How Peter Sellers tried to swap a Ferrari for Ryan O’Neal’s wife!
And that’s not the only bizarre story his daughter Sarah has to tell
THE startling revelations about comic actor Peter Sellers’ life keep coming, even 35 years after his death. Sarah Sellers, his daughter, has organised a photographic exhibition, which has required some delving into her father’s past. What she has discovered is more colourful than the mainly black-and-white images suggest.
Her research put her in contact with an old co-star, the actress Leigh Taylor Young. It was no surprise to discover that Sellers (a notorious womaniser, besotted with many of his leading ladies) had been a little in love with Leigh.
Did they have a fling? If they had she would have been in good company, given that Sellers was at various times famously married to Britt Ekland, engaged to Liza Minelli and smitten to the point of obsession with Sophia Loren.
‘No, I don’t think so. Leigh was married to the actor Ryan O’Neal at the time’, says Sarah. ‘Not that it stopped Dad trying. In fact, he offered to do a swap. Leigh told me that Dad had offered Ryan a Ferrari in return for his wife.’ Now, if you’re the daughter of a man like this, does such a revelation make you laugh or cry?
With Sarah, it’s a little of both, and always has been. For while she’s the first to laugh and roll her eyes at her father’s extremes — she says this anecdote is ‘typical Dad’ — she’s also the first to admit that her relationship with her father was as flawed as they come.
‘He wasn’t a father figure, really,’ is her rather poignant conclusion. ‘All the things you want from a father, well, I didn’t get them from him. I got them from my stepfather Ted. He was the one I would turn to for help, advice.
‘Dad was just Dad. But I loved him.’ Did he love her in return? ‘I think so, in his own way,’ she says.
For Sarah, the daughter of Sellers and his first wife, actress Anne Howe, the uncertainty is quite understandable. Peter Sellers, most famous for his role as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther movies, may be remembered as a comic genius, but anyone who knew him was painfully aware of how his brilliance had a dark, often explosive, underside.
Prone to depression and manic outbursts, he could be unreasonable, petulant, vindictive and — Sarah won’t say it, but others have — quite an ogre. It was a side of him the fans never saw, but for his children it was the backdrop of daily life.
Just after Sellers died, his son Michael, Sarah’s older brother, wrote a book laying bare their life with him. It was a devastating account detailing how they witnessed Sellers trying to strangle their mother, and were collateral in his rages.
Sellers once shook a seven-year-old Michael awake at night and told him he was in love with Sophia Loren, and should he leave their mother?
ON ANOTHER occasion, when they were staying at Sellers’ mansion for the weekend, he demanded to know whether the children loved their mother or him more. Michael, weeping, was honest and said ‘Mummy’. Sarah had the sense to say ‘both the same’. Both children were instantly ordered back to their mother in London.
‘I remember Michael being so upset, and I was upset he was upset. And obviously Dad was upset,’ Sarah recalls. ‘Then we were just getting our stuff together for Bert, the driver, to take us home.’
That sort of scene was normal? ‘Yes,’ she says quietly. ‘It was what it was.’
Although Sarah supported her brother, and even helped with writing the book, the anger that fuelled it has long dissipated, to be replaced with real sadness. She insists that her father was ill, not evil.
‘Oh today, I think he’d be called bipolar. Sometimes I think if he’d lived, he’d have been diagnosed, got help. I like to think he would have calmed down and I’d be able to sit and laugh with him. But I don’t know. Maybe he would have been just the same.
‘I’m just sad I never got to have an adult relationship with him. He went too soon.’
Peter Sellers died in 1980, aged just 54. He had collapsed with yet another heart attack (he had been plagued by them) while staying at London’s Dorchester Hotel. For Sarah, then 23, it changed everything. She talks today of her life being in two halves, ‘pre-1980 and post-1980’. It’s safe to say her world imploded when her father died.
Shockingly, t he questions of whether her father loved her were writ large immediately after he died. Sellers’ modus operandi had been to fly into rages when anything his children did irritated him.
HE HAD disowned both Michael and Sarah countless times, ‘ to the point that it was just something Dad did. He’d be furious with us and tell us we were no longer his children.’
Sellers treated everyone like this. Staff were often sacked, then reinstated; friends were dropped, then reembraced. Devastatingly, though, he vented his fury on the last occasion by removing his children from his will. They got a mere £800 each — just enough that they could not legally claim they had been forgotten about.
The rest of the £5 million fortune — almost £20 million today — went to his fourth wife, the actress Lynne Frederick, even though they were bitterly estranged when he died. So did all Sellers’ personal possessions.
The news was broken to his children by a very embarrassed lawyer. ‘Just after the funeral he said to Michael, “I don’t know how to tell you this”. I was just stunned. I kept saying, “There must be a mistake”.
‘I knew what Dad was like, but to write your own children out of your will, even I didn’t think he would go that far. It’s not even about the money, is it? It’s about the message it sends. You know people will be thinki ng, “They must be such awful children. They must have done something so terrible”.’
She’s still at pains not to rubbish her father’s decision, though, putting it down to a temporary insanity. ‘I really don’t think he would have meant it, or foreseen the implications. But we’ll never know.’
The decision — mad or lucid — delivered a bombshell into the family. The upshot was that the children who had been delivered to school in a chauffeur-driven Aston Martin (later replaced with a Rolls-Royce) and had hob-nobbed with the rich and famous ( Sarah remembers Cary Grant ruffling her hair, and hanging out with Pri ncess Margaret) were left with nothing.
