Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (33 page)

Peter’s theological beliefs resembled his relationships with women. He
was a spiritual compulsive whose piety carried with it an attendant poison,
the latter bringing about another upsurge of the former. “He made great
demands,” Peter’s priest acknowledged. “Having been your best friend, he
could then turn on you and be quite vile. I have some letters from him
which are really beastly. He would stab you in the back and then be very
penitent.”

• • •

He craved the spiritual strength he lacked, and he thought the same should
apply to his money. To be “financially impregnable”—that was Peter’s goal
in the material world.

“If one has money one should spend it wisely,” Peter told the Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky. “There are things that give me pleasure,
and it’s only fair to me to lavish them on myself. After all, I’ve earned the
money. I didn’t steal it, though a lot of people who have seen my pictures
may think so.”

He told another eager interviewer, “And only seven years ago, I practically had less pounds in the bank than I had in my body. I got rich by
working hard and
not
following Socrates’s advice. ‘Know thyself.’ I couldn’t
follow it even if I wanted to.”

By 1963, he was earning an annual income of £150,000. In order to
manage it to its best advantage, his accountant Bill Wills tried once again
to enforce an allowance: Wills began doling out Peter’s spending money in
£20,000 installments, the rest to be stashed in a Swiss account. It was the
same system as the £12 per week Wills had given Peter in the old days, but
as though on cue, Peter rendered the matter moot by purchasing a seventy-five-foot, £75,000, custom-built yacht. (An American newspaper valued the
yacht at $215,000.)

A string of new apartment rentals also cut into Peter’s balance sheet.
These flats were not for Peter himself but rather for a string of girlfriends.
He scarcely wanted to
live
with these young women, after all, but he felt
he owed them something for their trouble, and housing seemed a fair trade.

The task of finding and renting these flats fell to Hattie Stevenson. The
leases she produced for Peter’s signature were inevitably longer than the
relationships themselves, some of which lasted but a night or two. There
was no pause in this trajectory, no relief, but Peter’s luck remained uncanny,
for his state of mind, now in constant crisis, found itself coinciding with a
film about the end of all human life.

• • •

Stanley Kubrick nursed a morbid interest in thermonuclear war, and like
most sane people, he personalized it. In the late 1950s, when he was living
on East 10th Street in New York, he well understood that his apartment
was located in the heart of one of the world’s top three bombing targets,
so he contemplated a move to Australia, an unlikely ground zero. Kubrick’s
fascination with global immolation was further amplified by a novel he
considered adapting for the screen. Written by an ex-RAF officer and
spy who had become active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament,
Peter George’s
Red Alert
was the tale of a U.S. Army general who, consumed by suicidal depression, dispatches forty bombers to destroy the
Soviet Union. It was not a funny book. (Peter George published
Red
Alert
under the pseudonym Peter Bryant; he titled an earlier version
Two Hours to Doom
.)

Kubrick initially worked with George to develop a screenplay, but as
he brooded on the basic scenario, his creative intelligence drew him from
doomsday thriller to satire. One night, he and his producer, James B. Harris, just couldn’t help themselves: they dreamt up comedy scenes involving
the practicalities of humanity’s annihilation. Kubrick himself described a
bit of business from their improvisational game: “What would happen in
the War Room if everybody’s hungry and they want the guy from the deli
to come in and a waiter with an apron around him takes the sandwich
order?”

Peter George (who committed suicide in 1966 at the age of forty-one)
failed to see the humor. So Kubrick asked the cartoonist and playwright
Jules Feiffer to take up the script, but that collaboration didn’t go very far
either. “My idea of an anti-nuclear satire and Stanley’s were miles apart,”
Feiffer said later.

In December 1962, Kubrick told the
New York Times
that he and
Harris were hard at work on a project with a nuclear theme and that Peter
Sellers would star. Sellers, he said, would play “an American college professor who rises to power in sex and politics by becoming a nuclear wise
man.” They planned to shoot the film mostly on location “here in the East
and elsewhere this September.” Their new film would have a very long title:
Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
(1964).

