Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [11]
Remarkably, the fake talent agent persona itself wasn’t enough to suit him, so Sellers accomplished these missions of love while wearing a trenchcoat in imitation of Humphrey Bogart, a hat like William Powell’s, and even the beloved paste-on mustache to make him look a little more like Clark Gable, all in addition to the now-standard Robert Donat voice. These overlapping disguises testify to the lengths Peter Sellers went to deny who he was—or wasn’t.
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It was 1943, the grim middle of the war, and Pete was approaching the age of conscription. The Irish-born wartime novelist Elizabeth Bowen described the country’s mood that year: “Every day the news hammered one more nail into a consciousness which no longer resounded. Everywhere hung the heaviness of the even worse you could not be told and could not desire to hear. This was the lightless middle of the tunnel.”
Bill Sellers, being rather at home in a murk with no end in sight, took one of the most decisive actions of his life. With his son turning into a talented drummer, Bill formed a quartet, with Pete on percussion. At first they played only in North Devon, but gigs followed further afield, and by summertime they were all the way up in Lytham St. Annes on the coast of Lancashire. Bill, whose confidence in Peter’s future had once been shaky, grew fond of the kid’s drumming: “He proved a wizard at it,” Bill later said. To enhance the boy’s reputation, Bill had business cards printed, citing Pete’s profession as “Young Ultra-Modern Swing Drummer and Uke Entertainer.” This burst of confidence on Bill’s part leads to unanswerable questions: Was Bill’s lack of confidence in Peter’s abilities actually invented by Peter out of resentment for Bill’s frequent absences, or out of loyalty to his darling mother, or simply out of a mischievous desire to embellish a frankly conventional father-to-son chastisement into a weightier tale of Peter’s victimization?
No one knows, but the cards appear to have worked, perhaps too well, for soon Pete was heading out on his own. He took a job with a band from Blackpool farther up the coast. Peg was not happy. His band having broken up upon the drummer’s departure, Bill joined the Entertainments National Service Association. ENSA had been founded at the start of the war as a network of morale-boosting, ever-touring diversions for soldiers and factory workers. ENSA’s mandate was to bring entertainment not only to workers and servicemen within Great Britain but to British workers and servicemen anywhere in the world—a global music hall. By the war’s end more than four out of every five British actors, musicians, costumers, comedians, stage managers, acrobats, and clowns had found employment, however temporary, with ENSA. It’s an impressive statistic as statistics go, but what it really reflects is the extent to which the British entertainment barrel’s wartime bottom had to be scraped. For every great ENSA discovery—Terry-Thomas, Tony Hancock—and every popular ENSA star—Sybil Thorndike, George Formby, Gracie Fields—there were at least six essentially talentless washouts who would never have been allowed onstage had dire conditions not demanded it. For them, World War II was an employment bonanza. “We had to endure them once a month—and endure it was,” one Surrey factory worker shuddered when recalling those compulsory amateur hours.
Bill Sellers was in the middle range—a proficient musician who was able to provide his audience with a bit of relief from the tedium of military drills or assembly-line monotony. He assembled still another band, largely from the old band, but with one addition: