Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [38]
As one of the British trade papers sniffed, Sellers “impersonates the characters of the story, plugs away energetically and may amuse the unsophisticated.” It would take a few more movies for him to rise above that level.
FIVE
In March 1952, after being married to Peter for six months, Anne suffered a miscarriage, a tragedy that only served to enflame Peg’s maternal instincts. While Anne was recuperating in the hospital, Peg invited Peter to dinner every night, along with a series of his former girlfriends. Ever thorough, Peg is said to have made a point of including one who Peter believed had borne him a daughter (and put her up for adoption) during the war.
Peter Sellers was the painstaking product of a terrible mother, the fucked-up labor of her love. As even his best friends acknowledge, he could be a selfish, childish man, responsive to every need as long as it was his own. His cars, gadgets, and RAF and Goon Show buddies (not to mention his mother) occupied at least as crucial a place in his heart as his wife, with the RAF and Goon Show buddies (not to mention his mother) outlasting all the others in terms of duration. When, for instance, in the spring of 1952, Peter and Anne moved to a house in Highgate, Spike moved in along with them and stayed until he got married. “He was tired of sleeping under people’s carpets,” Anne later explained.
There was little restraint in Peter’s life. Interests became manias. After Graham Stark became a proficient photographer, Peter, always entranced by mechanical equipment of any sort, grew equally fascinated by his friend’s ability to convince beautiful women to pose for pictures. Photography had much to recommend itself—one of his best friends loved it; it involved instruments that could be purchased and replaced; and girls, girls, girls—so Peter swiftly developed a passion for the art. At the very start of it, according to Stark, Peter beelined “to Wallace Heaton’s in Bond Street, the Rolls-Royce of camera dealers, and apparently bought every piece of equipment in the shop.” Stark claims that Peter even called in sick for a Goon Show recording one Sunday so he and Stark could meticulously retouch the breasts and buttocks depicted in one of Graham’s bikini-oriented pictures.
At the same time, Peter could be good-hearted and generous, sometimes exceedingly so. He simply could not keep himself from buying gifts for people he liked. He wanted things, and so, he concluded, must they. And if, stubbornly, they would not acquire these objects for themselves, he would step in and provide them. “He used to call me when he wanted to go downtown in London,” the Goon Show harmonica virtuoso Max Geldray remembers. “He would say, ‘I’m going to the camera shop’—which he did all the time—‘and why don’t you come with me?’ One particular time he said, ‘I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.’ ” Geldray told him, no, he had other errands to do and he’d meet him there, especially because he, Max, needed a new flashbulb for his own camera. When he got there, Peter was admiring a new and very small Swiss camera.
“Look, it has a brighter picture, but the amperage is much lower,” said Peter. “And he went on about the thing,” Geldray continues. “He said to me, ‘Why don’t you get it?’ ”
“ ‘I don’t need it,’ ” Max replied. “Several hours later, I opened the door of my home, and in the middle of the living room was a package. He and Anne were sitting in my living room. He didn’t say anything—he just pointed at the package. I opened it, and there was the new Swiss camera. I said, ‘I don’t need a camera!’ He said, ‘Yes you do. Yours is broken.’
“He meant the flashbulb. For him, that was ‘broken.’ ”
Technicalities failed to impress Peter. He didn’t have time for them. Graham Stark describes the frenzy that accompanied every new purchase: “Pete believed in brute force. He’d tear the box open, ignore the instruction book, and press every