Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [21]
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The Gang Shows’ steady employment having given way to seemingly endless stretches of nothing, Pete was losing hope. A booking at a Peterborough music hall might have bolstered his flagging confidence except for the fact that on opening night, after sharing a cramped dressing room with a blind accordion player and a trick dog act, the waves of hisses that greeted his comedy routine led the manager to fire him on the spot. Luckily for Peter, the headlining singer, Dorothy Squires, came to his rescue and convinced the manager to keep him on, though Squires later said that she’d seen nothing particularly special in Sellers’s drab routine. She just felt sorry for him: “He was just another struggling kid, fresh out of the services, very lonely and very scared.”
A drumming gig at the Aldershot Hippodrome took a similar downturn. Having been loftily billed as “Britain’s answer to Gene Krupa,” Peter launched his set only to have the lights go wrong and the accompanying band fall drastically off-tempo. The audience rebelled, loudly. Graham Stark recalls Peter telling him about the fiasco, though for Stark’s benefit Peter couldn’t help but turn it into a black comedy routine: “As a story of absolute disaster it unfailingly reduced me to tears of laughter,” Stark recalls.
With Peter suffering one thudding calamity after another, it’s little wonder that he thought about disappearing into still another new identity. At his mother’s urging, he considered adopting the stage name “Peter Ray.” Hilda Parkin remembers it: “She wanted him to be called ‘Peter Ray’—it’s in one of my letters. And I said to him, ‘You know, “Peter Sellers” sounds much better. It sort of comes to the tongue better than “Peter Ray.” ’ And there already was the star comedian Ted Ray.”
As it happened, he kept Sellers but dropped the drums. The big shining car was gone now—who knows where it had come from, and who knows where it went—and since Peter had, after all, chosen to master the most unwieldy musical instrument this side of the piano, the lack of ready transportation made it difficult for him to get from show to show with his cumbersome drum set. “I was playing with a little group called ‘The Jive Bombers,’ ” Peter’s story goes. The band was booked in the industrial city of Birmingham, about one hundred miles northwest of London. Peter got there, along with his drums, by hitching a ride with the saxophone player. The Jive Bombers were in mid-session when people began crowding around Peter’s drums, helpfully making little percussive noises with their tongues in the middle of his set. Peter’s tale concludes: “This fellow says to me, ‘Oh say, can ya play “Any Umbrellas”? I said, ‘No, no, we don’t play that.’ He says, ‘Why don’t you play it?’ I was getting annoyed at this point, so I said, ‘Just ’cause we don’t play it, that’s all.’ So he looks at me and says ‘Shitface’ and walks away. I thought, ‘That’s it, inn’it? I’m out.’ ”
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In March 1948, he was standing around Archer Street not knowing quite what else to do when a press agent friend told him that a nearby strip club was looking for a comic. The Windmill, just off Piccadilly Circus, was run by a successfully sordid impresario named Vivian Van Damm. Forbidden by the local morals code from gyrating, Mr. Van Damm’s strippers made a show out of stationing themselves around the stage in exalted tableaux of live neoclassical sculpture, each element designed, however roughly, as a contemporary interpretation of a low-grade Venus. The girls were essentially coarser and more modern Peg Rays without the slides and body stockings, and the audiences made do. Already frustrated, the Windmill’s crowd was thus a tough one as far as any intervening joke-tellers were concerned, and Van Damm, accordingly, was a harsh auditioner. (Who wants to run a strip club with a clientele bored to the point of rioting? Not Vivian Van Damm.) But Peter was funny