Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (7 page)

At home, a jittery Peg took to her bed whenever Paddy turned up at
211B Finchley High Road. Hilda Parkin had had better luck: “Since they
were working and involved with my family, they were quite pleased by it.
She was very nice to me.” With Paddy, though, Mother made herself so
scarce that Paddy assumed she was a bedridden invalid. “Peter?” Paddy
would hear a little voice moan from behind a closed bedroom door during
these cramped domestic dates.

Then a little louder: “Peeee-ter?!”

• • •

World War II had scared Peg, but certain of Peter’s romances threw her
into a cold terror. Following her own mother’s liberal morality, she didn’t
expect him to remain chaste. It was his heart’s arousal she feared, particularly when the women weren’t firmly within her family’s orbit. Besides, she
was smothering.

David Lodge still remembers the disquieting goodnight phone calls
Peter placed to his mother when they were separated: “Good night, Peg.
God bless you. Yes, you too. God keep you safe! I love you. Yes, I
do
! Yes,
I love
you
,
too
!”

Lodge also recalls tiny Peg taking him aside one day, looking up at the
burly ex-serviceman, and telling him, with profound admiration and not a
shred of comprehension, “
You
wouldn’t get married and leave your darling
mother.”

What drove Lodge craziest, though, was the Lady Bountiful air with
which Peg thanked him for taking such good care of her Pete during the
war. “I’ll make things easy for you,” she told him, and with a great fanfare
of largesse, she arranged for her theater-managing brother-in-law Bert to
hire Lodge as an usher.

“She was a pain in the ass,” Lodge observes.

A
fter returning from the Lord Beaconsfield escapade in Norwich with
humiliation in place of the fiancée on whom he claimed, at least, to
pin his future, Peter found himself hanging around the streets of Soho
killing time with other unemployed musicians. The musical arranger Wally
Stott, with whom Peter would work closely a few years later, remembers
meeting him for the first time on the sidewalk on Archer Street: Peter was
dressed “in an RAF uniform with a snare drum under his arm.” “
All
musicians stand around Archer Street, you know,” Sellers himself once noted,
“and everyone was getting work but me.” (What do you call a guy who
hangs around with musicians? A drummer.) Stott, who came to understand
Peter very well and like him even more, reflects that “in one of his lives he
would like to have been a jazz drummer.”

In still another life, clearly, he would have liked to have been noble.
Like the pasted-on mustache he used to dress his upper lip in order to
become the youngest dick in Devon, Sellers’s assumed identity as Lord
Beaconsfield surfaced again at, of all places, a middle-class campground on
one of the Channel Islands. The camp was owned by Hilda Parkin’s brother
Stanley; Peter’s cousin Dick Ray found work there as well. The job itself
was not exactly fulfilling for the talented, impatient young drummer-comedian—crying out “wakey, wakey” to a slew of slumbering tourists
wasn’t quite the career he had in mind for himself. So Peter decided to add
a little sparkle by billing himself as the Fifth Earl of Beaconsfield—that is,
until a local reporter spoiled the fun by inquiring as to the circumstances
by which someone in
Burke’s Peerage
had descended to a downscale campground in Jersey. Even after he was unmasked Peter couldn’t quite give it
up. He insisted on calling himself simply “the Fifth Earl” until he lost that
job, too.

Whether he was Lord Nelson’s relative, Disraeli’s descendent, the next
Marquess of Reading, or the disembodied doubles of Tommy Handley and
the cast of
ITMA
, Peter Sellers was unusually able to sustain multiplying
identities and never let them interfere with each other—or with reality, for
that matter. As his friends explain it, it was all because he didn’t much like
himself, a schizoid way to build self-esteem. This is a plausible explanation,
but perhaps it was equally the case that Sellers harbored an expanding
number of selves and liked
too many
of them. What he didn’t like was
having to choose one and stick to it.

Was it to keep these propagating identities at bay or to distill them
further into a kind of
eaux de folie
that Peter began to believe—insofar as
any grotesque fantasy is actually
believed
—in the existence of scurrying little
midgety creatures called Toffelmen? Moronic buggers who embraced a philosophy of contradiction, Peter’s Toffelmen were creepy but stalwart, rock-bottom pessimists who harbored flickers of hope. With their high, squeaky
voices and circus-act entertainment value, they kept Peter company. Who
knows when they first knocked on his mental door, or when (if ever) they
departed, but when Peter revealed their existence to David Lodge, Lodge
was most unnerved. “They were very vulgar,” says Lodge. “They were always
masturbating.”

