Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers by Ed Sikov Page A

took him into the office,” Hilda says, “he phoned his
mother.”
    According to Hilda, Peg explained that yes, Peter “was always kidding,
there was no harm in him, he’s not going to hurt anybody, and his uncle
is the manager of a big London theater. . . .”
    But that was not quite the end of it, according to Hilda: “When he got
back to London he had to report to the police. They let him off. I think
the police called on them, because I remember he told me that his father
had said, ‘Here you are, officer—here’s the Lord Beaconsfield.’
    “At the end of the three years when we were very good friends, he
wanted to get married, he really did. I wasn’t thinking of marriage. There’d
been a war, and we’d only just finished it. The last thing I wanted to do
was get married.” So Hilda Parkin told Peter Sellers something he never
wanted to hear: “I thought it was fair just to tell him that I wasn’t in love
with him. He burst out crying. So I cried, too. He kept writing, but I didn’t
contact him any more. I didn’t answer the letters.”
    • • •
     
     
    Pete wasn’t mortally crushed by the rejection, especially since Margaretta
“Paddy” Black, a member of an all-girl Gang Show, appears to have been
enjoying a relationship with Peter at the same time he was pursuing Hilda.
Paddy recalls accompanying Peter on a visit to one of the Marks/Rays’ quite-distant relatives, Gerald Rufus Isaacs, the second Marquess of Reading.
(Gerald Rufus Isaacs’s father, Rufus Daniel Isaacs, 1860–1935, was lord
chief justice of England, ambassador to the United States, and viceroy of
India.) After a pleasant discussion of heraldry and cousins far removed, Peter
and Paddy headed home, whereupon Peter proudly told her that Gerald
Rufus Isaacs’s title was hereditary and that he—Peter Sellers—was next in
line. If she agreed to marry him, he added pregnantly, Paddy Black stood
to become a countess. But the made-up promise of a title wasn’t enough.“As much as I liked Peter,” Paddy Black later said, “the idea of getting
engaged never entered my head.”
    At home, a jittery Peg took to her bed whenever Paddy turned up at
211B Finchley High Road. Hilda Parkin had had better luck: “Since they
were working and involved with my family, they were quite pleased by it.
She was very nice to me.” With Paddy, though, Mother made herself so
scarce that Paddy assumed she was a bedridden invalid. “Peter?” Paddy
would hear a little voice moan from behind a closed bedroom door during
these cramped domestic dates.
    Then a little louder: “Peeee-ter?!”
    • • •
     
     
    World War II had scared Peg, but certain of Peter’s romances threw her
into a cold terror. Following her own mother’s liberal morality, she didn’t
expect him to remain chaste. It was his heart’s arousal she feared, particularly when the women weren’t firmly within her family’s orbit. Besides, she
was smothering.
    David Lodge still remembers the disquieting goodnight phone calls
Peter placed to his mother when they were separated: “Good night, Peg.
God bless you. Yes, you too. God keep you safe! I love you. Yes, I do ! Yes,
I love you , too !”
    Lodge also recalls tiny Peg taking him aside one day, looking up at the
burly ex-serviceman, and telling him, with profound admiration and not a
shred of comprehension, “ You wouldn’t get married and leave your darling
mother.”
    What drove Lodge craziest, though, was the Lady Bountiful air with
which Peg thanked him for taking such good care of her Pete during the
war. “I’ll make things easy for you,” she told him, and with a great fanfare
of largesse, she arranged for her theater-managing brother-in-law Bert to
hire Lodge as an usher.
    “She was a pain in the ass,” Lodge observes.

T HREE
     
     
    A fter returning from the Lord Beaconsfield escapade in Norwich with
humiliation in place of the fiancée on whom he claimed, at least, to
pin his future, Peter found himself