Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  “I don’t think he made up a whole scene that didn’t already exist,” Kubrick reported, “but he did a bit of embroidery. In the famous phone call to the Russian premier, for instance, he may have added the rueful line, ‘Well, how do you think I feel, Dimitri?’ ”

  Some of Peter’s inventions didn’t work, and Kubrick nipped them in the bud. For instance, Peter originally played the obscenely named Merkin Muffley as a limp-wristed clown with a nasal inhaler. That was Peter’s inspiration; Kubrick’s was to have Muffley rise into place in the War Room on a hydraulic lift. But between the lift and the nasal spray, the cast and crew laughed so hard that Kubrick couldn’t get a usable take. Apart from the fact that this single bit wasted an entire afternoon, Kubrick didn’t like the broadness of Sellers’s performance in it. In the director’s vision of the character, Muffley should have been the only sane person in the room, and so the lift and the inhaler were cut and the scene reworked. This time, an American political figure did strongly influence the characterization: Muffley is a parody of Adlai Stevenson, a bland intellectual nominally in command of a gang of military madmen.

  Peter embraced the new Muffley so fully that Hattie Stevenson couldn’t even identify her own boss under his makeup: “I shall never forget while he was making Dr. Strangelove, he asked me to pop down to the studios with some letters. I walked onto the set—the very lavish one they had when he was playing the bald-headed president—they had just broken for lunch—and I walked straight past him. Having worked for him for two or three years, I didn’t even recognize him.”

  The War Room set to which Stevenson refers was designed by Ken Adam, the art director responsible for the looks of such disparate but equally eye-catching films as Around the World in 80 Days (1956), Curse of the Demon (1957), and Dr. No (1962). Adam supervised its construction in Shepperton’s Stage B: Twelve-hundred square meters of polished black flooring; a massive circular table, also black; a demonic halo of a chandelier suspended above the table; and a looming map of the world, with tiny lightbulbs representing centers of human population. Complementing Adam’s design were the actors’ dark, nearly identical military costumes (plus Muffley’s schvach dark suit), all made in wool. Unseen by the spectator are the felt overshoes everyone wore to protect Adam’s immaculate jet-black floor. It was all very warm.

  The War Room is graced by banquet tables full of food, including a seemingly endless parade of custard pies. In Kubrick’s vision, this was the way the world would end, not only with a bang but with slapstick. The original concluding scene of Dr. Strangelove:

  With all hope lost, Strangelove, having fallen out of his wheelchair, rolls around on the lustrous black floor while President Muffley demands a search of the Soviet Ambassador DeSadesky’s body cavities—“in view of the tininess of your equipment.” “The seven bodily orifices!” Buck Turgidson cries, whereupon George C. Scott points directly at the camera—it’s a point-of-view shot taken from DeSadesky’s perspective. Buck ducks, causing the President of the United States to be struck by a pie. Muffley collapses into Turgidson’s arms, a modern Pietà.

  Turgidson: “Mr. President! Mr. President! [No response.] Gentlemen, our beloved president has just been infamously struck down by a pie in the prime of life! Are we going to let that happen? Massive retaliation!”

  In jittery fast-motion, everyone in the War Room begins to hurl cream pies, all to the tune of hopped-up silent-movie music. Great globs of white custard cover the floor; Buck skids on it. The huge round chandelier swings as men climb on top of the conference table. Kubrick includes a tracking shot of a line of men ending with Buck atop somebody’s shoulders; you can see him stuff a handful of pie into his mouth between throws. A subsequent master shot of the room makes the brilliantly lit table look like a boxing ring.

  Suddenly, a gunshot. It’s Strangelove firing into the air. Kubrick cuts to a high angle shot. Strangelove: “Gentlemen! Ve must stop zis childish game! There is verk—verk!—to do!”

  Kubrick then cuts to a high angle shot of a physically recovered but mentally stricken Muffley sitting on the floor opposite DeSadesky amid a lunar landscape of custard, craters, and crust. Drenched in it, they’re happily building meringue mudpies and sandcastles. Kubrick cranes down to floor level to watch them play at closer range; the president destroys his own castle.

