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Sellers later described the atmosphere of Kiss Me, Stupid: “I used to go down to the set with Billy Wilder, and find a Cooks Tour of hangers-on and sightseers standing off the set in my line of vision. Friends and relatives of people in the front office come to kibitz. When I told Billy I couldn’t work with that crowd there, he said, ‘Be like Jack Lemmon. Whenever he starts a scene he shuts his eyes and says to himself, “It’s magic time” and then forgets everything else.’ ” Peter found it difficult to forget everything else. The idea of completing the picture began to gnaw at him.

Then came the sty.

According to Jack Lemmon, Sellers was plagued that week by “a massive sty” on his right eye. Sheilah Graham reported that he’d missed at least one day of filming because of it. Lemmon also noticed that Peter “looked as if he were approaching nervous exhaustion.” He was tired, anxious, irritated. He could do bits of physical business that pleased his writer-director, but he couldn’t change a single word of the dialogue. The sty was a clinically hysterical reaction—a bodily manifestation of what Peter felt inside.

On Friday, April 3, Wilder and Sellers filmed the scene in which Orville gives a piano lesson to a child while growing increasingly convinced that his wife, played by Felicia Farr, is (as Wilder put it) “doing it” with the milkman. Standing on the sidelines along with Peter’s costars Dean Martin, Kim Novak, Felicia Farr, and Cliff Osmond, Britt watched her husband perform for the first time. She was amazed by his extraordinary talent and spark. So were the others, including Wilder himself, who, despite his experience as a director, couldn’t help but break out into unrestrained laughter during Peter’s takes.

“And then he did not show up on Monday,” Billy Wilder declared from a distance of thirty-five years. “He had borrowed some money from me because he wanted to take his kids to Disneyland. He was at Disneyland! That’s the last I saw of him, giving him the money. It was two or three hundred dollars.”

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There is a funny but foreboding exchange in The World of Henry Orient between the difficult Henry and his earnest manager, Sidney (John Fiedler). “Henry!” Sidney pleads. “You’ve got to remember you’re not Van Cliburn! Now if Van Cliburn misses a rehearsal, he’s still Van Cliburn, and nobody says, ‘Throw the bum out!’ ” But Henry is having his hair done at the moment and is too busy admiring his own head in a handheld mirror to concern himself with the warning. “I tried ’a phone ’em,” he mumbles.

In 1964, Peter’s profound misfortune was that he was Van Cliburn. On that incontrovertible basis, he believed he could do as he pleased. In fact, if comparisons are to be drawn, Peter Sellers was better than Van Cliburn. He was more famous. And he made more money. And ironically, despite years of outrageous behavior and eccentricity and periodically debilitating despair, Peter Sellers ended up remaining far longer on the klieg-lit world stage than Van Cliburn.

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He was worried about his body. As Britt describes it, Peter “believed that the essence of his masculinity relied on his ardor as a lover. He was always searching for what he liked to term as the ‘ultimate’ orgasm, and when he discovered that amyl nitrate assisted his physical endurance the tiny capsules of chemical became almost a routine component of our nightly love-making pattern.” So on Monday, April 6, after forgoing the tension-provoking sound stages of Kiss Me, Stupid for VIP treatment at the Magic Kingdom, Peter and Britt put the kids to sleep and went to bed, inhaled some poppers, made love with their hearts racing, and afterward opened a bottle of champagne, which spilled all over the sheets. They were changing them when Peter reached for his chest. “Get me some brandy—quickly,” he said.

When Britt returned to the bedroom she found Peter lying in the damp bed.

“I know what it is. I’ve had a heart attack. Phone the doctor.”

Dr. Rex Kennamer, physician to the stars, arrived very shortly, gave Peter a sedative,