Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (6 page)

• • •

Europe was in unimaginable ruins when World War II ended in 1945.
Thousands of acres in the heart of British cities had been reduced to rubble—and Britain had
won
the war.

There wasn’t enough food, or clothing, or fuel, and these shortages
lasted for years. British soldiers, eager to return home from abroad once
their enemies had surrendered, were nevertheless compelled to await demobilization on the British military’s terms. Since the defeated Germans
had to be policed by Allied troops, there were still thousands of British
airmen in need of light entertainment. Peter remained in the RAF.

Sellers and Lodge were stationed in a decimated Germany when the
officer impersonations kicked up again. “We were based up on the third
floor of a big barrack block” in a former Luftwaffe camp in Gütersloh,
Lodge remembers. A trace of shock is still left in his voice after all these
years. “Out came the makeup box,” whereupon Sellers morphed before his
eyes into a classical sort of British military man with “a full handlebar
mustache, parted hair, lieutenant’s bars, wings, and ribbons.” Lodge,
amazed and appalled at his friend’s absolute transformation, asked Sellers
where he thought he was going, to which Sellers replied—in a voice unearthed from some forgotten Boer War epic—“I think I’m going to inspect
the lads downstairs!”

With the air of a bureaucratic missionary or a sort of military uncle,
Peter proceeded to question the boys about the quality of their quarters,
their supplies, their food, all with an air of deep concern. Returning to his
quarters, he simply couldn’t understand Lodge’s panicky attitude. “Now
they really believe somebody cares about them!” Sellers explained sympathetically.

In telling these tales, Lodge stresses that Sellers still had the lowest
possible rank. “He did it because he didn’t like himself as he was,” Lodge
says. “He didn’t think he was attractive at all. And he didn’t like being a
nobody.”

There was an infantile streak as well. Lodge tells of sitting in a Paris
patisserie with Peter when a tray of cream cakes was set before them: “Very
deliberately, Peter took a single bite out of every pastry on it—he was like
an immature, undisciplined child who must cram himself with as much
satisfaction as he can as quickly as he can.”

As far as the chaperoning of Peter was concerned, David Lodge turned
out to be a corrupt nanny. He and Pete were males in their twenties; they
liked to cat around. In fact, in Cannes they managed to procure some
champagne to go with a couple of girls, and everyone got so plastered that
the boys creatively talked the girls into crawling around the floor pretending
to be feline.

In Toulon, Lodge took it upon himself to rescue Peter from an especially low-life prostititute. Peter had had too much to drink and disappeared. Lodge managed to trace him to a seedy apartment in a bad part of
town and burst in to find Peter trying to remove his pants. Fearing for his
friend’s safety, he grabbed the disappointed Sellers and sped him away.

Women, says Lodge, were particularly easy in Germany. Much to his
retrospective shame, the pretty young German girls were helpfully starving,
which led the two randy young men to use cookies as bait. (“It was really
pathetic,” Lodge mutters.) Lodge was—and remains—especially disgusted
by Pete’s voraciousness with one particular girl, describing her as “desperate”
and Sellers himself as “animalistic.” There was a comical retribution,
though, when Pete got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom
and chose the wrong door in the dark. Wearing nothing but his RAF
underwear, he plunged directly out into the street. The door locked behind
him, and he had to pound on it furiously to be let back in.

Lodge remembers spending Christmas 1945 with Sellers on the
Champs-Elysees. It was a merry time. The war was over, the Allied soldiers
were gleeful, and all was right with the world, except that Pete, always on
the needy side, had grown a little too dependent on his best friend. When
they had to part, having been sent on different entertainment tours, Sellers
fell into lonely despair. “I left him in Germany on the Danish border,” says
Lodge. “He was crying.”

• • •

Sellers was back in London working at the Air Ministry on Sloane Square
and killing time at the Gang Show headquarters on Houghton Street when
his term of service with the RAF ended. He had already returned home to
his mother, who somehow managed to reward his survival with a big, new,
shiny black American car.