• • •

The Gang Shows’ steady employment having given way to seemingly endless stretches of nothing, Pete was losing hope. A booking at a Peterborough
music hall might have bolstered his flagging confidence except for the fact
that on opening night, after sharing a cramped dressing room with a blind
accordion player and a trick dog act, the waves of hisses that greeted his
comedy routine led the manager to fire him on the spot. Luckily for Peter,
the headlining singer, Dorothy Squires, came to his rescue and convinced
the manager to keep him on, though Squires later said that she’d seen
nothing particularly special in Sellers’s drab routine. She just felt sorry for
him: “He was just another struggling kid, fresh out of the services, very
lonely and very scared.”

A drumming gig at the Aldershot Hippodrome took a similar downturn. Having been loftily billed as “Britain’s answer to Gene Krupa,” Peter launched his set only to have the lights go wrong and the
accompanying band fall drastically off-tempo. The audience rebelled,
loudly. Graham Stark recalls Peter telling him about the fiasco, though
for Stark’s benefit Peter couldn’t help but turn it into a black comedy
routine: “As a story of absolute disaster it unfailingly reduced me to tears
of laughter,” Stark recalls.

With Peter suffering one thudding calamity after another, it’s little
wonder that he thought about disappearing into still another new identity.
At his mother’s urging, he considered adopting the stage name “Peter Ray.”
Hilda Parkin remembers it: “She wanted him to be called ‘Peter Ray’—it’s
in one of my letters. And I said to him, ‘You know, “Peter Sellers” sounds
much better. It sort of comes to the tongue better than “Peter Ray.” ’ And
there already
was
the star comedian Ted Ray.”

As it happened, he kept Sellers but dropped the drums. The big shining
car was gone now—who knows where it had come from, and who knows
where it went—and since Peter had, after all, chosen to master the most
unwieldy musical instrument this side of the piano, the lack of ready transportation made it difficult for him to get from show to show with his
cumbersome drum set. “I was playing with a little group called ‘The Jive
Bombers,’ ” Peter’s story goes. The band was booked in the industrial city
of Birmingham, about one hundred miles northwest of London. Peter got
there, along with his drums, by hitching a ride with the saxophone player.
The Jive Bombers were in mid-session when people began crowding around
Peter’s drums, helpfully making little percussive noises with their tongues
in the middle of his set. Peter’s tale concludes: “This fellow says to me, ‘Oh
say, can ya play “Any Umbrellas”? I said, ‘No, no, we don’t play that.’ He
says, ‘
Why
don’t you play it?’ I was getting annoyed at this point, so I said,
‘Just ’cause we don’t play it, that’s all.’ So he looks at me and says ‘Shitface’
and walks away. I thought, ‘That’s it, inn’it? I’m out.’ ”

• • •

In March 1948, he was standing around Archer Street not knowing quite
what else to do when a press agent friend told him that a nearby strip
club was looking for a comic. The Windmill, just off Piccadilly Circus,
was run by a successfully sordid impresario named Vivian Van Damm.
Forbidden by the local morals code from gyrating, Mr. Van Damm’s
strippers made a show out of stationing themselves around the stage in
exalted tableaux of live neoclassical sculpture, each element designed,
however roughly, as a contemporary interpretation of a low-grade Venus.
The girls were essentially coarser and more modern Peg Rays without the
slides and body stockings, and the audiences made do. Already frustrated,
the Windmill’s crowd was thus a tough one as far as any intervening
joke-tellers were concerned, and Van Damm, accordingly, was a harsh
auditioner. (Who wants to run a strip club with a clientele bored to the
point of rioting? Not Vivian Van Damm.) But Peter was funny enough,
and brave enough, to pass Van Damm’s test, and so Peter took the job of
legitimizing naked women for £30 a week.

Each night, after appearing in small roles in other acts, Peter briefly
held the spotlight by himself. He performed a selection of Tommy Handley’s
ITMA
voices followed by a song written for him by his father. The
audience seems not to have resented Peter’s intrusion on the Greco-nudie
tableaux vivantes
, and at the end of the appointed six-week run, Van Damm
was impressed enough to add Peter’s name to a bronze plaque on the Windmill wall. It was labeled “Stars of Today Who Started Their Careers in This
Theatre.”

