The Lynne Frederick Story, copyright Victoria Mary Clarke, 2004

Nobody would have guessed that she had once been a great beauty.  Like the great Norma Desmond, in ‘Sunset Boulevard’, Lynne Frederick was a caricature of the evil, ego-driven, lonely, pathetic drama queen.  Just another blonde actress found dead in her bed, a bloated carcass, ravaged by alcohol and drugs.  Alone, washed up and past her sell-by-date.
Her funeral, it was said, went almost unnoticed by the Hollywood community.  Despite the fact that she had been famous as the last wife of the very much loved comic genius Peter Sellers.  Sellers was best known for the ‘Pink Panther’ series of films, in which he created for himself the character of Inspector Clouseau, the bumbling detective.   He was already enormously possible as a radio impressionist on the ‘Goon Show’, a firm favourite of the English royal family, which had earned him a friendship  with Princess Margaret, in particular.  As Mrs Sellers, Lynne had met a great many important people, but only a handful of mourners were in attendance at her funeral in Santa Monica; her ten year old daughter Cassie, Cassie’s father, Los Angeles heart specialist Barry Unger, Lynne’s mother Iris Frederick, and a few others.  Absent were the friends and family of her late husband, absent were the movie-stars, producers and directors that the couple had worked with.
The song they played was ‘I Did It My Way,’ her favourite song.  And she did do it her way.  Making enemies and very few friends, along the way.  Regrettably or not,  Lynne was not a popular lady, when she died.  Least of all with Michael, Sarah and Victoria, the three children of Sellers, by his previous wives.  When it was revealed that Lynne’s last wish was to be buried with her famous husband, the children objected, causing one final skirmish in a series of nasty clashes, over the course of the relationship with their stepmother.
The children had every reason to be hostile.  Their father had neglected each and every one of them most hurtfully, when he was alive.  ‘My father had a problem expressing his love,’ Michael recalls.  On one occasion Sellers invited his son to spend a weekend with him, in Venice, on board his yacht.  When the teenage boy arrived, Peter immediately packed his bags apologised dismissively, and left to chase a young woman back to London.  To his daughter Victoria, he was equally unpleasant.  Having once given her a pony, he arrived with a horse-box and took it back, he wanted to give it to his new friend Princess Margaret. 
It was hardly surprising that when Sellers married Lynne Frederick, -who was thirty years his junior,- the children weren’t enthusiastic.  ‘Aren’t you going to congratulate me?’ Sellers asked his son.  Michael wasn’t interested and told his father so.  ‘One day he forced me to mutter congratulations,’ he later told a biographer. 
But the young actress made no attempt to heal the relationship between Sellers and his children.  When their father changed his Will, shortly before his death, leaving  four million pounds to Lynne and almost nothing to any of them, things turned vicious.  Probate lasted ten years,- the longest on record,- as they battled for their rightful inheritance and lost.  The later wrote a book about their father, ‘PS I Love You,’ a vitriolic, warts and all biography in which they detailed the misery of being Peter Sellers children.  Spike Milligan, a long term colleague and friend of Sellers recalls that the comedian changed his mind about the Will- he was well known for changing his mind- and told him that he regretted what he had done and intended to leave money to the kids.  Milligan informed Frederick of this, to no avail.  He framed the letter which she wrote back to him, and beside it, he put a notice which read ‘In case of Dysentry please break glass.’ 
  Hollywood is a dream factory and it makes dreams come true for some of the actors and actresses who pass through its machine.  But for every dream that comes true, there are a thousand unseen nightmares.  A thousand broken hearted, disappointed failures.  And as the wheel of fortune turns, the new talent rises to the top and the unwanted, the used-up, the has-beens are spun off into anonymity.  Many famous actors and actresses died tragically at their own hands, lonely, beautiful, drugged and before their time.  But for most, like Marilyn Monroe, -the most famous of all tragic blondes-there had at least been something magical to bequeath to future generations, the gift of her prodigious talent. 
