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Mason also offered a strange and unexpected detail in his autobiography: “Sellers told us that he did not enjoy improvising.” Mason tried to explain the remark: “I think that he was referring to the occasional necessity to think on his feet when giving a live performance. He was painstaking and meticulous in preparation.” This is a generous but unconvincing clarification. One has no doubt that Peter told his colleagues that he didn’t like to improvise. This was, after all, a man who told people he’d descended from Disraeli, and no doubt he believed what he said at the time. But what Peter expected to achieve from the remark nevertheless remains obscure. The only sense one can make of it is that Peter seems to have been developing an even greater need to confound—to prove to people who didn’t know him very well that, in fact, they didn’t know him at all.

• • •

With Shelley Winters, Peter found himself back in the baffling, excruciating land of Terry-Thomas and Jean Seberg. To his total horror, he discovered that Miss Winters tended to use a director’s calls for “camera!” and “action!” as the most convenient time in which to memorize her lines. Anthony Harvey faced the problem later in the editing room. “When we were shooting Lolita, Peter had a scene with Shelley Winters,” Harvey says. (Their only scene together, it’s set at Lolita’s high school dance, where the blowsy Charlotte reminds Quilty that she and the vague roue had screwed the year before.) “Stanley Kubrick made about sixty-five takes. Shelley didn’t know any of her lines at all. The first few takes, Peter was absolutely brilliant. And as it progressed, Shelley began to learn her lines, and Peter totally blew them, so that by take thirty-eight, or forty-eight, or whatever it was, when I got back to the cutting room, I had to cut take two of Peter and take forty of Shelley together.” (It’s a sequence of over-the-shoulder shot/reverse shots. When Peter delivers his lines and listens to Shelley’s responses, Shelley’s lips can’t be seen forming her exact words and vice versa.)

Harvey concurs with James Mason on the subject of Peter’s relationship with Kubrick, though without Mason’s tinge of jealousy: “They had great respect for one another and had a marvelous rapport.” As for Peter himself, says Harvey, “I liked him a lot, but he was a totally haunted fellow.”

Kubrick was even more abrupt in one of his descriptions of Peter Sellers: “There is no such person.”

• • •

“He was the only actor I knew who could really improvise,” Kubrick once wrote. “Improvisation is something useful in rehearsal, to explore a role. But most actors, when they improvise, stray into a sort of repetitive hodgepodge which leads them down a dead end, while Sellers, by contrast—even when he wasn’t on form—after a time fell into the spirit of the character and just took off. It was miraculous.” The critic Janet Maslin once put it equally well: “Sellers could bring a musician’s improvisatory sense to a role, teasing and stretching a character until it took off in the free-flowing slip of a jazz riff.”

But it took work, not only for Sellers but for Kubrick, who painstakingly had to lift his star out of his typical morning funk. “He would usually arrive walking very slowly and staring morosely,” Kubrick told Alexander Walker. “As the work progressed, he would begin to respond to something or other in the scene, his mood would visibly brighten, and we would begin to have fun. . . . On many of these occasions, I think, Peter reached what can only be described as a state of comic ecstasy.”

Lolita builds the tortured skill Kubrick saw in Peter Sellers into its essential nature. The film begins with Humbert wandering through a decimated, Xanadu-like mansion—the Kane, not the Khan—full of empty bottles and glasses, cigarette stubs, torn paper, breakage, furniture covered with rumpled sheets. One of the sheets rustles. Peter’s head slumps out:

HUMBERT: Are you Quilty?

QUILTY: (in broad Long