Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [113]
(Just to note: Nunnally Johnson’s credits include the adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, 1940, for John Ford; Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window, 1944; and The Three Faces of Eve, 1959, which he directed. George Roy Hill went on to direct such hits as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969, and The Sting, 1973. And Oscar Levant was not from Brooklyn; he was from Pittsburgh.)
Nora Johnson’s initial reaction to Peter’s performance was to be “jarred to the roots,” though when she saw Henry Orient again many years later, she was “no longer jarred . . . it had somehow blended like old wine.”
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During a location shoot on East 64th Street, the cameras and klieg lights drew a crowd. A New York City cop grew so weary of the many bystanders asking him what they were filming that he told one, “Guadalcanal Diary, lady.”
For the most part, Peter remained serenely above the fray in his trailer drinking vodka and tonics and waiting to be called. He took the opportunity to show off his wardrobe for a reporter: the bright red lining of Orient’s houndstooth jacket, his gold karate pants, his opera cape, his blue, custom-made Tillinger shirts with the initials HO embroidered on the cuffs. “This role will do great things for my image,” Peter remarked.
Although Sellers brings star power to The World of Henry Orient, his role is surprisingly small. The Johnsons’ script originally contained a strange coda: Henry ends up playing the piano in a whorehouse. It had been written, in Nunnally Johnson’s words, in case “more exposure was needed to keep Sellers happy.” But George Roy Hill excised it from the script before filming even began. But even with the coda the film would still have belonged to the two girls; the primary story would have remained theirs. Henry himself provides only a subplot.
Still, perhaps as part of the predictable backlash against a prolific star, many reviewers made a point of claiming that Merrie Spaeth and Tippy Walker “steal” the film away from Peter, who, owing to the script itself, had already ceded it to them. What with his accent and disagreeable character, it’s a strange, high stakes–gambling performance on Peter’s part, a fact the director didn’t seem to respect enough. George Roy Hill told the press when the film was released in February 1964, that “Sellers, for all his experience, actually comes off second best now and then due to these two kids,” an attitude that scarcely endeared him to Peter, who flatly refused to work with him ever again.
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Peter’s offscreen life during the production of The World of Henry Orient featured its own sad little comedy or two. Shortly after arriving in New York, Peter received a fan letter. It was from a blond girl. She enclosed a close-up of herself along with her note, and Peter quickly contacted her and invited her to join him.
Peter accompanied Bert and Hattie to the airport to pick her up, but just before she stepped off the plane he made sure to hide himself behind a pillar so he could give the thumbs-up (or -down) signal to his factotums. The fat girl emerged and was instantly vetoed.
He couldn’t very well send her back on the next plane, could he? So Bert and Hattie took her to a hotel in midtown Manhattan—though emphatically not the Plaza, which was where he was staying. They kept her sequestered there for a few days before telling her that, really, she might think about shedding a few pounds before meeting Mr. Sellers. Then Peter telephoned her himself and advised her of what he considered to be an acceptable weight, all this while attempting—and failing—to romance his happily married costar, Angela Lansbury, who plays the mother of one of the girls.
For three weeks he