Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [200]
Peter kept to himself most of the time during the production. At Peter’s insistence, reporters were turned away left and right, although two—Mitchell Glazer of Rolling Stone and Todd McCarthy of Film Comment—were allowed to visit the set with the promise of interviews at a later time. Shirley MacLaine later wrote that she repeatedly invited Peter to lunch or dinner, but that he kept refusing, despite their shared interest in what Shirley herself itemized as “metaphysics, numerology, past lives, and astrology.” Peter himself said that “Shirley used to have a go at me for always going off into a corner. But I had to. I didn’t want to break my gardener for the day.”
On the other hand, Melvyn Douglas told of a more genial and social Peter. “Jack Warden and Peter Sellers are theatre raconteurs as well as wonderful actors,” Douglas later wrote in his autobiography. “The two of them hardly ever left the set. Shooting on their scenes would end and they would retire to another part of the room and go on telling stories, gesturing and laughing until tears ran down their faces.”
In early February, Peter was filming on location in Washington, D.C.—Chance wandering the streets of the ghetto; Chance walking down the median strip of a crowded artery, seemingly headed for the brilliantly lit Capitol. By mid-February, the cast and crew had moved to another location—Biltmore, a 10,000-acre estate owned by George W. Vanderbilt in Asheville, North Carolina. The producers made a point of setting aside one of the mansion’s vast rooms to serve as Peter’s dressing room, but Peter took one look at it and hurried back to his own trailer.
On Valentine’s Day, Peter sent Shirley five dozen red roses—anonymously, but she knew. Shirley thanked Peter for them, but he refused to acknowledge the gift.
• • •
“You’re always going to be a little boy, ain’t you?” says Louise, the black maid, as her parting words after the old man dies and leaves the helpless Chance to fend for himself. And so, to the tune of Eumir Deodato’s souped-up, synthesizer-ridden “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” the overgrown infant opens the front door for the first time in his life, closes it behind him, negotiates the few steps down to the sidewalk, and enters the world. Later that morning, when a young black gang leader pulls a knife on him, Chance responds by yanking his television remote control device out of his pocket, pointing it at the street tough, and trying to change channels to someone more pleasant.
In front of an electronics store, Chance stands dumbfounded before a big-screen TV that plays images of the sidewalk in front of it. He backs up in horrified confusion at finding himself to be a video image and is immediately hit by Eve Rand’s immense Cadillac. In the limousine’s backseat, Eve gives him a drink. Assuming that the liquid is water or some form of juice, Chance drinks alcohol for the first time and promptly chokes just as Eve asks him his name:
“Chance—achhkk—achkg—actgk’he gardner.”
“Chauncey Gardiner?”
Chance has a new name. “Are you related to Basil and Perdita Gardiner?” the luxurious Eve asks in a hopeful tone. “No,” Chance replies in the flat near-monotone that expresses the full extent of his emotional life. “I am not related to Basil and Perdita.”
It’s not that Chance has no affect. Sellers periodically knits the muscles of his forehead to create an expression of mild and regular bewilderment. Chance appears at those moments to think, but it is thinking without thoughts, a kind of vestigial reasoning that leads nowhere. He is a mental earlobe trying to be a fin. It’s not surprising that American audiences accepted the plot of Being There, in which an idiot becomes a national hero, for after all, they elected Ronald Reagan to the presidency the following year.
• • •
Ben Rand suffers