Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [85]
Forbes finished his script in April 1960, after which casting began. The beautiful Mai Zetterling was chosen for the bombshell role, Virginia Maskell for the plainer, warmer wife. Peter’s friend Kenneth Griffith took the role of the other librarian, the one with whom Peter vies for a promotion. (The bombshell, whose husband chairs the library board, uses this potential promotion as leverage to get Peter’s character into the sack.) Graham Stark came along, too; his was the small role of a dirty-minded library patron clad in an even filthier raincoat.
Griffith had experienced Peter’s preparatory method before: “On a film job—always, I think—he’d agree to do it, he would sign the contract, and then inevitably he would say, ‘Kenny, I can’t do it, I can’t.’ On this occasion, he said to me about three weeks before we started filming, ‘Kenny, I can’t be a Welshman. I can’t do it. I’m sorry, because I would like to have done it with you.’ He was serious. So I said to him, ‘Look, Pete, why don’t we go down to Wales right away and I’ll introduce you to a number of Welshmen who, I think, could be like the character you’re playing.’
“ ‘That’s a good idea.’ ”
Bert whisked them to Wales in a Rolls. First Griffith introduced Peter to his friend the poet (and crony of Dylan Thomas) John Ormond, but Peter wasn’t especially inspired. “The next one on my list was John Pike, a close friend of mine who was a newsreel cameraman. The moment Sellers saw Pike all his problems were over. A brilliant impersonation of John Pike is what you’re seeing.” (Griffith digresses: “John was sent by the BBC to the war in Vietnam. The effect over there. . . . He had a nervous breakdown. Killed him. Drink.”)
• • •
A few weeks later, with shooting about to commence, Sellers and Griffith returned to Wales, this time along with the rest of the company. There was an immediate flap over the hotel.
“He expected me to stay wherever he stayed, which I didn’t mind,” says Griffith. “Swansea was the town they got. They’ve got pretty substantial hotels there now—it’s changed. [Then] it was just tidied up from the wreckage after the war and that was about it. The best hotel was the hotel at the railway station. That’s where we were both going to stay. Suddenly I could hear some disagreement between Sellers and the manageress. He said, ‘Mr. Griffith and I can’t stay here.’ She said, ‘Why not?’ He said, ‘It’s claustrophobic.’ So he drags me in and he says, ‘Kenny we can’t stay here—I’m not going to let you stay here. We’ll go down and see Launder and Gilliat and tell them.’
“I didn’t want to. He had money in the film—he was helping to finance it—so it was easy for him. But I, you know, I’m not fussy, and I remember trying to hide behind him. He said [to Launder and Gilliat], ‘Kenny and I—we can’t stay there,’ and I said, ‘Oh, shit.’ And indeed, we moved out to a seaside hotel at Porthcawl [about fifteen miles down the coast to the east]. It was a real old boardinghouse, but he liked it.”
Kingsley Amis put it more curtly in his Memoirs: Peter “buggered off down the coast to Porthcawl and what proved to be a measurably worse hotel.”
Then came the costar crisis. It occurred quite early in the shoot. Virginia Maskell had filmed but a single scene, when:
Roy Boulting: “[Peter] was on vacation making Only Two Can Play, and he had as his wife in the film a young actress called Virginia Maskell. Her talent had already been noted by the critics, and I think she had a very promising future. Well, for whatever reason—and I have my own suspicion as to what the reason was—Peter Sellers took agin’ her.”
Sidney