Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [19]
Hilda: “My family was running this carnival, as you call it—it was an amusement park—and Peter came up to see me. He came everywhere, wherever I was, bless his heart. He said, ‘You must come over to the hotel. I’ve booked in as Lord Beaconsfield.’ His mother said there was some back relationship with Beaconsfield, but that line had died out many years ago. There happened to be a lady in that hotel, and someone told her, ‘Oh, we have Lord Beaconsfield.’ And she said, ‘There is no Lord Beaconsfield.’
“So they went and looked in his suitcase and found a pack of very cheap cigarettes—Woodbines. Not the best cigarettes! And his pajamas were from Marks and Spencers. When we got there, a couple of fellows came straight up to him. One stayed with me, and one marched him off to the manager’s office. He came out a little while later, red-faced, and we both just walked off. I said, ‘I thought I was going to be arrested!’ ”
And what was Peter’s first response when confronted by the hotel manager? “When they took him into the office,” Hilda says, “he phoned his mother.”
According to Hilda, Peg explained that yes, Peter “was always kidding, there was no harm in him, he’s not going to hurt anybody, and his uncle is the manager of a big London theater. . . .”
But that was not quite the end of it, according to Hilda: “When he got back to London he had to report to the police. They let him off. I think the police called on them, because I remember he told me that his father had said, ‘Here you are, officer—here’s the Lord Beaconsfield.’
“At the end of the three years when we were very good friends, he wanted to get married, he really did. I wasn’t thinking of marriage. There’d been a war, and we’d only just finished it. The last thing I wanted to do was get married.” So Hilda Parkin told Peter Sellers something he never wanted to hear: “I thought it was fair just to tell him that I wasn’t in love with him. He burst out crying. So I cried, too. He kept writing, but I didn’t contact him any more. I didn’t answer the letters.”
• • •
Pete wasn’t mortally crushed by the rejection, especially since Margaretta “Paddy” Black, a member of an all-girl Gang Show, appears to have been enjoying a relationship with Peter at the same time he was pursuing Hilda. Paddy recalls accompanying Peter on a visit to one of the Marks/Rays’ quite-distant relatives, Gerald Rufus Isaacs, the second Marquess of Reading. (Gerald Rufus Isaacs’s father, Rufus Daniel Isaacs, 1860–1935, was lord chief justice of England, ambassador to the United States, and viceroy of India.) After a pleasant discussion of heraldry and cousins far removed, Peter and Paddy headed home, whereupon Peter proudly told her that Gerald Rufus Isaacs’s title was hereditary and that he—Peter Sellers—was next in line. If she agreed to marry him, he added pregnantly, Paddy Black stood to become a countess. But the made-up promise of a title wasn’t enough. “As much as I liked Peter,” Paddy Black later said, “the idea of getting engaged never entered my head.”
At home, a jittery Peg took to her bed whenever Paddy turned up at 211B Finchley High Road. Hilda Parkin had had better luck: “Since they were working and involved with my family, they were quite pleased by it. She was very nice to me.” With Paddy, though, Mother made herself so scarce that Paddy assumed she was a bedridden invalid. “Peter?” Paddy would hear a little voice moan from behind a closed bedroom door during these cramped domestic dates.
Then a little louder: “Peeee-ter?!”
• • •
World War II had scared Peg, but certain of Peter’s romances threw her into a cold terror. Following her own mother’s liberal morality,