Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [9]
As their refuge, she chose the town of Ilfracombe on the north coast of Devon. Even apart from the fact that a brother worked in a theater there, escaping to Ilfracombe was a smart move on Peg’s part. There was nothing there worth bombing—unless, of course, the Nazis decided to target picturesque seaside resorts for obliteration by firestorm.
TWO
The little watering hole of Ilfracombe is seated at the lower verge of one of these seaward-plunging valleys, between a couple of magnificent headlands which hold it in a hollow slope and offer it securely to the caress of the Bristol Channel. . . . On the left of the town (to give an example) one of the great cliffs I have mentioned rises in a couple of massive peaks and presents to the sea an almost vertical face, all muffled in tufts of golden broom and mighty fern.” This is Henry James describing Peter Sellers’s new location, if not his new home, albeit half a century earlier.
It was in Ilfracombe that Peter Sellers, an unemployed adolescent, returned to the theater, and he did so partly in response to the conflicting influences of his parents. After he became famous, Sellers spoke often about his theatrical grandmother, his mother’s performing career, his own bitter childhood backstage, and his profoundly ambivalent feelings about the world of show business. He rarely spoke about his father, who throughout Peter’s youth kept up sporadic employment as a musician of little note. But in 1974, Sellers mentioned to Michael Parkinson of the BBC a reflective detail that suggests that Bill Sellers was not simply a blank slate on which his wife and son wrote nothing. Bill’s confidence in Peter, at times at least, bore an inverse relation to Peg’s: Peg’s was infinite, Bill’s could be utterly void. Was it in defiance of Bill’s paternal defeatism that Peter pursued his career? “Dad was convinced always that I was going to be a road sweeper,” Sellers told Parkinson with a laugh. “And he always was very encouraging: ‘So you’ll turn out to be a bloody road sweeper, will you? I’ll tell you that!’ ”
“See,” Peter continued, “my mum very much wanted me to go into the theatre.” So that is what he did.
Through the nepotism of Stanley Parkin, a family friend who operated an Ilfracombe theater and hired Peg’s brother to work there, Pete got his first job: janitor at ten shillings per week. Promotions followed, as suited an adolescent: box office clerk and usher; assistant stage manager and lighting operator; and, eventually, actor, though as he told Parkinson, only in bit parts “like (officious servant voice) ‘Your carriage is without!’ or (decrepit old man voice) ‘Hello!’ or something like this—minor niddly tiddly poo things.”
Because of the upswing in touring companies during the war, young Pete also got a glimpse or two of real theater. Ilfracombe was hardly comparable to the prewar West End (and there seem to have been no fond memories of Peg ever having taken him to see plays in London), but instead of the carnival acts he witnessed during his early childhood with Ray Brothers, Ltd., Sellers’s backstage jobs in Ilfracombe earned him the chance to see a few sophisticated actors playing complex parts: “I saw some very famous actors come to that theatre—Paul Scofield was one in Night Must Fall with Mary Clare.”
Somehow he made a new friend. When his uncle and Stanley Parkin hired him to work in the theater, they also brought in a boy named Derek Altman, with whom Pete launched his first stage act. They called themselves Altman and Sellers; they played ukuleles and sang and told jokes. Despite winning first prize in a weekly talent show—a cynic might conclude that their jobs as ushers and box office staff at Pete’s uncle’s theater played some role in this triumph—the duo soon disbanded. During this time, Pete and Derek, having developed a fondness for the novels of Dashiell Hammett, were also inspired to found their own detective agency and even had business cards printed to that effect. An unfortunate incident