The
Times
account seemed simple enough, but behind the scenes it
was a more complicated series of deals, breakups, and pleas that brought
Dr. Strangelove
into being. Harris and Kubrick’s deal for
Lolita
, which they
had forged with Ray Stark and Seven Arts, entailed a commitment from
Harris-Kubrick for another film for Seven Arts. But Harris, having worked
with Kubrick on
The Killing
(1956),
Paths of Glory
(1957), and
Lolita
by
that point, decided to make a break with his colleague and strike out on
his own, and the collapse of the partnership brought with it artistic as well
as business consequences. It had been Harris who had (re)written the
screenplay for
Lolita
in addition to producing the film, and it had been
Harris whose like-minded imagination had instigated Kubrick’s tilt toward
comedy for the nuclear disaster project. And now, with Harris-Kubrick
dissolving, the Seven Arts production connection disappeared as well. Columbia Pictures took over
Dr. Strangelove
.

Peter Sellers ended up helping to solve both the artistic and the business
problems, though not without putting Kubrick into a bit of a pique in the
process. The aesthetic solution occurred because someone had given Peter
a copy of a strange and flamboyant novel called
The Magic Christian
by the
American writer Terry Southern. (Whether that someone was the satirist
Jonathan Miller or the novelist Henry Green is disputed.) Peter, flush with
excitement over finding a kindred worldview, began doling out copies as
gifts to all of his friends. Kubrick was one of the recipients. Columbia
Pictures, meanwhile, was certain that
Lolita
succeeded not because of Stanley Kubrick or James Mason or the film’s provocative topic, but because of
Peter Sellers and his many masks, and when the studio assumed financial
control of
Dr. Strangelove
, it stipulated that Peter not only star in the film
but also that he appear in multiple roles. Kubrick got along well with Peter,
but he was still annoyed at front-office interference in a decision he considered his alone. “What we are dealing with is film by fiat, film by frenzy!”
he fumed.

Terry Southern, meanwhile, had learned that Peter had given a copy
of
The Magic Christian
to Kubrick and suggested to his friend George
Plimpton, editor of the
Paris Review
, that he, Southern, write a profile of
Kubrick for the journal. Or
Atlantic Monthly
. Or maybe
Esquire
. . . . It was
an enticing proposal—a great, hip writer profiling a great, hip director, and
all three magazines expressed interest.
Esquire
ultimately assigned the piece.

Southern’s first interview with Kubrick began on a more or less standard
track. But then, as Southern described it, “Somehow or other we get into
this rather heavy rap—about
death
, and
infinity
, and
the origin of time
—you know the sort of thing. We never got through with the interview.”
Something much better than a celebrity profile took its place: “We met a
few times, had a few laughs and some groovy rap . . . and then about
three months later he called from London and asked me to come over
and work on
Strangelove
.” Southern said that Kubrick “had thought of
the story as ‘a straightforward melodrama’ until . . . he ‘woke up and realized that nuclear war was too outrageous, too fantastic to be treated in
any conventional manner.’ He said he could only see it now as ‘some
kind of hideous joke.’ ”

Complicating matters was the fact that Peter refused to leave England
for the duration of the production. Whether it was because of the tension
of his divorce, which was finalized in March, or his latest affair—with the
British actress and former child star Janette Scott—the result was that Peter
wouldn’t budge out of Britain. Kubrick thus felt he had to go begging.
He’s said to have shown up late at night in the lobby of Peter’s Hampstead
apartment building, where he would simply wait for Peter to arrive from
his nights on the town, whereupon the director would spend the early hours
of the morning cajoling the partied-out movie star. Peter succumbed to the
pressure, in addition to the million dollars (a most significant raise) and the
promise to film at Shepperton. Peter also wangled himself a luxury suite in
town at the Dorchester for the duration of the shoot. He liked to stay in
town after work.

