Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (2 page)

• • •

They were playing Portsmouth. Her new production (either “More
Splashes” or “Have a Dip!,” there’s some dispute) had just opened at the
King’s Theatre. It was the Roaring Twenties in England, which is to say
that the tank water was clear and the censors weren’t troubled. Peg and Ma
were seated in a café listening to the piano player’s rendition of “I’m Forever
Blowing Bubbles,” and Ma liked what she heard. She asked the man if he
could drive a car and promptly hired him.

Bill Sellers—actually “Seller” at the time—was a Yorkshireman
(Bingley, to be precise), a fact that couldn’t have worried Ma Ray, and he was
a Protestant, which might have bothered her but didn’t. Bill did not possess
a powerful personality. And it may have evaporated further after he married
Peg. The writer and comedian Spike Milligan, who met him in the 1940s,
once described him: “Bill, I think, is kept in the clothes cupboard. I see his
cigarette smoke filtering through the keyhole. Poor Bill—the original man
who never was; he looked a pasty white and reminded me of those people
at Belsen.”

• • •

Peg and Bill married in London at the Bloomsbury Registry Office in 1923.
The marriage certificate lists the bride as “Agnes Doreen Ayers, formerly
Marks”; the groom’s name is down as “Seller.” The ceremony was brief and
the reception nonexistent, since Ma spirited Peg off immediately afterward
to perform the charlady routine while Bill rushed off in another direction
to play the piano for another act. They moved—Peg and Bill and Ma—into a rooming house in Highgate, North London.

Peg’s first pregnancy began soon thereafter. She kept performing. They
were on tour in Dublin when the baby was born and died. According to
Bert Marks’s wife, Vera, “We were told that we were never, never to refer
to that child. It was as if he had never existed.” But by remaining entirely
unspoken, of course, baby Peter’s death came to dominate the family’s
emotional life for years to come.

Peg’s second pregnancy began at the end of 1924, and once again it
did not stand in the way of her performing schedule. Neither did labor.
She was onstage in the middle of a routine in Southsea on the evening of
September 8, 1925, when contractions began, and, trouper that she was,
since she had no understudy she went right on with the show. After the
curtain fell Bill hauled her into the big red heap of a Ford, got her back to
their lodgings, and summoned an obstetrician. And so Richard Henry
Seller, the second boy they called Peter, was born. One week later Peg was
back onstage.

Peter Sellers, a showbiz baby, was carried onstage two weeks into his
life by the vaudevillian Dickie Henderson, who encouraged the audience
to join him in singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Little Pete instantly
burst into tears and the audience erupted into laughter and applause. From
Pete’s perspective, this emotional scenario was played out more or less consistently
until his death in 1980.

• • •

“Fun Showers.” “Mermaids.” “Ripples.” Hampshire. Kent. Suffolk. Trunks,
rooming houses, Ma, and the inevitable water tank. . . .Baby Pete was
schlepped around with Ray Brothers, Ltd., and never had a home. He was
pressed into theatrical service at the age of two and a half when Peg secured
the little blond boy into a cute white-tie-and-tails outfit complete with a
top hat, thrust a cane into his tiny hands, and forced him onstage to sing
the sappy “My Old Dutch.” The boy detested the bit and made his criticism
physical by stomping on the hat.

Matriculation at Miss Whitney’s Dancing Academy in Southsea was
equally short-lived (discipline problems). But when the child cared to perform
his own routines on his own schedule and terms, he was a natural.
And he liked it. His Aunt Vera, whom he called Auntie Ve, used to accompany
him to the waterfront at Southsea so he could play at conducting an
orchestra for amused passersby. She also took him to see Peter Pan in London,
where, inspired by the onstage Peter’s ability to fly, one daring little
boy in the balcony attempted to hurl himself off the ledge. Auntie Ve
restrained him.

Peg and Bill saw their son as their best ticket to theatrical easy street,
a role the son resented. As Auntie Ve once recalled, “They all thought, ‘This
is where we sit back and Peter will make us a fortune.’ ” Defiant at an early
age, though, young Pete refused to cooperate. Hired for £5 to pose for an
advertisement, he shunned all the photographer’s directions and then flatly
refused to take on any more modeling assignments.

