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Peter was seeing multiple women in August alone. One was the eighteen-year-old Tessa Dahl, the daughter of the novelist Roald Dahl and his wife, the actress Patricia Neal. Another was the model Lorraine Cootamundra, née MacKenzie. “In the past ten days,” a British tabloid gasped that month, “he has taken out Susan George three times and is also seeing Scandinavian beauty Liza Farringer, who is in her late 20s.” By the end of the month he was high in the Rockies—Vail, Colorado, to be exact—for a lunch with the First Lady of the United States, Betty Ford, and her eighteen-year-old daughter, Susan, whom he was photographing for Vogue.

In September Peter hosted a party at his rented pad in Beverly Hills. Cary Grant showed up. So did Bill Wyman and Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones, Keith Moon, and David Bowie. The party turned into an impromptu jam session, with Peter doing his bit on drums. Bowie played the saxophone. Earlier that year, Moon had invited Peter and Graham Chapman to his Beverly Glen home, where the three Brits amused themselves with reenactments of old Goon Show sketches.

September also had him in London, where he was a presenter at the glittering Society of Film and Television Awards. Princess Anne was the honored hostess. Peter handed Joanne Woodward her award; Hayley Mills gave one to John Gielgud; Jack Nicholson’s trophy was proffered by Twiggy. By early October Peter was back in Los Angeles, where he attended Groucho Marx’s birthday party along with Elliott Gould, Sally Kellerman, Milton Berle, Red Buttons, Carroll O’Connor, Sally Struthers, Jack Lemmon, Lynn Redgrave, Roddy McDowall, and Bob Hope. Peter was subdued. “Just to sit there and realize you are in the same room with Groucho Marx is a delightful experience,” he remarked.

In October, Keith Moon took a short break from the beginning of his yearlong tour with The Who and booked a room at the Londonderry Hotel on Park Lane, in which he threw a rambunctious party for a group of select friends, including Peter, Ringo, and Harry Nilsson. The party got out of hand when a sizable chunk of plaster suddenly blasted into the adjacent room. According to Moon, he was just “trying to show Peter Sellers how to open a bottle of champagne without touching the cork. It involves banging it against the wall.”

• • •

With Peter back in the movie game, and with so much time having elapsed since the unpleasant closing of Brouhaha—and with few people having remembered the unproduced The Illusionist—the producer Bernard Miles tried to convince him, again, to return to the theater. Richard III. Peter turned it down in favor of more films.

Clouseau was a cash cow, but not a perfect one. “God forbid that I should do a whole series,” Peter said in May, while Blake Edwards was industriously preparing the script of The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976). But money mattered to Peter, as it should have, given his previously deteriorated fortune; by the time The Return of the Pink Panther opened in Europe in September, it had already taken in $36 million in the United States alone, second only to Jaws (1975). And so he soon agreed to another round of Clouseau. One early idea for the fourth Pink Panther was that Peter would take four roles: in addition to Clouseau, he’d play (or replay) James Bond as well as playing Dr. Phibes and the fiendish Fu Manchu.

But before the Panther comedy had a chance to go before the cameras in early 1976, he made Neil Simon’s detective spoof, Murder by Death (1976). His role: Sidney Wang, a hideous parody of the already-appalling Charlie Chan. His costars were Maggie Smith and David Niven as the Thin Man-esque sleuths Dick and Dora Charleston; Elsa Lanchester, with a nod to Agatha Christie, as Jessica Marbles; Peter Falk as Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade; James Coco as Milo Perrier (another, more strained, Agatha Christie joke); Eileen Brennan as the flamboyant Tess Skeffington; the unnaturally hilarious Truman Capote as their host, Lionel Twain; Nancy Walker as the deaf maid;