Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers
Read Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers Online
Authors: Ed Sikov
Tags: #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Biography & Autobiography, #Actors
PART ONE
DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE:
1925–57
PART THREE
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS:
1964–80
A
LSO BY
E
D
S
IKOV
On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder
Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedies of the 1950s
Study Guide for American Cinema
Screwball: Hollywood’s Madcap Romantic Comedies
To Edward Hibbert,
who makes my work possible.
To Bruce Schackman,
who makes the rest possible.
Some forms of reality are so horrible we refuse to face them, unless we are trapped into it by comedy.
To label any subject unsuitable for comedy is to admit defeat.
—Peter Sellers
ART
O
NE
DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
1925–57
O
NE
“Who in the world am I? Ah,
that’s
the great puzzle!”
I
n 1924, a low-end music hall performer called Peg Sellers gave birth to
a baby boy. She named him Peter. Peg had long been dominated by her
imposing impresario of a mother, Welcome Mendoza, and she was eager
to focus her own fierce maternal drive on the tiny boy. But Peter Sellers
died quickly and was buried and never mentioned again.
Welcome Mendoza was, truly, the outlandish name with which Peg
Sellers’s mother was born, though she changed it twice along the way: first
to Marks when she got married, then to Ray when she elbowed her kids
onto the music hall stage. Showmanship and aggression ran strong in this
family. Welcome Mendoza Marks, who started calling herself Belle Ray
when she became a vaudeville manager, was the granddaughter of the most
renowned Jewish prizefighter of the eighteenth century.
Strange to say, there were many brawling Jews in that era: Aby Belasco,
Barney “Star of the East” Aaron, Lazarus the Jew Boy, the curiously named
Ikey Pig. . . . But the best of them, the strongest and scrappiest, was Daniel
Mendoza, whose fabulous life in the ring was set up, however indirectly,
by a gang of Jewish killers. In the spring of 1771, a flourishing group of
circumcised thieves (led by a doctor, of all people) was busily breaking into
Chelsea houses and successfully removing items of interest. The crime spree
came to an abrupt end in June when, in the midst of a heist, they made
the mistake of killing somebody’s servant. The doctor and his gang were
quickly apprehended, tried, convicted, and hanged, but the rest of London’s Jewish population felt a more long-lasting effect. “I have seen many
Jews hooted, hunted, cuffed, pulled by the beard, spit upon, and barbarously assaulted in the streets,” a contemporary wrote. “Dogs could not be
used in the streets in the manner many Jews were treated.”
Daniel Mendoza was five years old at the time of the Chelsea murder,
the consequence being that throughout his childhood and adolescence no
Jewish boy in London was safe from Christian harassment. Daniel was
naturally tough, even belligerent, and he learned to protect himself. When
he got older he trained other boys to fight as well, and eventually, as Mendoza’s contemporary noted, “it was no longer safe to insult a Jew unless he
was an old man and alone.” Thrashing others was not Daniel’s first career
choice, however. After his bar mitzvah he set himself on course to becoming
a glassmaker, but his apprenticeship came to a quick end when he couldn’t
help but beat up the glazier’s son. He moved on to assist a greengrocer but
spent so much time physically avenging the grocer’s wife against the insults
of shoppers that he soon moved on again, this time to a tea shop, where
he responded to a customer’s complaint about the service by clobbering
him—for forty-five minutes. The bruised patron, however, had sense. He
responded not with legal action but with sound advice: He convinced Daniel to become a professional fighter.
Until his great-great-grandson surpassed him in both fame and fortune,
Daniel Mendoza was his family’s brightest star. (The great-great-grandson
acknowledged this fact in several of his films by hanging portraits of Mendoza in the background; a certain inept French detective, for instance, is
an admirer of Daniel Mendoza.) The prizefighter left a curious series of
personality bequests. Like his descendent, Mendoza liked to assume other
identities if his own grew dull. Mendoza and his friends once decided to
go out on the town in the guise of seamen and were promptly arrested,
having been mistaken for group of sailors who had just jumped ship. Like
his descendent, Mendoza didn’t quit show business after facing a hostile
audience. There’s the story of Mendoza showing up at a Purim pageant and
being hired on the spot to perform; the audience booed, the manager refused to pay, and Mendoza, never one to back down from a dispute, simply
persisted in his demands until he got his fee. And he was inevitably the
victim of trouble, never the cause. As described by a contemporary, he
“always was the injured party. In his own estimation, never was there such
a mild mannered man as he. The fights just seemed to seek him out.” Can
a sense of victimization be genetic?
