by Ed Sikov
Pete was a mama’s boy, but he wasn’t a coward. Airman Sellers thought he’d like to be a pilot. This goal might be written off as the glamorous reverie of a callow dreamer, but it was a wartime dream, which is to say that when Sellers signed up for military service, real planes were crashing every day and real pilots were dying. It was a bitter disappointment for him when RAF doctors found that his eyesight wasn’t quite up to the task of piloting. Turned down for flight training, Pete ended up nothing better than an aircraft hand.
Sellers’s entry into military service was doubly depressing for him since the other airmen weren’t at all dazzled by the fact that he could play the drums. Pete, who needed much more attention than he got whenever he was away from his mother, found his mood rapidly sinking.
So Peg stepped in to soothe him. Since he hadn’t shipped out yet, she was free to become a kind of camp follower, trooping after him the way Marlene Dietrich trails Gary Cooper at the end of Morocco (1930), except, of course, that Dietrich is Cooper’s lover, not his mother.
As befitted her role, Peg cooked his meals for him, RAF mess halls not being good enough for her special boy. And not surprisingly, Peg demonstrated an extraordinary knack for procuring good food for Pete, despite stringent wartime rationing. Eggs, butter, cream, sugar, tea—all were in short supply. Peg got them.
Pete soon found a way out of military drudgery by resuming his performing career; it was better to risk demeaning himself onstage and harbor the hope of applause than to demean himself daily as an aircraft hand. He approached Ralph Reader, the head of an RAF entertainment unit called the Gang Shows, and asked to be auditioned. When Reader asked him what exactly he did onstage, Sellers answered that he played drums and did Tommy Handley bits from ITMA. Entering the auditorium the following day for the audition, Reader had the peculiar experience of hearing himself singing “We’re Riding Along on the Crest of a Wave,” the Gang Show theme song, to the great amusement of a group of seated airmen who should have been busy cleaning the theater. The airmen noticed the officer and stood at attention; Sellers kept on singing—until he, too, saw Reader staring at him in disbelief. “Well,” Pete said resignedly to Reader, “do you want a drink or do I get jankers?”
For a mimic so accurate, jankers—otherwise known as the boot—was unlikely. But when Reader heard Sellers drum, he knew for certain that he had a workable act. Sellers turned out to have other skills. Beyond the drumming, for which Pete was soon showcased, Reader’s Gang Shows offered Pete his first chance to be a comedian onstage. Doing short stand-up routines as well as group skits, he played to troops across England before shipping out.
Jack Cracknell, who ran the Gang Show office in London, remembered being bedeviled by a characteristically persistent Peg, who tried every means to convince him—behind her son’s back, of course—that Pete should be kept safe within the borders of England.
Once again, she lost. Peter Sellers was sent all the way to India.
• • •
The precise sequence of Peter Sellers’s tour of service is vague. As formative as his travels in Asia were to him—think of the many mannerly Indians he impersonated over the years—it’s unclear just how much time he actually spent there. Sellers himself once claimed to have spent three years in the East, an impossible length of time given the fact that he also served in France and occupied Germany after the war ended and was back at his mother’s house by the end of 1946. As Graham Stark, one of his closest friends, puts it: “He was a great one for the fantasies. He used to boast—God knows why—that he was descended from Lord Nelson!”
However long Peter Sellers spent in Asia—we know he was in and around Calcutta in December 1944—the people he saw and heard there made such an impression on him that he couldn’t help but return the compliment by picking up speech patterns that would last a lifetime. These early impersonations may even have included the complete getup, skin tone and all. Sellers once claimed that while in India with the RAF he went so far as to rub brown pancake makeup on his face and hands and wrap his head in a turban so as to pass himself off as a Sikh.
But it was the impersonation of officers—a more dangerous stunt, because he could be court-martialed for it—that became a standard routine during Sellers’s military career. He claimed that he’d first pulled the prank on Christmas Eve 1944, in the city of Agartala, most of the way to the Burmese border, in Assam. Sellers’s rationale for the stunt was, characteristically, both tortured and foreseeable:
“I’d never spent Christmas Eve in a hot country, and I was far away from home, and I was thinking, ‘My mum wants me at home.’ ” His Peg-sickness led to an excess of Christmas cheer: “In those days we were sort of drinking a bit, you know.” (Sellers is employing the royal “we.”) “We don’t drink any more of course—wine, wine, just wine, you know!—and I remember getting very drunk. And I thought, ‘I’m a twit to sit here and do this when I could be in the officers’ mess.’ ” So he “found” some insignia of suitably impossible rank and off he went, straight to the officers’ club with a new identity.
Since it was the middle of the night, there was “only one lone old twit sitting in the corner.” Plowed as he was, the old officer still managed to question Sellers as to how he could possibly have achieved the rank of air commodore at such a young age. After offering several asinine evasions, Sellers came up with this one: “I see in the dark, you know—it’s all this rum.”
• • •
In late 1944 and early 1945, at the time that Peter Sellers found himself in India, it hadn’t been more than a few months since the subcontinent had faced the invading Japanese—a disaster for the Japanese. In fact, there was still intense fighting in parts of Burma in early 1945 when Peter was sent there to drum and tell jokes to exhausted British soldiers. Sellers seems never to have been very near the front, but the same can’t be said of his audiences. In England, some of the airmen for whom he performed were regularly flying bombing missions over Germany. In India and Burma, they were fighting jungle fever as well as their fierce enemy. As such, they were a peculiar audience. As soldiers they were tough. As combat-weary men in need of distraction, they were easy.
