Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (5 page)

“Although I was on my own at last, I hated the life,” he later said. “I
felt lonely. I felt trapped. I missed Peg, who’d always entertained me when
things were black.

“It put the final seal on my dislike of show business,” Sellers went on,
“of
having
to entertain. I thought to myself, ‘There must be less humiliating
ways of being pushed around.’ ”

He managed to find such a way: by joining the Royal Air Force. That
military service turned out to be less a source of complaint for him than
entertainment work provides a stark measure of Sellers’s ambivalence toward his lifelong career.

• • •

Military service was a national expectation at the time; barring some physical or mental abnormality, one enlisted, and that was it. So it was not
unusual that after his birthday in September 1943, Peter Sellers signed up
with the RAF. Spike Milligan, who heard Sellers’s tales some years later,
describes Peg’s predictable reaction: “She must have gone through the entire
medical encyclopedia to find a disease that would get Pete back into civvy
street, back into her loving care and protection: ‘He’s got flat feet! He’s got
a flat head! Flat ears! He’s even got flat teeth!’ ” It was all to no avail; Peg’s
chubby son became 2223033 Airman Second Class Sellers, P.

Pete was a mama’s boy, but he wasn’t a coward. Airman Sellers thought
he’d like to be a pilot. This goal might be written off as the glamorous
reverie of a callow dreamer, but it was a wartime dream, which is to say
that when Sellers signed up for military service, real planes were crashing
every day and real pilots were dying. It was a bitter disappointment for him
when RAF doctors found that his eyesight wasn’t quite up to the task of
piloting. Turned down for flight training, Pete ended up nothing better
than an aircraft hand.

Sellers’s entry into military service was doubly depressing for him since
the other airmen weren’t at all dazzled by the fact that he could play the
drums. Pete, who needed much more attention than he got whenever he
was away from his mother, found his mood rapidly sinking.

So Peg stepped in to soothe him. Since he hadn’t shipped out yet, she
was free to become a kind of camp follower, trooping after him the way
Marlene Dietrich trails Gary Cooper at the end of
Morocco
(1930), except,
of course, that Dietrich is Cooper’s lover, not his mother.

As befitted her role, Peg cooked his meals for him, RAF mess halls not
being good enough for her special boy. And not surprisingly, Peg demonstrated an extraordinary knack for procuring good food for Pete, despite
stringent wartime rationing. Eggs, butter, cream, sugar, tea—all were in
short supply. Peg got them.

Pete soon found a way out of military drudgery by resuming his performing career; it was better to risk demeaning himself onstage and harbor
the hope of applause than to demean himself daily as an aircraft hand. He
approached Ralph Reader, the head of an RAF entertainment unit called
the Gang Shows, and asked to be auditioned. When Reader asked him what
exactly he did onstage, Sellers answered that he played drums and did
Tommy Handley bits from
ITMA
. Entering the auditorium the following
day for the audition, Reader had the peculiar experience of hearing himself
singing “We’re Riding Along on the Crest of a Wave,” the Gang Show
theme song, to the great amusement of a group of seated airmen who should
have been busy cleaning the theater. The airmen noticed the officer and
stood at attention; Sellers kept on singing—until he, too, saw Reader staring
at him in disbelief. “Well,” Pete said resignedly to Reader, “do you want a
drink or do I get jankers?”

For a mimic so accurate, jankers—otherwise known as the boot—was
unlikely. But when Reader heard Sellers drum, he knew for certain that he
had a workable act. Sellers turned out to have other skills. Beyond the
drumming, for which Pete was soon showcased, Reader’s Gang Shows offered Pete his first chance to be a comedian onstage. Doing short stand-up
routines as well as group skits, he played to troops across England before
shipping out.

Jack Cracknell, who ran the Gang Show office in London, remembered
being bedeviled by a characteristically persistent Peg, who tried every means
to convince him—behind her son’s back, of course—that Pete should be
kept safe within the borders of England.

Once again, she lost. Peter Sellers was sent all the way to India.

