A Grand Guy: The Art and Life of Terry Southern

by Lee Hill

  “He was like many such people totally lucid even though he was absolutely awash with liquor,” said Christiane. “Because our children were small, Stanley and Peter would sort of fan out into the kitchen. George would drink a mix of whiskey and milk. I remember this impressed me. He said that the milk would keep his stomach in better order. He would then speak very lucidly, though somewhat emotionally about his past…stories about Ireland. I don’t know how he came about those. He sort of gave me a little history about the hardship of the Irish.”

  James B. Harris recalls George vaguely, but does remember that he and Kubrick put together the first version of the shooting script: “After we finished Lolita, Stanley came across this Red Alert book when he was over in London and he brought it to my attention and started educating me on the thermonuclear dilemma. I started to read books like On Thermonuclear Warfare by Herman Kahn. So we started the development of a straight dramatic suspense story based on Red Alert; that’s how it was treated. I was on the West Coast so I wasn’t totally involved on a day-to-day basis. Peter George came to New York and started to work on the screenplay with Stanley. I would come into town from time to time and sit in with them and bounce the ideas around and so forth. I didn’t get to know Peter George that well.”

  George acted as Kubrick’s resource person on all things military and fleshed out some of the technical nuances of nuclear defense. The United States Air Force and the State Department would not cooperate with Kubrick’s production, because he would not give them script approval. Kubrick circumvented their lack of cooperation by gathering studies, academic papers, magazine articles, and books on nuclear power and the arms race to add credibility to his work-in-progress.

  The early drafts of what would become Dr. Strangelove tried to merge this array of technical data with the need for a compelling film narrative. The initial George/Kubrick draft walked an uneasy line between the inexorable gloom of George’s source novel and a broad, almost juvenile slapstick. Kubrick and George devised a cumbersome meta-satirical structure using the plot of Red Alert as a film within a film produced by an alien intelligence. Kubrick intended to spoof Hollywood’s penchant for glitz over substance when dealing with social and political issues. Unlike Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, George’s 1958 novel was a straightforward, albeit socially conscious, thriller in terms of style and structure. George was too close to his material for the radical leap required to make the absurd unthinkability of nuclear holocaust seem believable, profound, and immediate. On his previous film, Lolita, Kubrick had Nabokov, a genius as thorough and perfectionistic as himself, to collaborate (and argue and debate) with. Peter George was no Nabokov. Kubrick knew he was gambling by choosing this subject. Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach was the only other studio film on the subject. Despite the presence of Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire, and Ava Gardner, the earnest funereal tone of the film killed its success at the box office.

  Kubrick later articulated his shift from melodrama to satire in Films and Filming in the summer of 1963 while editing Dr. Strangelove: “My idea of doing it as a nightmare comedy came when I was trying to work on it. I found that in trying to put meat on the bones and to imagine the scenes fully one had to keep leaving things out of it which were either absurd or paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny, and these things seemed to be very real. Then I decided that the perfect tone to adopt for the film would be what I now call nightmare comedy, because it most truthfully represents the picture.”

  In October 1962, Kubrick told Harris that a new writer was needed. “Stanley told me he decided to pursue certain things that we had discussed earlier. [He] kind of put them on a back burner or discarded them figuring we were onto such a good thing with a straight thriller maybe it was foolhardy to get off a winning team…. But he told me that some of the thoughts that he had were that he could best present the thermonuclear dilemma in comedy form. That it was just more powerful that way—the message would still be the same—but he thought it would be much more entertaining and a better film for it. Then he started to educate me about Terry Southern who I really wasn’t familiar with. He started to fill me in on Flash and Filigree and The Magic Christian and things like that. Needless to say when you start reading [Southern’s work] you start realizing how talented he was. So Stanley started working with Terry and that was when it was converted into a satire and the new title, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. That’s the history of that project as far as I was concerned. Then strangely enough I wound up doing as my first film as a director a picture called The Bedford Incident which is really the same subject matter, but I did it as a straight suspense piece.”