Peg was always adept at pulling money out of a hat, but it took special
skill to produce
any
car, let alone a huge American model. It was easy for
Peter to park the gleaming heap on any reduced-scale London lane because,
apart from the strict gasoline rationing that was still in force, the deprivations of postwar England meant that there were precious few competitors
for spots. It was in this car-poor context that Graham Stark, a Gang Show
sergeant, arrived at the entertainment unit’s headquarters on slim, curving
Houghton Street one day and was flabbergasted to see a lowly airman methodically polishing a car so big that it appeared to be a limousine. “The
whole thing had an air of a sequence from a Hitchcock movie,” Stark
writes, “the empty street, the incongruous car, the lone airman silently
polishing.”

Curious, Stark struck up a conversation with the airman, who boasted
that it “only does fourteen to the gallon, but you’ve got to admit it’s a right
beauty.” (“No concern with petrol rationing, no concern that I was a sergeant,” Stark notes. “He just wasn’t impressed.”) They ended up going out
for some tea and war stories, including tales of Peter’s life in the theater,
after which Peter inquired about the state of his new friend’s lodgings. Stark
had to confess that he was staying in a one-shilling-a-night flophouse. Peter
was appalled.

After a quick call to Peg, he put Stark in the newly polished car and
sped him back to East Finchley, where Sellers brought the family’s initially
skeptical landlady nearly to tears by a torrent of melodramatic pleas. (Poor
young officer, served his nation so bravely, jungles of Burma, orphan needing roof. . . .) She immediately offered Stark the empty one-room flat on
the floor below Peter, Peg, and Bill. The flat provided a close-range position
from which Stark could witness Peter’s family dynamic. “He
was
an only
child,” Stark has said, “but it was an absurd ‘only child’ ”—all the spoiledness and narcissism, only warped.

London itself wasn’t itself. The destruction of whole stretches of the
city forced many newly homeless residents to become squatters in empty
buildings and still-occupied army camps. Mourning was standard, the sullen
knowledge still sinking in that the war’s dead were not just stragglers on a
late steamer from Colombo. There were severe shortages, and therefore
strict rationing, of basic foods and supplies. The British people’s meat allowance hovered around thirteen ounces per person per week; milk at two
pints; cheese at one and one half ounces. They got “sweetie coupons” for
candy, and they didn’t get many of them. Everybody won a single egg every
seven days.

During the winter of 1946, London, never the brightest of cities, was
particularly dreary. It scarcely helped that the battery of fierce blizzards and
freezing temperatures that season was followed in quick succession by floods
during a bleak London spring and a relentlessly gray and rainy summer.

• • •

At the Sellers residence, the inevitable business cards were printed: “Peter
Sellers, Drums and Impressions.” Peter took work where he could find it,
which is to say that he didn’t work very much and was supported almost
entirely by Bill and Peg.

In his off hours, which appear to have been many, he pursued a girl.
He did so with such drive and determination that the words
clinical
and
obsession
come to mind. Pretty, blond Hilda Parkin met Peter in 1946 at a
Christmastime ball at the Grosvenor House in London. The Parkin family
had been longtime friends of the Sellerses and Rays; it was Hilda’s much-older brother, Stanley, who owned the theater in Ilfracombe. “It was a big
thing to go to the Grosvenor House,” Hilda recalls. “One of the first times
we’d been able to go to a big ball for a long time. Peter was really my
nephew’s friend; my nephew was about my age. And when he told Peter
his aunt was coming I don’t think he was very pleased. Until we met. And
then we had great fun together.”

Hilda, who was living in Norfolk at the time, has kept to this day the
many letters Peter Sellers wrote to her during their three-year relationship.
“I’ve got 109 letters from Peter, with three proposals of marriage and threats
to commit suicide if I broke up with him. Some of the letters were sixteen
pages long, and he’d already written one in the morning, and he was writing
one now, and he’d just posted one.”

From one letter: “Hilda, will you marry me next year? We will both
be 22.”

From another: “Dearest Hilda—If you ever took it in your mind to
pack me in, I’d go completely round the bend.”