• • •

The precise sequence of Peter Sellers’s tour of service is vague. As formative
as his travels in Asia were to him—think of the many mannerly Indians he
impersonated over the years—it’s unclear just how much time he actually
spent there. Sellers himself once claimed to have spent three years in the
East, an impossible length of time given the fact that he also served in
France and occupied Germany after the war ended and was back at his
mother’s house by the end of 1946. As Graham Stark, one of his closest
friends, puts it: “He was a great one for the fantasies. He used to boast—God knows why—that he was descended from Lord Nelson!”

However long Peter Sellers spent in Asia—we know he was in and
around Calcutta in December 1944—the people he saw and heard there
made such an impression on him that he couldn’t help but return the
compliment by picking up speech patterns that would last a lifetime. These
early impersonations may even have included the complete getup, skin tone
and all. Sellers once claimed that while in India with the RAF he went so
far as to rub brown pancake makeup on his face and hands and wrap his
head in a turban so as to pass himself off as a Sikh.

But it was the impersonation of officers—a more dangerous stunt, because he could be court-martialed for it—that became a standard routine
during Sellers’s military career. He claimed that he’d first pulled the prank
on Christmas Eve 1944, in the city of Agartala, most of the way to the
Burmese border, in Assam. Sellers’s rationale for the stunt was, characteristically, both tortured and foreseeable:

“I’d never spent Christmas Eve in a hot country, and I was far away
from home, and I was thinking, ‘My mum wants me at home.’ ” His Peg-sickness led to an excess of Christmas cheer: “In those days we were sort of
drinking a bit, you know.” (Sellers is employing the royal “we.”) “We don’t
drink any more of course—wine, wine, just wine, you know!—and I remember getting very drunk. And I thought, ‘I’m a twit to sit here and do
this when I could be in the officers’ mess.’ ” So he “found” some insignia
of suitably impossible rank and off he went, straight to the officers’ club
with a new identity.

Since it was the middle of the night, there was “only one lone old twit
sitting in the corner.” Plowed as he was, the old officer still managed to
question Sellers as to how he could possibly have achieved the rank of air
commodore at such a young age. After offering several asinine evasions, Sellers came up with this one: “I see in the dark, you know—it’s all this rum.”

• • •

In late 1944 and early 1945, at the time that Peter Sellers found himself in
India, it hadn’t been more than a few months since the subcontinent had
faced the invading Japanese—a disaster for the Japanese. In fact, there was
still intense fighting in parts of Burma in early 1945 when Peter was sent
there to drum and tell jokes to exhausted British soldiers. Sellers seems
never to have been very near the front, but the same can’t be said of his
audiences. In England, some of the airmen for whom he performed were
regularly flying bombing missions over Germany. In India and Burma, they
were fighting jungle fever as well as their fierce enemy. As such, they were
a peculiar audience. As soldiers they were tough. As combat-weary men in
need of distraction, they were easy.

A bit of personal comic relief occurred for Peter when, somewhere on
the subcontinental road show of World War II combat vaudeville, he
bumped into none other than the great Welsh “Waldini” and his band of
English gypsies. Still in their bandanas, Waldini and his band were gamely
crisscrossing India playing their standby Hungarian tunes for homesick
British fighting men.

Pete’s stint in Asia was necessarily his first extended separation from
Peg. Psychologically, he took a notable turn. She remained on his mind, of
course, but he wrote to her rarely, if ever. Earlier, when he left her behind
to tour around England with his father, ENSA, or the Gang Shows, he’d
had no need of pen and paper; the telephone was easier. But now, given
the choice between letter writing and nothing, Pete, conspicuously, chose
nothing.

• • •

One reason was that Peter was necessarily thrown together with his fellow
Gang Show performers, billeted in close quarters, and was rarely alone. One
new acquaintance ended up sticking with him for the rest of his life, though
with a few years’ hiatus after the war.

Dennis Selinger was a theater manager turned RAF gunner. Peter’s
sharply drawn double nature struck Selinger quickly, just as it struck almost
everyone with whom Sellers ever became close: “He was affable, easy, very
funny when the mood was on him; at other times withdrawn, uncommunicative.”

