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Because of Peter’s long-standing need for a vocal model on which to hang his performance, Kubrick assigned a genuine Texan—Terry Southern, of Alvarado, Johnson County—the task of making a recording of Kong’s dialogue. Some time elapsed before Kubrick convinced Peter to listen to the tape, but Sellers eventually appeared for the requested hearing at Kubrick’s offices at Shepperton. At that point it was Kubrick’s turn to become nutty. When Peter “finally did show up,” Southern later wrote, “he had with him the latest state-of-the-art portable tape recorder, specially designed for learning languages. Its ultrasensitive earphones were so oversized they resembled some kind of eccentric hat or space headgear. From the office [Kubrick and Southern] would see Sellers pacing between the lilac bushes, script in hand, his face tiny and obscured beneath his earphones. Kubrick found it a disturbing image. ‘Is he kidding?’ he said. ‘That’s exactly the sort of thing that would bring some British heat down for weirdness.’

“I laughed,” Southern continued, “but he wasn’t joking. He phoned the production manager, Victor Lyndon, right away. ‘Listen, Victor,’ I heard him say, ‘you’d better check out Pete and those earphones. He may be stressing. . . . Well, I think he ought to cool it with the earphones. Yeah, it looks like he’s trying to ridicule the BBC or something, know what I’m saying? All we need is to get shut down for a crazy stunt like that. Jesus Christ!’ ” (In point of fact, Victor Lyndon was the associate producer of Dr. Strangelove; Clifton Brandon was the production manager.)

Peter tried to do the accent. According to Southern, the first day of shooting consisted of one of Kong’s B-52 bomber scenes, and Kubrick was pleased with the results of Peter’s performance. But the next day, Kubrick took a phone call from Victor Lyndon. Bad news. Peter had slipped while getting out of a Buick in front of an Indian restaurant on King’s Road. A sprained ankle was theorized.

Peter returned to the set that afternoon and filming resumed without incident, but after breaking for tea, Kubrick suddenly altered the shooting schedule. Without warning, he told Peter to climb down two separate ladders into the belly of the plane. Southern witnessed: “Sellers negotiated the first, but coming down the second, at about the fourth rung from the bottom, one of his legs abruptly buckled, and he tumbled and sprawled, in obvious pain, on the unforgiving bomb-bay floor.”

The next day Victor Lyndon was once again the bearer of bad tidings. Peter had not only seen his doctor, he’d made his injury known to the men who mattered: “The completion bond people know about Peter’s injury and the physical demands of the Major Kong role,” Lyndon reported. “They say they’ll pull out if he plays the part.”

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.”

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As though a satire about bombing all of humanity to death wasn