But I didn’t learn about that dead boy from Peg or Pete—it was from the parrot. When Henry wasn’t screeching “Bollocks” or “Bugger off,” he would cluck his tongue and ask, “Where’s the dead baby, where’s the dead baby? Where’s Peter Sellers?”
Pete would cover the cage with a kind of blackout cloth and threaten to hurl Peg’s parrot off his own balcony at the Dorchester. “Down to Hell with him, Mum. I promise you that.” She’d start to cry and plead with her son. She’d already tossed back enough scotch to drown her parrot.
“Henry’s all I have, love. . . . I lost my other boy. I was at the music hall, wearing a white tutu, when he choked to death. He swallowed his own bile. Greenish it was. I will never forget that color. . . . Pete, give us a hug. You and Ian are good boys.”
I’d have to drive her home in the Bentley he had bought for his mum. His dad, Bill Sellers, had died in ’62. I was bowled over when I saw a picture of Bill. He looked exactly like Pete. He’d run off with another bird during the blitz. Peg had to take him back, like she would a wayward boy. She slept in the same room with Pete. Bill was banished to the sofa in the sitting room. He was the lone Protestant in a tribe of Sephardic Jews that loved to squabble.
And now I was squabbling with a maniac who was descended from Mendoza.
I promised not to call him Pete in front of PM.
“But why would you want me at Ma’am’s garden party? I’m a bit short on royal blood.”
“But you’re a reader, my reader. And I wouldn’t want Ma’am to consider me obtuse. She’s friends with Gore Vidal and all those literary barracudas. PM can spend a whole afternoon in bed with bloody William Blake. And I can’t read his poems. They bore me. So you’re my shield, Ian. You’ll protect me from her darts. When she starts to recite about burning tigers, just chime in. I’ll slowly slip into your shoes and become William Blake in front of her eyes.”
His astrologer had warned him that he had to woo Princess Margaret this month. And it was best not to interfere with his madness. I wore a velvet suit to Kensington Palace and a black silk shirt. Pete wasn’t bothered at the gate, but I had to deliver my passport to a clerk, who squinted at me and checked my name off a list. Ma’am’s own detective, a bloke with enormous hands, kept my passport in his pocket.
“Hello, Mr. Sellers. Is this your man?”
“Yes, Burroughs, and you mustn’t be rough with him. Ma’am wouldn’t like it.”
Burroughs accompanied us to the royal tea tent. It was as tall as the palace, and it rattled in the July wind. I grew dizzy watching the tent’s tarpaulin skirt sway round and round my head. I didn’t recognize any of the royals, but then I recalled that Ma’am and her husband had their own crowd of barracudas—mobsters, models, and musicians, sprinkled with a few of London’s literati and notorious hangers-on.
I was welcomed into this club once Pete introduced me as Archibald Diggers’ grandson. The London mobsters, who looked like financiers in their Savile Row suits, insisted that my grandfather was the savviest breaker of skulls that London had ever seen.
“A legend in his own time, Archie was. He could split a man right down the middle.”
And then Her Royal Highness appeared with Snowden, the commoner who had been made over into a lord. Pete longed to accomplish the same trick, to supplant Snowden and even surpass him by hopping out of the royal box as some prodigious lord of lords. It was a ludicrous quest. He would have been a madman after a month or two of palace life with Margaret.
He was ebullient under the tent, calling her “Ma’am Darling” and kissing her in front of Snowden, who was in the midst of a much publicized affair with Lady Jacqueline Rufus-Isaacs, one of London’s tallest and most exquisite beauties; Peter loved to regale me with the story of how he’d once squired Ma’am (and her detective) to some restaurant in Soho and found Lord Snowden and Lady Jacqueline seated at another table. The detective, Burroughs, fell into a blind rage, but Ma’am sat down, nursed her scotch, and said, “Peter, do be funny. I’m in the mood for some fun remarks.”
