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By Root 1638 0

(Whether that someone was the satirist Jonathan Miller or the novelist Henry Green is disputed.) Peter, flush with excitement over finding a kindred worldview, began doling out copies as gifts to all of his friends. Kubrick was one of the recipients. Columbia Pictures, meanwhile, was certain that Lolita succeeded not because of Stanley Kubrick or James Mason or the film’s provocative topic, but because of Peter Sellers and his many masks, and when the studio assumed financial control of Dr. Strangelove, it stipulated that Peter not only star in the film but also that he appear in multiple roles. Kubrick got along well with Peter, but he was still annoyed at front-office interference in a decision he considered his alone. “What we are dealing with is film by fiat, film by frenzy!” he fumed.

Terry Southern, meanwhile, had learned that Peter had given a copy of The Magic Christian to Kubrick and suggested to his friend George Plimpton, editor of the Paris Review, that he, Southern, write a profile of Kubrick for the journal. Or Atlantic Monthly. Or maybe Esquire. . . . It was an enticing proposal—a great, hip writer profiling a great, hip director, and all three magazines expressed interest. Esquire ultimately assigned the piece.

Southern’s first interview with Kubrick began on a more or less standard track. But then, as Southern described it, “Somehow or other we get into this rather heavy rap—about death, and infinity, and the origin of time—you know the sort of thing. We never got through with the interview.” Something much better than a celebrity profile took its place: “We met a few times, had a few laughs and some groovy rap . . . and then about three months later he called from London and asked me to come over and work on Strangelove.” Southern said that Kubrick “had thought of the story as ‘a straightforward melodrama’ until . . . he ‘woke up and realized that nuclear war was too outrageous, too fantastic to be treated in any conventional manner.’ He said he could only see it now as ‘some kind of hideous joke.’ ”

Complicating matters was the fact that Peter refused to leave England for the duration of the production. Whether it was because of the tension of his divorce, which was finalized in March, or his latest affair—with the British actress and former child star Janette Scott—the result was that Peter wouldn’t budge out of Britain. Kubrick thus felt he had to go begging. He’s said to have shown up late at night in the lobby of Peter’s Hampstead apartment building, where he would simply wait for Peter to arrive from his nights on the town, whereupon the director would spend the early hours of the morning cajoling the partied-out movie star. Peter succumbed to the pressure, in addition to the million dollars (a most significant raise) and the promise to film at Shepperton. Peter also wangled himself a luxury suite in town at the Dorchester for the duration of the shoot. He liked to stay in town after work.

“To me it’s like having three different great actors,” Kubrick said in response to a Queen magazine reporter’s question about why he cast Sellers in multiple roles. But there was supposed to have been a fourth and maybe, if one believes Peter, even a fifth. Originally, Sellers was signed to play the President of the United States, Merkin Muffley; the British Group Captain Lionel Mandrake; the eponymous nuclear physicist; and Major T. J. “King” Kong, the whooping Texan who eventually straddles an atom bomb like a broncobuster at the end of the film. But in Sellers’s own account, he “was going to do them all!”

“Stanley was convinced I could. I could do no wrong, you see. Some days Stanley used to be sitting outside my front door saying, ‘What about Buck Schmuck Turgidson [the role played by George C. Scott]? You’ve got to play Buck Schmuck!’ And I’d say, ‘I physically can’t do it! I don’t like the role anyway, Stan. And I’ll try to do the [Kong] thing, but, I mean, I think that’s enough.’ ”

But there was a problem with Kong, too—one that made little sense at the time and makes even less in retrospect. The world