Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  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.

  Peter counted. “The word was that this guy was just terrific,” Harris later said. “It caused us to feel lucky if we could get him. It turned
out that Peter had an availability—but not much, because he was so busy going from one picture to another. If we could shoot his part in the picture on fourteen consecutive days, he could work us in.” Shooting began in late November 1960, at Elstree.

  For the role of Lolita’s mother, Kubrick cast Shelley Winters, the undisputed queen of poignant tawdriness. In 1951, for instance, she invited audiences to cheer Montgomery Clift on in his goal of killing her in A Place in the Sun. (It requires extraordinary skill to achieve that degree of contempt.) For Lolita herself, Kubrick signed an unknown, Sue Lyon, after Nabokov nixed Tuesday Weld. Peter was necessarily captivated by the girl, but even he knew she was off limits. Still, at a party at James Mason’s house during the production, Mason’s wife was fascinated to see Peter spending most of the evening lying on his back, Michelangelo-like but on the floor, snapping photos of the sexy fifteen-year-old.

  Like the making of so many great films, the construction of Lolita was a matter of methodically creating nuanced art among gargantuan egos. Mason, the star of the picture (not to mention the star of Max Ophuls’s Caught, 1949; George Cukor’s A Star Is Born, 1954; Nicholas Ray’s Bigger than Life, 1956; and many other films) was not at all happy at the way Kubrick fawned over him—meaning Peter. According to Mason, Kubrick “was so besotted with the genius of Peter Sellers that he seemed never to have enough of him.” Mason was right. Sellers and Kubrick harmonized in a way that rarely occurred between Peter and his directors. They shared the same macabre sensibility. They bonded.

  At the time, as James B. Harris recalls, Peter was particularly social as far as Kubrick and Harris were concerned: “Every Sunday we used to go out to Chipperfield and visit with Peter and Annie and all his friends. The Boulting brothers were there, and Graham Stark, and David Lodge. It became sort of a ritual.” It also seems to have helped drive a wedge between Peter and the rest of the cast.

  During rehearsals, Kubrick suggested that his actors pretend to have forgotten the lines they had just meticulously memorized—except for Peter, who’d been told not to worry about his scripted dialogue at all. Instead, Kubrick announced, Peter should do what Peter did best: Make things up on the spur of the moment. Cues be damned—let it fly! Mason was annoyed, but he didn’t blame his costar: “You could not fault Peter Sellers. He was the only one allowed, or rather encouraged, to improvise his entire performance. The rest of us improvised only during rehearsals, then incorporated any departures from the original script that had seemed particularly effective.” Kubrick’s artistic instinct was right on target. With Sellers given free rein, Quilty became even more unpredictable and terrifying.

  But ironically, and comically, they were all speaking dialogue that was written by Harris but continued to be credited to Nabokov, an extraordinarily pedantic author who, when he turned in his essays to The Saturday Review, forbade the magazine’s copy editors from altering a single comma.

  Mason also offered a strange and unexpected detail in his autobiography: “Sellers told us that he did not enjoy improvising.” Mason tried to explain the remark: “I think that he was referring to the occasional necessity to think on his feet when giving a live performance. He was painstaking and meticulous in preparation.” This is a generous but unconvincing clarification. One has no doubt that Peter told his colleagues that he didn’t like to improvise. This was, after all, a man who told people he’d descended from Disraeli, and no doubt he believed what he said at the time. But what Peter expected to achieve from the remark nevertheless remains obscure. The only sense one can make of it is that Peter seems to have been developing an even greater need to confound—to prove to people who didn’t know him very well that, in fact, they didn’t know him at all.

  • • •

  With Shelley Winters, Peter found himself back in the baffling, excruciating land of Terry-Thomas and Jean Seberg. To his total horror, he discovered that Miss Winters tended to use a director’s calls for “camera!” and “action!” as the most convenient time in which to memorize her lines. Anthony Harvey faced the problem later in the editing room. “When we were shooting Lolita, Peter had a scene with Shelley Winters,” Harvey says. (Their only scene together, it’s set at Lolita’s high school dance, where the blowsy Charlotte reminds Quilty that she and the vague roue had screwed the year before.) “Stanley Kubrick made about sixty-five takes. Shelley didn’t know any of her lines at all. The first few takes, Peter was absolutely brilliant. And as it progressed, Shelley began to learn her lines, and Peter totally blew them, so that by take thirty-eight, or forty-eight, or whatever it was, when I got back to the cutting room, I had to cut take two of Peter and take forty of Shelley together.” (It’s a sequence of over-the-shoulder shot/reverse shots. When Peter delivers his lines and listens to Shelley’s responses, Shelley’s lips can’t be seen forming her exact words and vice versa.)

