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screenwriter Ben Hecht (Scarface, 1932; Notorious, 1946; and many others), who had died the year before. Feldman had acceded to Peter’s wishes when he’d hired Terry Southern to write new dialogue and bits of comedy business. (According to Southern’s son, Nile, Sellers specified in his contract that “he would have the exclusive services of Terry Southern to write his dialogue. And a white Bentley.”) Peter had asked Terry to meet with him in Rome, and at the time both men thought they understood each other’s minds about the direction of the script. But, it seemed to Feldman, they hadn’t really heard each other as much as they believed they had. Still, Feldman said, he was certain that they would have a great screenplay before shooting began.

In early September, Feldman flew to Rome to meet with Peter and discuss casting. McGrath joined him. So did Peter’s Hollywood agent, Harvey Orkin. So did Casino Royale’s latest screenwriter—Wolf Mankowitz.

One scarcely had to be as superstitious as Peter Sellers was to see that this was a distinctly bad omen, a human version of purple. Sellers and Mankowitz had tried and failed, furiously, to form a production company together in 1960, and Mankowitz distrusted Peter greatly. Still, their meetings appear to have gone smoothly enough—while they were actually happening, that is—and together the key members of the production team began to come up with a cast list. Casino Royale, they all agreed, should costar Shirley MacLaine and Trevor Howard.

A few days later, Feldman was back in Los Angeles meeting with MacLaine over dinner at Trader Vic’s. They called Peter from their table and spoke for half an hour about the film’s story and characters. The next day, Peter called Feldman. He didn’t like the way Mankowitz was developing the script, he said; he suggested that they bring Terry Southern back. Peter was also complicating matters by talking to Columbia about doing another picture called A Severed Head, which was scheduled to shoot in mid-February. Charlie Feldman knew that Casino Royale would take more than a month’s worth of Peter’s time, and he was worried that his star was overcommitting himself.

In November, with a late-January start date having been scheduled at Shepperton, Feldman arranged for Dr. Rex Kennamer to check up on Peter, just to make sure. Kennamer found Peter to be in good health, and Casino Royale was on its way. Sort of.

Casting was still in flux. MacLaine and Howard were out. Orson Welles, David Niven, and Ursula Andress were in. Eventually, of course, so were a few others, including William Holden, Charles Boyer, Woody Allen, Deborah Kerr, Joanna Pettet, Daliah Lavi, John Huston, Jacqueline Bissett, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and George Raft.

Casino Royale is categorically chaotic, but that was its nature all along. David Niven plays Agent 007, but so does Peter Sellers. In fact, so does Ursula Andress, and Joanna Pettet, and Terence Cooper. Niven’s Bond reluctantly agrees to return to Her Majesty’s service after the death of agent M (John Huston), whose fake widow (Deborah Kerr) fails to seduce him and becomes a nun. The evil SMERSH has gone bankrupt, and the baccarat mastermind Le Chiffre (Orson Welles) tries to win back funding in the casino but loses to a man named Evelyn Tremble (Sellers), who has been hired to play James Bond; Le Chiffre responds to the loss by torturing Tremble/Bond, who meanwhile has been seduced by the voluptuous Vesper (Ursula Andress), and on and on, until the purest evil on earth is found to exist in the form of Woody Allen.

• • •

Joe McGrath recalls his close friend Peter with a refreshing lack of malice: “There was a kindness there—a soft kindness, do you know what I mean? It was a side of him a lot of people never saw. So, I would forgive him most things. I mean, we had a bad time on Casino Royale because he went off and disappeared for three weeks. He was chasing Britt. They had trouble, and she went back to Sweden. But meanwhile Orson Welles and two thousand extras were waiting. Orson said, ‘Where’s your thin friend, Joe?’ ”

Wolf