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Moellinger’s girlfriend at the time was nineteen years old and still in school, and she didn’t happen to have her passport with her at the airport. Moellinger hadn’t thought to bring his along either. “Peter said, ‘It doesn’t matter. We’ll fly to Dublin and the plane will fly you back.’

“ ‘I can’t, Peter.’

“ ‘You must.’

“So finally I arranged it so that the girlfriend stayed there and I flew with him to Dublin, and I arrived back at about 9:30 in the morning, and the whole trip cost about 170,000 [Swiss] francs. When I get back the telephone rings, and Peter says, ‘Hans, I knew it. She was cheating on me. She was in the arms of another man, I promise you.’ I said, ‘How did you know?’ He said, ‘I felt it.’ ”

• • •

While living in Ireland, Peter and Miranda had renovated a house in the county of Wiltshire, about sixty miles west of London. Stonehenge is in Wiltshire, for example. But Miranda was now living there by herself.

With Miranda, or even without her, there seems never to have been the ardor of his obsessive love for both Anne and Britt. Miranda was pretty and amusing in a kicky, cusp-of-the-sixties sort of way, but her breeding got in the way. It’s insensitive, not to mention inaccurate, to label Peter’s interest in Lord Mancroft’s stepdaughter as nothing more than crass social-climbing, as others have done; after all, a queen, a princess, and a prince each trump the stepdaughter of a lord. But he does appear to have been delighted, at first at least, to expand his social circle to include the established gentry. Still, as with all things Peter, it didn’t last long. (As Lady Mancroft noted at the time, “I’m not surprised at anything to do with Peter.”) He hated the Miranda-engineered parties at which half of Burke’s Peerage would demand instantaneous comedy routines. Also, he later said of his third wife, “She was my intellectual superior.”

• • •

On December 9, 1972, at the Rainbow Theater in London, The Who—Roger Daltrey, Keith Moon, Peter Townsend, and John Entwistle—backed by the London Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Choir and joined by an almost all-star cast, performed their rock opera Tommy onstage—twice—before live audiences as a charity event. An orchestra-backed studio album, released two months earlier, had been a smash hit, but The Who wanted to take it live.

Onstage at the Rainbow, Daltrey was Tommy, Moon the depraved Uncle Ernie, Entwistle was Cousin Kevin, and Townsend served as the narrator. Steve Winwood (of the groups Blind Faith and Traffic) played Tommy’s father, Maggie Bell (of the Scottish group Stone the Crows) appeared as his mother, and Merry Clayton was the Acid Queen; Clayton is the belting singer best known for her feverish backup vocals on the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” Peter Sellers played the doctor who attempts to cure the legendary deaf, dumb, and blind boy in the song “Go to the Mirror.” (Richard Harris performs the role on the album.) The show was taped and broadcast in the United Kingdom later that month and raised £10,000, for a group supposedly called the Stars’ Organisation for Spastics.

It was from the Who’s drummer, Keith Moon, that Peter felt the strongest and most reciprocal pull of friendship. Moon was also, as the critic Ira Robbins describes him, “an irrepressible adolescent, reckless, fearless and merciless in his need to entertain and be amused. His destructive exploits—hotel rooms, cars, stages, drums—made The Who more dangerous than other groups,” though somehow, as Robbins points out, it all seemed to be in harmless fun. In person, “Moon the Loon” lived big. He was relentlessly inventive, openly friendly, and completely off his rocker. In private, Keith Moon was, in Robbins’s words, “a sad, needy guy incapable of basic human experience.”

As a drummer, says Robbins, “Keith was less a timekeeper than an explosive charge that detonated on time, every time.” Peter was much the same as an actor, and the two became friends. Moon’s improvisations weren’t those of a jazz drummer; he was too undisciplined for that.