Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [199]
“I did it just to see a genius at work,” said Shirley MacLaine, explaining why she agreed to take what she called a supporting role at that stage of her spectacular career (The Trouble With Harry, 1955; The Apartment, 1960; Irma La Douce, 1963; Sweet Charity, 1969; The Turning Point, 1977). Still, MacLaine’s agent successfully played the bad cop in negotiations with Braunsberg, Ashby, and Lorimar and made sure that his client got her name above the title immediately below Peter’s. Jack Warden and Melvyn Douglas’s agents followed suit, so by the time everything was said, signed, printed, and screened, a total of four movie stars’ names preceded the words Being There in the opening credits.
Finally, in mid-January 1979, Peter Sellers began to make the film of his life. Literally, he thought.
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Being There is the story of a man named Chance, a mindless, nearly emotionless middle-aged fool forced by the death of his ancient benefactor to leave the mansion and small garden in which he has spent his life and, alone, to take to the streets, where, quickly, and luckily, he is hit by a limousine owned by the wife of one the richest men in the world, who doctors him, houses him, feeds him, and sets him up for superstardom.
MacLaine plays the wife, Eve Rand. Hal Ashby originally considered Laurence Olivier for the role of Eve’s dying husband, Benjamin Rand, but Lord Olivier turned it down. As Shirley MacLaine explained during the production, “I called Larry about it the other day. He didn’t like the idea of being in a film with me masturbating.” After briefly considering Burt Lancaster, Ashby ended up with Melvyn Douglas.
As for the role of Chance, Peter once explained facetiously that “Jerzy Kosinski wanted the part himself. That’s why he wrote it for a young man of Olympian, god-like beauty.” (In fact, Kosinski was a slight and rather rat-faced man—not ugly, but not Olympian either.) “I saw Chauncey Gardiner as a plump figure, pallid, unexercised from sitting around watching television. [Am I] too old? A lot of people said that. I just told them, ‘You’re wrong, I’m right.’ ”
Given the fact that Peter had spent most of the last decade trying to embody Chauncey Gardiner, it hurt to be told that he was now too old to play him. The face-lift helped. It eliminated the haggard quality that had begun to creep in with The Pink Panther Strikes Again. Owing to his heart condition and the lack of a sustainable treatment, Peter was fundamentally unhealthy, though he didn’t look it onscreen.
To create Chance’s voice, Peter said that he had, as usual, “messed around a long time with sounds. I have a whole sound set-up, and I spoke into a tape recorder and then listened. I compared one sound with another until I found the one I was happy with.” The result was a voice with “very clear enunciation, slightly American, with perhaps a little Stan Laurel mixed in.” David Lodge maintains that in Chance’s voice there’s a touch of Peter’s old, taciturn gardener from Chipperfield as well.
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Peter had been a problematic figure in the world of big-budget motion pictures for quite some time by the time Being There was filmed, and he required no small degree of personal handling, let alone public explanation. Andrew Braunsberg felt the need to make excuses for some of Peter’s recent (and not-so-recent) work, but Braunsberg handled the awkward issue deftly and accurately by saying simply that “he knows he’s done some junk, but everyone who makes a lot of films has.” (As if there was any doubt about Braunsberg’s theory, it is proven by Laurence Olivier’s Inchon, 1981, and Katharine Hepburn’s Olly Olly Oxen Free, 1978, to name only two of the hundreds of crummy films made by fine performers.) And his weirdness