  The exact nature of the first meeting between Kubrick and Southern has become absorbed into the larger myth of the making of Dr. Strangelove. Southern remembers they got “into this rather heavy rap—about death, and infinity, and the origin of time—you know, that sort of thing. Meanwhile, my agent, Si Litvinoff, found out about this and a number of people wanted me to interview Kubrick. They didn’t know what was happening. They just heard I was going to see Stanley Kubrick and thought, ‘Well, this would make a good interview.’ So about three people—Esquire, the Atlantic, I think even George Plimpton—asked me about it.”

  In Stanley Kubrick, Terry would encounter a kindred spirit, someone who didn’t just want to use film, but wanted to change it irrevocably. At thirty-six, the Bronx-born, self-educated Kubrick was part of the same generation as Southern and equally keen to push the envelope of form and convention. As the auteur of Paths of Glory and Lolita, Kubrick was already on record decrying the lack of ambition among American filmmakers. His heroes—Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein, and Max Ophuls—were all iconoclasts. Kubrick wanted to follow their path, but he wanted to do so from a secure base of power. Lolita had been only a mixed success. Kubrick wanted his next film to be an event that people had to see if only because their friends were talking about it. It would be an American film as mature and complex as the finest European films, yet also as seductively entertaining as the best American studio pictures.

  When Kubrick’s offer to work on Dr. Strangelove arrived, Carol Southern remembered Terry asking her if he should go. “Since we had absolutely no money, I was very keen for him to go,” she recalls. “But he must have had some premonition that it would lead him into a totally different area, because there was some hesitation.”

  Terry left for London a few days later. Carol lost contact with Terry due to the U.S. mail strike. About three weeks later, she received a call from Terry telling her to get tickets for Nile and her to fly to London.

  Kubrick knew, says Southern, that the possibility of the world going up in one big mushroom cloud of atomization was “too weird to treat in an ordinary way. So he wanted to make [Dr. Strangelove] a black comedy.” And if there was one thing Terry was a master of, it was black comedy. Through influences like Kafka, Céline, and especially Henry Green, Southern understood that the most banal situations and statements could be charged with multiple meanings. The main characters of Flash and Filigree and The Magic Christian, Dr. Eichner and Guy Grand, were strange maguslike figures. They could be sinister, poignant, all-knowing, enigmatic, silly, or genteel by turns. Many of the characters in Dr. Strangelove would embody these same traits.

  Kubrick’s motives in hiring Terry were, in his words, “to see if some more decoration might be added to the icing on the cake.” It was a somewhat disingenuous description of what became an intense merging of sensibilities. Kubrick, the bleak ironist, could meet and accommodate the black, yet oddly gentle satire of Southern. On the set, they would look like brothers (Peter Sellers and Southern, with their cocked eyebrows, hawklike noses, and wry expressions, even more so). Both favored simple black clothes. They always looked as if they were short of sleep. Terry was almost painfully shy in the mornings, but as the day wore on he would become more outgoing and playful. Kubrick, the brooding point of focus, was kept relaxed by the jokes
and antics of Southern, Sellers, and other members of the cast and crew.

  Upon Terry’s arrival in England, George disappeared. During the “official” period of Southern’s employment, November 16 to December 28, 1962, Southern and Kubrick drastically reworked George’s script. Christiane Kubrick heard that George’s drinking had gotten worse and that he’d had to be hospitalized for ulcers. In contrast to George, who seemed to live under a cloud of sadness, Terry, who was now a constant presence at the Kubrick household, struck Christiane as constantly cheerful and “very bohemian” in his rumpled dark suit and tie. He never seemed to eat or sleep. He didn’t seem to mind the presence of the children.

  “We were together a great deal,” recalls Christiane, “because when you have small children, your professional life spilled over into jamming the last cold spoons of custard down a child…. I remember it was an immensely cold winter. Terry and Stanley would often sit in their coats in the London flat surrounded by a mixture of toddlers, all their papers, and saying ‘don’t touch that’ to the children. They tried to flee from the family into smaller rooms.”

  Terry initially stayed in a hotel in Knightsbridge. Later, when Carol and Nile arrived, he would sublet Kenneth Tynan’s apartment on Prince Albert Road. Then they moved into a commercial apartment across from Harrods.