For Lynne Frederick, it appeared to have been a squandered life.  As an actress, she had made only a handful of films, none of which can easily be come by now, not even in bargain basement video stores.  As an actress she failed to achieve her potential.  As a woman, she devoted her entire adult life to one man and to his memory.  That man, she was to say, had consumed her every waking moment.  He had been her reason for living her life, despite the fact that they were married for only three years and spent much of that time apart and despite the fact that he was thirty years her senior.  That man had been Peter Sellers.
She wasn’t have been the first woman to have been obsessed with a man, to the point of putting him and his career before her own.  Behind every great man, it is often said, there is a Hillary Clinton.  Nor would she have been the first widow to have  gone to the grave with her man, in her heart.  Queen Victoria remained in mourning for Albert until her own death, never taking off her widow’s weeds. 
Unlike Victoria, Lynne married again.  Twice.  Once to Sir David Frost, shortly after Peter’s death, a marriage that lasted just over a year and ended in divorce.  And again to  Barry Unger, with whom she had Cassie, before the couple divorced.  But she admitted that throughout her life, there was only one man that really mattered.  She remained Mrs Peter Sellers to the end of her days, both on her credit cards and in her imagination.  If she couldn’t have the man, she could have the memory, his posthumous life, his bequest, his fame.  She could be the keeper of his flame.
Like Norma Desmond, Lynne kept a shrine to the glorious past.  In Gstaad, Switzerland, in Sellers playboy chalet, things were kept just exactly as he had left them, when he died.  The lights were turned on and off, at appropriate times, music played on the hi-fi, cocktails waited on the cabinet and clothes were laid out on the bed.  But aside from the caretaker, nobody ever went there, not even Lynne. To anyone she met, she introduced herself as the widow of Peter Sellers.  Towards the end of her life, she asked a journalist ‘Do you think Peter will be remembered as a great star?’  To which the journalist inevitably replied that yes, he did think so.  ‘There was a time when I thought I’d be a big star too,’ she wistfully responded.
Frederick could have been a star in her own firmament, it was true.  She was unquestionably a beautiful woman, before she hit the bottle and blew up to fourteen stone.  A sexy, luminous blonde.  If you search the internet for information about her, you turn up endless websites devoted to nude pictures of her.  Apart from her beauty, actors and directors were taken with her work, what little of it there was.  Peter spotted her in a film about Henry the Eighth, and began to woo her, when they were introduced at a dinner party, by a friend .  Later, he told journalist Peter Evans that he thought she was ‘a terrific bloody actress. Everyone I’ve met, including Malcolm Mc Dowell was knocked out by her performance’, he added, and he was advising her to be very selective about the parts she chose next.
But Lynne, having been wooed by Sellers with jewels and furs and endless flowers, was not interested in her own career.  She wanted only to be his wife.  ‘If you want, I’ll give it up,’ she told him.  And give it up, she did, except for ‘Prisoner of Zenda’, which bombed.  The part that she would play until her untimely death was that of devoted wife, lover, mother, sister, friend, nurse, psychiatrist, manager and advisor to Peter.  A job which she embraced wholeheartedly.
‘Peter is a very dear person and he desperately needs someone to look after him,’ she said.  ‘I felt it was my duty to boost his confidence.’
Like many a man before him, Peter Sellers had been searching all his life for a woman who could take the place of his mother.  And the pretty twenty two year old ‘child-bride’ that he had found was more than willing to play that role.  She knew, she said, that it would be a demanding one, a round-the-clock commitment.  But she wasn’t to know that it was one that would devour her and transmute her, as Spike Milligan later said into ‘Lynne Unger, late Mrs David Frost, late Mrs Peter Sellers, late human being.’  A woman who had absorbed all of the negative traits of her dead husband without any of his genius to make up for it.
So why did young Lynne Frederick, from Hillingdon in Middlesex marry a man old enough to be her father and why did she sacrifice her own career to look after him?  Did she, indeed, sacrifice herself for him, or did she manipulate and control him?  Was she a victim of a domineering, megalomaniacal older man, or was she a cunning fortune hunter who used Sellers to make her mark in the world and make her millions?
