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“I’ve depressed myself getting into a state like this. I really am an idiot. They say all comedians are sad. I wonder if that’s true? Still, I’m not really a comedian. I don’t know what I am.”

Under the barrage of Peter’s phone calls, Britt took a break from filming. She left London for Los Angeles on March 24. Peter was overjoyed to see her. They lunched in his dressing room and dined at hotspots like La Scala or the Bistro. She met Peter’s friends—Cary Grant, Steve McQueen, Shirley MacLaine, Capucine, “R. J.” Wagner, Goldie Hawn.

Peter had rented a marbled mansion in Beverly Hills for the duration of Kiss Me, Stupid. Home movie footage of the house, which was located just off Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills, reveals, along with the obligatory swimming pool, a monochromatic, showy, haute-L.A. style: white front doors, white marble walls, white marble floors, white dining table, white chairs. . . . By the time Britt arrived Peter had already outfitted it with a closet’s worth of clothes for her. Michael and Sarah appeared soon thereafter for another trip to Disneyland.

The trouble was, Britt had not even come close to completing her scenes in Guns at Batasi, and on March 31, Fox filed a $4.5 million suit against her for breach of contract. The studio named Peter as well. By a strange coincidence, the house he had rented in Beverly Hills was owned by Spyros Skouras, the head of Twentieth Century-Fox, though the landlord decided not to intervene in Peter’s domestic life. A little later, Peter Sellers countersued for $4 million, but his case was dismissed, and he ended up paying Fox $60,200 to compensate the studio for the celluloid containing images of Britt.

John Guillermin was Guns at Batasi’s under-the-gun director. “Peter was desperately unhappy, you know, and was talking to Britt all the time on the phone. She left the picture after two weeks. She was inexperienced. She hadn’t done much, and I don’t think if she’d had more experience she’d have left. We got Mia Farrow to do the role and had to reshoot a couple of weeks of it. Dickie Attenborough was not pleased. I saw Peter after that—it didn’t leave any scars.” Britt herself was later embarrassed by the episode: “I knew in my heart I was doing the wrong thing. I just knew it. But I wasn’t my own woman in those days. So I went.”

She was captivated by him—his magnetism, his fame, and his potent love for her were a dazzling combination. To say that he was controlling is obvious; more to the point is that Britt loved him.

Peter, of course, was resolute that she had every right to leave the picture. “The only thing my wife ever signed was Darryl F. Zanuck’s autograph book,” he declared.

• • •

Kiss Me, Stupid, for which Peter was to be paid $250,000 plus a percentage of the profits, was only the first picture Wilder planned to make with Peter; Sherlock Holmes was the second. Obviously the director had high hopes for him. But the actual, day-to-day experience of shooting a film together revealed that these two brilliant filmmakers had radically different work habits and personal styles. Wilder liked to share meals with his stars; he enjoyed the camaraderie of collaborative filmmaking, as long as no actor dared alter a single word of the scripts he so carefully crafted with his writing partner, I. A. L. Diamond. Peter had lunch in his dressing room, and improvisation was his stock in trade. The hyper and gregarious Wilder enjoyed commanding a wildly open set. His friends; his chic wife, Audrey; his chic wife’s friends; visitors from out of town. . . . The doors of Kiss Me, Stupid’s soundstage at the Goldwyn studio were thrown wide. Peter preferred to film in relative privacy. Audrey Wilder, a quick-witted pistol and former big-band singer who, by this point, had become one of Hollywood’s foremost social leaders, characteristically has something to say about Peter, too: “He queered his pitch with me when he didn’t show up for a dinner we were giving for him at