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He did not end up moving to Stonehenge, but he did marry Miranda.

• • •

London’s Evening Standard, August 24, 1970:

Peter Sellers and Lord Mancroft’s stepdaughter, Miranda Quarry, were married at Caxton Hall today. About 300 people waiting outside the register office cheered as the couple emerged. Miranda, 23, and Sellers, 44, have been close friends for about two years but had previously denied marriage plans. About three dozen guests were at the wedding. They included actor Spike Milligan, who wore a cream safari-style shirt and black corduroy peaked cap.

Miranda arrived with Lord and Lady Mancroft at 12 noon exactly. She was wearing a gypsy-style dress with a full length skirt in puce printed silk and a black velvet bodice. She had a black sombrero hat and carried a posy of white roses. With her were her two three-year-old Pekinese dogs, Tabatha and Thomasina. “They are my bridesmaids,” she said with a smile. . . .

Witnesses at the ten minute ceremony were Sellers’ closest friend, Bert Mortimer, who was also best man, and solicitor John Humphries.

With two rings did he wed. He slipped both on Miranda’s finger—a traditional platinum band and a more elaborate Russian ring that signified love, fidelity, and happiness.

• • •

“Every man’s dream is still, I’m sure, finding a virgin,” Peter told an Esquire interviewer shortly before the wedding. He and Miranda were married by the time the profile was published, so his remarks became an unfortunate historical record. “That’s why marriage has gone on the rocks,” he persisted. “The original idea was that the girl had never been with anyone else, and it was so pure. That’s not quite the word. So I came to the conclusion that to be in love with the girl of one’s dreams—who if possible was a virgin—was the ultimate happiness.”

His notions about the desirability of virgins went quickly by the boards. Peter clearly harbored grave misgivings about his long-term prospects with Miranda. And, as was his custom, he took his complaints to an ex-wife, in this case Britt. In one of their disconcertingly frequent telephone conversations during this period, he was markedly perplexed. “I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing,” he whined, “but Miranda says it’s now or never.” Anne was consulted as well.

Despite his insistence to Esquire that he wasn’t at all the sad, neurotic clown that his first biographer, Peter Evans, had just gotten through portraying in The Mask Behind the Mask (a good book that Peter hated), Peter was often quite morose. Siân Phillips recounts the melancholy nature of a man adrift in a sea of material splendor: “He turned up in Rome in O’Toole’s suite at the Excelsior and said, ‘Could I sleep on your couch?’ He wanted to come to England, but he wasn’t allowed—he’d be arrested for tax or something, I don’t know—so he pitched his tent, as it were, in O’Toole’s sitting room. O’Toole thought this was great fun for a bit and then got very tired of it and said, ‘Go and stay with my wife in Hampstead. I know she won’t tell anybody. You can just sneak in and hole up there, and just don’t go out, and nobody will know you’re there.’

“Now, I had two children and a house full of people, and the only bed was in the study on the ground floor, where all the phones were as well. So I thought, ‘Right, okay, I’ll do this, he probably won’t be here for very long.’ So he arrived with Bert, his trusty, chauffeur, companion, friend, whatever, and they moved in with a mountain of luggage. I’ve never seen more Louis Vuitton in my life—there were trunks! I couldn’t believe it. I thought, ‘This is not very good.’

“I told my mother, who looked after the house for us. I said, ‘Peter Sellers is coming to stay.’ ‘When’s he coming?’ ‘I don’t know. He’s sneaking in under cover of darkness.’ ‘Never mind—I’ll make a big boef bourguignon.’ So she spent most of the day making a very authentic, exquisite boef bourguignon, and Peter arrived, and she said, ‘Settle down, Mr. Sellers