Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [12]
Pete himself was successfully bribed by the promise of a set of flashy new £200 drums. “They were the finest,” Peg told Alexander Walker in the 1960s. “They had to be! Pete wouldn’t have looked at them if they hadn’t been. With Pete, everything had to be perfect or it wasn’t for him. And what Pete wanted, Pete got.”
• • •
In Taunton he got a girl. As it does for most young men, this triumph, Pete’s first home run, took a blend of luck and engineering. But in Pete’s case there was an added complication: Peg often accompanied her son and husband on their ENSA tours. According to one fellow ENSA trouper, Peg actually went so far as to sleep in Pete’s room with him, leaving Bill to find a bed somewhere else. But when Bill and Pete set up the band in Taunton, Peg stayed at home, fifty long miles away in Ilfracombe.
They were billeted, along with some ENSA showgirls, in a funeral parlor. This made more sense than it may seem at first, since the mortician happened to serve as the local ENSA manager, but still, it was something out of a macabre vaudeville sketch. The doorbell rings, an ENSA trouper answers it, and finds a corpse on the other side of the threshold.
One of the girls was particularly unnerved by the whole experience and found it difficult to sleep with dead people in the house. She confessed her fears to Pete and maternally told him that if he, too, became frightened, he could always join her in her room for solace and support. He took her up on it.
“It was absolutely irresistible,” Sellers later declared. “Although I was still pretty young, I was no stranger to the charms of girls. But I’d never had an invitation issued to me in such plausible circumstances. So one night, in pajamas and dressing gown, and armed to the teeth with Robert Donat accents, I found my way along to the girls’ room. Feigning fear, and trembling with what I hoped she’d think was fright, I got into bed with her. The only mistake I made was that I didn’t take off a stitch in advance—it was a far from ideal state for impetuous lovemaking.”
Peter Sellers was no longer a virgin. Quickly thereafter he was no longer an ENSA trouper, either, Bill having discovered his son’s sexual success. He dispatched the boy back to Peg.
But drumming had sparked Pete’s ambition to the point that even Peg Sellers was forced to contend with the fact that her son couldn’t simply stay with her forever doing nothing, and soon he was playing gigs with the broadcast bandleaders Oscar Rabin and Henry Hall. Finding work outside of ENSA wasn’t terribly difficult at the time, given the scarcity of musicians during the war. But sometimes he had to take what was available, no matter what. Thus, Waldini and His Gypsy Band—an elderly Welshman and a group of Brits with bandanas on their heads. “Waldini” was no master musician, but he was even worse at finding his way from town to town; getting lost seems to have been one of Waldini’s greatest talents. One day, directionless in the middle of a Lancashire nowhere, Pete decided he’d had enough and returned again to Peg.
For Peter Sellers, these back-and-forth shuttlings were his first negotiation between the absolute dependence of childhood and the relative autonomy of young adulthood. All adolescents go through it. But in Sellers’s case, his fledgling freedom was doubly crippled by the vacuum that passed for a core self—his ego was made up of multiplying electrons soaring around no nucleus—and a dependence on his mother that verged on obscenity. (Unlike Freud’s version of the Oedipus myth, Peter never had to challenge his father for his mother’s affections because Bill was figuratively impotent already.) The overgrown boy was turning into an undergrown man, with ludicrous results. At one point he landed in Brighton