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“Peter wouldn’t tolerate Blake, who needed to direct everybody. But Peter wasn’t going to be directed by Blake. He didn’t like him as a person. Peter thought at the time that Blake was a shit, and he wasn’t going to be bossed around by a worthless human being, and all that kind of crap.” Their relationship was like a screwball marriage—comedy and combat in equal measure—and it was based on mutual need.

Still, Lom insists on one point: “I never found him to be difficult. Never.”

For his part, Blake Edwards offers a stark account of Peter’s troubles: “He talked to God, what can I tell you? He called me up in the middle of the night and said, ‘Don’t worry about how we’re going to do that scene tomorrow. I just talked to God, and He told me how to do it.’ ”

• • •

“I’m very protective of Peter,” Burt Kwouk insists. According to Kwouk, the reason is simple: “Respect. Respect for what he was. There’s too little respect in our business. There are very few actors who are not troubled people.” Asked if Peter Sellers was more troubled than most, Kwouk answers, “I happen to think that he wasn’t. He wasn’t any more fucked up than I am.” For Kwouk, the difference was this: “When you’re somebody like Peter Sellers, the media latch onto it and make it much bigger than it seems. That’s what the media do. What the hell, they’ve got to make a living.

“He was a complicated man. Some of us loved him, some of us hated him. Of course. That’s true of everybody. There were people who didn’t like Jesus Christ. They nailed him to a cross, for chrissake. The business of being a human being is what it’s all about. It’s not about being a movie star, not about being an actor, not about being world famous. It’s about being a human being. We all go to the toilet every morning, whoever we are.”

• • •

In the south of France in July, in London in August, in Los Angeles in September, and with a side trip to the Seychelles sometime in between, Peter, fifty, was beginning to keep company in the form and figure of Lynne Frederick, a wild little thing of twenty-one. An actress (she appeared as Catherine Howard in Masterpiece Theatre’s Henry VIII and His Six Wives) and girl about town (by the time she hooked up with Peter, the precocious Lynne had already enjoyed affairs with both the thirty-seven-year-old David Frost and the fifty-year-old West End gaming club operator Julian Posner), Lynne was a striking beauty, confident beyond her years. And ambitious.

Sellers himself described her as having what he called an “extrasensory instinct” that told her precisely what he needed at any given moment. She, in turn, provided it. She was four months younger than his son.

On December 15, 1976, The Pink Panther Strikes Again received its Royal World Charity Premiere at London’s Odeon in Leicester Square. A single invitation was sent to Mr. Peter Sellers, who was insulted at being unable to invite his chosen date, specifically Lynne, since royal invitations cannot be altered, even for close friends of the royals. “If Lynne is not allowed to be there I’m bloody well not going myself,” he said. And so he boycotted the British premiere of his own film, to much stir in the British press.

Now it was Prince Charles’s turn to be offended. Charles was aghast at his old friend’s behavior and the scandal it caused. It was still bloody: “I was bloody annoyed that he didn’t turn up,” the Prince declared at the time. “I wish I could take my girlfriend to functions, but I can’t. I’m going to tell him how I feel when I see him.”

Peter, Lynne, and Victoria left for Gstaad two days later.

After eleven months passed, a reporter was curious. “Are you still in the doghouse with Prince Charles?” Peter was asked. “Don’t know,” Peter replied. “Haven’t seen him since.”

• • •

Malcolm McDowell was already acquainted with Lynne Frederick. “I’d just worked with her on a film called Voyage of the Damned (1976) so I was rather. . . . I would have warned him off, had I known. But you can’t, can you?”

At a party, McDowell recalls,