Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (34 page)

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.”

“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 singsong 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.