Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers Read Online Free PDF Page 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 put a quick end
to the enterprise: a humorless adult reached over and ripped Pete’s fake
mustache off his lip.
    • • •
     
     
    When a swing band turned up at the theater for a weeklong gig, Pete
discovered a new talent. He’d heard drums before, of course, but he’d never
had the chance to create all that rhythmic racket himself, so one afternoon,
when he found a set of drums onstage for Joe Daniels and His Hot Shots,
Pete let loose. The bandleader/drummer caught him mid-act. Daniels
wasn’t angry. Appreciating the teenager’s enthusiasm and nascent talent, he
ended up giving Pete pointers for the rest of the week, after which Pete
begged his parents for drums and steady lessons. Unable to resist his whims
let alone his wants, they came through.
    Drumming suited him. Banging in time, Pete could envelope himselfin a world of near-total abstraction, all in the context of a great deal of
noise. What aggression he felt as an awkward fat kid could be expelled, at
least in part, by methodically hitting things, all in a socially respectable and
even artistic manner—one that might eventually pay off at that, though
drummers’ lowly status in the music world tended to be fodder for jokes.
(Did you hear about the drummer who graduated from high school? Me
neither.)
    Jokes aside, Peg was pleased by Pete’s enthusiasm for a performing art.
Bill went along.
    • • •
     
     
    At the time, whole city blocks across Britain were turning to dust. In a
single ten-hour period in mid-November 1940, German warplanes dropped
hundreds of tons of bombs on the medieval city-center of Coventry, effectively flattening it. The Germans coined a new verb: to Coventrate , meaning
to devastate the psychological as well as the physical heart of a population.
London was so immense that despite hundreds of thousands of bombs
raining down on its head it could not be thoroughly obliterated, at least
not with the technology available at the time. But Bristol could—and was.
(Bristol is about eighty miles away from Ilfracombe as the crow, or German
warplane, flies.) So were Birmingham and Southampton. By the beginning
of 1941, the people of Britain were taking a sustained hit of the sort that
Americans had never experienced in their own land, and the aftershocks of
their direct experience of war continued to rumble in the British psyche for
many years to come.
    Relatively safe in Ilfracombe, Pete turned sixteen in September 1941.
In addition to girls, he was developing an interest in communication with
the dead. He began turning to the clairvoyant mother of a friend for cheer
and solace when the radio wasn’t enough. For whatever reasons, disembodied voices spoke to Pete as meaningfully as those that were attached to
people close at hand, if not more so. He believed in them.
    Meanwhile, the radio show It’s That Man Again ( ITMA for short) had
become an even bigger hit, and even more exciting to Peter. One writer
has gone so far as to claim that Tommy Handley was “probably the most
popular man in the country after Churchill.” (“That Man,” by the way,
wasn’t Handley; it was Hitler.) Along with Monday Night at Eight , ITMA was the BBC’s attempt to infuse its more steadfast offerings with fast-paced,
American-style patter. According to the