Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [20]
David Lodge still remembers the disquieting goodnight phone calls Peter placed to his mother when they were separated: “Good night, Peg. God bless you. Yes, you too. God keep you safe! I love you. Yes, I do! Yes, I love you, too!”
Lodge also recalls tiny Peg taking him aside one day, looking up at the burly ex-serviceman, and telling him, with profound admiration and not a shred of comprehension, “You wouldn’t get married and leave your darling mother.”
What drove Lodge craziest, though, was the Lady Bountiful air with which Peg thanked him for taking such good care of her Pete during the war. “I’ll make things easy for you,” she told him, and with a great fanfare of largesse, she arranged for her theater-managing brother-in-law Bert to hire Lodge as an usher.
“She was a pain in the ass,” Lodge observes.
THREE
After returning from the Lord Beaconsfield escapade in Norwich with humiliation in place of the fiancée on whom he claimed, at least, to pin his future, Peter found himself hanging around the streets of Soho killing time with other unemployed musicians. The musical arranger Wally Stott, with whom Peter would work closely a few years later, remembers meeting him for the first time on the sidewalk on Archer Street: Peter was dressed “in an RAF uniform with a snare drum under his arm.” “All musicians stand around Archer Street, you know,” Sellers himself once noted, “and everyone was getting work but me.” (What do you call a guy who hangs around with musicians? A drummer.) Stott, who came to understand Peter very well and like him even more, reflects that “in one of his lives he would like to have been a jazz drummer.”
In still another life, clearly, he would have liked to have been noble. Like the pasted-on mustache he used to dress his upper lip in order to become the youngest dick in Devon, Sellers’s assumed identity as Lord Beaconsfield surfaced again at, of all places, a middle-class campground on one of the Channel Islands. The camp was owned by Hilda Parkin’s brother Stanley; Peter’s cousin Dick Ray found work there as well. The job itself was not exactly fulfilling for the talented, impatient young drummer-comedian—crying out “wakey, wakey” to a slew of slumbering tourists wasn’t quite the career he had in mind for himself. So Peter decided to add a little sparkle by billing himself as the Fifth Earl of Beaconsfield—that is, until a local reporter spoiled the fun by inquiring as to the circumstances by which someone in Burke’s Peerage had descended to a downscale campground in Jersey. Even after he was unmasked Peter couldn’t quite give it up. He insisted on calling himself simply “the Fifth Earl” until he lost that job, too.
Whether he was Lord Nelson’s relative, Disraeli’s descendent, the next Marquess of Reading, or the disembodied doubles of Tommy Handley and the cast of ITMA, Peter Sellers was unusually able to sustain multiplying identities and never let them interfere with each other—or with reality, for that matter. As his friends explain it, it was all because he didn’t much like himself, a schizoid way to build self-esteem. This is a plausible explanation, but perhaps it was equally the case that Sellers harbored an expanding number of selves and liked too many of them. What he didn’t like was having to choose one and stick to it.
Was it to keep these propagating identities at bay or to distill them further into a kind of eaux de folie that Peter began to believe—insofar as any grotesque fantasy is actually believed —in the existence of scurrying little midgety creatures called Toffelmen? Moronic buggers who embraced a philosophy of contradiction, Peter’s Toffelmen were creepy but stalwart, rock-bottom pessimists who harbored flickers of hope. With their high, squeaky voices and circus-act entertainment value, they kept Peter company. Who knows when they first knocked on his mental door, or when (if ever) they