by Ed Sikov
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.”
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, yo
u 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.
THREE
After 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.�
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• • •
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:
