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

war’s end more than
four out of every five British actors, musicians, costumers, comedians, stage
managers, acrobats, and clowns had found employment, however temporary, with ENSA. It’s an impressive statistic as statistics go, but what it
really reflects is the extent to which the British entertainment barrel’s wartime bottom had to be scraped. For every great ENSA discovery—Terry-Thomas, Tony Hancock—and every popular ENSA star—Sybil
Thorndike, George Formby, Gracie Fields—there were at least six essentially talentless washouts who would never have been allowed onstage had
dire conditions not demanded it. For them, World War II was an employment bonanza. “We had to endure them once a month—and endure it
was,” one Surrey factory worker shuddered when recalling those compulsory
amateur hours.
    Bill Sellers was in the middle range—a proficient musician who was
able to provide his audience with a bit of relief from the tedium of military
drills or assembly-line monotony. He assembled still another band, largely
from the old band, but with one addition: the ukulele master George
Formby being occupied on the top tier of ENSA, Bill settled for George’ssister Ethel, a singer who also liked to do a Gracie Fields–like Lancashire-accent comedy routine. Peg, searching for a reason to bring Pete back into
the family fold, convinced Bill to get Pete an ENSA job as well.
    Pete himself was successfully bribed by the promise of a set of flashy
new £200 drums. “They were the finest,” Peg told Alexander Walker in the
1960s. “They had to be! Pete wouldn’t have looked at them if they hadn’t
been. With Pete, everything had to be perfect or it wasn’t for him. And
what Pete wanted, Pete got.”
    • • •
     
     
    In Taunton he got a girl. As it does for most young men, this triumph,
Pete’s first home run, took a blend of luck and engineering. But in Pete’s
case there was an added complication: Peg often accompanied her son and
husband on their ENSA tours. According to one fellow ENSA trouper, Peg
actually went so far as to sleep in Pete’s room with him, leaving Bill to find
a bed somewhere else. But when Bill and Pete set up the band in Taunton,
Peg stayed at home, fifty long miles away in Ilfracombe.
    They were billeted, along with some ENSA showgirls, in a funeral
parlor. This made more sense than it may seem at first, since the mortician
happened to serve as the local ENSA manager, but still, it was something
out of a macabre vaudeville sketch. The doorbell rings, an ENSA trouper
answers it, and finds a corpse on the other side of the threshold.
    One of the girls was particularly unnerved by the whole experience and
found it difficult to sleep with dead people in the house. She confessed her
fears to Pete and maternally told him that if he, too, became frightened, he
could always join her in her room for solace and support. He took her up
on it.
    “It was absolutely irresistible,” Sellers later declared. “Although I was
still pretty young, I was no stranger to the charms of girls. But I’d never
had an invitation issued to me in such plausible circumstances. So one night,
in pajamas and dressing gown, and armed to the teeth with Robert Donat
accents, I found my way along to the girls’ room. Feigning fear, and trembling with what I hoped she’d think was fright, I got into bed with her.
The only mistake I made was that I didn’t take off a stitch in advance—it
was a far from ideal state for impetuous lovemaking.”
    Peter Sellers was no longer a virgin. Quickly thereafter he was no longer
an ENSA trouper, either, Bill having discovered his son’s sexual success.
He dispatched the boy back to Peg.
    But drumming had sparked Pete’s ambition to the point that even Peg
Sellers was forced to contend with the fact that her son couldn’t simply
stay with her forever doing nothing, and soon he was playing gigs with the
broadcast bandleaders Oscar Rabin and Henry Hall. Finding work outside
of