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more than once. We’re talking about a man who had been pronounced dead and was brought back to life. He said he’d arranged to be frozen. You could either have just your head frozen or your whole body frozen. I think he said he had arranged for the whole body; maybe it was just the head; I don’t really know. I said, ‘Aren’t you worried? We know that everything deteriorates when frozen, so when you come to, you won’t be the same. If, a thousand years from now, they know how to revive a dead man, you won’t be the same dead man. You’ll be a freak!’ And he said, ‘I don’t care. At least I’ll be alive.’ ”

• • •

In October, with Hoffman still in production, Peter mentioned to the Evening Standard that he was set to return to the stage. It wasn’t going to be a splashy exercise like Brouhaha; Jane Arden’s The Illusionist would play at the Open-Space theater, which was located in a Tottenham Court basement. “The main character is a music-hall illusionist who does tricks,” he said. “It’s a very evil part. The play is a strange piece. It has an edge of great horror.” The Illusionist would have a ten-week run beginning in January.

Then it changed; The Illusionist would play at the Round House theater, and Peter’s costar would be Charlotte Rampling.

It changed once more—Peter never appeared in The Illusionist. It all ended in a little lawsuit and was forgotten.

• • •

“Very een-ter-est-ing,” Artie Johnson murmurs in a 1969 episode of Laugh-In. Peter pops up out of the bushes in matching German military gear. He stares intently at Johnson. “I sink zat you are very een-ter-esting, too!” says Peter, cracking up at the end of the line and descending back into the bushes together with a giggling Johnson.

Dan Rowan and Dick Martin’s Laugh-In was the hippest American comedy show of the period—Burbank’s answer to Monty Python. ( Laugh-In actually predated Monty Python’s Flying Circus by a year.) Guest stars turned up regularly to add a certain celebrity kick to the series’ regulars—Johnson, Judy Carne, Ruth Buzzi, Henry Gibson, Goldie Hawn, Alan Sues, and Joanne Worley. Richard Nixon once appeared, famously saying “Sock it to me?” On the program on which Peter turned up, the other special guests were Johnny Carson and Debbie Reynolds.

Some of Peter’s jokes were defiantly lame. “Thanks for the tea, Dan,” says Peter, “but it is awfully weak, I’m afraid.” “I’m sorry, Peter,” Rowan responds. “Say, how long should the tea be left in the water?” “Well, let me put it this way: the tea in the Boston Harbor is just about ready.” A better bit occurs with Artie Johnson, when Peter turns up as Artie’s friend in Johnson’s classic, black-coated Dirty Old Man routine. They molest Ruth Buzzi together on a park bench. She beats Peter back with her pocketbook. Peter (in Henry Crun voice): “You’ve just made an old man very happy!” whereupon he and Artie fall off the bench together and die.

“Hel-lo!” Peter sings out as he pulls open a window in the magnificent Joke Wall. “You really have done a remarkable job in your experiment with the democratic system here in America. Just think! It was only a hundred years ago when President Lincoln freed the black people. And already some of them are even going to school!”

• • •

Always generous to his friends, Peter lent his support to Graham Stark by agreeing to appear as himself in Stark’s thirty-minute silent comedy short, Simon Simon (1970), along with Michael Caine and David Hemmings. A pair of blokes of limited intelligence (Stark and John Junkin) involve themselves in a series of misadventures involving a truck and short underpass, a mock firing squad, a stranded cat and a cherry picker, an aerial dogfight between two cherry pickers, and so on. Peter’s scene lasts all of forty seconds. In the midst of a car chase—the car is chased by two cherry pickers—there occurs a minor crash. The driver of the chased car hits a sleek blue sports car. Peter is inside. It’s a hit and run accident, but Peter isn’t concerned about legal issues. With a troubled expression on his face, he gets out, inspects the dent,