Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (3 page)

He particularly loved the variety show
Monday Night at Seven
. (The
title and time were later changed to
Monday Night at Eight
.) Pete listened
to it every week, as did Bryan Connon, though always in separate houses.
On Tuesdays they’d discuss it in exacting detail on their walk home from
school, with Peter tossing off all the best comedy bits against Bryan’s
straight-man backboard. “He had a gift for improvising dialogue,” Connon
remembers. “I’d be the ‘straight’ man, the ‘feed,’ and all the way up Archway
Road I’d cue Peter and he’d do all the radio personalities and chuck in a
few voices of his own invention as well.” The fun would last only as long
as the walk, though, for once they reached Peg’s gate it was all over. Pete
said good-bye and that was the end of that.

• • •

With its heavy quotient of solitude and an awkwardness both physical and
social, Peter Sellers’s youth might necessarily have carried along a third
component: sexual immaturity. But no. Describing his adolescence to Alexander Walker, Sellers described his own youthful randiness: “I found out
how much I liked girls and how much they liked me—or said they did.”

It started early. Not coincidentally, his entrance into school marked the
first opportunity Pete had to spend a few hours away from Peg—and with
girls his own age. It was in kindergarten that he fell for a child he nicknamed
Sky Blue. She rejected him, but instead of the expected retreat into despair,
Pete pressed forward. In fact, Pete kept after Sky Blue all the way into his
twenties. It was all to no avail, and yet he persisted on this doomed quest
for at least fifteen years, through several changes of school and neighborhood.

Pete’s passion for Sky Blue led him to a dawning awareness of how
belittling his mother’s treatment of him was. Specifically, Peg was still dressing him in shorts, and he hated them. Not wishing to be regarded as a
toddler by Sky Blue, he begged his mother for a pair of boy-worthy trousers
to wear to Sky Blue’s for tea, and since Peg couldn’t bear to say no, she
gave them to him. This is the kind of family contradiction that ties boys
and girls in knots: Peter Sellers’s mother protected, controlled, and belittled
him, and she refused him nothing—except normal maturation.

As for the outfit Peg chose for Pete’s date, it took the ridiculous form
of white ducks—formal, starchy things that humiliatingly made him resemble a tiny aristocrat or waiter. Pete wore the ducks to tea and quickly pissed
them in a nervous attack. Since white ducks tend to be rather less impressive
with a fresh yellow stain spreading around the crotch, the date was a fiasco.

Even this severe disgrace failed to dampen Peter Sellers’s affections,
which in itself indicates an unusual psyche for a boy. A less single-minded
kid might have given up and moved on, his love turned self-protectively to
hate. But Pete was either impervious to punishment or, more likely, a
glutton for it, and pressed forward. This time he used performance as his
chief means of seduction. In this way Sky Blue became Peter Sellers’s first
audience—apart, of course, from his devoted mother.

“I found that Sky Blue had a movie hero, Errol Flynn,” he recalled.
“I’d seen him in
Dawn Patrol
and that was good enough. The next day I
put on his voice, his accent, his mannerisms. I even threw in a background
of airplane and machine-gun noises for good measure. All to impress Sky
Blue.” But the girl was a tough audience; the performance wasn’t a hit.
“She’d switched her affections. Now she was a fan of Robert Donat’s. So I
went to any Donat films I could find playing—fortunately for me he was
a prolific actor—and went through the whole act again with his voice. No
luck this time, either.”

Rainer Werner Fassbinder once remarked that Steven Spielberg always
wanted to be a little boy when he grew up. With Peter Sellers, it was neither
a matter of choice nor desire. Consider his formative years: Peg’s incessant
doting and catering to his every whim; his parents’ nomadic existence
throughout his childhood; the school shuffle and subsequent demotion at
St. Aloysius, which effectively made it impossible to bond with anyone his
own age and size; the lack of any religious identity (or, better, the abundance
of religions at his disposal); the absent father, both figuratively and literally;
the obsessive pursuit of a girl who didn’t want him. With whatever degree
of intent, Peg and Bill Sellers did a splendid job of creating an emotionally
spoiled, spiritually amoebic mama’s boy, whose innate and fierce talent for
mimicry allowed him not only to perpetuate but to depend on and enjoy
his own evacuated personality.