  What Carol Southern was able to observe of the production was an intense, fertile atmosphere of hypercreativity with Kubrick applying his all-seeing scrutiny to every aspect of the film. Carol was fascinated by Kubrick and remembers lots of conversations regarding Ken Adam, the production designer. “‘Ken’s doing this. Ken’s doing that.’ It was obvious Stanley had a very high regard for him.” She found both Stanley and Christiane Kubrick warm and hospitable.

  Shooting had begun in a very tentative way when Terry first arrived in London. Most of it was second unit aerial footage to be inserted into the bomber scenes. But Kubrick soon realized, to use Southern’s words, “You can’t do the end of the world in a conventionally dramatic way. You have to do it in some way that reflects your awareness that this is serious and important. You can’t treat it in a conventional boy-meets-girl way, so it has to be a totally different treatment and black humor is the way to go. That was [Kubrick’s] decision.

  “The humor that attracted him in The Magic Christian he thought would be effective in this new approach. He would talk about the mechanics of the script in terms of making it totally credible in the fail-safe aspect and then tried to make that funny. And the way you make it funny is because the situation is absurd, you deal with it in terms of the dialogue and characters.”

  On January 28, 1963, principal photography began on Dr. Strangelove. From January to April 1963, over a fifteen-week period, Kubrick shot exteriors and interiors at Shepperton Studios and the IBM Corporation in London. Kubrick and his chauffeur would pick up Terry at 4:30 each morning and they would go over scenes in the back of the car. The writing would continue at Shepperton Studios. Terry would hand over rewritten pages from the night before, observe rehearsals, comment on scenes as they were being shot, and basically act as a kind of creative lieutenant to Kubrick’s role of the Auteur as Commander General. It was a period of intense, highly stimulating collaboration.

  Southern also described his collaboration with Kubrick in unintentionally revealing terms: “He’s got a weird metabolism; while I’m taking Dexamyl, he’s taking Seconal.” Dexamyl was rapidly becoming Southern’s drug of choice during the furious rewriting process. Southern pumped out dialogue and scene changes on yellow legal pads and index cards in hotel lobbies, on soundstages, and in the backseats of cars and taxis at all hours. As a big proponent of writing from the gut, Southern found that the demands of screenwriting played havoc with his metabolism. By “dexing it,” he was able to keep up not just his energy, but enthusiasm.

  “Terry would drink whiskey and take amphetamines,” recalls Christiane Kubrick, “I didn’t know this at first. I would say, ‘You must eat!’ not really knowing why he had no appetite. I was pushing my food. He was very nice and would say he wasn’t hungry. I thought, ‘My God, this man has tremendous energy. It’s two o’clock in the morning and I am falling over.’

  “Stanley kept saying, ‘You shouldn’t take those things, especially not with liquor.’ Stanley being a doctor’s son never took anything except maybe coffee. Still he didn’t sleep very much either. No more than four hours at a time. I think as a result he lived maybe the equivalent of eighty-one years rather than seventy. Terry had his little green pills and whiskey, but he was never sloshed like Peter [George].”

  Southern would remain a regular fixture on the set and guest at the Kubrick home throughout the rest of the shoot. Based on improvisations with Sellers, Southern and Kubrick would refashion the material into revised dialogue before each day’s shooting. Southern found Kubrick’s meticulous organization fascinating. Kubrick loved nothing more than to go into a stationery store and buy various organizational aids to assist with the production process.

  “We shared the vision” is how Southern summed up his collaboration with Kubrick. If Kubrick had an intuitive grasp of the look and atmosphere he wanted Dr. Strangelove to have, Southern supplied the dialogue and tone to reinforce the overall mood. Although the structure of the Peter George/Kubrick draft remained the same, the film-within-a-film concept was dropped. The dialogue in the earlier drafts had strained too hard for laughs and often read like a high school parody.

  In the Southern and Kubrick draft, a new standard was set for black comedy. There was a unity of time and space sustained by jumping back and forth between the Air Force base, the cockpit of the B-52 bomber, and the Pentagon War Room. The accuracy of Kubrick’s research anchored the satire in a kind of hyper-realism that made the absurdity and horror mesmerizing to watch. Most important, although the characters were essentially archetypes of certain all-too-familiar figures—the hawkish generals, the bland president, the mad scientist, or the redneck Texan—the detailing of these characters by Kubrick, Southern, and Sellers gave them a specificity rare in satire.

