Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (8 page)

“He said, ‘You cheeky young sod! What do you do?’ I said, ‘Well, I
obviously do impersonations.’ ”

Speer was correct. Peter Sellers
was
a cheeky young sod. In other
words, he was a natural comedian whose intense insecurity was armored
by the hide of a pachyderm. The child who’d gotten whatever he wanted
had become an ambitious twenty-two-year-old man who wrote the letters
and made the phone calls and white-knuckled his way through one
wretched audition after another in pursuit of the blazing career he was
convinced he was ordained to have. After his period of postwar malaise,
the young Peter Sellers became exceedingly persistent in seeking work
that would showcase his enormous talent, and he offended people all
along the way.

The piano player at the Windmill found him pushy. A disgruntled
Freemason claims that Peter joined the peculiar group in the late 1940s,
became an unrepentant social climber, and broke the sacred covenant of
secrecy—the code words and wacky handshakes and all the rest. “He bandied the phrases and signals about at the BBC,” the bitter Mason reports.
By doing so, he continues, Peter greatly embarrassed the good but gullible
Masons who had sponsored him in the first place.

Spike Milligan offered a more empathic explanation for his friend’s
peculiarities. Peter, Milligan once said, “was just a nice, very quiet, and very
complex simpleton. He was the most complex simpleton in the world.”

• • •

The BBC broadcast Peter’s
Show Time
program on July 1, 1948. A little
over a week later, Leslie Ayre, the radio critic for the London
Evening News
,
gave Peter his first postwar review. It was a very good one with one highly
quotable nugget: “In Peter Sellers, radio brings us another really conscientious and excellent artist.” An overjoyed Peg framed the whole review
and kept it on the wall for the rest of her life. Dennis Selinger did something
more practical: He had it reproduced as a three-column ad and ran it in
the trades, complete with a glamorous-looking head shot of the suddenly
rising young star, the new master of funny voices.

The ad, the review, Selinger’s phone calls, and most of all Peter’s performances rapidly earned him a slew of variety show bookings and cabaret
engagements, not to mention more radio show appearances. Over the
course of the next twelve months, Sellers and his proliferating voices turned
up on the BBC on
Workers’ Playtime
,
Variety Band Box
,
Ray’s a Laugh
,
Petticoat Lane
, and
Third Division
. The seamless flow of dissociation his
multiple characters produced was remarkable. Men, women, old, young,
upper class, working class, the nasal, the clipped . . . Peter’s endlessly redoubling accents were so naturalistic that listeners had to remind themselves
that they were hearing only one man and not a crowd. And on the radio,
at least, whatever genuine Peter Sellers there was tended to get lost. “Well,
that’s
me
!,” Peter announced on one show, only it wasn’t his actual voice
at all; it was the voice of a bland and anonymous BBC announcer as imitated by Peter.

On the strength of his reputation, the ex-nobody was even able to
hook up his friend Graham Stark with steady BBC work as well. Stark
and Sellers continued to enjoy each other’s company, to the point of developing a double-pickup routine. Along with the disk-cutter, the increasingly gadget-prone Peter owned a then-novel automatic record-changer
that accommodated a total of eight records, and so it served as a built-in timing device for two young men on the make. He and Graham would pick up
girls and bring them back to Pete’s place when Peg and Bill were out. “If we
hadn’t gotten anywhere with the girls by the fifth, we certainly wouldn’t by
the eighth,” Stark fondly recalls. “This became a catchphrase which Peter
and I used to bandy about: ‘If you haven’t made it by the fifth. . . .’ ”

• • •

In late 1946, a year and a half before Peter appeared at the Windmill, a
bulbous and good-natured Welshman took the stage with an edgy music
hall routine. He sang, and not only in the fine Welsh baritone for which
he would become world famous. The man sang
both
parts of the sappy
Jeanette MacDonald–Nelson Eddy duet “Sweetheart.” When
“MacDonald” and “Eddy” were forced to sing at the same time, the Welshman yodeled incomprehensibly. But it was a warped shaving routine that caught
the audience’s interest most dramatically, for the man really did shave himself onstage using a big bowl of warm water, a well-used brush, an old-fashioned cutthroat razor, and ridiculous amounts of shaving cream, after
which the comedian drank his filthy shaving water.