Another describes the view from his parents’ flat on Finchley High
Road: “From the window, I can see the backs of rows of dreary looking
houses. An overcast sky looks down upon the tax- and cup-tortured England. When I get to the top I’ll get you a Rolls Royce! Throw in a few
butlers for luck.” (By “tax- and cup-tortured England,” Sellers is referring
to the fact that in the postwar years taxes were as high as food supplies were
low. He railed against Britain’s new Labor government in other letters, even
going so far as to blame Labor for the frigid winter.)

“He was a little fat boy, not that it meant anything,” Hilda notes. “I was
a trained dancer and acrobat, and I taught him to dance. Peter got on very
well with it. He was always kidding, impersonating. . . . We had a thousand
laughs. We made some records together, Peter and I [in novelty booths
where people could cut their own vinyl]. He used to impersonate me.”

He also enjoyed other impersonations: “Often, his letters would arrive
with photographs, and in one of them he was dressed up like his mother.”
This was not done behind Peg’s back.
She
took the picture. “In another he
was pretending to be his nonexistent sister.”

Toward the end of their relationship, Peter paid Hilda a visit in Norwich, where he’d taken the job of carnival barking at one of the Parkins’
amusement parks. He checked himself in at the best hotel in town—under
the creative name “Lord Beaconsfield”—and went pluckily off to visit his
girlfriend. In point of fact, however, the first and only Earl of Beaconsfield
was the nineteenth-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, with
whom Peter, fantastically, had begun to claim family ties.

Hilda: “My family was running this carnival, as you call it—it was an
amusement park—and Peter came up to see me. He came everywhere,
wherever I was, bless his heart. He said, ‘You must come over to the hotel.
I’ve booked in as Lord Beaconsfield.’ His mother said there was some back
relationship with Beaconsfield, but that line had died out many years ago.
There happened to be a lady in that hotel, and someone told her, ‘Oh, we
have Lord Beaconsfield.’ And she said, ‘There
is
no Lord Beaconsfield.’

“So they went and looked in his suitcase and found a pack of very cheap
cigarettes—Woodbines. Not the best cigarettes! And his pajamas were from
Marks and Spencers. When we got there, a couple of fellows came straight
up to him. One stayed with me, and one marched him off to the manager’s
office. He came out a little while later, red-faced, and we both just walked
off. I said, ‘I thought I was going to be arrested!’ ”

And what was Peter’s first response when confronted by the hotel manager? “When they took him into the office,” Hilda says, “he phoned his
mother.”

According to Hilda, Peg explained that yes, Peter “was always kidding,
there was no harm in him, he’s not going to hurt anybody, and his uncle
is the manager of a big London theater. . . .”

But that was not quite the end of it, according to Hilda: “When he got
back to London he had to report to the police. They let him off. I think
the police called on them, because I remember he told me that his father
had said, ‘Here you are, officer—here’s the Lord Beaconsfield.’

“At the end of the three years when we were very good friends, he
wanted to get married, he really did. I wasn’t thinking of marriage. There’d
been a war, and we’d only just finished it. The last thing I wanted to do
was get married.” So Hilda Parkin told Peter Sellers something he never
wanted to hear: “I thought it was fair just to tell him that I wasn’t in love
with him. He burst out crying. So I cried, too. He kept writing, but I didn’t
contact him any more. I didn’t answer the letters.”

• • •

Pete wasn’t mortally crushed by the rejection, especially since Margaretta
“Paddy” Black, a member of an all-girl Gang Show, appears to have been
enjoying a relationship with Peter at the same time he was pursuing Hilda.
Paddy recalls accompanying Peter on a visit to one of the Marks/Rays’ quite-distant relatives, Gerald Rufus Isaacs, the second Marquess of Reading.
(Gerald Rufus Isaacs’s father, Rufus Daniel Isaacs, 1860–1935, was lord
chief justice of England, ambassador to the United States, and viceroy of
India.) After a pleasant discussion of heraldry and cousins far removed, Peter
and Paddy headed home, whereupon Peter proudly told her that Gerald
Rufus Isaacs’s title was hereditary and that he—Peter Sellers—was next in
line. If she agreed to marry him, he added pregnantly, Paddy Black stood
to become a countess. But the made-up promise of a title wasn’t enough.
“As much as I liked Peter,” Paddy Black later said, “the idea of getting
engaged never entered my head.”