Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [14]
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