“He was a little monster.” This was Auntie Ve on the subject of her
nephew. “He had far too many people worshipping him. A good smacking
would have done him the world of good.” Her husband, Uncle Bert, agreed:
“If Peg had to go out of the room for a minute, he would set up a yell you
could hear in the Portsmouth dockyards on payday.”

Discipline played no role in Peter Sellers’s upbringing. Once, after he
pushed one of his aunties into the fireplace—with a fire in it—Peg’s response was simply to say that “it’s the kind of mischief any boy would get
into at his age.” After all, she was his mother.

• • •

Still, it was a peculiar kind of worship, since Peg alternately doted on and
abandoned the boy according to her own needs. She gave him whatever he
wanted when she was there, but then she went off on tour and left him in
the care of one of the aunts. Peg and Bill did bring Pete along with them
sometimes, but their care of him was still sporadic, not to mention risk-prone. In the midst of a fierce Yorkshire winter, with Peg and Bill appearing
in something called
The Sideshow
and the child being carted back and forth
between a chilly rooming house and the spartan dressing rooms of the
Keighley Hippodrome, Pete developed bronchial pneumonia.

The stink of stale fish in strange hotels was the price Peter Sellers paid
for staying with his parents when they were working. It was a sad childhood,
and he hated it. “I really didn’t like that period of my life as a kid,” he once
declared. “I didn’t like the touring. I didn’t like the smell of grease paint.
It used to hit you when you went into any stage door. Grease paint and
baritones with beer on their breath and makeup on their collar. . . . All these
voices: ‘Hello, how are you, little sonny boy? Are you all right little boy
there? (Who is he?)’ I used to spend my time sitting in dressing rooms.”

There were, of course, moments when Peter found joy in the work of
entertainers. One act in particular contributed greatly to young Peter’s appreciation of the absurd. He loved Fred Roper’s Midgets. They played with
trained dogs and jumped through hoops and were the same size as Pete,
despite the fact that they had deep voices and smoked cigars. The midget
act’s merry idiocy spoke to him.

Tragedy provided Pete’s salvation from the stinking backstages. Ma Ray
died in 1932, and the company quickly slid. Bill and Peg and the uncles
were forced to take work with other troupes, and Pete got to stay home a
bit more with one or the other of his parents.

• • •

Peter Sellers had just turned six years old in September 1931, when Britain
went off the gold standard; by 1932, his cast-adrift parents had discovered
a new way of making money. They called it “golding.” It was, in essence,
a scam. Bill, Peg, and Peg’s brother Bert would climb into Bert’s car with
little Pete in tow; they’d drive out of London to some remote village or
other and go house to house convincing the näıve locals that they represented the London Gold Refiners Company, Ltd., a flimflam firm that paid
equally fictitious prices for gold. The locals had no idea what their jewelry
was worth; Peg did, and she profited. The only “refined” aspect of the
company was the phony accents Pete’s mother assumed as she relieved
people of their bracelets and chains. Although Pete was kept out of sight
in the car during these glorified shakedowns, he still claimed as an adult to
remember hearing his mother’s performances in the gold trade. Even at the
time the boy considered them to be a step up from what he had heard her
do onstage.

Bill, meanwhile, formed a ukulele duo with a man named Lewis, which
meant that he was often on the road. With the already spectral Bill vanishing
completely when he went out on tour, Pete was left entirely in his mother’s
care. The Sellers family’s life was made even more transitory by the fact
that they kept changing apartments; moving was easier than paying the
rent. “I had the constant feeling I was a mole on the lam,” Sellers recalled.
“I kept longing for another more glamorous existence—for a different me,
you might say. Maybe that was the beginning of my capacity for really
becoming somebody else.”

Still, the Sellerses cut a particular swath as they chased around London:
They kept entirely to the north side of the city. The family’s locus classicus,
established by Ma Ray, was Hackney. Ma lived with Peg and Bill in Islington, East Finchley, and Highgate; after she died the Sellerses moved
around in Camden Town. Apart from brute geography, what linked these
neighborhoods was their increasing Jewishness. Whitechapel, the East London neighborhood in which Daniel Mendoza lived, was still the center of
Jewish life in the city (to the point of being considered a ghetto as late as
1900), but the North London neighborhoods in which the Sellerses housed
themselves were attracting more Jews by the year.