• • •

While the dreariness of Peter Sellers’s childhood paved the way only to the
awkward joylessness of being the big fat Jew of St. Aloysius, the gray chill
of his prep school years yielded, thanks to international politics in the late
1930s, to a dawning awareness of his own potential annihilation. He had
just turned thirteen when thoughts of mass suffocation drifted into his head
as well as everyone else’s in the kingdom. World War II was beginning.

In the last week of September 1938, with Hitler on the brink of attacking Czechoslovakia and the skies of London increasingly dotted with
blimps, the government bestowed 38 million gas masks on the British people. Men, women, and children got them; babies, too young to know the
difference, were written off.

The historian Angus Calder describes the British people’s mood as they
tried on their new headgear at the dawn of the new era: “Fitting on these
grotesque combinations of pig-snout and death’s-head, sniffing the gas-like
odour of rubber and disinfectant inside them, millions imagined the dangers
ahead more clearly. Symptoms of panic appeared.” The imaginative Briton,
Calder writes, “saw in his mind’s eye not the noble if heart-rending scenes
of 1915, not the flower of the nation marching away to fight in a foreign
land, but his own living-room smashed, his mother crushed, his children
maimed, corpses in familiar streets, a sky black with bombers, the air itself
poisoned with gas.”

Pete’s fourteenth birthday occurred at the end of the week in which
Great Britain declared war on Germany. Along with millions of other Englishmen, the Brothers of Our Lady of Mercy ran for cover to the countryside
as St. Aloysius was evacuated to a town in Cambridgeshire. Peg, who had
opened a Highgate trinket shop at the time, claimed to be unable to move
to Cambridgeshire on such short notice.

Perhaps it ought to go without saying, but Peg was unwilling to send
her son so far away (two and a half hours by train) without her. So she
immediately yanked him out of school, and that was the end of Peter
Sellers’s education.

She was assisted, however unintentionally, by the government. September 1, 1939, had been set as the date on which children would be required
to remain in school to the age of fifteen rather than fourteen, but the war
necessitated a postponement. Had it not been for World War II, Peter
Sellers might have received at least one more year’s worth of education.

But no matter. Peg was very pleased to have him by her side all day
long, and that was what counted.

• • •

In September 1939, when the Nazis attacked Poland and England declared
war on Germany, the government issued gas masks, mobilized troops, and
evacuated nearly 4 million British citizens out of the cities and into the
countryside. On the BBC, the immensely popular radio comedian Tommy
Handley turned the onrushing catastrophe into an absurd extended joke.
Handley’s new show,
It’s That Man Again
, featured a series of recurring
characters with funny voices, a taste for puns, and a brand of humor that
would have fallen flat to any audience but the English. In one routine,
Handley played the Minister of Aggravation, a joint venture between Agriculture and Information:

H
ANDLEY:
To all concerned in the Office of Twerps! Take notice that
from today, September the twenty-tooth, I, the Minister of Aggravation, have power to confiscate, complicate, and commandeer—

A
SSISTANT:
How do you spell
commandeer
, Mr. Hanwell?

H
ANDLEY:
Commandeer—let me see. (Singing:) Comm-on-and-ear,
comm-on-and-eer, Tommy Handley’s wag-time band! Comm-on-and-eer . . . ! Er, where were we? “I have the power to seize anything
on sight!”

A
SSISTANT:
Oh, Mr. Handpump! And me sitting so close to you!

Fun, filth, and playing to the crowd: Pete was inspired.

England was profoundly rattled by the war, but by and large the British
people didn’t go berserk at the prospect, their mood at the start of this
international catastrophe an improvement over the previous generation’s
histrionic reaction to the so-called Great War. (The declaration of war on
Germany in August 1914 is said to have sparked the stoning of hapless
dachshunds in the streets.) In fact, because there was so little combat at
first, British wags took to calling it “the Bore War.”

