Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [4]
The stink of stale fish in strange hotels was the price Peter Sellers paid for staying with his parents when they were working. It was a sad childhood, and he hated it. “I really didn’t like that period of my life as a kid,” he once declared. “I didn’t like the touring. I didn’t like the smell of grease paint. It used to hit you when you went into any stage door. Grease paint and baritones with beer on their breath and makeup on their collar. . . . All these voices: ‘Hello, how are you, little sonny boy? Are you all right little boy there? (Who is he?)’ I used to spend my time sitting in dressing rooms.”
There were, of course, moments when Peter found joy in the work of entertainers. One act in particular contributed greatly to young Peter’s appreciation of the absurd. He loved Fred Roper’s Midgets. They played with trained dogs and jumped through hoops and were the same size as Pete, despite the fact that they had deep voices and smoked cigars. The midget act’s merry idiocy spoke to him.
Tragedy provided Pete’s salvation from the stinking backstages. Ma Ray died in 1932, and the company quickly slid. Bill and Peg and the uncles were forced to take work with other troupes, and Pete got to stay home a bit more with one or the other of his parents.
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Peter Sellers had just turned six years old in September 1931, when Britain went off the gold standard; by 1932, his cast-adrift parents had discovered a new way of making money. They called it “golding.” It was, in essence, a scam. Bill, Peg, and Peg’s brother Bert would climb into Bert’s car with little Pete in tow; they’d drive out of London to some remote village or other and go house to house convincing the näıve locals that they represented the London Gold Refiners Company, Ltd., a flimflam firm that paid equally fictitious prices for gold. The locals had no idea what their jewelry was worth; Peg did, and she profited. The only “refined” aspect of the company was the phony accents Pete’s mother assumed as she relieved people of their bracelets and chains. Although Pete was kept out of sight in the car during these glorified shakedowns, he still claimed as an adult to remember hearing his mother’s performances in the gold trade. Even at the time the boy considered them to be a step up from what he had heard her do onstage.
Bill, meanwhile, formed a ukulele duo with a man named Lewis, which meant that he was often on the road. With the already spectral Bill vanishing completely when he went out on tour, Pete was left entirely in his mother’s care. The Sellers family’s life was made even more transitory by the fact that they kept changing apartments; moving was easier than paying the rent. “I had the constant feeling I was a mole on the lam,” Sellers recalled. “I kept longing for another more glamorous existence—for a different me, you might say. Maybe that was the beginning of my capacity for really becoming somebody else.”
Still, the Sellerses cut a particular swath as they chased around London: They kept entirely to the north side of the city. The family’s locus classicus, established by Ma Ray, was Hackney. Ma lived with Peg and Bill in Islington, East Finchley, and Highgate; after she died the Sellerses moved around in Camden Town. Apart from brute geography, what linked these neighborhoods was their increasing Jewishness. Whitechapel, the East London neighborhood in which Daniel Mendoza lived, was still the center of Jewish life in the city (to the point of being considered a ghetto as late as 1900), but the North London neighborhoods in which the Sellerses housed themselves were attracting more Jews by the year.
All the stranger, then, that it was to St. Mark’s Kindergarten that Peg Sellers sent her son. When Pete outgrew St. Mark