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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.

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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.