It is sometimes easy to trace the origins of ambitions from looking at the parents.  Like Peter Sellers, Lynne Frederick was born of a mother who had ambitions not just for herself but also for her child. Iris Frederick, -who inherited custody of the Peter Sellers name on the death of her daughter- had encouraged Lynne’s acting career from childhood, allowing her to forego O-levels for her first movie.  Iris worked as a television executive on Hughie Green’s ‘Opportunity Knocks’, and as such knew what it took to be a star.  But to be a star wasn’t enough for Lynne.  She wanted something else.  There was somebody missing from the Frederick family home and that somebody was to prove so powerful by his absence that Lynne Frederick would spend the rest of her life trying to replace him.  The somebody was her father, who had split from her mother when she was two, abandoning his daughter.
If Lynne was desperately seeking an older, powerful man who could make her feel abandoned and inadequate, just as Daddy had done, Peter in looking for someone like his own mother, wanted a doting, controlling, smothering kind of a partner. Peg often said that she knew what was best for her son and who even ventured to remark that Peter didn’t have to think because she did his thinking for him.  Peter was always attracted to actresses and Peg had herself been an actress, from a long line of entertainers.  Peg didn’t relinquish control of her only son without a fight and she competed with and saw off several of Peter’s previous wives, before her death.  After his wedding to Britt Ekland, she took to wearing boob tubes and hot pants and lashings of Mary Quant mascara, a sight which didn’t impress Peter’s biographer, Roger Lewis, who likened her to a pterodactyl.  Neither was he enamoured of Lynne.  ‘Did I kill Lynne Frederick?’ he wondered, when she died on the eve of publication of his biography of Sellers, ‘The Life and Death of Peter Sellers’, -a book which has just been made into a film, with Amelia Fox.  ‘If I contributed to her exit, it was only because I had written what she knew to be the truth.  She had married Sellers virtually in good faith and he had systematically destroyed her, preying upon her weakness and devotion.’
Did marriage to Sellers destroy Lynne?  Sarah Sellers believes that in an effort to appease the temperamental star, Lynne took to behaving like him.  ‘If Dad said something unpleasant about somebody in passing,’ she says, ‘she would echo it six times more.’
‘Peter taught me to hate and I always hated him for that.’ Peter Evans, who wrote ‘The Mask behind the Mask, the definitive biography of Peter Sellers’ quoted Lynne as saying.   Was she an innocent, sweet natured girl until she became tainted by a madman?  Evan’s doesn’t think so.
‘They painted her as a victim, the younger woman manipulated, exploited and set on the road to destruction,’ he says.  ‘Nothing could be further from the truth.  In fact, it was Frederick who introduced Sellers to hard drugs like cocaine, and became his dealer.  And in the war that was their marriage, she outmanoeuvred him to the very grave.’   
 The marriage, it appeared, was doomed from the start, and this should have been apparent to Lynne.  Evans had lunch with Sellers in December 1976, before the couple married.  ‘It’s certainly working very well,’ Sellers said of the relationship,  ‘and please God if it goes on like this it will be a real treat.’
Three hours later, Sellers had changed his mind.  ‘It’s been a ghastly mistake and she’s out of here,’ he said, decisively.  They married in February and oscillated between ardour and hatred from then on.  While the couple were apart, Peter sent a telegram to Lynne.  ‘Dear Lynne, you have no sense of humour.  At least, not mine at any rate.’  This was followed by a bouquet of flowers and a note saying he didn’t mean it. 
In May, 1979 they had both consulted lawyers, pending a divorce.  Lynne, it seemed, was bemused.  ‘I knew I was his fourth wife and my mother warned me against marrying him,’ she said ‘But I was sure we could make it work.  I still love him, of course.  You don’t suddenly switch it off.’
Where did it all go wrong?  Peter had said that Lynne was ‘different to all the ladies that I’ve been attracted to.  She’s a smasher.’  Unfortunately, this was patently untrue.  Lynne was quite a lot like the other ladies he had been attracted to, she was young, beautiful, desirable and in demand.  And he knew it.
