UFO Info Week-End

But I don’t talk to him very much anymore

“But I don’t talk to him very much anymore.”A few weeks later, on July 24, 1980, Peter Sellers died for the second and last time.’The Paranormal Peter Sellers’ is on Channel 4 later this year. Give my regards to Dan, I told Sellers the last time we said goodbye, after we’d had lunch at the old Empress restaurant in Berkeley Street, Mayfair.”I will,” he promised with sudden poignancy. He had continued to insist that he would never read it and I expressed my curiosity.”Dan Leno’s read it again and says it’s much better than he’d first thought,” he explained, deadpan. “Dan isn’t at all happy with that book of yours,” Sellers told me reproachfully.”But Peg likes it.

And she’s told you not to pay attention to Dan,” I reminded him.”Peg’s my mother. Talk to me, Dan.”This was before the days when booze and dope sometimes caused him to hallucinate and his behaviour was as unnerving to me as it clearly was to the woman of the house.”It’s Peter Sellers, the actor,” I explained, keeping it as brief and factual as I could. When we reached the house in Kennington – one man in a dinner jacket, the other wearing short pants, and dark glasses, both driving Mini Cooper S-types (Sellers’s was mauve, with purdah-glass windows, and wickerwork doors) – we were greeted with understandable suspicion by the woman who came to the door.Before I could begin to explain the reason for our visit, the psychic pull of Leno became too great for Sellers, who pushed passed the woman and rushed into the tiny hallway “Dan. “She said I shouldn’t listen to Dan so much,” he admitted, the lisp now mercifully cured. It was then that I made the mistake of telling him that Leno had lived not far from where we were.He wanted to go there at once.

He hadn’t read the book himself, he said, but Peg had been in touch and told him that she liked it a lot. This struck me as breathtakingly mistaken but agreed that it was the best way forward.A few months after The Mask Behind the Mask was published to some acclaim in 1968, Sellers came to my house in London for lunch. Eventually, Sellers suggested that I should continue the book without his active participation Dan, he said, couldn’t object to that. When Sellers’ mother, Peg, died during the making of The Bobo, she apparently intervened on my behalf. Alas, she was no match for Leno, who continued to be a figure of consequence in Sellers’ life.

“Dan’th going to make a futh, but I have to draw a line in the thand thumwhere,” Sellers said with no indication that the lisp owed anything to his comedic sense.Leno didn’t take it lying down, of course, and the book was on and off again several times in the following months. Leno didn’t object to me per se, Sellers assured me, only to the timing of my book. Leno had had a mental breakdown and died, after a brief comeback, three years after the publication of his autobiography, Hys Booke, and was now very superstitious about things like that, Sellers explained.Nevertheless, he promised to stand up to Leno on this occasion. “Dan told me not to do that bloody film (Casino Royale) for Charlie and I didn’t lithen to him,” he said miserably, attesting to Leno’s acumen.Leno, who regretted writing his own autobiography when he was the age Sellers then was (42), had advised Sellers that my book should wait at least another eight or nine years. Introduced to Leno by Mrs Roberts’s spirit guide, a North American Indian called Red Cloud, Sellers had developed a touching trust in the old pantomime dame’s professional judgement and only rarely argued with him. It wath Dan Leno’th.”Thanks to Charlie Feldman, and Sellers’s medium Estelle Roberts, whom I had interviewed, I was now on to Mr Leno, and able to handle this statement with some equanimity. “I’m sorry I put you through that bithineth, Pete,” he lisped when the coffee came “It wathn’t my idea.