  Strangelove speaks: “Zis is regretable, but I think their minds have snepped from the strain!” Peter bites down on every word: “Perhaps they Vill Heff To Be In-Stit-Utiona-Lized!” Buck Turgidson responds by calling for a three-cheer salute to Strangelove, at which point Kubrick brings Vera Lynn onto the sound track. She’s singing the World War II chestnut “We’ll Meet Again.”

  • • •

  George C. Scott later claimed that they’d “shot a thousand pies a day for a week”; one of Kubrick’s biographers, Vincent LoBrutto, doubles both figures. Terry Southern remembered it differently: “The studio representatives, who were skeptical of the scene all along, had been excruciatingly clear about the matter: ‘We’re talkin’ one take. One take and you’re outta here, even if you only got shit in the can!’ ”

  Whatever actually occurred, it didn’t matter, because Kubrick cut the sequence. “It was too farcical and not consistent with the satiric tone of the rest of the film,” he later explained.

  Southern believed that this was because the characters were enjoying themselves too much: “He [Kubrick] believed that watching people have fun is never funny.” (Even in the final cut of Dr. Strangelove, Peter Bull, who plays DeSadesky, cracks up onscreen during one of Peter’s gestures. Bull remains embarrassed about his inability to keep a straight face, “grinning in an obvious and inane way. [It] makes me blush to think of it.”)

  As far as the custard pie sequence is concerned, Kubrick was right; it doesn’t work. History also intervened in the cutting of the legendary, supposedly lost sequence. (It exists in the archives of the British Film Institute.) Test screenings of Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb were conducted in late November 1963. Given the artistic failure of the sequence, the question of whether it took the assassination of President Kennedy to cause the sequence to be deleted is irrelevant.

  • • •

  With Dr. Strangelove, Peter Sellers achieved genius once again. His three characters are variegated, complex, and refined. He effaces himself as an actor, but not completely; he invites his audience to appreciate his performance as a stylistic tour de force, but he doesn’t issue the invitation hammily. He lets his characters speak for themselves, and yet they do so with Sellers’s unique panache.

  He gives Mandrake that slight British slack-jaw quality, ending each of his sentences with his mouth left slightly agape, perhaps in expectation of receiving a further command that would require a dutiful response. He’s got the unflappable politesse of a seasoned British military officer, one who, facing atomic holocaust, responds in unflappable kind. He is above all an Englishman.

  Muffley is an unnaturally placid, somewhat indigestive-looking middle-aged man with a flat, indistinguishable American accent and little hair. He’s intelligent—perhaps too much so for the job. The nasal inhaler routine is reduced to a faint sniffle, which Muffley dabs methodically with a hanky. One of the most remarkable aspects of the performance is that Kubrick’s camera keeps catching Muffley with an eerily neutral expression on his face. It’s not Sellers in plain repose; it’s a precisely studied lack of affect, the elimination of emotion without the simultaneous expulsion of intellect.

  Time ticks by, but Muffley remains on his imperturbable course. He’s on the phone with Kisoff, the Soviet premier:

  “Fine, I can hear you now, Dimitri—clear and plain and coming through fine. I’m coming through fine, too, then? Fine. Well then, as you say, we’re both coming through fine. Good. Well then it’s good that you’re fine and, and I’m fine. I agree with you. It’s great to be fine. [At this point even Muffley grows a bit frustrated and launches into a slightly sickly s
ingsong tone in an attempt to steer the drunken Kisoff to the matter at hand.] Well then Dimitri. You know how we’ve always talked about something going wrong with the bomb? [Pause.] The bomb, Dimitri. [Pause.] The hydrogen bomb.”

  But it’s the grimace-grinning Strangelove who steals the show, for obvious reasons. Beyond his ghastly German accent, which transcends imitation no matter how often it has been imitated, Peter Sellers achieves pure grotesquerie on the level of physicality and intelligence combined. With his persistent baring of teeth while holding his lips rigid, Strangelove’s mouth is a leering, terrifying rictus, and everything that comes out of it is infected. With a high-pitched nasality, he spits nothing but contempt for the self-evidently lower-functioning brains of his so-called peers in the War Room. And yet he cannot master his own right arm, which flails or goes rigid on its own schedule. He bites it; it keeps coming. It tries to strangle him. At one point it drops to the side, seemingly lifeless, at which point he begins frantically beating on it with his left hand, attempting beyond all reason to revive the monstrous thing—an improvised gesture.

