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Peg’s heavy consumption of liquor and cigarettes had done nothing but increase throughout her widowhood. Britt couldn’t help but notice that she hid her smokes under the cushions of the couch and decanted her booze into empty medicine bottles, which she then stashed in the bathroom cabinet, all to keep Peter from confronting his mother’s vices directly. Still, says Ekland, “I got along with Peg well and I knew that as long as I didn’t betray the secret of her gin reservoirs, I always would.”

• • •

Through it all, Peter’s closest and most trusted friends provided him with the greatest comfort. “The thing about psychiatry, I found, is just talking to someone,” he mentioned to a British newspaper in 1966, “and in England if you have some good friends, as I have, then you don’t need to go to a psychiatrist.” Maybe, maybe not.

But the fact is, Peter did find compassion and solace among his mates. Spike, Joe McGrath, Graham Stark, Kenneth Griffith, David Lodge—these men showed him the kind of mercy that most frail people deserve but rarely receive. Their companionship was genuine, particularly when, from Peter’s perspective, the rest of the world appeared inexplicably to become more and more hostile to him. His friends saw Peter’s oddities—how could they help but notice them, since he wore his eccentricities on his sleeve?—but they saw the tender core beneath. Also, he was hilarious.

“He could be very, very funny,” says McGrath. “There used to be an Italian restaurant called the Tratou in London. Milligan, Peter, Eric Sykes, and myself—we would get our wives or girlfriends, whoever we were with at the time, and we’d go around at ten at night and have dinner. Then they would close the restaurant, but we were allowed to stay. There was a pianist called Alan Claire, who they used to use a lot in television shows—Frank Sinatra always used him when he came over—and he’d be there, and we would finish dinner and sit around till three or four o’clock in the morning, and Peter would sing. He’d sing standards, and Spike would play the trumpet. That’s a side that other people never saw.”

For other people, the so-called normal, it takes great trust to expose their ugliest aspects to those closest to them. Typically, though, Peter Sellers got it backward. He trusted only his closest friends enough to reveal to them his essentially good heart.

• • •

In June of 1966, shortly after walking out on Casino Royale, Peter was named Commander of the British Empire by Elizabeth II in the Queen’s Birthday Honors List. The queen named Harold Pinter as well.

Then destiny called: Peter spent four days shooting Alice in Wonderland (1967). He was the befuddled King of Hearts.

“I didn’t want a lot of famous featured performances with lots of animal heads,” the director Jonathan Miller declares of his adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s philosophically absurd children’s book. The physician-turned-satirist and Goon Show fan had something darker and more cerebral in mind: “It’s rather melancholy. The film was designed to be a recreation of Victorian life and the melancholy of growing up—the Victorian thing about childhood being an innocent time and everything else being sad and decaying.” Miller made Alice in Wonderland on a relatively low budget for BBC television, a fact that did not discourage some of Britain’s best performers from appearing in it. “I asked John Geilgud, Michael Redgrave, Leo McKern, and Peter Cook, and then I went to Sellers [and] said, ‘Would you do it for as little as £500, which is all you’ll get paid by the BBC?’ ”

Miller had worked with Peter in 1961. “I once appeared on what was then called a gramophone record with him—‘The Bridge on the River Wye.’ Peter Cook and I figured as minor characters in that, with Sellers rather brilliantly playing Alec Guinness, and it was quite funny. We spent a day doing it, and he was very jolly. There was lots of laughter then.” (The record, a spoof of the 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai, costarred