  The inexorable race toward doom in Red Alert remained the foundation of Dr. Strangelove, but rethinking the narrative in satirical terms had made the result more profound than Peter George’s novel. It was the one sad note in this collaboration that George never quite came to terms with.

  According to Southern, he strove to craft dialogue that emphasized the incongruity of civilized men in suits and uniforms talking about megadeaths in a casual, almost nonchalant manner: “They have all the jargon, vernacular, and vocabulary that are specific, peculiar, and particular to their skills and positions. There is something so utterly pompous about the phrases themselves, and the idea of the macho thing of the military is an absurdity in itself, that the very phrases become funny.”

  A classic example of this occurs when the president phones the Russian premier from the War Room to delicately inform him that nuclear bombers are headed his way. Concerned about the late hour of the call, the Russian ambassador counsels the president that the premier is “a man of the people, but he is still a man.” Cupping the phone, the president asks a drunken premier to turn some music down. Then, in the voice of a soothing parent, he says, “Dimitri, you know how we always talked about the bomb…the bomb, Dimitri.”

  The dialogue that follows tugs at the viewer in two ways. The slowly mounting horror of a world on the verge of nuclear disaster is combined with laughter at the idea of two statesmen trying to maintain buddy-buddy decorum. Kubrick and Southern also refined the use of scatological or sexually charged names for the characters—“Bat” Guano, Premier Kissoff, Colonel Kilgore, etc. Perhaps the most daring name change was that of the president, Merkin Muffley—a Merkin being a wig made out of pubic hair.

  The title character, who appears only in the film’s third act, when nuclear holocaust seems unavoidable, was not, as many mistakenly believe, based on Henry Kissinger. In 1963, Kissinger was still a relatively unknown Harvard foreign policy
expert. Southern explained later that “[Dr. Strangelove] was modeled on a combination of the great crazy German scientists of the period and Wernher von Braun and Peter Sellers presenting [the type] as a madman.”

  Southern, an unrepentant Anglophile, hit it off with Sellers, the master mimic of all things American right from the beginning of production. He worked closely with the actor to find the right Texas accent for the bombardier captain.

  “The financing of the film was based almost 100 percent on the notion that [Sellers] would play multiple roles,” says Southern. “About a week before he was supposed to start shooting he sent a telegram saying he could not play a Texas role because it was one accent he was never able to do. Kubrick asked me to do a tape of the accent. When Sellers got to the studio, he had this tape recorder with huge, monster earphones. He looked ridiculous, but he mastered the accent in about ten minutes. Then Sellers sprained his ankle and he couldn’t make the moves going up and down the ladder in the bomb bay. He was out. The doctor said you can’t do it. So it was a question of replacing him, but Stanley had set such store by Sellers’s acting that he said you can’t replace him with just another actor. ‘We got to get an authentic John Wayne (who it was originally written for) type to do it.’ Wayne was approached and dismissed it immediately.

  “Stanley hadn’t been in the States for some time and didn’t know anything about the TV programs. He wanted to know if I knew of any actors. So I said there is this big, authentic guy who plays on Bonanza named Dan Blocker—Big Hoss—so without seeing him, Kubrick sent off a script to his agent and got an immediate reply. ‘It was too pinko’ for Mr. Blocker.”

  Kubrick then remembered Slim Pickens from One-Eyed Jacks, which he almost directed for Marlon Brando.

  “When Slim Pickens arrived in London, it was the first time he had ever been anywhere other than the Rodeo Circuit as a clown,” said Southern.” Stanley was very concerned about him being in London for the first time and asked me to meet him. I got some Wild Turkey and went down to the set with a couple of glasses to talk to Slim about the script. When he showed up, I asked him if he wanted a drink since it was only ten in the morning and Slim said, ‘It’s never too early for a drink.’ Then I asked him if he was settled in and he said, ‘It doesn’t take too much to make me happy. Just a pair of loose shoes, a tight pussy, and a warm place to go to the bathroom.’ One of Kubrick’s assistants, a very public school type, couldn’t believe his ears, but laughed along anyway.”