Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers by Ed Sikov Read Free Book Online Page A

rubble—and Britain had won the war.
    There wasn’t enough food, or clothing, or fuel, and these shortages
lasted for years. British soldiers, eager to return home from abroad once
their enemies had surrendered, were nevertheless compelled to await demobilization on the British military’s terms. Since the defeated Germans
had to be policed by Allied troops, there were still thousands of British
airmen in need of light entertainment. Peter remained in the RAF.
    Sellers and Lodge were stationed in a decimated Germany when the
officer impersonations kicked up again. “We were based up on the third
floor of a big barrack block” in a former Luftwaffe camp in Gütersloh,
Lodge remembers. A trace of shock is still left in his voice after all these
years. “Out came the makeup box,” whereupon Sellers morphed before his
eyes into a classical sort of British military man with “a full handlebar
mustache, parted hair, lieutenant’s bars, wings, and ribbons.” Lodge,
amazed and appalled at his friend’s absolute transformation, asked Sellers
where he thought he was going, to which Sellers replied—in a voice unearthed from some forgotten Boer War epic—“I think I’m going to inspect
the lads downstairs!”
    With the air of a bureaucratic missionary or a sort of military uncle,
Peter proceeded to question the boys about the quality of their quarters,
their supplies, their food, all with an air of deep concern. Returning to his
quarters, he simply couldn’t understand Lodge’s panicky attitude. “Now
they really believe somebody cares about them!” Sellers explained sympathetically.
    In telling these tales, Lodge stresses that Sellers still had the lowest
possible rank. “He did it because he didn’t like himself as he was,” Lodge
says. “He didn’t think he was attractive at all. And he didn’t like being a
nobody.”
    There was an infantile streak as well. Lodge tells of sitting in a Paris
patisserie with Peter when a tray of cream cakes was set before them: “Very
deliberately, Peter took a single bite out of every pastry on it—he was like
an immature, undisciplined child who must cram himself with as much
satisfaction as he can as quickly as he can.”
    As far as the chaperoning of Peter was concerned, David Lodge turned
out to be a corrupt nanny. He and Pete were males in their twenties; they
liked to cat around. In fact, in Cannes they managed to procure some
champagne to go with a couple of girls, and everyone got so plastered that
the boys creatively talked the girls into crawling around the floor pretending
to be feline.
    In Toulon, Lodge took it upon himself to rescue Peter from an especially low-life prostititute. Peter had had too much to drink and disappeared. Lodge managed to trace him to a seedy apartment in a bad part of
town and burst in to find Peter trying to remove his pants. Fearing for his
friend’s safety, he grabbed the disappointed Sellers and sped him away.
    Women, says Lodge, were particularly easy in Germany. Much to his
retrospective shame, the pretty young German girls were helpfully starving,
which led the two randy young men to use cookies as bait. (“It was really
pathetic,” Lodge mutters.) Lodge was—and remains—especially disgusted
by Pete’s voraciousness with one particular girl, describing her as “desperate”
and Sellers himself as “animalistic.” There was a comical retribution,
though, when Pete got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom
and chose the wrong door in the dark. Wearing nothing but his RAF
underwear, he plunged directly out into the street. The door locked behind
him, and he had to pound on it furiously to be let back in.
    Lodge remembers spending Christmas 1945 with Sellers on the
Champs-Elysees. It was a merry time. The war was over, the Allied soldierswere gleeful, and all was right with the world, except that Pete, always on
the needy side, had grown a little too dependent on his best friend. When
they had to part, having been