Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [65]
The clairvoyant in question was Maurice Woodruff, a nationally syndicated columnist of the old Jeanne Dixon school. In short, Woodruff was a showman and a fraud. Peter began to rely on him.
Peter had been superstitious since at least his teens. Later on, he added a bit of paranoia; his postwar girlfriend Hilda Parkin states that he used to insist “that ‘mad mullahs’ haunted him whenever he slept in a certain four-poster bed in one of my relatives’ homes in Peterborough.” Now he turned to a syndicated soothsayer.
“He would live, die, and breathe by Maurice Woodruff,” the director Bryan Forbes declares. “He wouldn’t take a foot outside the house unless he’d spoken to Maurice.” Woodruff had seen his mark.
In Graham Stark’s view, Woodruff “clung like a leech.”
• • •
The Mouse That Roared is a satirical comedy. The Grand Duchy of Fenwick has fallen on hard times. To extract foreign aid from the Americans, the Prime Minister concocts a war with the United States. The express purpose is to lose immediately and reap thereafter the benefits of Marshall Plan–like foreign aid.
At first, Shenson only considered Peter for the role of Tully Bascombe, the bland and well-meaning gamekeeper who leads the Fenwick forces against the United States—and wins. But another Columbia executive mentioned the idea of Peter playing two supporting roles as well, and despite Peter’s later claim that he resisted the notion, he told Shenson at the time that he knew he could play all three: Tully; Prime Minister Mountjoy, a goateed aristocrat; and the Grand Duchess Gloriana XII, a full-figured regent. As it happened, Sellers was least comfortable playing Tully, the role he’d originally been offered and the most lifelike of the three: “I don’t quite have a handle on the leading guy,” he confessed, “but we’ll come up with something.”
Whether because of the original benevolent augury or simple good will, Peter caused no trouble during the production of The Mouse That Roared. “He got along with everybody,” Walter Shenson said. “I think he liked the idea of working for Americans.” Peter’s costar, Jean Seberg, later told a reporter that “to work with him is to love him. He’s angelic.”
The film’s director, Jack Arnold, described him in somewhat more detail: “Peter was a marvelous improvisational actor, brilliant if you got him on the first take. The second take would be good, but after the third take he could be really awful. If he had to repeat the same words too many times they became meaningless. But it was such a joy to work with Peter because he was such an inspired actor. Sometimes he would literally knock me off my feet. I’d fall down convulsed with laughter.”
With Peter having to rush back to the Aldwych nearly every evening to star in Brouhaha, filming of The Mouse That Roared began in mid-October with three weeks on location in Surrey and on the Channel coast. The production moved on to Shepperton sound stages on November 10. Despite the general goodwill on the set, Arnold described the first day of shooting as being somewhat tense, owing to the seemingly countless takes it took Jean Seberg to get her lines right. Seberg was used to being directed, at times to the point of browbeating, by Otto Preminger, for whom she had starred in two dramas, Saint Joan and Bonjour Tristesse (both 1957). (Seberg was only seventeen when Preminger cast her in Saint Joan, her first film.) The Mouse That Roared, however, was a comedy, the director wasn’t a tyrant, and Seberg was consequently cut adrift from her method. According to Arnold, “By take twenty-five Peter didn’t know what he was saying either. He was just spouting gibberish. I could see he was really getting crazy.”
Seberg’s need for multiple takes