  Harvey concurs with James Mason on the subject of Peter’s relationship with Kubrick, though without Mason’s tinge of jealousy: “They had great respect for one another and had a marvelous rapport.” As for Peter himself, says Harvey, “I liked him a lot, but he was a totally haunted fellow.”

  Kubrick was even more abrupt in one of his descriptions of Peter Sellers: “There is no such person.”

  • • •

  “He was the only actor I knew who could really improvise,” Kubrick once wrote. “Improvisation is something useful in rehearsal, to explore a role. But most actors, when they improvise, stray into a sort of repetitive hodgepodge which leads them down a dead end, while Sellers, by contrast—even when he wasn’t on form—after a time fell into the spirit of the character and just took off. It was miraculous.” The critic Janet Maslin once put it equally well: “Sellers could bring a musician’s improvisatory sense to a role, teasing and stretching a character until it took off in the free-flowing slip of a jazz riff.”

  But it took work, not only for Sellers but for Kubrick, who painstakingly had to lift his star out of his typical morning funk. “He would usually arrive walking very slowly and staring morosely,” Kubrick told Alexander Walker. “As the work progressed, he would begin to respond to something or other in the scene, his mood would visibly brighten, and we would begin to have fun. . . . On many of these occasions, I think, Peter reached what can only be described as a state of comic ecstasy.”

  Lolita builds the tortured skill Kubrick saw in Peter Sellers into its essential nature. The film begins with Humbert wandering through a decimated, Xanadu-like mansion—the Kane, not the Khan—full of empty bottles and glasses, cigarette stubs, torn paper, breakage, furniture covered with rumpled sheets. One of the sheets rustles. Peter’s head slumps out:

  HUMBERT: Are you Quilty?

  QUILTY: (in broad Long Island tones): No, I’m Spartacus. Ya come ta free the slaves er somethin’?

  He drapes the sheet over his shoulder like a toga. He’s hungover. And still drunk. Slurred words spill out: “Lissen lissen le’s have a game a li’l lovely game of Roman Ping-Pong like two civilized senators.” (He picks up a paddle and ball and hits one across the table at the mystified, appalled, murderous Humbert.) “Roman ping?” (Silence from Humbert, who fails to hit it back.) “You’re s’posed to say ‘Roman pong!’ ”

  Quilty adjourns to a chair and a leftover drink into which an anonymous partygoer has stubbed out an old smoke. “Quilty!” barks Humbert in exasperation. “I want you to concentrate. You’re going to die. Try and understand what is happening to you. . . . Think of what you did, Quilty, and think of what is happening to you now.”

  At which Quilty turns into a frontier spinster: “Heh heh! Say, tha’s a, tha’s a durlin’ little gun you got there! Tha’s a durlin’ li’l thing! How much a guy like you want for a durlin’ li’l gun like that?” As written, Quilty is what a later generation would call Humbert Humbert’s worst nightmare, but that phrase fails to capture the fact that even Humbert’s unconscious could never conjure up the black anarchy of a Goon.

  At the close of the scene Quilty stumbles
up the stairs and hides behind a massive portrait of an elegant woman. Humbert shoots it up. “Oh, that hurt,” says Quilty.

  An extended flashback follows, extending all the way to the film’s penultimate scene: Humbert arrives in mild Ramsdale, sees his nymphet sunbathing in the backyard of a possible lodging, and immediately moves in. Humbert marries the little sexpot’s mother, Charlotte, in order to remain close to the girl. Charlotte gets run over by a car. Humbert begins sleeping with Lolita and travels with her around the country, all the while being pursued by Lolita’s wraithlike suitor, Quilty, with whom she ultimately vanishes.

  In the novel, Quilty appears as in a haze. Nabokov inscribes him mainly in shadow form—wordplay, oblique references, appearances in absentia. In the film, he’s more present, but in nebulous, desultory ways. Peter Sellers is his perfect embodiment.

  He turns up at the high school dance wearing a pair of black-rimmed glasses—the kind that became a standard feature of Peter’s own early-sixties look—and performs a finger-snapping, eyebrow-arched Latin-lover dance with an evil-looking mystery woman (Vivian Darkbloom—an anagram of her creator). Only after Charlotte prompts him by whispering the details of their afternoon tryst in his ear does Quilty remember, whereupon a chipmunky beam dawns: “Did I do that? Did I? . . . Yes, really great fun, lissen, lissen, didn’t you, didn’t you have a daughter? Didn’t you have a daughter with a lovely name? Yeah, a lovely—what was it now?—a lovely lyrical lilting name like, uh—”