  It is this that causes Peter Bull, standing to Peter’s right, to break out into unrestrained laughter. Kubrick found Peter’s raw spontaneity more important than a background actor’s giggle, so he used that take rather than reshooting it.

  • • •

  Dr. Strangelove ends with a miracle. Peter, as the brilliant but decrepit Strangelove, a technical genius but not a whole man, rises out of his wheelchair and hobbles stiffly across the shiny floor. It’s shot low-angle, like an aggrandizing ad for a crippled children’s hospital, except, of course, that the angle is aggrandizing a madman and the world is blowing up.

  “Mein Fuehrer! I can walk!” Cue Vera Lynne as a montage of mushroom clouds fills the screen.

  THIRTEEN

  “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

  “You must be,” said the Cat,

  “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

  The Hollywood gossip columnist and former actress Hedda Hopper had several items to report about Peter Sellers in 1963. Sarah and Michael had accompanied him on a trip to Hollywood in early summer, and he’d taken them to all three of the region’s major amusement parks—Disneyland, Marineland, and Knott’s Berry Farm. “The recently divorced Peter took out some glamour girls at night,” Hopper noted, “but he says it’s nothing serious.” Peter had become quite the swinging single, and he finally had the body to go with the image. He weighed 158 pounds, down from his all-time high of 210.

  On the professional front, Hopper and others reported that a second Billy Wilder project had found its way onto Peter Sellers’s horizon. Wilder had purchased the rights to the Sherlock Holmes characters from the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle, the scribes revealed, and he planned to write and direct a new Holmes film. Peter O’Toole was to be Sherlock, Peter Sellers Watson.

  He recorded a new comedy album, Fool Britannia, with Anthony Newley and Joan Collins; it was a warped-from-the-headlines satire of the Profumo sex scandal—involving John Profumo, the British Secretary of State for War; Eugene Ivanov, the Soviet Assistant Naval Attaché and spy; and Christine Keeler, the showgirl they shared—that rocked Britain that year.

  The Telegoons arrived on British television in the fall of 1963—a puppet version of the radio series, with Peter, Harry, and Secombe providing the voices.

  The director Jules Dassin offered him the lead role in his lavish heist comedy Topkapi, but when Peter learned that Maximilian Schell was being considered for the picture as well, he turned Dassin down. It makes little sense, but Schell and Sophia had costarred in a film already, and that apparently made Peter’s participation in Topkapi impossible. So Peter Ustinov took the role.

  Robert Aldrich considered making a film version of Brouhaha, of all things—with Peter, perhaps needless to say, in the leading role—but production delays on Aldrich’s Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte stalled the project permanently.

  The comedy writer S. J. Perelman met with Peter and Harvey Orkin, one of his several agents; Perelman tried to persuade Peter to play all of the major roles in a film version of his play The Beauty Part—Bert Lahr had played them onstage—but Peter seems not to have been interested, and the film was never made.

  And the entertainment writer Joe Hyams told Elke Sommer that he had struck a deal with Peter to write his life story. But the deal fell apart and the book was never written.

  • • •

  In addition to the Los Angeles trip, Peter spirited his kids away on flash vacations, making up his mind suddenly and tearing into whatever new locale he’d chosen with a frenzy. As Bert Mortimer rather too colorfully put it, “for the first few days he’d rape the place.”

  Bert was given the job of taking family pictures, but Peter would soon grow bored and go off on his own, leaving the children in the care of Bert and Hattie. “He wanted the photos to establish that he’d had children,” said Bert, “and was capable of playing the father to them the way fathers are supposed to do. The sad thing was, children really didn’t interest him at all.”

  With Peter out of town so often, the task of accompanying Peg on shopping trips in her brand new Bentley fell to Hattie Stevenson. “Go and spend what you like, my darling,” Peter told his mother, and “have it all charged to me.” Off Peg went.

