Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [111]
It is this that causes Peter Bull, standing to Peter’s right, to break out into unrestrained laughter. Kubrick found Peter’s raw spontaneity more important than a background actor’s giggle, so he used that take rather than reshooting it.
• • •
Dr. Strangelove ends with a miracle. Peter, as the brilliant but decrepit Strangelove, a technical genius but not a whole man, rises out of his wheelchair and hobbles stiffly across the shiny floor. It’s shot low-angle, like an aggrandizing ad for a crippled children’s hospital, except, of course, that the angle is aggrandizing a madman and the world is blowing up.
“Mein Fuehrer! I can walk!” Cue Vera Lynne as a montage of mushroom clouds fills the screen.
THIRTEEN
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat,
“or you wouldn’t have come here.”
The Hollywood gossip columnist and former actress Hedda Hopper had several items to report about Peter Sellers in 1963. Sarah and Michael had accompanied him on a trip to Hollywood in early summer, and he’d taken them to all three of the region’s major amusement parks—Disneyland, Marineland, and Knott’s Berry Farm. “The recently divorced Peter took out some glamour girls at night,” Hopper noted, “but he says it’s nothing serious.” Peter had become quite the swinging single, and he finally had the body to go with the image. He weighed 158 pounds, down from his all-time high of 210.
On the professional front, Hopper and others reported that a second Billy Wilder project had found its way onto Peter Sellers’s horizon. Wilder had purchased the rights to the Sherlock Holmes characters from the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle, the scribes revealed, and he planned to write and direct a new Holmes film. Peter O’Toole was to be Sherlock, Peter Sellers Watson.
He recorded a new comedy album, Fool Britannia, with Anthony Newley and Joan Collins; it was a warped-from-the-headlines satire of the Profumo sex scandal—involving John Profumo, the British Secretary of State for War; Eugene Ivanov, the Soviet Assistant Naval Attaché and spy; and Christine Keeler, the showgirl they shared—that rocked Britain that year.
The Telegoons arrived on British television in the fall of 1963—a puppet version of the radio series, with Peter, Harry, and Secombe providing the voices.
The director Jules Dassin offered him the lead role in his lavish heist comedy Topkapi, but when Peter learned that Maximilian Schell was being considered for the picture as well, he turned Dassin down. It makes little sense, but Schell and Sophia had costarred in a film already, and that apparently made Peter’s participation in Topkapi impossible. So Peter Ustinov took the role.
Robert Aldrich considered making a film version of Brouhaha, of all things—with Peter, perhaps needless to say, in the leading role—but production delays on Aldrich’s Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte stalled the project permanently.
The comedy writer S. J. Perelman met with Peter and Harvey Orkin, one of his several agents; Perelman tried to persuade Peter to play all of the major roles in a film version of his play The Beauty Part—Bert Lahr had played them onstage—but Peter seems not to have been interested, and the film was never made.
And the entertainment writer Joe Hyams told Elke Sommer that he had struck a deal with Peter to write his life story. But the deal fell apart and the book was never written.
• • •
In addition to the Los Angeles trip, Peter spirited his kids away on flash vacations, making up his mind suddenly and tearing into whatever new locale he’d chosen with a frenzy. As Bert Mortimer rather too colorfully put it, “for the first few days he’d rape the place.