Pete carried on five conversations at once, playing Snowden, Jackie Rufus-Isaacs, Burroughs, Ma’am, and Peter Sellers, excoriating each of them and himself, while Ma’am puffed on her Gauloise in a black pearl cigarette holder and never laughed. Finally she leaned over, said, “You are a darling boy,” lured Pete back to her palace, and let him make love to her for the first time, with the detective outside her door. And Pete smelled marriage after one knockabout in Margaret’s bed.
She didn’t have Jacqueline’s long legs and regal bones; Ma’am was barely five feet tall, but she had the pale complexion of a child, with a swan’s white neck, a sensual mouth, and blue eyes that crinkled with mischief and warmth. I’d been in love with Margaret Rose ever since I saw her in a newsreel in 1943; she must have been twelve or thirteen when I was six; she was carrying a helmet and a gas mask and wearing a British officer’s uniform; she had enormous, smoldering eyes; I believe she was the mascot or honorary colonel of a tank corps, and in this newsreel she was inspecting the tanks. She saluted the tank men. Her voice trembled slightly. “My brave boys,” she said, her words sounding like a song.
I had to hide my crush on her while Pete introduced us. I dipped my knees a bit; you weren’t supposed to shake a princess’s hand. I didn’t expect her to smile. But her lips pursed after one look at me and her blue eyes began to glaze. Then she whispered to herself and bolted away. And I realized that Pete had led me into some sort of trap. All that banter about William Blake was a ruse of his. I wasn’t meant to talk literature with Margaret Rose. I wasn’t mean to talk at all.
Her detective didn’t seem to like me, but I had to appeal to his sense of fair play. Burroughs had a bullish neck and bulging eyes. He must have been trying to protect her with his own perpetual scowl. He wore a topcoat in midsummer—I hate to think of the truncheons and pistols he had stored in his inner pockets.
“Mr. Burroughs, sir. Have I wounded Princess Margaret in any way? It was not my intention. I—”
“Are you daft, old son? You remind Ma’am of her lost love.”
Half the planet must have memorized her fairy-tale romance with Group Commander Peter Townsend, a fighter pilot who had become an equerry at Windsor after the war. He was sixteen years older than the teenage princess, who lived in her own tower and rebelled against the seriousness of her sister. She must have wooed Peter Townsend with her eyes alone, and that wooing went on for years. And by the time she was ready to marry him, Lilibet sat on the throne. Townsend was both a commoner and a divorced man, and the queen’s advisers threatened to take away Margaret’s title and her royal allowance if she dared marry Peter Townsend. They bullied her into giving him up. And they’d robbed Margaret, “the Sick Rose,” of all her joy. I thought of bloody William Blake. I wanted to whisper into Margaret Rose’s ear the song of Blake’s Little Girl Lost.
Know that in a former time
Love, sweet love, was thought a crime.
While I brooded, Margaret Rose came up to me with her own silent wind. She seized my hand, held it in hers, and with her other hand she clutched an enormous flute of champagne.
“Dear Mr. Diggers, I cannot forgive myself. I was horribly rude. But will you ever forgive me?”
She was smiling now, and that imperial ice of a princess was gone.
“There’s nothing to forgive, Ma’am. I startled you. But it wasn’t out of malice. I’d never been told that I bear a resemblance to one of your former equerries.”
“Not much of a resemblance, dear,” she said, licking the champagne like a naughty cat. “My Peter was a thinner man, almost ascetic—but it’s your expression that’s so similar, like a man who inflicts pain upon himself.”
“I didn’t realize I was such a flagellant, Ma’am.”
“Call me Margaret, please. Margaret Rose. Darling Peter Sellers says you’re something of a Blake scholar.”
I laughed, and Ma’am seemed to like it. “I’m a failed actor-playwright a
nd a failed philosopher. But there isn’t much scholarship in my dossier. Mr. Sellers was praising me—”
“To puff himself up. But there’s another party involved in all this intrigue. Your grandfather.”
