Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (4 page)

“See,” Peter continued, “my mum very much wanted me to go into
the theatre.” So that is what he did.

Through the nepotism of Stanley Parkin, a family friend who operated
an Ilfracombe theater and hired Peg’s brother to work there, Pete got his
first job: janitor at ten shillings per week. Promotions followed, as suited
an adolescent: box office clerk and usher; assistant stage manager and lighting operator; and, eventually, actor, though as he told Parkinson, only in
bit parts “like (officious servant voice) ‘Your carriage is without!’ or (decrepit
old man voice) ‘Hello!’ or something like this—minor niddly tiddly poo
things.”

Because of the upswing in touring companies during the war, young
Pete also got a glimpse or two of real theater. Ilfracombe was hardly comparable to the prewar West End (and there seem to have been no fond
memories of Peg ever having taken him to see plays in London), but instead
of the carnival acts he witnessed during his early childhood with Ray Brothers, Ltd., Sellers’s backstage jobs in Ilfracombe earned him the chance to
see a few sophisticated actors playing complex parts: “I saw some very famous actors come to that theatre—Paul Scofield was one in
Night Must
Fall
with Mary Clare.”

Somehow he made a new friend. When his uncle and Stanley Parkin
hired him to work in the theater, they also brought in a boy named Derek
Altman, with whom Pete launched his first stage act. They called themselves
Altman and Sellers; they played ukuleles and sang and told jokes. Despite
winning first prize in a weekly talent show—a cynic might conclude that
their jobs as ushers and box office staff at Pete’s uncle’s theater played some
role in this triumph—the duo soon disbanded. During this time, Pete and
Derek, having developed a fondness for the novels of Dashiell Hammett,
were also inspired to found their own detective agency and even had business cards printed to that effect. An unfortunate incident put a quick end
to the enterprise: a humorless adult reached over and ripped Pete’s fake
mustache off his lip.

• • •

When a swing band turned up at the theater for a weeklong gig, Pete
discovered a new talent. He’d heard drums before, of course, but he’d never
had the chance to create all that rhythmic racket himself, so one afternoon,
when he found a set of drums onstage for Joe Daniels and His Hot Shots,
Pete let loose. The bandleader/drummer caught him mid-act. Daniels
wasn’t angry. Appreciating the teenager’s enthusiasm and nascent talent, he
ended up giving Pete pointers for the rest of the week, after which Pete
begged his parents for drums and steady lessons. Unable to resist his whims
let alone his wants, they came through.

Drumming suited him. Banging in time, Pete could envelope himself
in a world of near-total abstraction, all in the context of a great deal of
noise. What aggression he felt as an awkward fat kid could be expelled, at
least in part, by methodically hitting things, all in a socially respectable and
even artistic manner—one that might eventually pay off at that, though
drummers’ lowly status in the music world tended to be fodder for jokes.
(Did you hear about the drummer who graduated from high school? Me
neither.)

Jokes aside, Peg was pleased by Pete’s enthusiasm for a performing art.
Bill went along.

• • •

At the time, whole city blocks across Britain were turning to dust. In a
single ten-hour period in mid-November 1940, German warplanes dropped
hundreds of tons of bombs on the medieval city-center of Coventry, effectively flattening it. The Germans coined a new verb:
to Coventrate
, meaning
to devastate the psychological as well as the physical heart of a population.
London was so immense that despite hundreds of thousands of bombs
raining down on its head it could not be thoroughly obliterated, at least
not with the technology available at the time. But Bristol could—and was.
(Bristol is about eighty miles away from Ilfracombe as the crow, or German
warplane, flies.) So were Birmingham and Southampton. By the beginning
of 1941, the people of Britain were taking a sustained hit of the sort that
Americans had never experienced in their own land, and the aftershocks of
their direct experience of war continued to rumble in the British psyche for
many years to come.

Relatively safe in Ilfracombe, Pete turned sixteen in September 1941.
In addition to girls, he was developing an interest in communication with
the dead. He began turning to the clairvoyant mother of a friend for cheer
and solace when the radio wasn’t enough. For whatever reasons, disembodied voices spoke to Pete as meaningfully as those that were attached to
people close at hand, if not more so. He believed in them.