“To me it’s like having three different great actors,” Kubrick said in
response to a
Queen
magazine reporter’s question about why he cast Sellers
in multiple roles. But there was supposed to have been a fourth and maybe,
if one believes Peter, even a fifth. Originally, Sellers was signed to play the
President of the United States, Merkin Muffley; the British Group Captain
Lionel Mandrake; the eponymous nuclear physicist; and Major T. J. “King”
Kong, the whooping Texan who eventually straddles an atom bomb like a
broncobuster at the end of the film. But in Sellers’s own account, he “was
going to do them
all!
”

“Stanley was convinced I could. I could do no wrong, you see. Some
days Stanley used to be sitting outside my front door saying, ‘What about
Buck Schmuck Turgidson [the role played by George C. Scott]? You’ve
got
to play Buck Schmuck!’ And I’d say, ‘I physically can’t do it! I don’t like
the role anyway, Stan. And I’ll try to do the [Kong] thing, but, I mean, I
think that’s
enough
.’ ”

But there was a problem with Kong, too—one that made little sense
at the time and makes even less in retrospect. The world’s greatest mimic
found himself unable to produce the twangy drawl of a Texan. It just wasn’t
happening.

Because of Peter’s long-standing need for a vocal model on which to
hang his performance, Kubrick assigned a genuine Texan—Terry Southern,
of Alvarado, Johnson County—the task of making a recording of Kong’s
dialogue. Some time elapsed before Kubrick convinced Peter to listen to
the tape, but Sellers eventually appeared for the requested hearing at Kubrick’s offices at Shepperton. At that point it was Kubrick’s turn to become
nutty. When Peter “finally did show up,” Southern later wrote, “he had
with him the latest state-of-the-art portable tape recorder, specially designed
for learning languages. Its ultrasensitive earphones were so oversized they
resembled some kind of eccentric hat or space headgear. From the office
[Kubrick and Southern] would see Sellers pacing between the lilac bushes,
script in hand, his face tiny and obscured beneath his earphones. Kubrick
found it a disturbing image. ‘Is he kidding?’ he said. ‘That’s exactly the sort
of thing that would bring some British heat down for weirdness.’

“I laughed,” Southern continued, “but he wasn’t joking. He phoned
the production manager, Victor Lyndon, right away. ‘Listen, Victor,’ I
heard him say, ‘you’d better check out Pete and those earphones. He may
be stressing. . . . Well, I think he ought to cool it with the earphones. Yeah,
it looks like he’s trying to ridicule the BBC or something, know what I’m
saying? All we need is to get shut down for a crazy stunt like that. Jesus
Christ!’ ” (In point of fact, Victor Lyndon was the associate producer of
Dr. Strangelove
; Clifton Brandon was the production manager.)

Peter
tried
to do the accent. According to Southern, the first day of
shooting consisted of one of Kong’s B-52 bomber scenes, and Kubrick was
pleased with the results of Peter’s performance. But the next day, Kubrick
took a phone call from Victor Lyndon. Bad news. Peter had slipped while
getting out of a Buick in front of an Indian restaurant on King’s Road. A
sprained ankle was theorized.

Peter returned to the set that afternoon and filming resumed without
incident, but after breaking for tea, Kubrick suddenly altered the shooting
schedule. Without warning, he told Peter to climb down two separate ladders into the belly of the plane. Southern witnessed: “Sellers negotiated the
first, but coming down the second, at about the fourth rung from the
bottom, one of his legs abruptly buckled, and he tumbled and sprawled, in
obvious pain, on the unforgiving bomb-bay floor.”

The next day Victor Lyndon was once again the bearer of bad tidings.
Peter had not only seen his doctor, he’d made his injury known to the men
who mattered: “The completion bond people know about Peter’s injury
and the physical demands of the Major Kong role,” Lyndon reported. “They
say they’ll pull out if he plays the part.”