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“ ‘Oh, I’m a vegetarian.’

“Consternation.

“People were sent out to comb Hampstead for vegetables at that hour of night, and from that moment on, the kitchen was piled high with chopped vegetables. There were pyramids of vegetables all the way up and down the work tops. Nobody could get anything done because my mother was always making homemade soup for Peter Sellers. He said, ‘This is the best soup I have ever tasted in my life.’ I said, ‘Well done, Mummy, you know, but what is it?’ She said, ‘Well, I put bones in it, of course. And marrow.’

“He was there for over a month, using both phones constantly, night and day. Nobody could make a phone call. He had all these charts of Eastern—I don’t know what they were, pictures of Buddhists. . . .

“He would just stay in his study communing with himself or with Bert on the phone. He was just terribly, terribly sad. I have to say that as a house guest he was the most depressing person I’ve ever had in the house. I used to creep in at night and try to sneak past the study door so I could get to bed without Peter intercepting me, because he would sit down and cry. He would talk about his life, and, oh, it was so. . . . I was sorry for him, but it was so depressing having him around. Not one joke from beginning to end. Not a laugh.”

And so he married Miranda.

• • •

“I was the best man at that wedding, and the bridesmaids were the dogs,” Bert later said. “Then they went off to their honeymoon. I accompanied them. We were in the south of France on the yacht, and it’s honeymoon time, and then one morning we couldn’t find him. The ship-to-shore phone rang, and it was him. He’d booked himself into a hotel, and he’d left his bride of weeks on the yacht with me, and we couldn’t work out why.”

Neither could he. As any actor knows, most entrances require an exit. Even with Miranda he kept moving. For tax reasons, the newlyweds moved to Ireland; they bought the coach house of a 1,000-acre manor near the village of Maynooth in County Kildare, about an hour’s drive from Dublin. Periodic privileges at the immense manor came with the deal.

He and Peg remained in touch. As he told the British entertainment reporter Roderick Mann, “When I was living in Ireland with Miranda, we kept chickens. And one day the hen got lost. I thought the fox had got it, but as Miranda was distressed we held a séance. When Peg came through I asked her, ‘Do you know where the hen has gone?’ ‘Of course I do,’ she said. ‘It’s up in the rafters of the stable.’ ‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘I’ll take a look.’

“Well, I couldn’t find the damn thing and I told her so. ‘It’s not there,’ I said. ‘Of course it’s there,’ she said. ‘Go and have another look. But don’t be long. I’m not sodding about all night looking for a perishing hen.’ ” They found the hen the next day. It was trapped in the rafters, just as Mother promised.

But the tale is suspect because, on other occasions, Peter claimed that, no, he did not actually speak to Peg directly but rather to an intermediary; another departed soul relayed her messages. According to Peter, the medium was the spirit of an American Indian named Red Cloud.

• • •

“I’ve been in pictures since Jesus was a lance corporal,” declares Rod Amateau, the director of Peter’s next picture, Where Does It Hurt? (1972). “I never treated him with any reverence. Only respect.”

Where Does It Hurt? is a gleefully sour comedy about a guy named Hammond (Rick Lenz) who comes into Valley Vue Hospital for a chest X-ray but has no health insurance. It looks bad for him until he mentions that he owns his own house. “You have a house!” the receptionist cries, her eyes lighting up as she pushes the secret toe buzzer that alerts Albert Hopfnagel (Peter), the fast-talking hospital administrator, to the presence of an easy mark. Hammond is whisked away and given a variety of procedures, a good deal of which pertain to his anus—blood work, a high colonic, an electrocardiogram, a rectal probe, urinalysis, and a barium enema,