Meanwhile, the radio show
It’s That Man Again
(
ITMA
for short) had
become an even bigger hit, and even more exciting to Peter. One writer
has gone so far as to claim that Tommy Handley was “probably the most
popular man in the country after Churchill.” (“That Man,” by the way,
wasn’t Handley; it was Hitler.) Along with
Monday Night at Eight
,
ITMA
was the BBC’s attempt to infuse its more steadfast offerings with fast-paced,
American-style patter. According to the historian Asa Briggs, “
ITMA
was
vox mundi
, rich in all the sounds of war and with more invented characters
than Walt Disney.” Pete Sellers of Ilfracombe found it inspiring.

• • •

Given his bedrock peculiarities, one of the most unexpected aspects of Peter
Sellers’s life is his extraordinary talent for sexual seduction. It began in
earnest in Ilfracombe. His scores weren’t just the bravado of a deficient
adult embellishing his youthful conquests. That Sellers went on to enjoy a
rampant sex life with some of the world’s most gorgeous women suggests
that he really did have something going for him and that women responded
to it. Still, even he admitted that his early dates were the product of desperate pretense. Believing that the real Peter Sellers wasn’t much of anything, Pete told the girls that he was a talent agent who’d dropped in on
Ilfracombe to scout for future stars. “I’d take the girls out to Bull’s Point,
opposite the lighthouse,” he fondly remembered, “and get them to audition
for me—songs, patter, dances. The ones who ‘won’ were generally those
with the most talent for being friendly.” These performances filled the ever-expanding subdivisions of his personality: “I enjoyed the impersonation for
the feeling of power it gave me. Nobody paid that kind of attention to Pete
Sellers.”

Remarkably, the fake talent agent persona itself wasn’t enough to suit
him, so Sellers accomplished these missions of love while wearing a trenchcoat in imitation of Humphrey Bogart, a hat like William Powell’s, and
even the beloved paste-on mustache to make him look a little more like
Clark Gable, all in addition to the now-standard Robert Donat voice. These
overlapping disguises testify to the lengths Peter Sellers went to deny who
he was—or wasn’t.

• • •

It was 1943, the grim middle of the war, and Pete was approaching the age
of conscription. The Irish-born wartime novelist Elizabeth Bowen described
the country’s mood that year: “Every day the news hammered one more
nail into a consciousness which no longer resounded. Everywhere hung the
heaviness of the even worse you could not be told and could not desire to
hear. This was the lightless middle of the tunnel.”

Bill Sellers, being rather at home in a murk with no end in sight, took
one of the most decisive actions of his life. With his son turning into a
talented drummer, Bill formed a quartet, with Pete on percussion. At first
they played only in North Devon, but gigs followed further afield, and by
summertime they were all the way up in Lytham St. Annes on the coast of
Lancashire. Bill, whose confidence in Peter’s future had once been shaky,
grew fond of the kid’s drumming: “He proved a wizard at it,” Bill later
said. To enhance the boy’s reputation, Bill had business cards printed, citing
Pete’s profession as “Young Ultra-Modern Swing Drummer and Uke Entertainer.” This burst of confidence on Bill’s part leads to unanswerable
questions: Was Bill’s lack of confidence in Peter’s abilities actually invented
by Peter out of resentment for Bill’s frequent absences, or out of loyalty to
his darling mother, or simply out of a mischievous desire to embellish a
frankly conventional father-to-son chastisement into a weightier tale of Peter’s victimization?

No one knows, but the cards appear to have worked, perhaps too well,
for soon Pete was heading out on his own. He took a job with a band from
Blackpool farther up the coast. Peg was not happy. His band having broken
up upon the drummer’s departure, Bill joined the Entertainments National
Service Association. ENSA had been founded at the start of the war as a
network of morale-boosting, ever-touring diversions for soldiers and factory
workers. ENSA’s mandate was to bring entertainment not only to workers
and servicemen within Great Britain but to British workers and servicemen
anywhere in the world—a global music hall. By the war’s end more than
four out of every five British actors, musicians, costumers, comedians, stage
managers, acrobats, and clowns had found employment, however temporary, with ENSA. It’s an impressive statistic as statistics go, but what it
really reflects is the extent to which the British entertainment barrel’s wartime bottom had to be scraped. For every great ENSA discovery—Terry-Thomas, Tony Hancock—and every popular ENSA star—Sybil
Thorndike, George Formby, Gracie Fields—there were at least six essentially talentless washouts who would never have been allowed onstage had
dire conditions not demanded it. For them, World War II was an employment bonanza. “We had to endure them once a month—and endure it
was,” one Surrey factory worker shuddered when recalling those compulsory
amateur hours.