They met in overheated, overstuffed Calcutta, Sellers fresh from a gig
in the jungle, when a turn of events occurred that would seem absurd if
not for the anything-might-happen disorder of wartime: The two English
nobodies suddenly found themselves treated to dinner by the American
movie star Melvyn Douglas, who, being there, was happy to distract two
war-weary soldiers.

The Gang Shows provided a good diversion for worn-out, homesick
troops, and Pete was getting the attention he required. With Reader the
impresario saving the best for last, Sellers’s drumming closed the show. A
reviewer in the
Bombay Sunday Standard
was impressed with him to the
point of clairvoyance: “The ‘baby’ of the show is Peter Sellers, aged 19, the
boy-drummer and impressionist. A big future lies before him.”

• • •

“He was a big, fat, curly-haired boy” with “a big, hairy body—like a monkey,” says Peter’s friend David Lodge, describing the way Sellers looked
when they met. They were in Gloucester at the time, fellow Gang Show
performers. Lodge recalls their meeting as having occurred just after Sellers
returned from Asia, which would place it in 1945. Then again, on another
occasion Lodge dated it as occurring in 1944. More important than the
exact date is the fact that they got along beautifully, amused each other
greatly, and remained the best of friends for the rest of Peter’s life.

Given the fact that tense and frustrated men are thrown together during
wartime with other tense and frustrated men, military theater often leans
in the direction of gender humor. In short, Pete’s dress-up routines included
drag. Lodge himself made a point of growing a mustache to prevent his
own forced march in gowns, but he notes that young Pete’s
“peaches-and-cream” complexion—a strange contrast to the hairy body—produced a
“very convincing woman.” But it was Sellers’s talent as a drummer more
than as a comedian that impressed Lodge: “He was a
great
drummer—as
good as Buddy Rich.” His were showman’s performances, complete with
flamboyant riffs and the confident tossing and catching of drumsticks in
midair. Aging drummers in Britain may disagree; rumors of Pete’s lack of
aptitude have surfaced. Unsung English drummers seem to resent the one
among their ranks who achieved vast wealth and fame as a movie star, and
apparently they denigrate his drumming talent. It doesn’t matter. The winner writes the history.

“He behaved like a boy—a rascal, actually,” says Lodge, who necessarily
got to see Sellers’s selfish streak at close range but who, like the other men
Sellers grew to trust, saw the tender and vulnerable side as well. They were
bunked next to each other in Gloucester. Lodge couldn’t help but notice
that Pete was being bullied by a loud and burly Welshman who did not
appreciate being in such close proximity to a Jew. Sellers, whose temper
could erupt violently and without warning, was reacting to these anti-Semitic taunts with undue restraint, so the bluff, muscular Lodge stepped
in to assist him. He handed Pete a heavy iron poker and advised him to
slam the Welshman over the head with it. “If he won’t, I will,” Lodge added
straight to the Welshman’s face. The bully backed off.

What’s fascinating about Lodge’s tale is not that Sellers was the object
of anti-Semitic contempt but that his Jewishness was so evident to a
stranger. Did the men question each other about their religions? Or was it
simply Peter’s nose?

As Lodge soon saw, Pete did possess a volatile temper, and when he
exercised it there was no holding back. “Another time he actually broke a
chair up, very deliberately, piece by piece, to work out his aggression,”
Lodge recalls. “I made a note—‘If you get on the wrong side of this
boy. . .’ ”

That Lodge quickly gained Peter’s trust was made evident by the fact
that Peter invited him back home to meet his mother. Peg and Bill were
living on Finchley High Road at the time. Lodge, not surprisingly, found
his new friend’s relationship with his mother “too close for comfort.” But,
Lodge continues, despite her domination of his emotional life, Peg couldn’t
control the actions of her willful son. Pete
did
precisely what he pleased.
He required her commanding love to survive, but he didn’t require her
permission for anything.

Only Peg Sellers could see in David Lodge—a tall, broad, athletic serviceman—nothing more than a surrogate for herself. When she discovered
that the Gang Show was heading out on tour again, she tried to make
Lodge promise to become a kind of nanny for her now fully grown son.
Says Lodge, “If she’d been a fella I’d have whacked her.”