Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (27 page)

Only Two Can Play
’s production team knew what they were getting
with Peter Sellers. Forbes had known Sellers since the war, when they’d
appeared together in
Stars in Battledress
along with Sgts. Harry Secombe
and Terry-Thomas and Lt. Roger Moore. Forbes had always enjoyed Sellers’s company, and as they rose in the world of British entertainment they
became even closer friends. Sidney Gilliat had cowritten Hitchcock’s
The
Lady Vanishes
(1938)—the other two screenwriters were Frank Launder
and Alma Reville, Hitchcock’s wife; Gilliat went on to produce many films
with Launder, among them
The Smallest Show on Earth
, with Peter as the
drunken projectionist. In short, Forbes, Gilliat, and the Boultings were all
seasoned to Peter Sellers—a funny if mercurial friend, an exceptionally
skilled actor with star power and a prickly nature.

Forbes finished his script in April 1960, after which casting began. The
beautiful Mai Zetterling was chosen for the bombshell role, Virginia Maskell for the plainer, warmer wife. Peter’s friend Kenneth Griffith took the
role of the other librarian, the one with whom Peter vies for a promotion.
(The bombshell, whose husband chairs the library board, uses this potential
promotion as leverage to get Peter’s character into the sack.) Graham Stark
came along, too; his was the small role of a dirty-minded library patron
clad in an even filthier raincoat.

Griffith had experienced Peter’s preparatory method before: “On a film
job—
always
, I think—he’d agree to do it, he would sign the contract, and
then inevitably he would say, ‘Kenny, I can’t do it, I can’t.’ On this occasion, he said to me about three weeks before we started filming, ‘Kenny, I
can’t be a Welshman. I can’t do it. I’m sorry, because I would like to have
done it with you.’ He was serious. So I said to him, ‘Look, Pete, why don’t
we go down to Wales right away and I’ll introduce you to a number of
Welshmen who, I think, could be like the character you’re playing.’

“ ‘That’s a good idea.’ ”

Bert whisked them to Wales in a Rolls. First Griffith introduced Peter
to his friend the poet (and crony of Dylan Thomas) John Ormond, but
Peter wasn’t especially inspired. “The next one on my list was John Pike, a
close friend of mine who was a newsreel cameraman. The moment Sellers
saw Pike all his problems were over. A brilliant impersonation of John Pike
is what you’re seeing.” (Griffith digresses: “John was sent by the BBC to
the war in Vietnam. The effect over there. . . . He had a nervous breakdown. Killed him. Drink.”)

• • •

A few weeks later, with shooting about to commence, Sellers and Griffith
returned to Wales, this time along with the rest of the company. There was
an immediate flap over the hotel.

“He expected me to stay wherever he stayed, which I didn’t mind,”
says Griffith. “Swansea was the town they got. They’ve got pretty substantial
hotels there now—it’s changed. [Then] it was just tidied up from the wreckage after the war and that was about it. The best hotel was the hotel at the
railway station. That’s where we were both going to stay. Suddenly I could
hear some disagreement between Sellers and the manageress. He said, ‘Mr.
Griffith and I can’t stay here.’ She said, ‘Why not?’ He said, ‘It’s claustrophobic.’ So he drags
me
in and he says, ‘Kenny we can’t stay here—I’m
not going to
let
you stay here. We’ll go down and see Launder and Gilliat
and tell them.’

“I didn’t want to. He had money in the film—he was helping to finance
it—so it was easy for him. But I, you know, I’m not fussy, and I remember
trying to hide behind him. He said [to Launder and Gilliat], ‘Kenny and
I—we can’t stay there,’ and I said, ‘Oh, shit.’ And indeed, we moved out
to a seaside hotel at Porthcawl [about fifteen miles down the coast to the
east]. It was a real old boardinghouse, but he liked it.”

Kingsley Amis put it more curtly in his
Memoirs
: Peter “buggered off
down the coast to Porthcawl and what proved to be a measurably worse
hotel.”

Then came the costar crisis. It occurred quite early in the shoot. Virginia Maskell had filmed but a single scene, when:

Roy Boulting: “[Peter] was on vacation making
Only Two Can Play
,
and he had as his wife in the film a young actress called Virginia Maskell.
Her talent had already been noted by the critics, and I think she had a very
promising future. Well, for whatever reason—and I have my own suspicion
as to what the reason was—Peter Sellers took agin’ her.”

