Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [3]
Peg’s first pregnancy began soon thereafter. She kept performing. They were on tour in Dublin when the baby was born and died. According to Bert Marks’s wife, Vera, “We were told that we were never, never to refer to that child. It was as if he had never existed.” But by remaining entirely unspoken, of course, baby Peter’s death came to dominate the family’s emotional life for years to come.
Peg’s second pregnancy began at the end of 1924, and once again it did not stand in the way of her performing schedule. Neither did labor. She was onstage in the middle of a routine in Southsea on the evening of September 8, 1925, when contractions began, and, trouper that she was, since she had no understudy she went right on with the show. After the curtain fell Bill hauled her into the big red heap of a Ford, got her back to their lodgings, and summoned an obstetrician. And so Richard Henry Seller, the second boy they called Peter, was born. One week later Peg was back onstage.
Peter Sellers, a showbiz baby, was carried onstage two weeks into his life by the vaudevillian Dickie Henderson, who encouraged the audience to join him in singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Little Pete instantly burst into tears and the audience erupted into laughter and applause. From Pete’s perspective, this emotional scenario was played out more or less consistently until his death in 1980.
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“Fun Showers.” “Mermaids.” “Ripples.” Hampshire. Kent. Suffolk. Trunks, rooming houses, Ma, and the inevitable water tank. . . .Baby Pete was schlepped around with Ray Brothers, Ltd., and never had a home. He was pressed into theatrical service at the age of two and a half when Peg secured the little blond boy into a cute white-tie-and-tails outfit complete with a top hat, thrust a cane into his tiny hands, and forced him onstage to sing the sappy “My Old Dutch.” The boy detested the bit and made his criticism physical by stomping on the hat.
Matriculation at Miss Whitney’s Dancing Academy in Southsea was equally short-lived (discipline problems). But when the child cared to perform his own routines on his own schedule and terms, he was a natural. And he liked it. His Aunt Vera, whom he called Auntie Ve, used to accompany him to the waterfront at Southsea so he could play at conducting an orchestra for amused passersby. She also took him to see Peter Pan in London, where, inspired by the onstage Peter’s ability to fly, one daring little boy in the balcony attempted to hurl himself off the ledge. Auntie Ve restrained him.
Peg and Bill saw their son as their best ticket to theatrical easy street, a role the son resented. As Auntie Ve once recalled, “They all thought, ‘This is where we sit back and Peter will make us a fortune.’ ” Defiant at an early age, though, young Pete refused to cooperate. Hired for £5 to pose for an advertisement, he shunned all the photographer’s directions and then flatly refused to take on any more modeling assignments.
“He was a little monster.” This was Auntie Ve on the subject of her nephew. “He had far too many people worshipping him. A good smacking would have done him the world of good.” Her husband, Uncle Bert, agreed: “If Peg had to go out of the room for a minute, he would set up a yell you could hear in the Portsmouth dockyards on payday.”
Discipline played no role in Peter Sellers’s upbringing. Once, after he pushed one of his aunties into the fireplace—with a fire in it—Peg’s response was simply to say that “it’s the kind of mischief any boy would get into at his age.” After all, she was his mother.
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Still, it was a peculiar kind of worship, since Peg alternately doted on and abandoned the boy according to her own needs. She gave him whatever he wanted when she was there, but then she went off on tour and left him in the care of one of the aunts. Peg and Bill did bring Pete along with them sometimes, but their care