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And the Best Actor? Michel Piccoli for Salto nel vuoto (1979).

• • •

“The only rocks in this marriage are the rocks other people are throwing,” Lynne declared at the end of May. And furthermore, she made a point of noting, “My mother and I are enjoying a very good relationship once again because she now approves of Peter. She assumed our marriage would last only a couple of months. Instead we have been together almost five years and we celebrated our third wedding anniversary in February. We are proving my mother wrong, so she has finally had to accept Peter.”

“My mother still hasn’t met him,” Lynne went on to say. “One of the reasons is that she lives in Spain and we have no plans to go there.”

Instead, Peter and Lynne went in precisely the opposite direction. They embarked on a yachting trip to the Aegean Sea.

• • •

It was probably wise of both Peter and Lynne to stay away from Iris Frederick, but even a luxurious sail could only do so much. The effects of the face-lift were wiped away by Peter’s worsening heart condition. His face was taking on a gaunt quality; the precise shape of his skull emerging more clearly with every pound of weight he lost, not to mention every added line of worry and stress. And yet, typically, and despite his increasing frailty, he continued to develop new film ideas. It was the only therapy he trusted.

The writer Stephen Bach, then an executive with United Artists, flew to Gstaad in June. “Peter Sellers was wraithlike,” Bach later wrote. “The smile he wore seemed paralyzed in place, and I thought I had never seen so delicate a man. His skull, his fingers, the tightly drawn, almost transparent skin—all seemed frail, infinitely fragile . . . . [He was] a spectral presence, a man made of eggshells.”

Peter had been working on the script of The Romance of the Pink Panther with a writer named Jim Moloney; the film’s producer, Danny Rissner, had sent Peter some script notes, and Peter, after reading them on the yacht in the Aegean, had threatened to jump overboard. He insisted that Lynne be named as executive producer. If UA balked, he would walk.

It must be said that Lynne Frederick had her hands full with Peter, as did each of his other wives. The difference was that none of his friends could stand this one. They knew him too well, for one thing. And they trusted neither her motives nor her personal performances—the ones she gave privately for them. It was relatively distant business associates who got the full treatment. Bach, for instance, believed Lynne’s benevolent routine on his trip to Gstaad to salvage the project. “The atmosphere was uneasy only until Lynne Frederick came into the room, exuding an aura of calm that somehow enveloped us all like an Alpine fragrance. She was only in her mid-twenties but instantly observable as the mature center around which the household revolved, an emotional anchor that looked like a daffodil.”

At the same time, Lynne Frederick deserves a bit of compassion herself in retrospect. It was the helpless Peter she nursed, the dependent and infantile creature of impulse and consequent contrition. Patiently, she ministered to him. And eventually, as Bach observes, Peter was moved to cooperate. At the end of the meeting, Bach observes, “I noticed, as he rose, that not once in the long, talkative afternoon had he let go of Lynne’s hand, nor had she moved away. She transfused him simultaneously with calm and energy and the hand he clung to was less a hand than a lifeline.”

• • •

The Romance of the Pink Panther was not the only project on Peter’s mind. Marshall Brickman’s Valium, now called Lovesick, was still in development. Brickman still possesses a tape recording of Peter practicing his scenes as a Viennese psychiatrist. Unfaithfully Yours, too, was moving forward, as was a sort of reunion project with Terry Southern. The proposed title: Grossing Out.

It was to be a satire based on someone Peter claimed to have met. Peter had, the story