Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [6]
He particularly loved the variety show Monday Night at Seven. (The title and time were later changed to Monday Night at Eight.) Pete listened to it every week, as did Bryan Connon, though always in separate houses. On Tuesdays they’d discuss it in exacting detail on their walk home from school, with Peter tossing off all the best comedy bits against Bryan’s straight-man backboard. “He had a gift for improvising dialogue,” Connon remembers. “I’d be the ‘straight’ man, the ‘feed,’ and all the way up Archway Road I’d cue Peter and he’d do all the radio personalities and chuck in a few voices of his own invention as well.” The fun would last only as long as the walk, though, for once they reached Peg’s gate it was all over. Pete said good-bye and that was the end of that.
• • •
With its heavy quotient of solitude and an awkwardness both physical and social, Peter Sellers’s youth might necessarily have carried along a third component: sexual immaturity. But no. Describing his adolescence to Alexander Walker, Sellers described his own youthful randiness: “I found out how much I liked girls and how much they liked me—or said they did.”
It started early. Not coincidentally, his entrance into school marked the first opportunity Pete had to spend a few hours away from Peg—and with girls his own age. It was in kindergarten that he fell for a child he nicknamed Sky Blue. She rejected him, but instead of the expected retreat into despair, Pete pressed forward. In fact, Pete kept after Sky Blue all the way into his twenties. It was all to no avail, and yet he persisted on this doomed quest for at least fifteen years, through several changes of school and neighborhood.
Pete’s passion for Sky Blue led him to a dawning awareness of how belittling his mother’s treatment of him was. Specifically, Peg was still dressing him in shorts, and he hated them. Not wishing to be regarded as a toddler by Sky Blue, he begged his mother for a pair of boy-worthy trousers to wear to Sky Blue’s for tea, and since Peg couldn’t bear to say no, she gave them to him. This is the kind of family contradiction that ties boys and girls in knots: Peter Sellers’s mother protected, controlled, and belittled him, and she refused him nothing—except normal maturation.
As for the outfit Peg chose for Pete’s date, it took the ridiculous form of white ducks—formal, starchy things that humiliatingly made him resemble a tiny aristocrat or waiter. Pete wore the ducks to tea and quickly pissed them in a nervous attack. Since white ducks tend to be rather less impressive with a fresh yellow stain spreading around the crotch, the date was a fiasco.
Even this severe disgrace failed to dampen Peter Sellers’s affections, which in itself indicates an unusual psyche for a boy. A less single-minded kid might have given up and moved on, his love turned self-protectively to hate. But Pete was either impervious to punishment or, more likely, a glutton for it, and pressed forward. This time he used performance as his chief means of seduction. In this way Sky Blue became Peter Sellers’s first audience—apart, of course, from his devoted mother.
“I found that Sky Blue had a movie hero, Errol Flynn,” he recalled. “I’d seen him in Dawn Patrol and that was good enough. The next day I put on his voice, his accent, his mannerisms. I even threw in a background of airplane and machine-gun noises for good measure. All to impress Sky Blue.” But the girl was a tough audience; the performance wasn’t a hit. “She’d switched her affections. Now she was a fan of Robert Donat’s. So I went to any Donat films I could find playing—fortunately for me he was a prolific actor—and went through the whole act again with his voice. No luck this time, either.”
Rainer