Harry Secombe was born in relative poverty in 1921 in the port city
of Swansea on the south coast of Wales. His love of singing was established
at an early age. According to his brother, the Reverend Frederick Secombe,
“Harry’s great place for singing was out in the
ty bach
. He used to sit and
sing there for hours.”

Like so many men his age, Secombe had gone through the war, though
in Harry’s experience—at least in Harry’s
telling
of the experience—World
War II tended to be rather more farcical than it probably seemed to others.
He recounted one escapade, for example, that is said to have occurred in
Medjaz-el-Bab, a tent somewhere in Algeria, where the myopic Secombe
espied what he took to be a helmeted Nazi and slapped the enemy dramatically under arrest, only to learn that the Nazi was Randolph Churchill.
(“He happened to be facing the wrong way at the time,” was Secombe’s
explanation.)

Young Harry Secombe was amiable but driven. He married a Swansea
girl, Myra Atherton, in 1948, and after a short honeymoon in Cornwall,
Harry returned to London, Myra to her family in Swansea. They saw each
other only when Harry needed to take a break from his heavy performing
schedule. They stayed happily married for fifty-three years.

Secombe’s six weeks at the Windmill ended with Vivian Van Damm
etching Harry’s name onto the honored bronze plaque, the one that augured
greatness to those who had performed under Van Damm’s roof. The gesture
may seem to have been a pro forma honor, but bear in mind that in the
seventeen months after Secombe appeared at the Windmill, the gruff Van
Damm added only three names to the plaque before Peter’s—Alfred Marks,
Michael Bentine, and Bill Kerr.

When Secombe left the Windmill, the comedy duo of Sherwood and
Forest moved in. Sherwood was Tony Sherwood. Forest was Michael Bentine.

Born in 1922 into an upper-crust Peruvian family, the Eton-educated
Bentine was, in appearance at least, a sort of Beat-poet Rasputin. With his
bushy black mane and beard, he looked, as the musician Max Geldray
described him, “as though his parents had invented hair.” Bentine’s past
was suitably shady. He served in the RAF; that much is certain. His exceptional intelligence is also verifiable. But the tales he told of his own exploits,
contacts, and secret lives tended to shift so effortlessly from eyewitnessed
fact to plausible circumstance to grandiose impossibility and back again that
none of his friends ever really knew what to make of him. The pub owner
and writer Jimmy Grafton reports: “I have heard him give accounts of
exciting incidents as a fighter pilot, bomber pilot, parachutist, commando,
member of the Secret Service, even as an atomic scientist. His claims to be
an expert swordsman, pistol shot, and archer are substantially true. He is
also a qualified glider pilot.” Spike Milligan claimed that “he once told me,
face to face, that his mother had levitated from the ground, across the dining
table, and settled down on the other side.”

“Bentine was forever telling people they were geniuses,” said Peter Sellers. “I don’t know why he did this, but he’d say to
anybody
after a few
minutes conversation, ‘You’re a genius!’ And they’d usually believe it, because Bentine is the only one who’s had any real education out of the three
of us. He was the one who started nuclear physics, and all we could do was
get through these three letter words like
cat
and
dog
.”

Whatever the actual facts of Michael Bentine’s biography may be, he
was impulsively creative and recklessly funny. He enjoyed disrupting quiet
cafés by suddenly bursting into fake-Russian babble so as to create the
illusion that he was a spy (albeit one who couldn’t keep his mouth shut).
Jimmy Grafton, the publican/writer, remembers being in Bentine’s dressing
room once at the London Hippodrome when Bentine picked up a longbow
and fired an arrow directly at the dressing room door. Because it had been
shot from a mighty longbow, the arrow penetrated the wooden door with
ease and ended up protruding several inches through to the other side. The
reporter who was approaching the door at the time was surely surprised.

