Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [13]
“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.
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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