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GRAHAM STARK: The phone is ringing.

PETER SELLERS: Then answer it!

STARK: But we haven’t got a phone.

When the phone is located—it has been filed under T in the filing cabinet—Sellers answers it, but only after putting on a wig to disguise himself.

A gun battle ensues—in the top drawer of the desk. Smoke comes pouring out to the sound of bullets.

A rock comes crashing through the window. There’s a note attached:

STARK: What does it say?

SELLERS: Fred Smith, window repairer.

STARK: I wonder what he charges?

[Second rock]

SELLERS: Three shillings and fifty pence.

Enter Miss Jones. It’s Anne, coming out of Peter’s enforced retirement long enough to put on a big black beard:

PETER What are you trying to hide?

ANNE: This! (She pulls off the beard to reveal a goatee.)

And suddenly, for no reason, the comedy grinds to a halt in order to give the Ray Ellington Quartet a chance to perform a jazzy version of “Teddy Bears Picnic.”

• • •

Thanks to Peter’s extended family, Highgate, where Peter and Anne were living, was turning into a neighborhood version of the Grafton Arms, a place where Goons and their friends could spend even more time together when they weren’t actually working as a team. “We became friends early,” Max Geldray says, “because we lived rather close. Peter had a cousin who was a real estate man, and he heard of a bunch of new apartments being built in Highgate. Peter called me and said, ‘My cousin tells me there are several apartments available there. Are you interested?’ That’s how we all came to live in Highgate—all meaning Spike Milligan and Ray Ellington [and Geldray and Sellers]. Actually Ray and I lived in the same apartment building. Peter lived around the corner.”

He was sticking to the familiar neighborhoods of his youth but enjoying them with money. He had good friends, a beautiful wife, and his mother was nearby. He might even have felt a wave of contentment once in a while.

But one day he called Peg on the telephone: “I’m at Bedford at the railway station. I’m feeling so low I’m going to end it all. I’m going to jump in front of a train.” Rushing to save him, just as she’d always done, Mother found him sitting alone on a bench, staring into an abyss only he could see.

• • •

Happy families may all be alike—since there are so few of them it’s difficult to tell—but as countless dysfunctional family memoirs so repetitively prove, unhappy families are similar, too. Marital tantrums sound the same. So do crying children. Peter Sellers’s family was no exception.

Wally Stott took a benign view of Peter’s marriage to Anne, a perspective made possible by the relative distance from which he viewed it: “Sometimes I’d be at parties at Peter’s house. They were always very enjoyable affairs. There’d always be music we both liked. His wife, Anne, was a very lovely lady, and a great hostess.” (Years after his professional association with Peter ended, Wally Stott became Angela Morley. Spike Milligan commented with a mean sort of affection for his old friend: “He has now had a sex change. I don’t know why. When he undresses he still looks like Wally Stott. I think when Secombe undressed at night he looked like Wally Stott. Peter didn’t. When he undressed at night he looked like Diana Dors.” When I spoke with Angela Morley, I asked her how she wished to be identified in this book, and she replied, “It’s a judgment you’ll have to make and I’ll have to accept.” My judgment is to attribute her quotes to Wally Stott, since he was the person with whom Peter Sellers worked on The Goon Show, and to thank Angela Morley for them in the acknowledgments.)

Anne was putting up a good front. In private, it was she who bore the brunt of Peter’s mercurial moods, the bleak stretches of silence as well as the hot rages, his tendency to grow bored with their living arrangements and insist that they go someplace else. “We did move a lot,” she notes. “I’m not quite sure why. I guess he got sick of wherever we were. I guess we lived in about [long pause] oh, I can’t think how many. . . . About eight different