• • •

Some time after the Jersey holiday camp fiasco, Peg had taken Peter by the
hand and led him to a Soho office building for a reaquaintance meeting
with Dennis Selinger, who seems to have lost touch with Peter after parting
ways in Calcutta. After being demobilized, Selinger had returned to London
and launched his own theatrical agency. The two men may have been
friends in India, but Peg seized control of their reunion, insisting as only
Peg could that her son would make a fortune for the hungry young agent.
“I was more impressed with Peg than with Pete,” Selinger later declared,
which was only natural since Peter spent most of the meeting clearing his
throat toward no vocal end and fussing over the pristine crease in his pants
and the fine leather gloves he held in his nervous hands. Severe clothes
rationing, by the way, was still in force.

Selinger agreed to represent Peter, but it appears never to have been an
exclusive arrangement, since Peter had at least one other agent knocking
on doors for him at the time, and many others followed suit over the years,
either in concert with or apart from Selinger. Still, it was Peter himself
rather than his agents or his mother who landed the first audition at the
BBC. He’d written to request an audition in January 1948, was granted
one in February, and in March he appeared on British television on an
amateur hour called
New to You
. The act consisted of impersonations and
included this little jingle:

I’m glad you’ve heard my name—it’s Peter Sellers!

Peter Sellers can be gay as well as zealous!

And now it’s my due, from the program
New to You
,

As one of Britain’s up and coming fellas—perhaps.

He needed a writer. In any event, the bit survives only because Peter himself
went out and bought a disk-cutting recorder, a rare and expensive machine
for the consumer market, simply in order to memorialize the occasion of
his BBC debut.

Peter did well enough on
New to You
, but he was not immediately
skyrocketed into stardom, and he still needed to find any work he could.
When the producer Hedley Claxton needed a straight man to appear with
the comedian Reg Varney in his
Gaytime
revue, Peter auditioned. The final
tryout came down to Peter and Benny Hill. Benny Hill won.

Peter set his sights, or rather his ears, back on the BBC—not television,
which was still minimal in Britain, but radio. After all, he’d been listening
to and mimicking BBC programming since childhood. Indeed, by this
point he could have trademarked his
ITMA
routines had Tommy Handley
himself not already done so. Besides Handley, Peter could do Neville
Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, and a host of precise but anonymous
American travelogue announcers. His renditions of any number of other
BBC powerhouses were flawless. And he could prove it.

The setup: In 1948, Kenneth Horne was the star of a hit radio show
called
Much Binding in the Marsh
. Set on an RAF base,
Much Binding
was
one of several war-themed comedy shows that were popular that year. The
patrician-sounding Horne played the commanding officer; the chirpy-voiced Richard Murdoch played his assistant. Roy Speer was a successful
BBC producer.

“I was pissed off—oh, excuse me!,
fed up
, right!—with getting nowhere fast,” Peter told Michael Parkinson on the BBC in 1974. “Roy
Speer was doing this show called
Show Time.
The compère was Dick
Bentley, and there were lots of new acts, you see? I’d written in I-don’t-know-how-many times to try to get in on the show. No reply. The secretary said that Mr. Speer ‘blah barumpfh hmpf.’ So I’ve got nothing to
lose, and I thought, well, I’ll phone up. We were doing these impersonations, and one of the big shows on the air was
Much Binding in the
Marsh
with Kenneth Horn and Dickie Murdoch. I just thought I’d
do
it.
You know, you
do
things at certain times. You’ve got to get ahead!
You’ve got to [car noise]
vrummmmm
! So I thought if I stay here I’m
dead, [and] even if he kicks my ass out of there it doesn’t matter
as long
as I make some impression
. So I phone up, and . . . I thought if I click
with the secretary, I’ll get through, right? So, I said [deep, resonant
voice], ‘Oh, hello hmmm, this is hmmm Ken Horn. Is Roy there?’ Once
she said, ‘Oh, yes he is, Ken,’ I knew that I was alright. So, I got on
there and Roy said, ‘Hallo, Ken! How are you?’ I said, ‘Listen, Roy, I’m
phoning up because I know that new show you’ve got on—what is it,
Show Time
or something? Dickie and I were at a cabaret the other night
and saw an amazing young fellow called Peter . . . Dickie, what’s his
name?’ [High-pitched twit voice:] ‘Uh, Peter Sellers! Sellers!’ [Resonant
voice again] ‘Anyway, it could probably be very good if you probably had
him in the show, you know. This is just a tip, a little tip.’ He said, ‘Well
that’s very nice of you.’ And then he came to the crunch, and I said, ‘Uh . . .
I, uh . . . It’s me, it’s Peter Sellers talking and this was the only way I could
get to you and would you give me a date on your show?’