“I’m bewildered. How could my grandfather ever have entered your dreams? Windsor Castle was light-years away from London’s waterfront.”
“Ah,” she said, “but they are closer than you think,” and invited me to have a sip. I was even more amazed. I didn’t know that a commoner and a princess could drink from the same glass. And while I nibbled champagne, Margaret Ma’am recited William Blake in a voice as soft and solitary as royal velvet.
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
“It’s not such a mystery, darling boy. My nurse grew up on tales of Archibald Diggers that her father had told her, and she recited such tales to me. I couldn’t go to bed without them. I was addicted, you see.”
“There were actual tales about my grandfather?”
“Zillions of them, about the lord of the London docks. But Nurse was a great liar and embroidered whenever she could, and in her telling he wasn’t a mobsman anymore, but a national hero who fought the enemies of England—terrible chaps who were always trying to infiltrate our shores and take over the Thames. But the marvel of it is that I told Nurse’s stories to Peter, my Peter, and we never had such laughs. And so when your Peter introduced you as Archie’s grandson, I suddenly remembered how much I had lost. And I took my fury out on you, Darling Diggers.”
A little of that fury must have come back. She grabbed the flute out of my hand, finished the champagne, smacked her lips, and tossed the flute to Burroughs, who caught it without batting an eye. Then, as only a princess can do with a commoner, Margaret Rose raised one hand, rubbed her knuckles against the curious sandpaper of my cheek, said, “Dearest, I was dying to know how that felt,” and dismissed me with a final glance.
— 3 —
SELLERS COULDN’T BEAR that I’d sipped champagne with Ma’am Darling out of the same glass. He groaned like some second-rate tragedian, accused me of undermining his efforts to marry Margaret. His mouth was flecked with foam.
“Did you talk with Ma’am Darling about my prick?”
We were having tea and cucumber sandwiches at the Dorchester. There were wedges of cucumber on his cheek. He would have strangled me if he’d had the strength, strangled me in front of the Dorchester’s liveried lads.
“Did she tell you that I was a lousy lay, that my dick’s too small?”
“Pete, Ma’am didn’t mention a single part of your anatomy.”
“Then what did you talk about, love?”
“Archibald Diggers.”
“I’m flummoxed,” he said. “I’m getting ropey again. Did you tick along with my intended, hold her hand, give her a French kiss under that bloody tent?”
There was no point in trying to reason with him. He was filled with black bile. But I had something to distract him with. He’d gotten excited over a book. It had been recommended by another reader, and Sellers passed it on to me. A short novel by a Polish-American writer who was lionized in literary circles. That would have mattered zilch to Pete. But the language of the novel was so simple, Sellers himself could read it.
He fell in love with Chance, the hero of the novel, a kind of idiot savant who spends his whole life in a rich man’s garden. Chance is without an echo, without a single reverberation. His sexual parts never developed, and so he has no longing, no desire. He is a castrato who was never castrated. Suddenly, the rich man who has been caring for him dies, and Chance is cast out of the garden, wearing the rich man’s tailored suits and shirts. But he has the look and the haberdashery of a banker or business tycoon. And through some trick of fate, he ends up in the mansion of a real tycoon and the tycoon’s luscious wife, EE, or Elizabeth Eve. Chance the gardener becomes Chauncey Gardiner in his new home, his only language the language of a garden, yet the tycoon and EE are in awe of him; they have never met someone so emptied of artifice; and they interpret his talk of seasonal growth and death in a garden as images of society itself, until he begins to sound like an economic wizard, a shy but persuasive savant of savants. The tycoon, Benjamin Rand, introduces Chauncey to the president of the United States, who is also mesmerized by the man in the tailored suit and his gardening talk. And soon secretive men in the White House’s inner closets decide on Chauncey as the president’s running mate in the coming election.
Sellers cried after he read Being There, the book about Chauncey Gardiner. He had glanced into the novel’s crazy mirror and seen himself. Hadn’t he also leapt out of the muck, the lad who had come from nowhere? Chauncey Gardiner was addicted to the tube, watched it day and night, and could mimic whatever action was on the screen. Wasn’t Sellers the same sort of mime?
