Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [155]
What he didn’t understand was that she was in character already. And unfortunately for Peter, her character was that of his mother. Clearly, she had her own idiosyncracies.
In the manner of a six-year-old, Peter tiptoed up to the side of the couch and whispered, in a little-boyish way, “Jo.” She didn’t respond. He repeated it: “Jo.” And again she didn’t respond. He tiptoed around to the other side of the couch and tried again. “Jo.” Then he blew up. “I hope you’re feeling better this morning!” he shouted.
“Oh, good morning, Peter,” Van Fleet said matter-of-factly.
As Ludwig puts it, “Peter vituperated.” It was all directed at an astonished Jo. She was awful in the picture, Peter declared to the room, over and over, and with increasing amplitude. She was ruining the whole film, he roared. And by the way, she was ruining everyone else’s morale, too.
“I realized he was talking about himself,” Ludwig observes.
Joyce Van Patten slipped quickly away in a successful effort to distance herself from the acrimony. But Hy Averback simply froze in place, as did Mazursky and everyone else. Peter kept on yelling for a full twenty minutes. No one made any attempt to calm Peter down, nor did anyone come to Jo Van Fleet’s defense.
“Peter?” Ludwig finally broke in. “Is there some grievance? Let’s go into your dressing room and talk about it.” “Yes,” Peter snapped. “It’s something very specific. It’s her general attitude!” And with that he marched off the set.
Ludwig began to follow him but was restrained from doing so on the grounds that Peter needed no further encouragement. “If you do this,” someone said, “he’ll get on his yacht and we’ll never see him again.”
Jo Van Fleet “went to pieces.” Distraught, she called her psychoanalyst and discussed it with him over the phone, after which she invited Ludwig to dinner that night and talked it through with him as well, at which point Mazursky telephoned and invited himself over for more conversation about Peter and his perceptions and what it all meant and what they were going to do about it. Mazursky expressed regret. “You did something I should have done,” he told Ludwig.
The problem was easily but awkwardly solved the following day. The scene was shot in two parts. Peter and Joyce Van Patten performed on one side of the soundstage, while Jo Van Fleet and Salem Ludwig performed on the other. The editor Robert C. Jones pieced it all together later. (In fact, there is a single shot of the four characters all in the same space; the rest is done in close-ups and two-shots.)
Sad to say, grudges were held. When I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! was about to open, Salem Ludwig was left conspicuously uninvited to the cast and crew screening. He called the production office and was told just to show up. He did so—and was promptly snubbed by Paul Mazursky.
Sellers went on to bad-mouth the film in the press. “You should have seen it before they got at it. . . . They set up this marvelous Jewish wedding ceremony and at the last moment they lost their nerve and dubbed the rabbi into English! Now if the audience hadn’t gathered by then that he was a rabbi speaking Hebrew, I don’t see that there’s much hope for the human race.” (In fact, the brief shot of the rabbi’s lips moving proves that indeed Warner Bros. did embrace the lowest common denominator by overdubbing Hebrew into English.)
A more outlandish complaint came much later, in 1980, when Peter expressed what appeared to be his long-standing outrage in a Rolling Stone profile:
“I wish you’d seen the original one with the interviews with Allen Ginsberg and Tim Leary. Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker and myself, we got into the lab at night and we cut the film. Can you believe it? We bribed the guard, we spent all night with an editor, and when the schmucks came in the following