Fast lane

Peter Sellers bought a car more often than he assumed a different character for a film or married a new wife. In the first year that he started making real money in the 1950s, he manically bought and sold no fewer than four cars. However, Britain’s greatest comic genius since Charlie Chaplin never owned a more desirable car than the 1961 Aston Martin DB4 GT that Bonhams will be offering at this year’s Festival of Speed sale at Goodwood in July.

The DB4, introduced in 1958, was one of the key cultural signifiers of its age. Along with the advent of CND, rock ’n’ roll and winklepicker shoes, it announced to the world that Britain was shedding its dour, regimented wartime identity and launching into a thrilling unknown. Until they saw the DB4, designed by coachbuilders Touring of Milan, nobody knew that stodgy, frigid old Britain was capable of such things.

Hand-built at a new factory in Newport Pagnell, with aluminium-alloy panels that were laid over a lattice-frame of small-diameter steel tubes, the DB4 was delicate without seeming fragile, pretty but masculine. It was Britain’s own Ferrari.

The DB4 GT, introduced in September 1959, was a special lightweight, high-performance version of the DB4. It featured enclosed headlights and a thinner aluminium skin to reduce the vehicle’s weight. The wheelbase was also reduced in comparison to the standard DB4, which resulted in most GTs not being fitted with rear seats. With a top speed of 151mph and 0-60 mph in 6.1 seconds it was at the time the world’s fastest road-legal production car.

Under registration number 41 DPX, the car – which is offered by Bonhams – was acquired from the original owners in late 1961 or ’62 to become the getaway car, driven by Sellers, in the forgettable British crime comedy The Wrong Arm of the Law, where it was pursued by a hopelessly outgunned Wolseley 6/90 in police garb. (Character actor Lionel Jefferies occupied the DB4GT’s rare back seats during the film’s climactic chase.)

During filming, the engine block was damaged and was replaced at the Aston Martin factory with a larger 4.0-litre block, fitted in early 1963. According to Aston Martin’s own records, it is to date the only factory-fitted 4.0-litre DB4GT engine. Meanwhile, it was another DB4 that performed the film’s most famous stunt – a flying jump over a bridge. Because the scenes were not filmed in sequence, so 41 DPX was back in the spotlight again for the final act.

We know that Sellers was certainly the car’s owner by 1964, but whether he bought it directly off the film lot and how long he kept it, we don’t know for sure. We can only be certain that whatever answers Sellers himself might have given to these questions would have been unreliable – because this was a man who couldn’t be depended on to tell the truth if you asked him the time of day.

For instance, in a BBC television interview in Hollywood in 1970, Sellers said, “I was born in Yorkshire.” If they had known about that claim, it might later have perplexed the people at English Heritage who were going to put up a blue plaque on a house in Castle Road, Southsea, that declares, ‘Peter Sellers 1925-1980 Actor and Comedian was born here’. Firm evidence suggests English Heritage was right, not least the fact that, two weeks after his birth, Sellers was carried on stage by a friend of his parents in Southsea.

Why would he not tell the truth about his place of birth? Because this chameleon character was capable of saying and believing anything that came into his head, as if he didn’t actually know the difference between truth and fiction. At one point, he claimed to be descended from Disraeli. Perhaps it sounded good to him at the time.

Neither could he tell the difference between his own personality and the role he was assuming for stage or film. “I’ve no idea who Peter Sellers is,” he would say, “except that he’s the one who gets paid.” Once, when he was recognised in the street and asked if he was Peter Sellers, he answered, “Not today.” Stanley Kubrick, who directed him in Lolita and Dr Strangelove said, “There’s no such person as Peter Sellers.” When he was making Strangelove, he entered so completely into the character of one of his roles – President Merkin Muffley – that his own long-term secretary didn’t recognise him when they passed each other backstage.

His was far from a comfortable state of mind. The film critic Alexander Walker, who knew Sellers for decades and wrote his biography, said, straightforwardly, that he was mad. The producer Roy Boulting said that Sellers, “Lives half his life in hell.” For his four wives, however, hell was more like a permanent abode. Sellers’ second wife, Britt Ekland (whom he married in 1963, within three weeks of their first meeting and around the time he acquired the DB4 GT) stated on the record that Sellers was bipolar, unstable, brittle and dependent on both cocaine and alcohol. She said he would kick off a titanic row every Friday, which would go on all weekend, including threats of divorce, and then, come Monday, he would bring her a present or take her out to lunch to make up.

He demanded complete control of her life, dictating what she wore and what she said, imposing a fixed identity on her when he had no certainty about his own. Nightmare.

He was utterly bonkers about women. When he was making The Millionairess, he became so besotted with his co-star Sophia Loren that he abandoned his first wife and their two children. “Don’t you love us any longer, daddy?” asked one of the children. “Of course I do, darling,” he answered, “just not as much as Sophia Loren.” There is no evidence at all, however, that Loren either reciprocated his feelings or consummated the relationship. It was all in his head.

Sellers’s incessant changing of cars looks as if it was a reflection of his personal insecurities. He explained it by saying that he was looking for perfection. It’s probably closer to the truth to say that he was looking for himself.

As the 1960s developed, Sellers wanted to shed the bespectacled bank-manager look that had seen him through the ’50s. He wanted to make himself hip. So he lost four stones in weight, from 15 to 11 stone, and started wearing kaftans when he went out with his third wife, the hippy chick Miranda Quarry. It wasn’t an entirely convincing transformation. Boulting said, “Inside the new thin Peter Sellers is a fat boy struggling to get out.” When he turned up at the Apple Studios and found the Beatles there, all blithering druggily, he was filmed desperately trying to get down with the kids, wearing a panicked grin on his face and asking, “What exactly are we discussing here?”. Meet Dylan’s Mr Jones.

At the same time, Sellers’s instabilities and uncertainties gave him a genius for all the dramatic arts. Performance, mimicry and simulation were second nature to a man who had no secure persona of his own, and it was this that allowed him to make authentic masterpieces like Strangelove and Being There.

In the DB4 GT, he found an authentic masterpiece to match his own talents. It wouldn’t have made him happy, however. Nothing ever did, or could.

Neil Lyndon is a writer and journalist.

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