Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  Blake Edwards is even more succinct: “I think he lived a great part of his life in hell.”

  • • •

  Peter Sellers was at the top of his game, his fame, his taste in projects, and his luck, and he was visibly miserable much of the time, so through the guidance of Harry Secombe, he sought spiritual advice from a priest.

  The sanest and best-natured Goon, Secombe was active in the Actors’ Church Union and, seeing his old friend in increasing distress, made a point of introducing Peter to Canon John Hester. This priest’s particular ministry was to men and women whose shifting identities earned them their daily bread, and still, Peter Sellers presented a special case. “Peter never really settled, and he seemed aware that this was a real problem,” Hester later said, referring to Sellers’s spiritual life more than to his locale. “He was never baptized, and a lot of our sessions were about the possibility of this happening.” (That a Jew would not have been baptized ought to go without saying, so Hester, in his restrained Anglican way, left it unsaid that Peter considered converting to Christianity.)

  “He never came very near to settling on any single manifestation of faith,” Hester continued. “He was looking in all sorts of directions, just as if he were playing with one of those cameras of his.” The baptism failed to occur, then or ever—though another equally sacred Roman Catholic ritual later did—and Peter continued on his unsteady course, ceaselessly seeking and unable to rest.

  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 G
eorge 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.”

  It wasn’t as though Peter would actually have had to fall very far, but it was apparently too far for the fearful Peter, the prop bomb being poised about ten feet off the floor. “He didn’t fancy dropping out on the bomb” is Bert Mortimer’s explanation. Hattie Stevenson goes further: “It was not a broken ankle, but he still insisted on getting put in a plaster cast so he could get out of the part.”

  Diagnostics aside, Kubrick needed an actor on short notice. It has been reported that Kubrick approached John Wayne and that Wayne instantly refused. Terry Southern’s companion, Gail Gerber, recalls that Southern himself proposed the fat Bonanza cowboy, Dan Blocker, who also found Dr. Strangelove to be too left-leaning for his taste. Slim Pickens had no such political qualms and, so, at the end of the film, it is Pickens who literally goes down in film history by descending deliriously on the bomb that destroys the planet. But then Pickens became a problem for Peter. Hattie Stevenson claims that Sellers “was infuriated, really frightfully angry that Slim Pickens played the part so well in the end.”

  • • •

  As though a satire about bombing all of humanity to death wasn’t gruesome enough, Kubrick brought in as a technical consultant the photographer Weegee, who was known for having taken stark, emotionally charged photographs of an estimated five thousand murder scenes over the course of his grim career. Named Usher Fellig at birth, Weegee moved with his family to New York at the age of ten; officials at Ellis Island changed his name to Arthur. As a photographer, he seemed to be clairvoyant in terms of knowing where crimes had been committed; Weegee often arrived on the scene before the police. Hence his nickname (inspired by the Ouija board). Officially, Weegee’s technical consultations involved Dr. Strangelove’s periodically harsh, crime-scene–like black-and-white cinematography, but because he had an unusual accent—German overlaid with New York, all with a nasal, slightly strangled, back-of-the-throat quality—he inadvertently provided technical assistance for the film’s star as well.

  “I vas psychic!,” Weegee told Peter on the set one day—a conversation Peter was taping for research purposes. “I vould go to a moidah before it vas committed!” Peter’s vocal model for Strangelove was Weegee, whom Sellers pushed further into parody.

  (Contemporary audiences sometimes assume that
Strangelove’s accent was based at least in part on Henry Kissinger’s, but although Kissinger was one of Kennedy’s security advisors, he was not a public figure when Dr. Strangelove was made. Kubrick himself denied the association: “I think this is slightly unfair to Kissinger. . . . It was certainly unintentional. Neither Peter nor I had ever seen Kissinger before the film was shot.”)

  • • •

  Principal photography began in January 1963.

  “He was harder to reach,” Kubrick said of Peter, comparing his friend’s demeanor on the set of Dr. Strangelove to the already unusual actor with whom he’d made Lolita. Sellers would arrive in the morning in what one of Kubrick’s biographers, John Baxter, calls a “near-torpor, saying very little, looking depressed, tired, and ill. Only when Kubrick began to set up the cameras—of which he always used at least three for any Sellers scene—did he begin to revive. By the afternoon, coaxed by Kubrick, he would have hit his stride.”

  “Kubrick is a god as far as I am concerned,” Sellers said later.

  As with Lolita, Kubrick began the making of Dr. Strangelove by giving Peter free rein to improvise. Kubrick would then pick out what he liked and build the film accordingly. During one take of a scene with Strangelove, for example, Sellers, without warning, shot his arm in the air and shouted “Heil Hitler!” Sellers recalled the moment: “One day Stanley suggested that I should wear a black glove, which would look rather sinister on a man in a wheelchair. ‘Maybe he had some injury in a nuclear experiment of some sort,’ Kubrick said. So I put on the black glove and looked at the arm and I suddenly thought, ‘Hey, that’s a storm-trooper’s arm.’ So instead of leaving it there looking malignant I gave the arm a life of its own. That arm hated the rest of the body for having made a compromise. That arm was a Nazi.”