Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (28 page)

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:

H
UMBERT:
Are you Quilty?

Q
UILTY:
(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—”

“Lolita!” Charlotte cries.

“Lolita, that’s right! Diminutive of Dolores, the tears and the roses. . . .”

Charlotte is thrilled. Overcome with excitement, she proclaims:
“Wednesday she’s going to have a cavity filled by your Uncle Ivor!”

Later, after Charlotte’s messy demise, Quilty accosts Humbert on the
porch of an old hotel. At once insinuating, nervous, bold, tic-y, sly, and
fast-talking, Peter’s Quilty threatens the paranoid Humbert by his ever-shifting and inexplicable demeanor, not to mention by his very presence,
which is more or less an absence, since Humbert has no idea who this man
is or what he wants.

In another scene, Humbert arrives at home and turns on the light.
There sits Peter: “Good eev’neeng, Doktor Humbardtz!”

Peter/Quilty has now turned into Dr. Zemf, “ze Beardsley High school
zychiatrist.” With hair greased back and yet another of Peter’s cherished
paste-on mustaches gracing his upper lip, the horrifying doctor describes
the troubled schoolgirl and her various neurotic symptoms: Lolita, he notes,
“chews gum, vehemently! All ze time she is chewing zis gum!” And she “has
private jokes of her own, vich no one understands so they can’t enjoy them
mit her!”

Backstage at Lolita’s play,
The Hunted Enchanters
(by Claire Quilty),
Quilty is seen fingering his camera and asking for film. But the anonymous
midnight caller in a still later scene is the one who really lets loose Humbert’s paranoia: “Uh, Professor, uh, tell me something—uh, with all this
traveling around you do, uh, you don’t get much time to, uh, see a psychiatrist, uh, regularly, is that right?” It’s Quilty’s (ab)normal voice, but
now it’s disembodied, and all the creepier for it.

Near the end, Lolita, poor, worn, Quilty-free, and pregnant by the
happy nobody to whom she is now married, writes to Humbert asking for
money to bail her out of debt. Humbert, not having seen or heard from
her since she took off with Quilty, tracks her down in her slummy house.
After fending off his pathetic advances, Lolita explains her original attraction to Quilty. There’s an eerie ring to her words, and not only because
she has screwed her own stepfather and he’s the stepfather in question:

“He wasn’t like you and me,” she explains to Humbert. “He wasn’t a
normal person. He was a genius. He had a kind of, um, beautiful Japanese-Oriental philosophy of life.” In her description of Quilty, one catches another fleeting glimpse of the comic cosmic.

• • •

With great fanfare and an excellent tagline—“How did they ever make a
movie of
Lolita
?”—the film was released in the United States on June 13,
1962, a year and a half after Peter shot his scenes. Notices were mixed.
“Whenever Sellers leaves, the life of the picture leaves with him,”
Time
opined. This was a most unfair assessment—Mason, Winters, and Lyon
are all superb—but it gives some indication of the impression Peter was
making at the time, not only on film screens, but in the buzzing press.
Lolita
’s reputation has grown considerably since then.

In January 1963, the important pre-Oscar jockeying season began with
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announcing Peter’s eligibility in the Best Actor category. For two reasons, James B. Harris tried
to convince the Academy to shift Sellers into the Best Supporting Actor
list. For one thing, Harris obviously wanted to avoid a head-to-head competition between Sellers and Mason. For another, Sellers had appeared in
only thirty-four minutes of the 154-minute
Lolita
. But the Academy refused
to budge. If Peter Sellers was to be nominated at all, it would be in the
category of Best Actor. Harris was, in his own word, “flabbergasted.” Sellers
was originally signed simply to do a cameo appearance, Harris told the
press, but “then we decided to take advantage of his name.” This, he explained, was the reason Sellers received star billing.