Pete helped his mum in her shop. His only friend, Bryan Connon from
St. Aloysius, was now his former only friend, having been dispatched along
with the other schoolboys to Cambridgeshire. Connon never heard from
Sellers again. With no contact with boys his own age, nor any men except
his always-in-the-background father—even the celibate monks of St. Aloysius were more spirited role models—Pete’s social world now consisted
essentially of his mother and the BBC. Together in their North London
flat, Pete with his radio and Peg with her trinkets, they endured the coldest
winter London had weathered in forty-five years.

And the blackouts. Once a night, for a few minutes at least, everyone
in London had to tack thick curtains or dark paper over their windows or
face the chastisement of police or patrolling air raid wardens. Blackouts
were a matter of national security, of course; lights provided targets for Nazi
bombers. But in the Sellers household, blackout curtains served as the physical manifestation of Peg’s goal as a mother—they sealed her son away with
her. The outside world could never love him as much as she did, so he had
to be kept from it in isolation.

As particular as Pete’s situation was, however, his countrymen were also
experiencing a deep and sometimes morbidly comical sense of disconnection. Plunged into blackness every night, not only were the British people
forced to sequester themselves behind dark curtains at home, but the enforced murk of London streets at night led to pratfalls. All told, an astounding one in five people injured themselves during the blackouts—walking
headlong into trees and lampposts, bumping against fat people, even just
losing their way in the dark chaos of an otherwise familiar lane and tumbling
off the curb. Nightlife had suddenly turned into a series of goofily scary
and nonsensical comedy routines.

The Bore War, or “funny war” as it was also known, grew less boring
in May 1940 when the Nazis’ seemingly unstoppable march to the French
coast forced the humiliating evacuation of 220,000 British soldiers from
the beaches near Dunkirk. The boredom ended absolutely on Saturday,
September 7—the day before Pete’s fifteenth birthday—when German war
planes destroyed London’s East End. Other London neighborhoods saw the
day’s cataclysm as predictive of their own fates. The blitz lasted a full two-and-a-half months, and German ships began massing off the coast of
France. The possibility of an outright invasion of England became a much
less abstract notion.

When the bombing began, Peg and Pete ran, along with countless other
terrified Londoners, to the nearest underground station, which in their case
happened to be Highgate. A few weeks later, the Sellers’s flat suffered a bit
of damage during a bombing raid. The apartment was certainly inhabitable
and the shop could have survived, but it was a close enough call to convince
Peg to shut the business, pack the trinkets and all the family’s furniture,
and spirit Pete swiftly and safely away from London.

As their refuge, she chose the town of Ilfracombe on the north coast
of Devon. Even apart from the fact that a brother worked in a theater there,
escaping to Ilfracombe was a smart move on Peg’s part. There was nothing
there worth bombing—unless, of course, the Nazis decided to target picturesque seaside resorts for obliteration by firestorm.

T
he little watering hole of Ilfracombe is seated at the lower verge of one
of these seaward-plunging valleys, between a couple of magnificent
headlands which hold it in a hollow slope and offer it securely to the caress
of the Bristol Channel. . . . On the left of the town (to give an example)
one of the great cliffs I have mentioned rises in a couple of massive peaks
and presents to the sea an almost vertical face, all muffled in tufts of golden
broom and mighty fern.” This is Henry James describing Peter Sellers’s new
location, if not his new home, albeit half a century earlier.

It was in Ilfracombe that Peter Sellers, an unemployed adolescent, returned to the theater, and he did so partly in response to the conflicting
influences of his parents. After he became famous, Sellers spoke often about
his theatrical grandmother, his mother’s performing career, his own bitter
childhood backstage, and his profoundly ambivalent feelings about the
world of show business. He rarely spoke about his father, who throughout
Peter’s youth kept up sporadic employment as a musician of little note. But
in 1974, Sellers mentioned to Michael Parkinson of the BBC a reflective
detail that suggests that Bill Sellers was not simply a blank slate on which
his wife and son wrote nothing. Bill’s confidence in Peter, at times at least,
bore an inverse relation to Peg’s: Peg’s was infinite, Bill’s could be utterly
void. Was it in defiance of Bill’s paternal defeatism that Peter pursued his
career? “Dad was convinced always that I was going to be a road sweeper,”
Sellers told Parkinson with a laugh. “And he always was very encouraging:
‘So you’ll turn out to be a bloody road sweeper, will you? I’ll tell you that!’ ”