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

sent on different entertainment tours, Sellers
fell into lonely despair. “I left him in Germany on the Danish border,” says
Lodge. “He was crying.”
    • • •
     
     
    Sellers was back in London working at the Air Ministry on Sloane Square
and killing time at the Gang Show headquarters on Houghton Street when
his term of service with the RAF ended. He had already returned home to
his mother, who somehow managed to reward his survival with a big, new,
shiny black American car.
    Peg was always adept at pulling money out of a hat, but it took special
skill to produce any car, let alone a huge American model. It was easy for
Peter to park the gleaming heap on any reduced-scale London lane because,
apart from the strict gasoline rationing that was still in force, the deprivations of postwar England meant that there were precious few competitors
for spots. It was in this car-poor context that Graham Stark, a Gang Show
sergeant, arrived at the entertainment unit’s headquarters on slim, curving
Houghton Street one day and was flabbergasted to see a lowly airman methodically polishing a car so big that it appeared to be a limousine. “The
whole thing had an air of a sequence from a Hitchcock movie,” Stark
writes, “the empty street, the incongruous car, the lone airman silently
polishing.”
    Curious, Stark struck up a conversation with the airman, who boasted
that it “only does fourteen to the gallon, but you’ve got to admit it’s a right
beauty.” (“No concern with petrol rationing, no concern that I was a sergeant,” Stark notes. “He just wasn’t impressed.”) They ended up going out
for some tea and war stories, including tales of Peter’s life in the theater,
after which Peter inquired about the state of his new friend’s lodgings. Stark
had to confess that he was staying in a one-shilling-a-night flophouse. Peter
was appalled.
    After a quick call to Peg, he put Stark in the newly polished car and
sped him back to East Finchley, where Sellers brought the family’s initially
skeptical landlady nearly to tears by a torrent of melodramatic pleas. (Poor
young officer, served his nation so bravely, jungles of Burma, orphan needing roof. . . .) She immediately offered Stark the empty one-room flat on
the floor below Peter, Peg, and Bill. The flat provided a close-range positionfrom which Stark could witness Peter’s family dynamic. “He was an only
child,” Stark has said, “but it was an absurd ‘only child’ ”—all the spoiledness and narcissism, only warped.
    London itself wasn’t itself. The destruction of whole stretches of the
city forced many newly homeless residents to become squatters in empty
buildings and still-occupied army camps. Mourning was standard, the sullen
knowledge still sinking in that the war’s dead were not just stragglers on a
late steamer from Colombo. There were severe shortages, and therefore
strict rationing, of basic foods and supplies. The British people’s meat allowance hovered around thirteen ounces per person per week; milk at two
pints; cheese at one and one half ounces. They got “sweetie coupons” for
candy, and they didn’t get many of them. Everybody won a single egg every
seven days.
    During the winter of 1946, London, never the brightest of cities, was
particularly dreary. It scarcely helped that the battery of fierce blizzards and
freezing temperatures that season was followed in quick succession by floods
during a bleak London spring and a relentlessly gray and rainy summer.
    • • •
     
     
    At the Sellers residence, the inevitable business cards were printed: “Peter
Sellers, Drums and Impressions.” Peter took work where he could find it,
which is to say that he didn’t work very much and was supported almost
entirely by Bill and Peg.
    In his off hours, which appear to have been many, he pursued a girl.
He did so with such drive and determination that the words clinical and obsession come to mind. Pretty, blond Hilda Parkin met