteful version of something he, Spike, and Richard Lester might have thought up for
Idiot’s Weekly, Price 2d
. Standing in
front of a makeshift theatrical curtain, Peter announces that for his next
trick he is going to do an impression of Princess Margaret. He darts behind
the curtain, and, after a pause, Margaret herself comes out and takes a bow.
It was a relatively intimate goof between friends, one of whom happened
to be royal—a good-natured amusement on a weekend afternoon.

In another bit, Snowdon, in trenchcoat and hat, played what turned
out to be a cross-dressing gangster sidekick to a gun-wielding, eventually-mincing Peter. But it’s “Riding Along on the Crest of a Wave” that best
captures the spirit of Peter’s royal friendships. There’s the queen’s sister in
a stylish black dress, gamely hopping up and down and waving her arms
over her head in a line of mock WWII soldier-chorines.

There’s something poignant about this footage. As the British writer
Alan Franks has observed, Peter’s intense need to photograph, film, and
tape record the day-to-day events of his life was essentially a tragic enterprise, “a device for fixing into place the otherwise transient moment. It was
as though he was trying to inject some permanence into a life which he
knew was condemned to flit from role to role, home to home, wife to wife.”
That this particular home movie starred Princess Margaret meant only that
Peter had risen higher than he had ever dreamed. What hadn’t changed
was that Peter still tried, with his latest technological toys, to keep his
evanescent soul from evaporating completely.

• • •

By that point, Britt was pregnant.

Not only had they started having sex while still in Los Angeles. They
began immediately after his return from the hospital. An especially dogmatic home-care nurse had insisted on following doctor’s orders by
remaining at Peter’s side constantly. Peter and Britt couldn’t even go to bed
together without Peter’s nurse remaining in the room with them, so the
only place the couple could have a bit of sexual privacy was under a blast
of running water in the shower. They begged the doctor to tell the nurse
to back off, and soon after she moved to a nearby bedroom at night, Britt
found herself in what passed for a family way.