hanging around the streets of Soho
killing time with other unemployed musicians. The musical arranger Wally
Stott, with whom Peter would work closely a few years later, remembers
meeting him for the first time on the sidewalk on Archer Street: Peter was
dressed “in an RAF uniform with a snare drum under his arm.” “ All musicians stand around Archer Street, you know,” Sellers himself once noted,
“and everyone was getting work but me.” (What do you call a guy who
hangs around with musicians? A drummer.) Stott, who came to understand
Peter very well and like him even more, reflects that “in one of his lives he
would like to have been a jazz drummer.”
In still another life, clearly, he would have liked to have been noble.
Like the pasted-on mustache he used to dress his upper lip in order to
become the youngest dick in Devon, Sellers’s assumed identity as Lord
Beaconsfield surfaced again at, of all places, a middle-class campground on
one of the Channel Islands. The camp was owned by Hilda Parkin’s brother
Stanley; Peter’s cousin Dick Ray found work there as well. The job itself
was not exactly fulfilling for the talented, impatient young drummer-comedian—crying out “wakey, wakey” to a slew of slumbering tourists
wasn’t quite the career he had in mind for himself. So Peter decided to add
a little sparkle by billing himself as the Fifth Earl of Beaconsfield—that is,
until a local reporter spoiled the fun by inquiring as to the circumstances
by which someone in Burke’s Peerage had descended to a downscale campground in Jersey. Even after he was unmasked Peter couldn’t quite give it
up. He insisted on calling himself simply “the Fifth Earl” until he lost that
job, too.
Whether he was Lord Nelson’s relative, Disraeli’s descendent, the nextMarquess of Reading, or the disembodied doubles of Tommy Handley and
the cast of ITMA , Peter Sellers was unusually able to sustain multiplying
identities and never let them interfere with each other—or with reality, for
that matter. As his friends explain it, it was all because he didn’t much like
himself, a schizoid way to build self-esteem. This is a plausible explanation,
but perhaps it was equally the case that Sellers harbored an expanding
number of selves and liked too many of them. What he didn’t like was
having to choose one and stick to it.
Was it to keep these propagating identities at bay or to distill them
further into a kind of eaux de folie that Peter began to believe—insofar as
any grotesque fantasy is actually believed —in the existence of scurrying little
midgety creatures called Toffelmen? Moronic buggers who embraced a philosophy of contradiction, Peter’s Toffelmen were creepy but stalwart, rock-bottom pessimists who harbored flickers of hope. With their high, squeaky
voices and circus-act entertainment value, they kept Peter company. Who
knows when they first knocked on his mental door, or when (if ever) they
departed, but when Peter revealed their existence to David Lodge, Lodge
was most unnerved. “They were very vulgar,” says Lodge. “They were always
masturbating.”
• • •
The Gang Shows’ steady employment having given way to seemingly endless stretches of nothing, Pete was losing hope. A booking at a Peterborough
music hall might have bolstered his flagging confidence except for the fact
that on opening night, after sharing a cramped dressing room with a blind
accordion player and a trick dog act, the waves of hisses that greeted his
comedy routine led the manager to fire him on the spot. Luckily for Peter,
the headlining singer, Dorothy Squires, came to his rescue and convinced
the manager to keep him on, though Squires later said that she’d seen
nothing particularly special in Sellers’s drab routine. She just felt sorry for
him: “He was just another struggling kid, fresh out of the services, very
lonely and very scared.”
A drumming gig at the Aldershot Hippodrome took a similar
killing time with other unemployed musicians. The musical arranger Wally
Stott, with whom Peter would work closely a few years later, remembers
meeting him for the first time on the sidewalk on Archer Street: Peter was
dressed “in an RAF uniform with a snare drum under his arm.” “ All musicians stand around Archer Street, you know,” Sellers himself once noted,
“and everyone was getting work but me.” (What do you call a guy who
hangs around with musicians? A drummer.) Stott, who came to understand
Peter very well and like him even more, reflects that “in one of his lives he
would like to have been a jazz drummer.”
In still another life, clearly, he would have liked to have been noble.
Like the pasted-on mustache he used to dress his upper lip in order to
become the youngest dick in Devon, Sellers’s assumed identity as Lord
Beaconsfield surfaced again at, of all places, a middle-class campground on
one of the Channel Islands. The camp was owned by Hilda Parkin’s brother
Stanley; Peter’s cousin Dick Ray found work there as well. The job itself
was not exactly fulfilling for the talented, impatient young drummer-comedian—crying out “wakey, wakey” to a slew of slumbering tourists
wasn’t quite the career he had in mind for himself. So Peter decided to add
a little sparkle by billing himself as the Fifth Earl of Beaconsfield—that is,
until a local reporter spoiled the fun by inquiring as to the circumstances
by which someone in Burke’s Peerage had descended to a downscale campground in Jersey. Even after he was unmasked Peter couldn’t quite give it
up. He insisted on calling himself simply “the Fifth Earl” until he lost that
job, too.
Whether he was Lord Nelson’s relative, Disraeli’s descendent, the nextMarquess of Reading, or the disembodied doubles of Tommy Handley and
the cast of ITMA , Peter Sellers was unusually able to sustain multiplying
identities and never let them interfere with each other—or with reality, for
that matter. As his friends explain it, it was all because he didn’t much like
himself, a schizoid way to build self-esteem. This is a plausible explanation,
but perhaps it was equally the case that Sellers harbored an expanding
number of selves and liked too many of them. What he didn’t like was
having to choose one and stick to it.
Was it to keep these propagating identities at bay or to distill them
further into a kind of eaux de folie that Peter began to believe—insofar as
any grotesque fantasy is actually believed —in the existence of scurrying little
midgety creatures called Toffelmen? Moronic buggers who embraced a philosophy of contradiction, Peter’s Toffelmen were creepy but stalwart, rock-bottom pessimists who harbored flickers of hope. With their high, squeaky
voices and circus-act entertainment value, they kept Peter company. Who
knows when they first knocked on his mental door, or when (if ever) they
departed, but when Peter revealed their existence to David Lodge, Lodge
was most unnerved. “They were very vulgar,” says Lodge. “They were always
masturbating.”
• • •
The Gang Shows’ steady employment having given way to seemingly endless stretches of nothing, Pete was losing hope. A booking at a Peterborough
music hall might have bolstered his flagging confidence except for the fact
that on opening night, after sharing a cramped dressing room with a blind
accordion player and a trick dog act, the waves of hisses that greeted his
comedy routine led the manager to fire him on the spot. Luckily for Peter,
the headlining singer, Dorothy Squires, came to his rescue and convinced
the manager to keep him on, though Squires later said that she’d seen
nothing particularly special in Sellers’s drab routine. She just felt sorry for
him: “He was just another struggling kid, fresh out of the services, very
lonely and very scared.”
A drumming gig at the Aldershot Hippodrome took a similar
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