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PART ONE

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE: 1925–57

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

PART TWO

IN WONDERLAND: 1957–64

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

PART THREE

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: 1964–80

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

EPILOGUE

FILMOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ALSO BY ED SIKOV

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

PART ONE

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

1925–57

ONE

“Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!”

In 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