Michael, she admits, never got over the public snub. He died at 52 in 2006 — 26 years to the day after his father — a victim of the same heart disease.
Sarah says resentment consumed him. ‘ Michael never stopped being angry, and look what it did to him,’ she says. ‘I vowed that I wouldn’t go down that road. And I haven’t.’
Sellers was lavish and loud, and intensely proud of his royal connections. Sarah, 57, by contrast has no airs and graces.
She has gone on to lead a very unadorned life, and now runs an antique teddy bear business. She was married to the father of her two daughters, who are in their 20s, but is now in
a different relationship. In comparison with her f ather’s romantic history, her story is ‘quite boring’, she jokes. Financially too, she is cheese to his chalk. There have been moments when she’s raged about the lack of provision, and the unfairness of the situation. Sellers’ fortune is now in the hands of Lynne Frederick’s daughter Cassie Unger, who’s 31 and lives in America, and was born four years after Sellers died. Frederick died in 1994.
Does she find the arrangement unfair? ‘When my girls were a bit younger and we would be booking our annual holidays, I always used to get a twang. I supposed it was guilt.
‘We could never afford to go on the sort of holidays I’d gone on as a child — travelling first class, going to America, Disneyworld, on yachts, to five-star hotels. My girls got to go to Devon. Nice holidays, yes, but I’d think, “Am I letting them down?” ’
To be frank, though, her holidays with her father sound like style over substance.
Did he get down on his knees and build sandcastles? No. She smiles. ‘He wasn’t there a lot of the time. Or maybe he would come and spend a few days, then he’d have to go somewhere else.’
It sounds like Bert, her father’s loyal chauffeur (until he, too, was fired) was a more permanent presence than Sellers, and she admits that in her teenage years and early 20s most correspondence would come through his secretary Sue.
‘We’d phone up Sue if we needed anything, or wanted to know how he was. It would be quicker and easier than trying to get Dad...’
What of her parents’ painful divorce? ‘Michael took it much more to heart than I did. I remember saying, “Oh goodie, will I have two bedrooms?”’ She even embraced her father’s new loves, to a point. ‘Oh, Britt Ekland [his second wife] I loved,’ she says. ‘I was at that age where I thought she was just amazing, a proper real-life fairy-tale princess.
‘She was so beautiful, and she made a real effort with us. I remember discovering that she had one of those kidney- shaped dressing tables where both sides opened out and the insides were full of nail varnish. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. She took me shopping. She bought me a mini mink coat just like hers.’ Britt and Sellers had a daughter, Victoria, who was to suffer a very similar relationship with their father — one of being sent for one day, then banished the next. Victoria, too, was written out of the will, and pretty much went to pieces. She has talked of her battles with drug addiction, a legacy, she claims, of bearing the Sellers name.
For a while, Sarah and Victoria were close. ‘She would come on the holidays, depending on whether she was in or out of favour. When she had problems, she’d stay with me. ’
Sarah seems less angry than either Victoria or Michael. ‘What’s the alternative?’ she asks tersely. ‘He’s been gone for 35 years. If you stay angry for all that time you’ll drive yourself mad.
‘Now, a part of me feels grateful that I didn’t get the money. It meant I had to be my own person, not be just Peter Sellers’ daughter.’
Interestingly, she’s not making anything from the exhibition she’s organising. All proceeds are going to a heart disease charity. So why is she doing it?
‘Because I feel it’s time to step up to the mark. Michael isn’t here any more. I’m the oldest Sellers child. I feel it’s my duty to shine a light on my father’s work, because whatever sort of a father he was, he was a brilliant man, and so loved.’
Organising the exhibition has been an emotional experience, not least because so many of her father’s ol d co - s t ars and coll eagues responded so positively to her appeals for help in identifying faces in pictures.
She starts to cry when talking about how Leigh Taylor Young told her that her father had gone to visit her just a little while before he died.
‘They’d remained friends. She was very into the spiritual side of things, as he was, and she really helped him. She told me that they went on a retreat together and did yoga.
‘He told her he knew he was dying. I found that really upsetting — we all knew he was ill, but he’d been told himself he’d live to be 75, and I thought he believed that. But in another way, I’m glad she was there for him. I hope he got peace there.’
She knows, in truth, that Peter Sellers never really got peace, though. Over the years, many have said that there was no Peter Sellers, t he man hi mself had l o ng disappeared and he was just a suc- cession of acting roles. Sellers himself joked about this. Sarah says she won’t accept that, the father she knew was rounded and real, if flawed. ‘Other people say it’s the case,’ she says. ‘My mother thinks it’s true. But I don’t. There was a real sense of him. I certainly don’t feel I never knew him. He was always real to me. He was Dad. ’
She was in Portugal when she got the call to say Sellers had suffered a heart attack. She rushed home to sit by his hospital bedside, holding his hand. ‘He’d had heart attacks before. We thought he would bounce back. But he didn’t.’
Ironically, one of Sellers’ close friends was the South African heart surgeon Christiaan Barnard, who performed the world’s first heart transplant. He had been lined up to have heart surgery with him, but he got cold feet. ‘There were a lot of what ifs,’ admits Sarah.’ The saga was so unfinished. ‘He could never just live in the present,’ she says of her father. ‘His whole life was about searching for something he didn’t have, whether it was a new car or a new house or a new wife. He could never be content in the here and now.’