Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [91]
Near the end, Lolita, poor, worn, Quilty-free, and pregnant by the happy nobody to whom she is now married, writes to Humbert asking for money to bail her out of debt. Humbert, not having seen or heard from her since she took off with Quilty, tracks her down in her slummy house. After fending off his pathetic advances, Lolita explains her original attraction to Quilty. There’s an eerie ring to her words, and not only because she has screwed her own stepfather and he’s the stepfather in question:
“He wasn’t like you and me,” she explains to Humbert. “He wasn’t a normal person. He was a genius. He had a kind of, um, beautiful Japanese-Oriental philosophy of life.” In her description of Quilty, one catches another fleeting glimpse of the comic cosmic.
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With great fanfare and an excellent tagline—“How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?”—the film was released in the United States on June 13, 1962, a year and a half after Peter shot his scenes. Notices were mixed. “Whenever Sellers leaves, the life of the picture leaves with him,” Time opined. This was a most unfair assessment—Mason, Winters, and Lyon are all superb—but it gives some indication of the impression Peter was making at the time, not only on film screens, but in the buzzing press. Lolita’s reputation has grown considerably since then.
In January 1963, the important pre-Oscar jockeying season began with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announcing Peter’s eligibility in the Best Actor category. For two reasons, James B. Harris tried to convince the Academy to shift Sellers into the Best Supporting Actor list. For one thing, Harris obviously wanted to avoid a head-to-head competition between Sellers and Mason. For another, Sellers had appeared in only thirty-four minutes of the 154-minute Lolita. But the Academy refused to budge. If Peter Sellers was to be nominated at all, it would be in the category of Best Actor. Harris was, in his own word, “flabbergasted.” Sellers was originally signed simply to do a cameo appearance, Harris told the press, but “then we decided to take advantage of his name.” This, he explained, was the reason Sellers received star billing.
The nominations themselves rendered the matter moot, for neither Sellers nor Mason was tapped for Best Actor. Gregory Peck won for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). Lolita’s sole nomination was for its adapted screenplay—Vladimir Nabokov was honored for writing words he hadn’t written, but it didn’t matter, because he lost to Horton Foote for To Kill a Mockingbird.
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On June 11, 1962, with Lolita on the brink of release, Peter Sellers addressed the University Indian Society at Cambridge. “I hope you did not all think I was going to be funny,” he announced, “because I am a uniquely unfunny person. I usually climb into a corner.” Bob Hope took a different point of view during the production of Peter’s next picture—Hope and Crosby’s The Road to Hong Kong (1962), in which Peter, uncredited, appeared in a five-minute cameo as a crank Indian neurologist. “Get rid of this man,” Hope had declared during the production. “He’s too funny.”
However amusing Hope found Sellers, the scene itself is singly unpleasant. In this, the seventh and final Road to . . . comedy (Bob and Bing had already trekked to Singapore, Zanzibar, Morocco, Utopia, Rio, and Bali), Bob loses his memory in a freak flying contraption accident, so Bing hustles him to “the most highly respected neurologist in India.” It’s Peter replaying Dr. Kabir as ghastly parody.
The dark-faced doctor examines Hope and groans repeatedly. “What is it, doctor?” Bing asks with alarm.