Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [31]
Because of his smothering mother, Peter was a man unable to tolerate any separation from a woman he loved—that is, any separation that he had not initiated himself. He found no difficulty in scheduling his own performances. It was Anne’s he found unsustainable. “Peter hated me being in the business,” Anne explains, ascribing it not only to Sellers’s possessiveness but also to the fact that he, too, wanted to do legitimate theater and couldn’t seem to make it happen for himself. His ambition was boundless, but his theatrical training was nonexistent. Besides, at the time he was known strictly as an impressionist, not as an actor.
It was the performing Peter with whom Anne Hayes fell in love, the Peter of infinite color and possibility. It was the everyday Peter she dated, and yet she accepted his proposal of marriage in April 1950. The tantrums, the jealousy, the vigilance, the resentment of her career . . . Anne says she “got used to that in time. You’d think, oh, it was just Peter throwing a tantrum—like a spoiled child, really. At its worst.”
“She only wants your body.” That was Peg on the subject of Anne.
She was “an old harridan.” This is Anne on the subject of Peg. “And the way she kissed him goodbye! I’d think, ‘Ugh! Who’s engaged to him, you or me?’ ”
That awful question became less of an idle musing when, all in a period of a few days, Anne broke off the engagement during a spat and threw her triple-diamond engagement ring back at Peter, who handed it over to Peg, who quickly sold it.
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Like everyone, with the notable exception of Jimmy Grafton, Anne blames everything on the harridan. Peg “would allow him anything. However badly he behaved as a child, he was allowed just to get away with it. That was instinctive in him. He thought all women would be like his mother.” She found his eating habits infantile: “I don’t think he knew the meaning of etiquette. He never knew which knife and fork to use, and he was the kind of boy who would immediately grab the first cake off the plate.”
Still, Peter was also funny and engaging. His appeal outweighed his ability to enrage or appall, and the bright young couple soon patched things up again despite Peter’s notable failure to replace the diamond ring. Not to mention the hostile telephone call Peg placed to Anne’s mother: “Anne is going to ruin his life—his whole career! Surely you can recognize this. He is going to be a star. Keep your daughter away from my son!”
Peter Sellers married Anne Hayes in Caxton Hall, in London, on September 15, 1951. Peg made a point of staying home. Bill did, too.
Anne gave up her career. “I would think I probably laughed more with him than with anybody I’ve known in my life—probably cried more, too,” she says in retrospect. “He was amoral, dangerous, vindictive, totally selfish, and yet had the charm of the devil.” After all, it could be most entertaining to spend time with Peter and his multiple personalities, as long as his mood allowed it. As Anne used to remark to their friends, “It’s like being married to the United Nations.”
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In January 1950, Peter and Harry, billed as “Goons,” performed a bit of comedy business on the radio show Variety Bandbox, but their communal ambitions were running much higher than a single appearance on radio’s answer to vaudeville. From Peter’s perspective, this drive wasn’t for lack of work. His solo career was prospering. In the two years after his initial Show Time appearance, Peter Sellers was heard on over two hundred