  “I’m Peter Sellers’s mother,” she would proclaim upon entering any given shop. “And I want the best.”

  • • •

  In the Boultings’ Heavens Above (1963), Peg’s son played a priest.

  The Rev. John Smallwood (Peter) is appointed to the position of vicar at Holy Trinity in the parish of Orbiston Parva, a factory town dominated by the Despards, an old industrialist family. (They make “Tranquilax,” a popular sedative, stimulant, and laxative.) He pays visits to the locals to discuss the residents’ spiritual lives and finds that they have none. His first sermon is direct on this point: “This town is full of people who call themselves ‘Christian,’ but from what I’ve seen of it, I wouldn’t mind taking a bet there aren’t enough real Christians about to feed one decent lion.” While constructing his character, Sellers once said, he stood in front of a mirror and suddenly realized that he was Brother Cornelius, his old teacher at St. Aloysius: “The Jewish boy knows his catechism better than the rest of you!”

  A squatter camp spreads its dingy self just outside the windows of the Tranquilax offices; Irene Handl plays the queen of the dump. At Smallwood’s behest, the squatters move—to the grounds of the church. To the entrenched vestry’s dismay, he brings in a black man, a Caribbean immigrant, as the new vicar’s warden. He piles outrage upon outrage, and yet the vicar begins to have an effect upon Lady Despard, who, seeing the light of mercy and charity for the first time in her life, abruptly spurs the establishment of a church food bank. But like Ian Carmichael’s character in I’m All Right, Jack, Smallwood only succeeds in provoking chaos.

  As it happens, they’ve got the wrong John Smallwood; the real one (Ian Carmichael), shows up later, suitably complacent and patrician.

  Peter’s is a muted performance—priestly sincerity dusted with a thin veneer of a skilled actor’s sardonic calculation, a balanced response on Sellers’s part to what is at its Boulting-brothers core a cynical social comedy. Once again, the Boultings gently rib the rich, including the Church, and save their bitter wrath to shower on the ignorant poor. Then again, when the good people of Orbison Parva beat the Rev. Smallwood to a pulp at the end of Heaven’s Above, the crowd does appear to cross all class lines.

  • • •

  The World of Henry Orient (1964) took Peter back to New York for several weeks of shooting in July and August 1963. Written by Nunnally Johnson and his daughter, Nora Johnson, and directed by George Roy Hill, Henry Orient concerns a pianist, not of the highest rank, and his absurd encounters with two Upper East Side schoolgirls (played by Tippy Walker and Merrie Spaeth), who find him dreamy. Budgeted at $2 million, The World of Henry Orient was, according to
the Times, the most expensive movie ever filmed in New York.

  Johnson, a longtime Hollywood screenwriter, was unhappy with Peter’s casting as Henry; Johnson wanted Rex Harrison. According to George Roy Hill, the filmmakers had Oscar Levant in mind as the model for Henry, but that’s most unfair to Levant, who was extraordinarily witty, urbane, and depressed, whereas Henry Orient is an unadulterated fool whose erotic interest lies in some unseen guy’s neurotic wife (Paula Prentiss). In any event, Peter concocted one of his most bizarre voices for Henry. As he described it, “He has a dreadful Brooklynese accent, but in an attempt to appear cultured and charming, he hides it with a phony French accent.” One critic described the result as “a cross between Rocky Graziano, Liberace, and Charles Boyer,” an assessment that lands not far off the mark. (“Shut the door” comes out “Shu’ de doerr.”) Adding to the voice’s complexity is its instability; Henry keeps slipping out of it, and as such he’s one of Peter’s most openly fragmented creations.

  (Just to note: Nunnally Johnson’s credits include the adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, 1940, for John Ford; Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window, 1944; and The Three Faces of Eve, 1959, which he directed. George Roy Hill went on to direct such hits as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969, and The Sting, 1973. And Oscar Levant was not from Brooklyn; he was from Pittsburgh.)

  Nora Johnson’s initial reaction to Peter’s performance was to be “jarred to the roots,” though when she saw Henry Orient again many years later, she was “no longer jarred . . . it had somehow blended like old wine.”

  • • •