Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [86]
Peter took the matter to the heads of the studio.
Roy Boulting: “He phoned John and myself and said, ‘Look, this girl is worse than useless. She will ruin the film. Will you get on to Sidney Gilliat and tell him that he must recast another actress immediately!’ ” Boulting, who had worked with Maskell on another film (Happy Is the Bride, 1958), refused to do it. “We had to very gently tell Peter that he should get on with his acting and leave the judgment of performance to his director,” he later explained.
Sidney Gilliat finishes the story: “Rather ironically, she was nominated by the British film academy as Best Actress, and Peter wasn’t nominated for anything.”
During the filming, Peter took his harmless revenge not against Maskell but against the Boultings—not in person, of course, but behind their backs. Kenneth Griffith was in on the private joke: “Now, in the morning to get to work I would sit with Peter in the back of the Rolls, which was driven by Bert. It was at least a thirty-minute journey into Swansea. Peter wouldn’t know how to talk about this, that, or the other, or he could be stumbling, or he could be depressed . . . but suddenly it’s John Boulting talking! If you didn’t look you wouldn’t know it wasn’t John Boulting. Now [the Boultings were] very, very broad, general, not very intelligent but very well educated, and Peter would speak to me as John, using John’s vocabulary and John’s point of view, none of which had anything to do with Sellers. It was hoped that I would reply as Roy. Which I did.”
The impersonations hardly stopped with the Boulting brothers. Peter enjoyed playing with people.
Griffith: “He said at the end of one day, ‘Kenny—you being Welsh, you know the best restaurants here in Swansea.’ I said, ‘I don’t really, Pete—I don’t spend much time here.’ And then I remembered a very simple little lino’d-floor Chinese restaurant and I thought the food was good there. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘That’s a good idea. I like Chinese food.’
“So we got Bert and the Rolls and we went there. It was little, very clean, very nice, but not even any Chinese nonsense hanging about—just a little place with Chinese food. We got seated there, Bert, Peter and I, and in came two big steelworkers, youngsters, big thugs—oh, they might have been miners—but they were big tough Welsh guys with their girlfriends, and you could hear everything that anyone said, and one of the girls said, ‘Hey—those two are on telly. Peter Sellers! On telly!’ One of the fellows said, ‘Don’t be bloody daft, what do you mean “on telly”?’ She said, ‘Who in the hell do you think they are?’
“Anyway, he got up and trundled over to us and says, ‘Yeah, my girlfriend is bloody daft, she says you two are on telly. Peter Sellers!’ Sellers answered him with a Welsh accent: ‘Oh no, no, no, no,’ he said, ‘no, Mr. Jones here and myself are on the staff of the steelworks, no, no, no. Come to think of it,’ he said—I was thinking, ‘Shit, let’s run away!,’ and there he was, playing!—‘no, no, come to think of it, when the Queen opened the big wing at the steelworks, well, Mr. Jones here and myself were present, and though I didn’t have the privilege of seeing it myself we have been told that when the camera tracked along we were distinctly seen.’
“He bought it. He trundled back to his table: ‘Yeah, yeah, I told you—bloody nonsense. They’re both with the steelworks.’ ”
• • •
Peter and Kingsley Amis, who was there for at least some of the production, successfully embarrassed themselves in the eyes of the cast and crew with an ongoing contest of dirty wit; it was a battle of obscene jokes between two able warriors, but their spectators were merely disgusted at the competition. Moreover, Amis himself was under the impression