Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [16]
What’s fascinating about Lodge’s tale is not that Sellers was the object of anti-Semitic contempt but that his Jewishness was so evident to a stranger. Did the men question each other about their religions? Or was it simply Peter’s nose?
As Lodge soon saw, Pete did possess a volatile temper, and when he exercised it there was no holding back. “Another time he actually broke a chair up, very deliberately, piece by piece, to work out his aggression,” Lodge recalls. “I made a note—‘If you get on the wrong side of this boy. . .’ ”
That Lodge quickly gained Peter’s trust was made evident by the fact that Peter invited him back home to meet his mother. Peg and Bill were living on Finchley High Road at the time. Lodge, not surprisingly, found his new friend’s relationship with his mother “too close for comfort.” But, Lodge continues, despite her domination of his emotional life, Peg couldn’t control the actions of her willful son. Pete did precisely what he pleased. He required her commanding love to survive, but he didn’t require her permission for anything.
Only Peg Sellers could see in David Lodge—a tall, broad, athletic serviceman—nothing more than a surrogate for herself. When she discovered that the Gang Show was heading out on tour again, she tried to make Lodge promise to become a kind of nanny for her now fully grown son. Says Lodge, “If she’d been a fella I’d have whacked her.”
• • •
Europe was in unimaginable ruins when World War II ended in 1945. Thousands of acres in the heart of British cities had been reduced to rubble—and Britain had won the war.
There wasn’t enough food, or clothing, or fuel, and these shortages lasted for years. British soldiers, eager to return home from abroad once their enemies had surrendered, were nevertheless compelled to await demobilization on the British military’s terms. Since the defeated Germans had to be policed by Allied troops, there were still thousands of British airmen in need of light entertainment. Peter remained in the RAF.
Sellers and Lodge were stationed in a decimated Germany when the officer impersonations kicked up again. “We were based up on the third floor of a big barrack block” in a former Luftwaffe camp in Gütersloh, Lodge remembers. A trace of shock is still left in his voice after all these years. “Out came the makeup box,” whereupon Sellers morphed before his eyes into a classical sort of British military man with “a full handlebar mustache, parted hair, lieutenant’s bars, wings, and ribbons.” Lodge, amazed and appalled at his friend’s absolute transformation, asked Sellers where he thought he was going, to which Sellers replied—in a voice unearthed from some forgotten Boer War epic—“I think I’m going to inspect the lads downstairs!”
With the air of a bureaucratic missionary or a sort of military uncle, Peter proceeded to question the boys about the quality of their quarters, their supplies, their food, all with an air of deep concern. Returning to his quarters, he simply couldn’t understand Lodge’s panicky attitude. “Now they really believe somebody cares about them!” Sellers explained sympathetically.
In telling these tales, Lodge stresses that Sellers still had the lowest possible rank. “He did it because he didn’t like himself as he was,” Lodge says. “He didn’t think he was attractive at all. And he didn’t like being a nobody.”
There was an infantile streak as well. Lodge tells of sitting in a Paris patisserie with Peter when a tray of cream cakes was set before them: “Very deliberately, Peter took a single bite out of every pastry on it—he was like an immature, undisciplined