• • •

In the summer of 1948, BBC radio’s Third Programme was running a
comedy series called
Listen, My Children
. (After World War II, the BBC
divided itself into three sections: the Light Programme, the Home Service
Programme, and the Third Programme, which appealed respectively to
working-class, middle-class, and upper-middle and upper-class audiences.)
Produced by Pat Dixon,
Listen, My Children
featured Benny Hill, Harry
Secombe, and Carole Carr. Smart and funny, the show was popular enough
that a follow-up series was quickly planned. It was originally to have been
called
Falling Leaves
, but the title was changed to
Third Division—Some
Vulgar Fractions
. Two new comics were added to the lineup—Michael
Bentine and Peter Sellers.

Peter and his fellow radio comics recorded
Third Division
’s first program in early December 1948. Five more shows were recorded before the
end of the year, and they began airing in late January 1949. In the second
Third Division
show, Sellers performed a hilarious sketch—so hilarious, in
fact, that Sellers kept it alive for many years thereafter. Written by Frank
Muir and Denis Norden, it was a travelogue of a South London neighborhood. “Balham, Gateway to the South” was narrated by an overly enthusiastic, broadly Midwestern American (Sellers), who persistently renders the
neighborhood’s name in two sharp, twangy stresses—
Bal! Ham!

With snappy scripts by Muir and Norden, brought to antic life by
Sellers, Secombe, Hill, and Carr,
Third Division
was a highly entertaining
series of six programs. But it wasn’t history-making. That would require
the participation of a gaunt lunatic who was living in an attic room over
Jimmy Grafton’s pub, sharing space with a rhesus monkey.

• • •

Spike Milligan was born in Ahmednagar, India, in 1918, and first appeared
onstage at the age of eight in the Christmas pageant of his convent school
in Poona. He played a blue-faced clown, arguing shortly before curtain time
(to no avail) that his face really ought to have been black. Then, feeling
himself unfairly excluded from the pageant’s concluding Nativity scene, the
boy-clown burst in upon the manger. “I thought the clown should have a
place in life,” he later explained.

The Milligans moved to England in 1933, when Spike was fifteen. The
family was decidedly poor, though no decision had ever been made. Spike
joined the war as a gunner in the Royal Artillery, but he was not a natural
warrior. In North Africa, his unit proceeded to fire a heavy artillery gun
without having dug it in, thereby sending the thing recoiling down a hill,
where it narrowly missed a truck occupied by Lance Bombardier Harry
Secombe. The burlap covering opened at the back of Secombe’s truck and
a face popped in. “Anybody seen a gun?” Spike inquired. (Secombe’s tale
of the event runs like this: “We couldn’t get the Germans out of these hills.
We kept sending them letters, but they wouldn’t go. . . . This huge gun
jumped out of the gun pit, and it came pattering over where we were and
missed us by a few yards, you know, in this little truck. And I thought,
‘They’re throwing guns at us.’ ”)

The comedy of Spike Milligan’s World War II took a darker turn when
he was blown up at Monte Cassino. His unit was taking cover in an olive
grove outside an enemy-held monastery. “I was counting out my Woodbines and reached five when this weird sound hit my ears,” Spike remembered. “I can’t describe it. It was like a razor blade being passed through
my head.”

Spike was dispatched to a rehab hospital—the same one to which Harry
Secombe had been sent after breaking his eyeglasses. (This is one of Secombe’s explanations, at any rate. The other is this: “I had been invalided
and downgraded after I got lost in a blizzard.”) Whatever it was that put
Harry Secombe in the hospital, Harry soon discovered that he and Spike
shared the same antic sensibility. Spike described one day: “A crippled
sergeant in a wheelchair came round and asked, ‘Does anyone do entertainments?’ ” Spike responded by telling four jokes in quick succession,
none of which produced a laugh—“so I picked up an axe and struck Harry
Secombe.”

Harry told of staying with Spike in a Roman military hostel, men
sleeping on every available surface: “There was Spike all tucked up in bed,
nice and comfortable with his pajamas on, so I poured a bottle of beer over
his head.”

In Milligan’s case, one suspects that the unbalanced foundation of his
worldview, or the solid foundation of his unbalanced worldview, had been
formed before the razor sliced through his brain, but the war certainly
exacerbated his despair. “I got used to seeing men jumping out of little
holes and looking about with binoculars. Men looking out of tanks with
binoculars. Always men looking out and throwing things at one another. I
thought to myself, ‘This is mad.’ ” Yes, it was. And so was he.