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’t difficult to teach him. After one or two weeks he could do a snowplow, so we could do mountains, no problem.” Peter’s own claims to the contrary notwithstanding, he didn’t give up skiing after his initial attempt, which certainly predated this particular New Year’s excursion. On at least one occasion Moellinger even took him helicopter skiing on the riskier high-altitude slopes near Zermatt. Peter enjoyed it, but there was a problem: “He nearly had an accident. We went up to the glacier, about 3,500 meters high, and started with a traverse. All of a sudden he couldn’t hold it anymore and went into a fall line situation and nearly went over a ridge. At just the last minute I threw him over so that he fell about ten meters before the rock.” (A snowplow is generally the first thing one learns in downhill skiing—a way to slow down and maintain control by pointing the skis in a v-shape in front while bending the knees. A traverse—skis together with all the weight on the downhill ski—is just a way to glide across the mountain. The “fall line situation” to which Moellinger refers means simply that Peter started to go straight down the slope. Nobody but the most expert skiers ever attempts to head purposely down the fall line, so Moellinger caused Peter to fall to keep him from heading over a cliff.)

Skiing itself was not the only thrill of the Zermatt excursion: “We were staying at the Zermatthof. They’re very conservative people, the Swiss. We celebrated one evening with champagne and two girls. We had an enemy in one of the hotel waiters. I don’t know why, but he didn’t like us—maybe because of the girl situation.” So Moellinger and Sellers decided to pull a weird prank on the surly servant. In the middle of the night, they got one of the women to strip and sit naked on the bed, and then they called room service. The waiter’s knock at the door was Peter’s cue to begin loudly intoning, “Ohmmmmmmm.” Moellinger remains amused by the result: “The waiter put the bottle down and walked backward toward the door—like in the old days with kings. He thought there was some sort of sex party going on.”

As for the skiing, Moellinger says that Peter “did enjoy it very much, because he said so. I once taught Robert MacNamara [the Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson Administration and later president of the World Bank], and he said that skiing was the only time he could really relax because he had to concentrate so much. Peter felt the same way. He liked the whiteness of the snow, the absolute quietness—especially in the high altitudes like Zermatt. It was very special to him—the only place he could relax. But with his heart problems we couldn’t stay very long at a high altitude, so for him it was better at Gstaad.”

Lots of things were better in Gstaad. Michael Sellers recalls the high-octane party he attended with his father at Polanski’s rented chalet; Michael was around twenty at the time, which places the event in the neighborhood of 1974. “Someone produced some grass,” Michael writes, “and Dad got me busy rolling joints—until someone arrived with cocaine. I was then equipped with a razor blade and asked to cut the cocaine on Roman’s marble table.”

• • •

Drugs aside, work went on.

“Clouseau never died,” Blake Edwards said, in late 1974, of the idiot detective’s sudden reemergence in the public eye after ten years of moribundity. “Over the years Peter and I kept him alive. He would call me up with Clouseau’s voice on the phone at all times of the day and night, and we’d spend hours thinking up ideas, talking and laughing like idiots.”

The film’s executive producer, the British impresario Sir Lew Grade, reported a rather different regeneration. It was he, Sir Lew wrote in his memoirs, who instigated The Return of the Pink Panther (1975) by approaching Blake with the idea of reviving Clouseau. Edwards was then living in London with his wife, Julie Andrews, having fled the States after their oddly melancholy and violently overpriced musical, Darling Lili (1970), tanked at the box office and effectively, albeit temporarily,