All the stranger, then, that it was to St. Mark’s Kindergarten that Peg
Sellers sent her son. When Pete outgrew St. Mark’s, she packed him off to
St. Aloysius, a prep school run by the Brothers of Our Lady of Mercy. It
wasn’t simple convenience that drove Peg to pick St. Aloysius, and in fact
she moved to a small house in Muswell Hill Road, Highgate, specifically
to give Peter close access to that particular Catholic school. A telling aspect
about all of these shifts in residence is that family and friends—and Peter
himself—consistently attributed the decision-making to Peg: Peg choosing
the school, Peg moving with Peter, Peg, Peg, Peg. Even when Bill was there
he wasn’t there. Indeed, according to Peter’s son, Michael, while Peg and
Peter lived at Muswell Hill, Bill lived separately at Holloway.

On still another occasion, Bill disappeared entirely, and Pete had no
idea what had precipitated the departure. After a good deal of time had
passed, Peg put Pete in a car, drove to Leicester Square, found Bill standing
on the sidewalk as obviously promised, and took him back, leaving Pete
utterly baffled.

Pete was not a stupid boy, but he was very much an uneducated one,
Peg never having stressed learning as a virtue. Originally enrolled in Form
II at St. Aloysius, he was quickly sent back to Form I, an experience he
found humiliating. One of his teachers, Brother Hugh, remembered that
Pete was upset at his demotion, especially because he was not only older
but substantially larger than any of the other boys in his new class. At that
point he was almost five feet tall and fairly fat, with coarsening features,
dark hair, and all the natural grace and poise of an expanding eleven-year-old. Brother Cornelius recalled that Pete looked as though he was four or
five years older than he actually was, a fact that, combined with his educational underachievement, exacerbated his embarrassment.

The most striking feature of Peter Sellers’s schooldays is the fact that
practically nobody remembered him. As Brother Cornelius said, “One always remembers the troublemakers. But Peter, we didn’t notice him at all.”
Scouring the many profiles, interviews, memoirs, surveys, studies, and incidental trivia about the life of Peter Sellers—and in England there are
libraries’ worth—one finds reference to only one schoolmate who has ever
had anything to say. And what he says is rather weird.

Bryan Connon, turned up by the deft entertainment writer Alexander
Walker, appears to have been Pete’s only chum at school. “He wasn’t much
liked,” Connon told Walker. But that wasn’t a big problem, Connon continued, because “he seemed to have no need of friends. The retreat home
to Peg was always open to him—it was the one he preferred to take.” Peg’s
son
had
to go to school, and so he
might
make a friend there, but Pete’s
friendship with Bryan Connon stopped precisely at her front gate. He never
got as far as her doorstep.

Sellers himself reflected on the loneliness of his childhood: “Sometimes
I felt glad not to be too close to people. I might have been happier, I
suppose. On the other hand, I never had much luck with people over the
years.”

• • •

Pete was not the only non-Catholic at St. Aloysius, though he was probably
the only Jew, and the brothers maintained a liberal policy of accommodation: non-Catholic boys were excused from prayers at their parents’ request.
The strange thing is that Peg never requested it. And so Peter Sellers learned
his catechism. In fact, he mastered not only its language but its cadence
and pitch, all in perfect imitation of the Brothers of Our Lady of Mercy
chanting in chapel. This skill prompted Brother Cornelius to scold Pete’s
recalcitrant classmates: “The Jewish boy knows his catechism better than
the rest of you!” The problem was, of course, that it wasn’t his catechism.

One of the few constants, apart from his mother, was the BBC.

The loyal electromagnetic friend of lonely boys, the radio carried more
than simple entertainment into the restricted world within which Peg had
barricaded her son. There was nothing radical on the BBC’s airwaves, but
the middlebrow comedians and variety acts that formed, along with news
and sports, the backbone of British broadcasting showed Peter Sellers a way
out of his mother’s tight domestic trap. However little he understood it at
the time (or ever), the blandly funny Misters Muddlecombe, Murgatroyd,
and Winterbottom, the stately bands, the hours of forgettable patter—all
were a subtly defiant rejection of Peg and her otherwise incessant grip.