Mendoza made and lost a vast amount of money in his life. His abiding
concern for the box office led him to stage one of several grudge matches
with his archrival, Richard Humphreys, on the riverbank, specifically to
keep gatecrashers away. He never imagined that they would simply arrive
by boat, a fact that bugged him for the rest of his life. The Prince of Wales
introduced his friend Mendoza to his father; thus Daniel Mendoza rode
the royal carriage to Windsor Castle and met George III. They strolled on
the terrace together, the King of England and the street fighter from the
East End. It was the first time the monarch had ever spoken to a Jew. After
winning his first professional bout and earning the sum of five guineas, he
went on in 1785 to whip a fighter called Martin the Butcher in a record
twenty minutes and earned, thanks to the patronage and friendship of the
Prince of Wales, more than £1,000—a fantastic sum at the time.
Mendoza tended to spend more than he earned, a common enough
failing, and more than once he spent time in debtors’ prison. As he aged,
prizefighting had to be supplemented with catering. Process serving. Recruiting
soldiers. Innkeeping. Inciting a mob. Baking. Mendoza died in
1836 at the age of seventy-three, leaving a wife, eleven children, and no
money.
Daniel’s son Isaac married a woman named Lesser, who bore Welcome.
Welcome married Solomon Marks and bore Peg. Peg married Bill Sellers.
In 1925 Peg and Bill had another baby to replace the dead one. They called
him Peter, too.
• • •
Welcome Mendoza Marks was prolific and shrewd, not only as a businesswoman
but as a mother. She birthed, fed, and raised a total of eight sons—George, Harry, Chick, Alfred, Lewis, Dick, Moss, and Bert—and two
daughters, Cissie and Peg, whose real name was Agnes. When Solomon
Marks died, Welcome was dynamic enough to corral her ten offspring at a
house at Cassland Crescent, Hackney, and press upon them the idea of a
family theater troupe and management company. She called it Ray Brothers,
Ltd., having decided that Belle Ray was a more fitting name for a woman
of the theater, though everybody around her called her “Ma.”
Ma Ray was Mama Rose with skill, better luck, and more children. She
never aimed at art. Commerce was her goal, and the more the better. From
nothing, she came to manage forty other vaudeville companies in addition
to her own, though Ray Brothers, Ltd., was always her chief concern. The
company survived, even thrived, but the hard fact was, vaudeville was already
on its way out. As clever as Ma was as a theater manager, a more
prescient enterprise would have been the business of motion picture exhibition.
And even within the slowly declining world of the English music
hall, Ray Brothers were never top-notch. They don’t seem to have ever
played London—only provincial theaters, a heavy component of which
were summer seaside resorts.
A German inventor sold Ma her big inspiration: a large but transportable water tank. In it, barely clad nymphs (her daughters) would frolic for
the pleasure of an audience (mostly men) who hadn’t come to see Shakespeare. Ma called her first revue “Splash Me!” It was prurient, and it sold
well. The only problem, her grandson later claimed, was that the tank broke
one evening and “eventually drowned the band. . . . Seriously drowned!”
(Asked by the interviewer how someone could be “unseriously drowned,”
the grandson was vague: “Yes, anyway . . .”)
Neither Peg nor Cissie Marks was a beauty, but they were young and
in good enough shape, and they could always be supplemented by any
interchangeable showgirl willing to appear nearly naked and drench herself
for pay on a music hall stage. Historically, aquacades have not ranked high
in the aesthetic hierarchy of live performance, but even in its own category
“Splash Me!” challenged good taste, particularly when Ma directed the girls
to eat bananas underwater. With “Splash Me!,” audiences throughout
southern England knew precisely what they had come to see. So did local
officials. But Ma got around whatever Watch Committee happened to have
jurisdiction by tinting the water lighter or darker depending on the degree
of likely censorship in that particular venue. Always cagey, she took a
preemptively patriotic posture during World War I by dyeing the tank water
red or white or blue and daring the prudes to criticize such a public-spirited
celebration.
Water was not Ma Ray’s only medium. For many years she got her
daughter Peg to stand onstage in a flesh-toned leotard. This seems to have
been the essential point of the act, though its artistic justification took the
form of Peg’s brother Bert projecting slides on her body that miraculously
dressed her as any number of famous ladies—Queen Victoria, Elizabeth I,
the Statue of Liberty. Peg appeared in other forms as well. One in particular,
a chestnut skit starring Peg as a libidinous charwoman, served well as the
warm-up for the water tank.
They were theater people, the Marks/Rays, and Ma was not overly
concerned with her children’s sex lives, though she’s said to have set a strict
moral tone during work hours. Peg attempted marriage with a fellow named
Ayers, but it didn’t work, and soon she was single again and back with Ma.
In 1921, with Peg a divorcee pushing twenty-five, Ma felt the need to go
husband hunting on her daughter’s behalf. An added incentive for the matriarch was that her car, an enormous showy red thing, needed a driver.
And so she found Bill Sellers.