Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  When the bombing began, Peg and Pete ran, along with countless other terrified Londoners, to the nearest underground station, which in their case happened to be Highgate. A few weeks later, the Sellers’s flat suffered a bit of damage during a bombing raid. The apartment was certainly inhabitable and the shop could have survived, but it was a close enough call to convince Peg to shut the business, pack the trinkets and all the family’s furniture, and spirit Pete swiftly and safely away from London.

  As their refuge, she chose the town of Ilfracombe on the north coast of Devon. Even apart from the fact that a brother worked in a theater there, escaping to Ilfracombe was a smart move on Peg’s part. There was nothing there worth bombing—unless, of course, the Nazis decided to target picturesque seaside resorts for obliteration by firestorm.

  TWO

  The little watering hole of Ilfracombe is seated at the lower verge of one of these seaward-plunging valleys, between a couple of magnificent headlands which hold it in a hollow slope and offer it securely to the caress of the Bristol Channel. . . . On the left of the town (to give an example) one of the great cliffs I have mentioned rises in a couple of massive peaks and presents to the sea an almost vertical face, all muffled in tufts of golden broom and mighty fern.” This is Henry James describing Peter Sellers’s new location, if not his new home, albeit half a century earlier.

  It was in Ilfracombe that Peter Sellers, an unemployed adolescent, returned to the theater, and he did so partly in response to the conflicting influences of his parents. After he became famous, Sellers spoke often about his theatrical grandmother, his mother’s performing career, his own bitter childhood backstage, and his profoundly ambivalent feelings about the world of show business. He rarely spoke about his father, who throughout Peter’s youth kept up sporadic employment as a musician of little note. But in 1974, Sellers mentioned to Michael Parkinson of the BBC a reflective detail that suggests that Bill Sellers was not simply a blank slate on which his wife and son wrote nothing. Bill’s confidence in Peter, at times at least, bore an inverse relation to Peg’s: Peg’s was infinite, Bill’s could be utterly void. Was it in defiance of Bill’s paternal defeatism that Peter pursued his career? “Dad was convinced always that I was going to be a road sweeper,” Sellers told Parkinson with a laugh. “And he always was very encouraging: ‘So you’ll turn out to be a bloody road sweeper, will you? I’ll tell you that!’ ”

  “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, a
nd 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.

  “Although I was on my own at last, I hated the life,” he later said. “I felt lonely. I felt trapped. I missed Peg, who’d always entertained me when things were black.

  “It put the final seal on my dislike of show business,” Sellers went on, “of having to entertain. I thought to myself, ‘There must be less humiliating ways of being pushed around.’ ”

  He managed to find such a way: by joining the Royal Air Force. That military service turned out to be less a source of complaint for him than entertainment work provides a stark measure of Sellers’s ambivalence toward his lifelong career.

  • • •

  Military service was a national expectation at the time; barring some physical or mental abnormality, one enlisted, and that was it. So it was not unusual that after his birthday in September 1943, Peter Sellers signed up with the RAF. Spike Milligan, who heard Sellers’s tales some years later, describes Peg’s predictable reaction: “She must have gone through the entire medical encyclopedia to find a disease that would get Pete back into civvy street, back into her loving care and protection: ‘He’s got flat feet! He’s got a flat head! Flat ears! He’s even got flat teeth!’ ” It was all to no avail; Peg’s chubby son became 2223033 Airman Second Class Sellers, P.