Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers

by Ed Sikov

  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?’

  “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.

  Chronically underhoused after the war, Spike moved into Jimmy Grafton’s attic, whereupon his friends dubbed him “the prisoner of Zenda.” The Grafton Arms, the pub on the first floor, had been in the Grafton family since 1848 and was now being operated by Jimmy, fresh back from the war, where he had served as an infantry officer. Grafton was no ordinary publican, however, since he also wrote comedy scripts for BBC radio. But it was not Grafton’s scriptwriting talent that initially drew Michael Bentine and Harry Secombe into the pub as patrons. It was the fact that the Grafton Arms served drinks after hours.

  Bentine and Secombe had shown up at the pub one day in 1946 or ’47 and immediately began complaining about the poor quality of a radio comedy show they had recently heard—Variety Bandbox, the author of which was none other than Grafton himself. Then again, Grafton was writing Variety Bandbox for the comedian Derek Roy, whom Spike described as “about as funny as a baby dying with cancer.”

  Since Harry’s strange friend Spike began spending a lot of time at Grafton’s anyway, Grafton offered him the attic space, where Spike, too, began typing comedy scripts for Derek Roy’s new program Hip Hip Hoo Roy and peering through a keyhole at a monkey who was living in the next room. Milligan went so far as to claim not only that “Jacko” peed into the pub’s pea soup but that he, Spike, actually watched the cook stirring it in. Jimmy Grafton disputes this repulsive accusation, though Grafton himself admits that another pet, a bulldog, came close to biting off Harry Secombe’s balls.