Sidney Gilliat: “Peter rang me up at the hotel and said, ‘That girl is no
good. She must go. She must go
at once
. And you must cast somebody else.’
Just like that. I said, ‘I won’t do anything of the kind.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Well,
you’ve got to be fair to the girl to begin with. She’s only played one scene,
and that consisted of taking a milk bottle out.’ ”

Peter took the matter to the heads of the studio.

Roy Boulting: “He phoned John and myself and said, ‘Look, this girl
is worse than useless. She will ruin the film. Will you get on to Sidney
Gilliat and tell him that he must recast another actress immediately!’ ”
Boulting, who had worked with Maskell on another film (
Happy Is the
Bride
, 1958), refused to do it. “We had to very gently tell Peter that he
should get on with his acting and leave the judgment of performance to his
director,” he later explained.

Sidney Gilliat finishes the story: “Rather ironically, she was nominated
by the British film academy as Best Actress, and Peter wasn’t nominated
for anything.”

During the filming, Peter took his harmless revenge not against Maskell
but against the Boultings—not in person, of course, but behind their backs.
Kenneth Griffith was in on the private joke: “Now, in the morning to get
to work I would sit with Peter in the back of the Rolls, which was driven
by Bert. It was at least a thirty-minute journey into Swansea. Peter wouldn’t
know how to talk about this, that, or the other, or he could be stumbling,
or he could be depressed . . .
but suddenly it’s John Boulting talking!
If you
didn’t look you wouldn’t know it wasn’t John Boulting. Now [the Boultings
were] very, very broad, general, not very intelligent but very well educated,
and Peter would speak to me as John, using John’s vocabulary and John’s
point of view, none of which had anything to do with Sellers. It was hoped
that I would reply as Roy. Which I did.”

The impersonations hardly stopped with the Boulting brothers. Peter
enjoyed playing with people.

Griffith: “He said at the end of one day, ‘Kenny—you being Welsh,
you know the best restaurants here in Swansea.’ I said, ‘I don’t really, Pete—I don’t spend much time here.’ And then I remembered a very simple little
lino’d-floor Chinese restaurant and I thought the food was good there. ‘Oh,’
he said, ‘That’s a good idea. I like Chinese food.’

“So we got Bert and the Rolls and we went there. It was little, very
clean, very nice, but not even any Chinese nonsense hanging about—just
a little place with Chinese food. We got seated there, Bert, Peter and I, and
in came two big steelworkers, youngsters, big thugs—oh, they might have
been miners—but they were big tough Welsh guys with their girlfriends,
and you could hear everything that anyone said, and one of the girls said,
‘Hey—those two are on telly.
Peter Sellers! On telly!
’ One of the fellows
said, ‘Don’t be bloody daft, what do you mean “on telly”?’ She said, ‘Who
in the hell do
you
think they are?’

“Anyway, he got up and trundled over to us and says, ‘Yeah, my
girlfriend is bloody daft, she says you two are on telly. Peter Sellers!’
Sellers answered him with a Welsh accent: ‘Oh no, no, no, no,’ he said,
‘no, Mr. Jones here and myself are on the staff of the steelworks, no,
no, no. Come to think of it,’ he said—
I
was thinking, ‘Shit, let’s run
away!,’ and there he was,
playing!
—‘no, no, come to think of it, when
the Queen opened the big wing at the steelworks, well, Mr. Jones here
and myself were present, and though I didn’t have the privilege of seeing it myself we have been told that when the camera tracked along we
were distinctly seen.’

“He bought it. He trundled back to his table: ‘Yeah, yeah, I told you—bloody nonsense. They’re both with the steelworks.’ ”

• • •

Peter and Kingsley Amis, who was there for at least some of the production,
successfully embarrassed themselves in the eyes of the cast and crew with
an ongoing contest of dirty wit; it was a battle of obscene jokes between
two able warriors, but their spectators were merely disgusted at the competition. Moreover, Amis himself was under the impression that it was
Griffith’s own coaching that helped Sellers find his Welsh voice, and the
novelist had a strangely ambivalent response to what he heard: “Partly to
my chagrin, the result of this, or what Sellers made of it, was unimprovable,
the precisely accurate local-university Welsh-English!” Amis was rather
pleased with
Only Two Can Play
and credited Sellers with much of the
success.

Necessarily, Peter came on to Mai Zetterling during the shoot, but she
gently but firmly fended him off in favor of her husband. Still, she offers a
sympathetic assessment of her costar in retrospect: “He was a very insecure
man, and a very frightened man who felt very small, and unloved, and ugly,
and all that kind of thing. With all the success he had it’s very difficult for
the public to understand.”

• • •

In March 1962, Launder and Gilliat announced their new film production—an adaptation of Aubrey Menen’s
The Fig Tree
starring Peter Sellers.
The plan was soon scuttled and they never worked with each other again.

The break may have occurred because there was a financial issue after
Only Two Can Play
was completed but before it was released. As Graham
Stark puts it, “Peter took such a dislike to it that he sold out his share of
the profits.” According to Roy Boulting, after Peter saw the final cut, “He
was despondent, he had no faith in it, in fact he really hated it.” The
Boultings are said to have paid him £17,500 for his share; the film turned
out to be such a hit that Peter’s share alone eventually earned over
£120,000.

• • •

Even before Vladimir Nabokov published his novel,
Lolita
, in 1955, the
casting of Peter Sellers as Quilty in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film adaptation
had suggested itself fantastically in the novelist’s own handwritten manuscript. Humbert Humbert describes the preteen object of his passion, the
fire of his loins, his sin, his soul: “the Lolita of the strident voice and the
rich brown hair—of the bangs and the swirls at the sides and the curls at
the back, and the sticky hot neck, and the vulgar vocabulary—‘revolting,’
‘super,’ ‘luscious,’ ‘goon,’ ‘drip’—
that
Lolita,
my
Lolita.” Humbert proceeds
to lose Lolita to Quilty; Nabokov always appreciated a cosmic joke.

In 1958, Kubrick and his associate, James B. Harris, placed a telephone
call to the Production Code office in Hollywood. They were thinking about
buying the rights to
Lolita
, they said, and they were wondering how the
boys at the Code would react to the idea. Geoffrey Shurlock, the longtime
head of the office, responded: “I suggested that the subject matter, an elderly
man having an affair with a twelve-year-old girl, would probably fall into
the area of sex perversion.” But by 1960, the dark and dynamic Kubrick—who in the meantime had tossed off
Spartacus
(1960)—had actually succeeded in convincing Shurlock that the film would not in fact violate the
Code. Kubrick’s argument was specious but effective: Young girls could
legally marry in certain Appalachian states, and what was legal could not
be immoral. Kubrick also had history on his side; enforcement of the Code
was becoming increasingly lax and dismissable.

With Shurlock’s provisional green light, Kubrick struck a deal with
Nabokov to write the screenplay, the erudite author being represented by
Swifty Lazar. Nabokov turned in a draft in June. It was four hundred pages
long. Kubrick responded by telling the novelist that such a picture would
run for seven hours. “You couldn’t make it,” James Harris once said; “you
couldn’t
lift
it.” Nabokov turned in a shorter version in September, but
Harris, uncredited, ended up revising it, leaving Nabokov to comment later
that, for him, watching
Lolita
was like “a scenic drive as perceived by the
horizontal passenger of an ambulance.”

For the role of the pervert Humbert, a series of stellar men were approached: James Mason (couldn’t schedule it); Laurence Olivier (sorry, no);
David Niven (yes, but then no); Cary Grant (“I have too much respect for
the movie industry to do a picture like that”). But then, suddenly, James
Mason became available after all. His wife and friends had helped to change
his mind, and luckily so. Humbert Humbert is one of Mason’s most delicately wrought performances.

Despite its Hollywood-based director and producer and New York financiers,
Lolita
’s production took place in England. Harris explains: “We
wanted to keep a very low profile during the shooting of that film. Everybody seemed to be interested in
how
we were going to do
Lolita
, and
what
was going to be in terms of censorship, and
what did the girl look like
 . . .
We felt that if we just got away from Hollywood and got to England, a
place where we spoke the language, we could keep a much lower profile.”
But it was financial considerations that actually drove the decision. To
attract foreign film productions, the United Kingdom was offering filmmakers the ability to write off substantial expenses if four out of five of the
cast and crew were subjects of the queen.