“Ian, you have to get me the rights to that book. Chauncey’s the best mate I ever had. Kill the author, I don’t give a flying fuck. I’ll bury him in Chauncey’s own garden.”
I could understand Pete’s desperation. He’d had a string of heart attacks in ’64. His heart had stopped beating for two minutes. And he liked to boast of how he’d come back from the dead. “I was chatting up the angels, love. Sexy beasts they were . . . and then they dropped out of sight, and I was a lad without a point of view.”
But those two minutes of suspended animation, of life in death, or whatever they call it, defined his current predicament. When he wasn’t playing Inspector Clouseau in yet another Pink Panther, he had flop after flop. He blundered along for five more years with his heart’s own irregular rhythm. And he saw his chance in Chauncey Gardiner.
But Jerzy Kosinski got in the way. If Sellers couldn’t kill Chauncey’s creator, he would have to woo him. He began sending Kosinski cryptic cables.
Mr. K., won’t you let me into your garden?
—Your admirer, Chauncey Gardiner II
But he seemed terrified to get on the phone with Mr. K.
“Ian, what will I tell him? I haven’t read his other works. I don’t know a bloody thing about Poland or politics. I’m Chauncey Gardiner.”
“But he might be amused by that.”
“No, no. You’ll have to call him, Ian. You’re the charmer. You’ll analyze his bloody book. What else am I paying you for? You lout, you stinking kettle of fish. I’ll have you banished from the Dorchester. You’ll have to grub on the streets, show your arse on Petticoat Lane.”
I called Mr. K. I couldn’t charm him at all. He talked to me as if he were interrogating a prisoner of war.
“Who are you? What do you want?” he asked in the clipped accent of some phantom secret service.
“Sellers,” I said, “Peter Sellers, he wants to play Chauncey Gardiner.”
“Are you his lawyer, his theatrical agent? Where are you calling from?”
“London,” I said. “I’m calling from Mr. Seller’s suite at the Dorchester.”
“What’s outside your window?”
“Hyde Park,” I said. “The Serpentine. I’m Mr. Sellers’ literary adviser. I entertain him when I’m not telling him what books to read.”
“Why does he harass me with cables and wires?”
“He doesn’t mean to harass. He fell in love with Chance the gardener. I told you. He wants to—”
“That’s impossible,” said Mr. K.
I was beginning to feel as crazed as Clare Quilty. “What’s impossible?”
“Chauncey Gardiner is not for sale. Sellers would drown him in slapstick. There are no pink panthers in my book. I have my own ideas about the film. I intend to play Chauncey Gardiner. You can go to the devil with your Mr. Sellers.”
Pete flew into a rage when I told him he couldn’t be Mr. Chance. He began to tear up his suite at the Dorchester. The hotel managers had gotten used to his tantrums. But I was sick of Pete. And whenever h
e flared up, I would disappear from the Dorchester and walk to a pub I knew near Holland Park. I was having a snack of buttered brown bread and bitters at a little place on Duchess of Bedford’s Walk when someone tapped me on the shoulder. It didn’t feel like a friendly tap. I whirled around with a snarl. “What’s your problem, mate?”
And I looked under the rim of a bowler hat, into the preternaturally large brown eyes of Ma’am’s detective.
“Come with me, my son.”
— 4 —
I WAS SHOVED INSIDE A REAR DOOR at Kensington like some clandestine on a risky mission for the Crown. The cluttered warrens I saw must have been the servants’ side of the palace. It was a miracle: I’d gone from the Dorchester to Charles Dickens in less than two hours. I thought a cyclone had crashed through these rooms and robbed them of intimacy or charm. Mr. Burroughs, the Scotland Yard man, led me onto a car that was like a dumbwaiter meant for two; our knees touched, and the edge of his bowler caught under my chin as we traveled aloft with a series of shivers.
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