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He changed his mind about The Prisoner of Zenda, at least in public, by the time the film was released. “I think it’s a wonderfully entertaining movie,” he penned in a letter to Roderick Mann. The print he’d seen, he explained, didn’t have a musical score and was even missing several scenes. Lynne, separately, put her two cents in, too: “Part of the trouble was we saw the film by ourselves, not with an audience. So there was no laughter. And Peter got upset.”

By that point, Lynne had moved into her own house. As Roderick Mann put it, the move occurred “with Sellers’s blessing.”

He hadn’t found lasting, unconditional love, and he hadn’t found spiritual contentment either. Michael Sellers takes a harsh tone when describing his father’s religious life: “If someone offered a cut-price, special-offer, gift-wrapped religion that guaranteed miracles and a personal audience with the Maker, then Dad would apply for instant enrollment.” Peter was scarcely alone in trying to fashion a spiritual quilt out of appealing and available scraps without worrying too much about how the seams would fit. But few people other than the half-Jewish, Catholic-educated, Buddhist- Hindu- yogic- Castanedaesque Peter Sellers would go so far as to fly a wondrous Catholic priest from Mexico to Gstaad, install him briefly in a hotel, and get him to offer him Holy Communion. Michael dutifully knelt alongside.

Peter had also paid a visit to a Beverly Hills numerologist, he told a friend. “She said that in one incarnation I had been a priest in Roman days. You know—it’s the old déjà vu thing, but every time I’ve been to Rome I’ve felt it—especially one night in the Circus Maximus. It’s now a car park. About three in the morning I was sitting right in the center thinking about all the Christians who had been sacrificed to the lions and feeling that I must have been there.”

• • •

For most of the 1970s, Peter Sellers was obsessed with playing a nobody who became a somebody nobody could really know. As his secretary Sue Evans once said, “You have to understand that Being There was a daily conversation” from the time Peter hired her in 1973 until 1979, when the film was shot and released. Jerzy Kosinski concurred: “For seven and a half years, Peter Sellers became Chauncey Gardiner. He printed calling cards as Chauncey Gardiner. He signed letters Chauncey Gardiner.” Peter often made a point of acting like Chauncey Gardiner, too. At a mid-seventies meeting with Kosinski in a Beverly Hills hotel room, Peter ordered champagne to be sent up. When the waiter arrived, Peter was staring at the television set. Only it wasn’t on. “Would you mind not stepping in the way?” he kindly asked the mystified waiter, who stepped gingerly all around the room in a strained effort not to block Peter’s view of an empty screen.

At one point a year or two later, Peter was in Malibu renting Larry Hagman’s beach house. “Jerzy Kosinski came over all the time,” Victoria Sellers remembers. “He and my dad hit it off really well.” Conveniently for Peter, the thin, white-haired, white-bearded director Hal Ashby lived in Malibu, too. Ashby was still interested in making the picture, and by that point, Ashby himself was becoming most bankable; his 1978 film Coming Home ended up winning three Oscars—for Jon Voight, Jane Fonda, and the screenwriters Waldo Salt and Robert C. Jones—and was nominated for six more.

In late 1978, Peter was renting an expansive blue and white house on Summitridge Place in Beverly Hills, where he flew the Union Jack above the driveway, just to make a point: He wasn’t one of them. After years of frustration and disappointment, and after a preparatory face-lift, he reached a joint agreement with Ashby, the producer Andrew Braunsberg, and the film and television production company Lorimar to make his most cherished project as a big-scale feature film. In 1973, the entire proposed budget for Being There had been $1,946,300. By the time production began on January 15, 1979, Peter alone was getting $750,000 for sixteen