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Bert was given the job of taking family pictures, but Peter would soon grow bored and go off on his own, leaving the children in the care of Bert and Hattie. “He wanted the photos to establish that he’d had children,” said Bert, “and was capable of playing the father to them the way fathers are supposed to do. The sad thing was, children really didn’t interest him at all.”

With Peter out of town so often, the task of accompanying Peg on shopping trips in her brand new Bentley fell to Hattie Stevenson. “Go and spend what you like, my darling,” Peter told his mother, and “have it all charged to me.” Off Peg went.

“I’m Peter Sellers’s mother,” she would proclaim upon entering any given shop. “And I want the best.”

• • •

In the Boultings’ Heavens Above (1963), Peg’s son played a priest.

The Rev. John Smallwood (Peter) is appointed to the position of vicar at Holy Trinity in the parish of Orbiston Parva, a factory town dominated by the Despards, an old industrialist family. (They make “Tranquilax,” a popular sedative, stimulant, and laxative.) He pays visits to the locals to discuss the residents’ spiritual lives and finds that they have none. His first sermon is direct on this point: “This town is full of people who call themselves ‘Christian,’ but from what I’ve seen of it, I wouldn’t mind taking a bet there aren’t enough real Christians about to feed one decent lion.” While constructing his character, Sellers once said, he stood in front of a mirror and suddenly realized that he was Brother Cornelius, his old teacher at St. Aloysius: “The Jewish boy knows his catechism better than the rest of you!”

A squatter camp spreads its dingy self just outside the windows of the Tranquilax offices; Irene Handl plays the queen of the dump. At Smallwood’s behest, the squatters move—to the grounds of the church. To the entrenched vestry’s dismay, he brings in a black man, a Caribbean immigrant, as the new vicar’s warden. He piles outrage upon outrage, and yet the vicar begins to have an effect upon Lady Despard, who, seeing the light of mercy and charity for the first time in her life, abruptly spurs the establishment of a church food bank. But like Ian Carmichael’s character in I’m All Right, Jack, Smallwood only succeeds in provoking chaos.

As it happens, they’ve got the wrong John Smallwood; the real one (Ian Carmichael), shows up later, suitably complacent and patrician.

Peter’s is a muted performance—priestly sincerity dusted with a thin veneer of a skilled actor’s sardonic calculation, a balanced response on Sellers’s part to what is at its Boulting-brothers core a cynical social comedy. Once again, the Boultings gently rib the rich, including the Church, and save their bitter wrath to shower on the ignorant poor. Then again, when the good people of Orbison Parva beat the Rev. Smallwood to a pulp at the end of Heaven’s Above, the crowd does appear to cross all class lines.

• • •

The World of Henry Orient (1964) took Peter back to New York for several weeks of shooting in July and August 1963. Written by Nunnally Johnson and his daughter, Nora Johnson, and directed by George Roy Hill, Henry Orient concerns a pianist, not of the highest rank, and his absurd encounters with two Upper East Side schoolgirls (played by Tippy Walker and Merrie Spaeth), who find him dreamy. Budgeted at $2 million, The World of Henry Orient was, according to the Times, the most expensive movie ever filmed in New York.

Johnson, a longtime Hollywood screenwriter, was unhappy with Peter’s casting as Henry; Johnson wanted Rex Harrison. According to George Roy Hill, the filmmakers had Oscar Levant in mind as the model for Henry, but that’s most unfair to Levant, who was extraordinarily witty, urbane, and depressed, whereas Henry Orient is an unadulterated fool whose erotic interest lies in some unseen guy’s neurotic wife (Paula Prentiss). In any event, Peter concocted one of his most bizarre voices for Henry. As he described it, “He has a dreadful Brooklynese accent, but in an attempt to appear cultured and charming, he hides it with a phony