Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers Read Online Free PDF

historian Asa Briggs, “ ITMA was vox mundi , rich in all the sounds of war and with more invented characters
than Walt Disney.” Pete Sellers of Ilfracombe found it inspiring.
    • • •
     
     
    Given his bedrock peculiarities, one of the most unexpected aspects of Peter
Sellers’s life is his extraordinary talent for sexual seduction. It began in
earnest in Ilfracombe. His scores weren’t just the bravado of a deficient
adult embellishing his youthful conquests. That Sellers went on to enjoy a
rampant sex life with some of the world’s most gorgeous women suggests
that he really did have something going for him and that women responded
to it. Still, even he admitted that his early dates were the product of desperate pretense. Believing that the real Peter Sellers wasn’t much of anything, Pete told the girls that he was a talent agent who’d dropped in on
Ilfracombe to scout for future stars. “I’d take the girls out to Bull’s Point,
opposite the lighthouse,” he fondly remembered, “and get them to audition
for me—songs, patter, dances. The ones who ‘won’ were generally those
with the most talent for being friendly.” These performances filled the ever-expanding subdivisions of his personality: “I enjoyed the impersonation for
the feeling of power it gave me. Nobody paid that kind of attention to Pete
Sellers.”
    Remarkably, the fake talent agent persona itself wasn’t enough to suit
him, so Sellers accomplished these missions of love while wearing a trenchcoat in imitation of Humphrey Bogart, a hat like William Powell’s, and
even the beloved paste-on mustache to make him look a little more like
Clark Gable, all in addition to the now-standard Robert Donat voice. These
overlapping disguises testify to the lengths Peter Sellers went to deny who
he was—or wasn’t.
    • • •
     
     
    It was 1943, the grim middle of the war, and Pete was approaching the age
of conscription. The Irish-born wartime novelist Elizabeth Bowen described
the country’s mood that year: “Every day the news hammered one more
nail into a consciousness which no longer resounded. Everywhere hung the
heaviness of the even worse you could not be told and could not desire to
hear. This was the lightless middle of the tunnel.”
    Bill Sellers, being rather at home in a murk with no end in sight, took
one of the most decisive actions of his life. With his son turning into a
talented drummer, Bill formed a quartet, with Pete on percussion. At firstthey played only in North Devon, but gigs followed further afield, and by
summertime they were all the way up in Lytham St. Annes on the coast of
Lancashire. Bill, whose confidence in Peter’s future had once been shaky,
grew fond of the kid’s drumming: “He proved a wizard at it,” Bill later
said. To enhance the boy’s reputation, Bill had business cards printed, citing
Pete’s profession as “Young Ultra-Modern Swing Drummer and Uke Entertainer.” This burst of confidence on Bill’s part leads to unanswerable
questions: Was Bill’s lack of confidence in Peter’s abilities actually invented
by Peter out of resentment for Bill’s frequent absences, or out of loyalty to
his darling mother, or simply out of a mischievous desire to embellish a
frankly conventional father-to-son chastisement into a weightier tale of Peter’s victimization?
    No one knows, but the cards appear to have worked, perhaps too well,
for soon Pete was heading out on his own. He took a job with a band from
Blackpool farther up the coast. Peg was not happy. His band having broken
up upon the drummer’s departure, Bill joined the Entertainments National
Service Association. ENSA had been founded at the start of the war as a
network of morale-boosting, ever-touring diversions for soldiers and factory
workers. ENSA’s mandate was to bring entertainment not only to workers
and servicemen within Great Britain but to British workers and servicemen
anywhere in the world—a global music hall. By the