Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [24]
On the strength of his reputation, the ex-nobody was even able to hook up his friend Graham Stark with steady BBC work as well. Stark and Sellers continued to enjoy each other’s company, to the point of developing a double-pickup routine. Along with the disk-cutter, the increasingly gadget-prone Peter owned a then-novel automatic record-changer that accommodated a total of eight records, and so it served as a built-in timing device for two young men on the make. He and Graham would pick up girls and bring them back to Pete’s place when Peg and Bill were out. “If we hadn’t gotten anywhere with the girls by the fifth, we certainly wouldn’t by the eighth,” Stark fondly recalls. “This became a catchphrase which Peter and I used to bandy about: ‘If you haven’t made it by the fifth. . . .’ ”
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In late 1946, a year and a half before Peter appeared at the Windmill, a bulbous and good-natured Welshman took the stage with an edgy music hall routine. He sang, and not only in the fine Welsh baritone for which he would become world famous. The man sang both parts of the sappy Jeanette MacDonald–Nelson Eddy duet “Sweetheart.” When “MacDonald” and “Eddy” were forced to sing at the same time, the Welshman yodeled incomprehensibly. But it was a warped shaving routine that caught the audience’s interest most dramatically, for the man really did shave himself onstage using a big bowl of warm water, a well-used brush, an old-fashioned cutthroat razor, and ridiculous amounts of shaving cream, after which the comedian drank his filthy shaving water.
Harry Secombe was born in relative poverty in 1921 in the port city of Swansea on the south coast of Wales. His love of singing was established at an early age. According to his brother, the Reverend Frederick Secombe, “Harry’s great place for singing was out in the ty bach. He used to sit and sing there for hours.”
Like so many men his age, Secombe had gone through the war, though in Harry’s experience—at least in Harry’s telling of the experience—World War II tended to be rather more farcical than it probably seemed to others. He recounted one escapade, for example, that is said to have occurred in Medjaz-el-Bab, a tent somewhere in Algeria, where the myopic Secombe espied what he took to be a helmeted Nazi and slapped the enemy dramatically under arrest, only to learn that the Nazi was Randolph Churchill. (“He happened to be facing the wrong way at the time,” was Secombe’s explanation.)
Young Harry Secombe was amiable but driven. He married a Swansea girl, Myra Atherton, in 1948, and after a short honeymoon in Cornwall, Harry returned to London, Myra to her family in Swansea. They saw each other only when Harry needed to take a break from his heavy performing schedule. They stayed happily married for fifty-three years.
Secombe’s six weeks at the Windmill ended with Vivian Van Damm etching Harry’s name onto the honored bronze plaque, the one that augured greatness to those who had performed under Van Damm’s roof. The gesture may seem to have been a pro forma honor, but bear in mind that in the seventeen months after Secombe appeared at the Windmill, the gruff Van Damm added only three names to the plaque before Peter’s—Alfred Marks, Michael Bentine, and Bill Kerr.
When Secombe left the Windmill, the comedy duo of Sherwood and Forest moved in. Sherwood was Tony Sherwood. Forest was Michael Bentine.
Born in 1922 into an upper-crust Peruvian family, the Eton-educated Bentine was, in appearance at least, a sort of Beat-poet Rasputin. With his bushy black mane and beard, he looked, as the musician