‘My trouble, I suppose, is that I can only be attracted to pretty girls,’ he said.  ‘And that’s courting disaster from the start.  Especially if you tend to be jealous like me.’
Peter was a monumentally jealous man, who did nothing to control his jealousy.  He constantly accused his young wife of having affairs and hired a private detective to tail her.  ‘I can’t take any more,’ he told his son Michael.  ‘She’s messing me about.  She’s got the hottest pants in Hollywood.’  On one occasion when he was in Gstaad and she was in Los Angeles, he tried to get her on the phone.  When she didn’t answer, he sent a friend all the way to California, by plane, to knock on her door.  She wasn’t home. 
All of the previous Sellers marriages had ended in tears.  ‘I never want to marry again,’ Peter said, after the break-up of his first marriage to Anne Howe.  ‘I feel it would be better to remain a bachelor and die a bachelor.’
He had subsequently married two more beautiful young women, Miranda Quarry and the actress Britt Ekland.  Britt greatly resembled Lynne in appearance and both were twenty one, at the time of meeting Peter.    If only Lynne had consulted with Britt, she might have known what she was in for, but perhaps she wouldn’t have paid any attention to the writing on the wall.
Britt, like Lynne had been wooed with gems from Garrards and Asprey’s, with the entire contents of the flower shop at the Dorchester and with a Lotus sports car.  Five days after they met, she had to go to New York and Sellers proposed at the airport, when she returned.  They were married the following Wednesday.  Almost immediately, the relationship turned nasty.
‘His incredible affection soured rapidly into an habitual jealousy which filled the first few weeks of our marriage with despair,’ she later said.
‘Sellers was convinced his pond was going to be fished,’ says Roger Lewis,  ‘He snooped on his bride, cross examined her and tried to have the mileage checked on her car.’
The marriage didn’t last long, it was to end in divorce after two years in 1968,with the couple getting joint custody of their daughter Victoria.
The marriage with Lynne was childless.  Lewis suggests that the couple didn’t even consummate it, because Sellers was impotent.  ‘There was not enough healthy blood left in his veins to sustain a hard-on’, he says, tastefully.
‘We would try,’ Lynne said.  ‘but it was difficult.  He frequently felt he had failed in himself.’
Despite the lack of sex, Lynne tried to please her husband.  ‘ I am sure Lynne was a loving and devoted wife,’ Britt said, charitably.  ‘We all were.  But none of us could reach him.  He was an unhappy, troubled human being.’  An understatement, perhaps.  As an entertainer, he was adorable, unquestionably. But as a human being?  ‘On the whole he is remembered with a mixture of incredulity and horror,’ Roger Lewis writes.
When a heart attack finally killed him, in July 1980, Lynne was not present.  Sellers had already initiated divorce proceedings against her.  But she flew in and took charge of the funeral.  In a gesture which echoed her late husband’s personality, she barred the ex-wives from the small, invitation only funeral.  Britt Ekland attended anyway, with her daughter Victoria and provoked an angry outburst from Lynne, who had barred her from visiting Peter in hospital.
Within months, Lynne had married David Frost, to whom she had given interviews about her husband’s death.  But she remained Mrs Peter Sellers and still wore a wedding ring which had belonged to Peter’s mother.
‘Not allowing Seller’s life to end,’ says Roger Lewis.  ‘Lynne’s never began.’  According to the biographer, she was to spend the next fourteen years sinking lower and lower into drink, coke, pills, bitterness and threats, instituting lawsuits to prevent the use of clips from her husband’s films, controlling the Sellers archive with an irrational possessiveness.
This picture of the life of Lynne Frederick descends into desperation, towards the end.  Having exhausted the fortune which she inherits, she is reduced to eating in cheap diners, wearing bargain basement clothes and ballooning to fourteen stone.  This is where we find her,  a cheap and tawdry has-been Hollywood blonde, alone and dead in her bed.  Who knows what went wrong for Lynne Frederick, what she really wanted, or why she chose the life she chose.  She herself was philosophical.  ‘I guess I smashed the vase in which the roses of my life once stood,’ she told Peter Evans.  ‘But I can still smell the scent.’