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As Brooks experienced the odd interaction, Peter didn’t mean to be rude, or dismissive, or regal: “It was just a series of different focuses. Foci. He’d focus on something and get lost in it.” It was Dennis Selinger who ultimately responded to Brooks on his client’s behalf, saying that he really didn’t know whether Peter had read The Producers or not, but the fact was (as Brooks tells it, quoting Selinger), “He’s so meshuggeneh—so crazy—he’s locked into so many things now. . . . This is not the right time to approach him with new material.”

And there was God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: or, Pearls Before Swine, an adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1965 novel. The movie was to have been directed by Blake Edwards, but Edwards and Sellers made a different film in the meantime and had a few difficulties with each other. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, too, went by the boards.

• • •

In the spring of 1967, the Hollywood trade papers excitedly scattered details of Peter Sellers’s imminent return to Tinseltown. “I’ve wanted to come back here and make a film on happy circumstances,” Peter told Army Archerd. The circumstance was Blake Edwards’s The Party (1968).

Sheilah Graham reported that Peter and Britt were scheduled to sail to New York on the Queen Elizabeth, then fly to Los Angeles. And once they arrived in Hollywood, Graham remarked, the couple wouldn’t “be living in separate houses as they have done recently in England.” (In addition to Brookfield and what appears to have been a standing reservation at the Dorchester, they’d taken yet another apartment—this one on Curzon Street in Mayfair. Who knows who stayed where?) Britt was supposedly packing twenty trunks of clothes along with one of the couple’s Yorkshire terriers.

In late April, Peter arrived in L.A. He alone had taken the Queen Elizabeth after all. Britt had gone to Sweden to be with her mother, who had just been diagnosed with cancer. He was accompanied by two-year-old Victoria, with whom he made the traditional trip to Disneyland in her mother’s absence.

• • •

An interviewer showed up one day at the Goldwyn Studios, where The Party was being filmed. “Why do you have all that dark stuff on your face?” he inquired of Peter. This was quite the wrong thing to say. “If you don’t know why I have this stuff on my face you have no right to interview me!’ Peter roared before ordering the unprepared hack off the set. “Go ahead—print all the dirty things you want to!” he shouted after him.

Originally titled R.S.V.P., The Party is about a polite, inept Indian actor, Hrundi V. Bakshi, whose name is mistakenly added to the guest list of an exclusive Hollywood bash, which he inadvertently destroys. Peter plays the role in blackface, and it’s very funny as long as one isn’t terribly concerned about issues of race and representation. Clad in a pale lavender suit, bright red socks, and white shoes, Hrundi Bakshi is essentially a one-man subcontinental minstrel show, though a sympathetic one. It’s the smug white Hollywood types who are contemptible in The Party. Producers and bimbos, studio executives and their shallow wives—they bear the brunt of Edwards’s scorn, with Hrundi V. Bakshi being the object of both the director’s and the audience’s sympathetic identification. It’s more the pity that The Party’s Deluxe color registers Peter’s dark-brown makeup so poorly.

Peter’s Indian accent features prominently, as it should, but The Party is largely about physical, cinematic sight-gag humor. Hrundi’s shoe floats away on a preposterous stream that runs through the ultramodern house. A drunken waiter (Steve Franken) wreaks havoc with the salad. Hrundi’s Rock Cornish hen flies off his plate in one shot and impales itself on a woman’s pronged tiara in the next, all in less than two seconds. The drunken waiter proceeds to retrieve it, along with the woman’s blond beehive wig, which he places on the dismayed Hrundi’s plate. The wracking tensions of dinner party etiquette are the scene’s main focus, and even under the blackface Peter expresses them charmingly, naturally.