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FORBES: Of course there’s the children to take into account.

SELLERS: You’d always be able to see them. . . . You’re not angry, are you?

When Nanette Newman learned of her imminent divorce and remarriage, she gently convinced Peter that any intimate relationship with him was impossible, let alone marriage. According to Forbes, “On two occasions he bought a gun and threatened suicide, and both times Nanette somehow calmed him and talked him out of it.”

And remarkably, work continued. In The Wrong Arm of the Law, Peter greets us as a couturier wearing a smoking jacket collared in silver quilt; he’s also adorned with a precise, thin mustache and a pronounced French accent. “Exquiseet! Byeautiful!” Monsieur Jules cries as he flounces a bride-to-be’s poofy net veil. “I weesh you every ’appiness,” he purrs as he kisses the bride’s hand in a manner très Continental, “and my felicitations to the, uh [his eyebrows arch], greum.” Monsieur Jules swiftly devolves into lower-class London when the buyers leave. The fashion house is a front; he’s actually the criminal “Pearly” Gates.

The cops are onto him. An officer played by Lionel Jeffries conveys the news in a scene of dueling accents:

JEFFRIES: Well gor bilmey, it’s “Pearly” Gates!

SELLERS: I’m delighted to meet you, but there mus’ be some meestek! My nem is Sharls Jewlz.

JEFFRIES: Oh don’t gimme that. When I took you in in 1948 you was “Pearly” Gates, an’ “Pearly” Gates you’ll always be.

SELLERS: Inspecteur, 1948 was a long time ageu. Theengs shenge.

JEFFRIES: Look, mite, jus’ ’cause you sell a few women’s frocks in the West End it does not mean to say that things change.

SELLERS: [Enraged, and thus reverting to Pearly-speak]: I do not sell “women’s frocks” in the West End. I sell gowns, mite.”

The Wrong Arm of the Law opened in the United Kingdom in March 1963, and in New York the following month. What’s most curious about the film is not its gimmick (because a rival gang of Australian crooks dresses up as cops and steals from “Pearly,” “Pearly” teams up with the real cops), nor the fact that the film was cowritten by several of the writers of Idiot Weekly, Price 2d (Ray Galton, Alan Simpson, and John Antrobus), but this: At this point in his career, Peter was attracting directors of the stature of Stanley Kubrick, not to mention the Boultings and Anthony Asquith, and still he ended up taking on another role in another small-scale movie made by a competent but undistinguished director (Cliff Owen).

Why wasn’t an actor of Peter’s caliber more discerning? For one thing, he liked money. He certainly wasn’t born to it, and he enjoyed his wealth. But financial desire (to the unsympathetic, the word would be greed) seems secondary to the emotional gratification he seized from the roles into which he threw himself. Work was essential, it was sport; work was a necessary distraction, it was simply what he did. Performing filled him in a way the rest of the world could not. Without constant filming and recording, Peter Sellers was simply unable to stand it.

• • •

Naturally, he found his way to Hollywood. After Waltz of the Toreadors opened in London in mid-April, Peter embarked on his first trip to Los Angeles, with a weeklong stopover in New York on the way. There was also a brief side trip to Washington.

In New York, he received his many supplicant flacks and hacks in a Hampshire House suite. He had much to report. Larry had offered him the Shakespeare role, after all; his car collection made its prolix appearance; he had no personality of his own; he was quite boring, really; and so on. He was a heavy smoker, readers learned. His cigarettes were described as “oversized,” the normal length apparently not able to provide the necessary jolt. And he told the New York Times of his experiences in Burma during World War II: “As a corporal I had the completely unglamorous job of arming up fighter planes with shells and bombs.” A corporal? When Peter Sellers was in Burma—briefly—he was drumming and telling jokes.

With Lolita about