A bit of personal comic relief occurred for Peter when, somewhere on the subcontinental road show of World War II combat vaudeville, he bumped into none other than the great Welsh “Waldini” and his band of English gypsies. Still in their bandanas, Waldini and his band were gamely crisscrossing India playing their standby Hungarian tunes for homesick British fighting men.
Pete’s stint in Asia was necessarily his first extended separation from Peg. Psychologically, he took a notable turn. She remained on his mind, of course, but he wrote to her rarely, if ever. Earlier, when he left her behind to tour around England with his father, ENSA, or the Gang Shows, he’d had no need of pen and paper; the telephone was easier. But now, given the choice between letter writing and nothing, Pete, conspicuously, chose nothing.
• • •
One reason was that Peter was necessarily thrown together with his fellow Gang Show performers, billeted in close quarters, and was rarely alone. One new acquaintance ended up sticking with him for the rest of his life, though with a few years’ hiatus after the war.
Dennis Selinger was a theater manager turned RAF gunner. Peter’s sharply drawn double nature struck Selinger quickly, just as it struck almost everyone with whom Sellers ever became close: “He was affable, easy, very funny when the mood was on him; at other times withdrawn, uncommunicative.”
They met in overheated, overstuffed Calcutta, Sellers fresh from a gig in the jungle, when a turn of events occurred that would seem absurd if not for the anything-might-happen disorder of wartime: The two English nobodies suddenly found themselves treated to dinner by the American movie star Melvyn Douglas, who, being there, was happy to distract two war-weary soldiers.
The Gang Shows provided a good diversion for worn-out, homesick troops, and Pete was getting the attention he required. With Reader the impresa
rio saving the best for last, Sellers’s drumming closed the show. A reviewer in the Bombay Sunday Standard was impressed with him to the point of clairvoyance: “The ‘baby’ of the show is Peter Sellers, aged 19, the boy-drummer and impressionist. A big future lies before him.”
• • •
“He was a big, fat, curly-haired boy” with “a big, hairy body—like a monkey,” says Peter’s friend David Lodge, describing the way Sellers looked when they met. They were in Gloucester at the time, fellow Gang Show performers. Lodge recalls their meeting as having occurred just after Sellers returned from Asia, which would place it in 1945. Then again, on another occasion Lodge dated it as occurring in 1944. More important than the exact date is the fact that they got along beautifully, amused each other greatly, and remained the best of friends for the rest of Peter’s life.
Given the fact that tense and frustrated men are thrown together during wartime with other tense and frustrated men, military theater often leans in the direction of gender humor. In short, Pete’s dress-up routines included drag. Lodge himself made a point of growing a mustache to prevent his own forced march in gowns, but he notes that young Pete’s “peaches-and-cream” complexion—a strange contrast to the hairy body—produced a “very convincing woman.” But it was Sellers’s talent as a drummer more than as a comedian that impressed Lodge: “He was a great drummer—as good as Buddy Rich.” His were showman’s performances, complete with flamboyant riffs and the confident tossing and catching of drumsticks in midair. Aging drummers in Britain may disagree; rumors of Pete’s lack of aptitude have surfaced. Unsung English drummers seem to resent the one among their ranks who achieved vast wealth and fame as a movie star, and apparently they denigrate his drumming talent. It doesn’t matter. The winner writes the history.
“He behaved like a boy—a rascal, actually,” says Lodge, who necessarily got to see Sellers’s selfish streak at close range but who, like the other men Sellers grew to trust, saw the tender and vulnerable side as well. They were bunked next to each other in Gloucester. Lodge couldn’t help but notice that Pete was being bullied by a loud and burly Welshman who did not appreciate being in such close proximity to a Jew. Sellers, whose temper could erupt violently and without warning, was reacting to these anti-Semitic taunts with undue restraint, so the bluff, muscular Lodge stepped in to assist him. He handed Pete a heavy iron poker and advised him to slam the Welshman over the head with it. “If he won’t, I will,” Lodge added straight to the Welshman’s face. The bully backed off.
What’s fascinating about Lodge’s tale is not that Sellers was the object of anti-Semitic contempt but that his Jewishness was so evident to a stranger. Did the men question each other about their religions? Or was it simply Peter’s nose?
As Lodge soon saw, Pete did possess a volatile temper, and when he exercised it there was no holding back. “Another time he actually broke a chair up, very deliberately, piece by piece, to work out his aggression,” Lodge recalls. “I made a note—‘If you get on the wrong side of this boy. . .’ ”
That Lodge quickly gained Peter’s trust was made evident by the fact that Peter invited him back home to meet his mother. Peg and Bill were living on Finchley High Road at the time. Lodge, not surprisingly, found his new friend’s relationship with his mother “too close for comfort.” But, Lodge continues, despite her domination of his emotional life, Peg couldn’t control the actions of her willful son. Pete did precisely what he pleased. He required her commanding love to survive, but he didn’t require her permission for anything.
Only Peg Sellers could see in David Lodge—a tall, broad, athletic serviceman—nothing more than a surrogate for herself. When she discovered that the Gang Show was heading out on tour again, she tried to make Lodge promise to become a kind of nanny for her now fully grown son. Says Lodge, “If she’d been a fella I’d have whacked her.”
• • •
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 a
t 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.
