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KERMIT: (looking nauseated) Uh, er, can . . . can we change the subject?

In a minute, Kermit. Peter Sellers was terribly self-conscious about his lack of a self, and it must have been taxing to sustain such a robust contradiction. What does it mean to have no self if you yourself think you have none? Sellers had selves, just as everyone does; his were just more extravagant, and most of them were played out under high-key lights in movies, television, and publicity photos. They were provisional, performative selves, and they popped up whenever the need for a particular one arose. His favorites were fictional, snapped on spontaneously and crafted over time. These selves made him a fortune and a lot of clever and successful friends who enjoyed his company. His least pleasant selves, the remorse-producing ones, were, in a word, selfish—hungry, impulse-driven selves bent on gratification at any cost. Expensive car, beautiful wife, willing girlfriend, latest camera, compliant child—he had to have it, and he had to have it right away, and, completing the performance, he had to let everyone know. Once he got it, of course, the selfish self faded away, satisfied but empty. Surgically removing that set of selves must have seemed less painful than living with them.

• • •

Peter and Lynne returned from Hong Kong to a domestic disruption in London. They were living in an elegant apartment in Roebuck House. The apartment, done in Indian-techno-Goon, featured saffron-colored walls, a lot of burning candles, a small carved Buddha, a prominent picture of Spike, acres of electronics and photographic equipment, and a huge blow-up photo of Lynne that had been taken by Peter.

Peter had been living there from the time before Titi; Tessa had briefly moved in. Now they found themselves faced with a 300 percent rent increase. Peter’s upstairs neighbors were outraged, too—Lord Olivier and his wife, Joan Plowright, who according to Peter had a habit of dropping marbles on the hardwood floor. “We tried living in France last year,” Lynne told the press, “but it wasn’t a success. I don’t know where we would go now. I hope it won’t be America.” They abandoned Roebuck House with no London residence to take its place.

Lynne described Peter as “incredibly volatile. He’ll say, ‘We’re going to Egypt tomorrow night.’ He needs someone to gently pull him down to earth a bit. . . . You need incredible patience. But I think I have it. I think I’m perhaps the first calm woman he’s found. He thinks he’s difficult to get along with. Past wives and girlfriends have put forward this moody, broody image. But I don’t see him like that.”

“What went wrong with my marriages?” Peter asked rhetorically some time later. He never condemned Anne, toward whom he remained friendly and needy. Miranda was too sophisticated and aristocratic for him, but he never ripped into her in public. He was now saving it all for Britt, to whom he generally referred tersely as “Ekland.” “She’s a professional girlfriend, so there’s no more to be said,” he declared on one occasion. On another he added this: “Every move she makes, she ruins a life. It’s her hard, driving, ruthless ambition.” Peter also made a point of letting Victoria know the depth of his feelings about her mother.

• • •

Physically, Peter’s heart was kept going by a pacemaker, but emotionally it was fracturing to the point that in the early summer of 1978 he flew with Lynne to the Philippines for several sessions of shamanistic surgery. As Michael Sellers describes it, the shamans “conducted their ‘surgery’ by invisibly passing their hands into a patient’s body and plucking out the diseased tissues.” Michael tried to talk him out of it. Lynne thought there was no harm in trying, so off they went.

Peter endured twenty grueling “surgeries,” which apparently involved the psychic doctors yanking pig spleens out from their concealment under the operating table.

He pronounced himself cured. Lynne herself went under the psychic knife to heal