Bill Sellers was in the middle range—a proficient musician who was
able to provide his audience with a bit of relief from the tedium of military
drills or assembly-line monotony. He assembled still another band, largely
from the old band, but with one addition: the ukulele master George
Formby being occupied on the top tier of ENSA, Bill settled for George’s
sister Ethel, a singer who also liked to do a Gracie Fields–like Lancashire-accent comedy routine. Peg, searching for a reason to bring Pete back into
the family fold, convinced Bill to get Pete an ENSA job as well.

Pete himself was successfully bribed by the promise of a set of flashy
new £200 drums. “They were the finest,” Peg told Alexander Walker in the
1960s. “They had to be! Pete wouldn’t have looked at them if they hadn’t
been. With Pete, everything had to be perfect or it wasn’t for him. And
what Pete wanted, Pete got.”

• • •

In Taunton he got a girl. As it does for most young men, this triumph,
Pete’s first home run, took a blend of luck and engineering. But in Pete’s
case there was an added complication: Peg often accompanied her son and
husband on their ENSA tours. According to one fellow ENSA trouper, Peg
actually went so far as to sleep in Pete’s room with him, leaving Bill to find
a bed somewhere else. But when Bill and Pete set up the band in Taunton,
Peg stayed at home, fifty long miles away in Ilfracombe.

They were billeted, along with some ENSA showgirls, in a funeral
parlor. This made more sense than it may seem at first, since the mortician
happened to serve as the local ENSA manager, but still, it was something
out of a macabre vaudeville sketch. The doorbell rings, an ENSA trouper
answers it, and finds a corpse on the other side of the threshold.

One of the girls was particularly unnerved by the whole experience and
found it difficult to sleep with dead people in the house. She confessed her
fears to Pete and maternally told him that if he, too, became frightened, he
could always join her in her room for solace and support. He took her up
on it.

“It was absolutely irresistible,” Sellers later declared. “Although I was
still pretty young, I was no stranger to the charms of girls. But I’d never
had an invitation issued to me in such plausible circumstances. So one night,
in pajamas and dressing gown, and armed to the teeth with Robert Donat
accents, I found my way along to the girls’ room. Feigning fear, and trembling with what I hoped she’d think was fright, I got into bed with her.
The only mistake I made was that I didn’t take off a stitch in advance—it
was a far from ideal state for impetuous lovemaking.”

Peter Sellers was no longer a virgin. Quickly thereafter he was no longer
an ENSA trouper, either, Bill having discovered his son’s sexual success.
He dispatched the boy back to Peg.

But drumming had sparked Pete’s ambition to the point that even Peg
Sellers was forced to contend with the fact that her son couldn’t simply
stay with her forever doing nothing, and soon he was playing gigs with the
broadcast bandleaders Oscar Rabin and Henry Hall. Finding work outside
of ENSA wasn’t terribly difficult at the time, given the scarcity of musicians
during the war. But sometimes he had to take what was available, no matter
what. Thus, Waldini and His Gypsy Band—an elderly Welshman and a
group of Brits with bandanas on their heads. “Waldini” was no master
musician, but he was even worse at finding his way from town to town;
getting lost seems to have been one of Waldini’s greatest talents. One day,
directionless in the middle of a Lancashire nowhere, Pete decided he’d had
enough and returned again to Peg.

For Peter Sellers, these back-and-forth shuttlings were his first negotiation between the absolute dependence of childhood and the relative autonomy of young adulthood. All adolescents go through it. But in Sellers’s
case, his fledgling freedom was doubly crippled by the vacuum that passed
for a core self—his ego was made up of multiplying electrons soaring around
no nucleus—and a dependence on his mother that verged on obscenity.
(Unlike Freud’s version of the Oedipus myth, Peter never had to challenge
his father for his mother’s affections because Bill was figuratively impotent
already.) The overgrown boy was turning into an undergrown man, with
ludicrous results. At one point he landed in Brighton and took a job at a
movie theater. He called Peg one day on the telephone and announced that
he had proposed to his landlady’s daughter the night before and was now
compelled to follow through. Outraged and panicking, Peg and her entourage—Bill, Auntie Ve, and Auntie Cissie—sped to Brighton and yanked
him home, whereupon he took a job in a circus and proposed to a girl from
the sideshow.