Mr. Strangelove
A Biography of Peter Sellers
Chapter One
"Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle!"
In 1924, a low-end music hall performer called Peg Sellers gave birth to
a baby boy. She named him Peter. Peg had long been dominated by her
imposing impresario of a mother, Welcome Mendoza, and she was eager
to focus her own fierce maternal drive on the tiny boy. But Peter Sellers
died quickly and was buried and never mentioned again.
Welcome Mendoza was, truly, the outlandish name with which Peg
Sellers's mother was born, though she changed it twice along the way: first
to Marks when she got married, then to Ray when she elbowed her kids
onto the music hall stage. Showmanship and aggression ran strong in this
family. Welcome Mendoza Marks, who started calling herself Belle Ray
when she became a vaudeville manager, was the granddaughter of the most
renowned Jewish prizefighter of the eighteenth century.
Strange to say, there were many brawling Jews in that era: Aby Belasco,
Barney "Star of the East" Aaron, Lazarus the Jew Boy, the curiously named
Ikey Pig.... But the best of them, ... read full excerpt from Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers ebook
