BREAKFAST WITH PETER THE GREAT

Printed words are capable of miraculous things, but they can’t quite capture the rich, exotic flavor of a breakfast with Peter Ustinov.

Words could not possibly convey Ustinov demonstrating how he barked like a small, excited dog and cooed like a dove to entertain an audience of children during his recent tour of mainland China for UNICEF.

Between grapefruit juice and toast Ustinov was a dozen voices, from nasal Brooklyn to the thin and piping accents of an elderly French woman he had encountered on the same Chinese tour. She was in search of a lamasery, he felt, and communicated daily with her late husband, filling him in on current events. “It was like a Menotti libretto,” Ustinov said.

He was in Los Angeles earlier this week in connection with the publication of a book celebrating UNICEF’s 40th anniversary. Like Danny Kaye and Liv Ullmann, Ustinov is an international good-will ambassador for the United Nations’ children’s organization, and has contributed an essay to the book (“We Are the Children” by Judith M. Spiegelman and the Staff of UNICEF, published by Atlantic Monthly Press, $29.95).

“It’s a powdered-milk-table book,” Ustinov explained. It is in fact an affecting collection of photographs of the world’s children in the postwar period, taken by Robert Capa, among others.

Ustinov also recently spent nearly four months in Russia, filming a six-hour miniseries called “Peter Ustinov’s Russia” and based on his best-selling book “My Russia”--his thoughtful illustrated essay, conceived as a gesture toward understanding, on Russian history and the Russian character.

The series, done with a Canadian producer, aired in Reykjavik during the recent summit meetings, has done well on Australian and Canadian television and was bought by the BBC. As yet, however, it has found no American taker.

The book itself drew some hostile editorials in conservative publications here, suggesting that Ustinov had been brainwashed. “In fact the best way of not getting brainwashed is to travel and form your own opinions,” Ustinov says. “The best way to be brainwashed is to stay home and listen to the same voices again and again.”

A month ago, he was one of a delegation of 14 writers, including Alvin Toffler, Arthur Miller and James Baldwin, who had what was to have been a one-hour conversation with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev but that lasted for three. It was, Ustinov says diplomatically, a cordial exchange of views.

By now Ustinov has done five outings as Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, and a sixth may be forthcoming. He sighs expressively. “If I bring any freshness to the performance,” he says, “it’s because I never can remember who did it.” He now has an increased sympathy for journalists. “Poirot spends 80% of his time asking questions. It’s as rigorous as a Bach sonata.

“It takes a special mind to enjoy Agatha Christie,” Ustinov thinks. “People who enjoy crossword puzzles.”

Chinese television ran “Death on the Nile” in honor of the start of the UNICEF tour. “I was then interviewed, as Hercule Poirot. The interviewer said, ‘M. Poirot, what is your impression of China?’ I said, ‘ So many suspects.’ ”

The tour of China took him deep into the interior, in an arid region of extreme poverty, where the average family income was said to be $60 a year. One village was so remote, he was told, that no Occidental faces had been seen there before.

“One felt a bit like Marco Polo, with a too great knowledge of spaghetti,” Ustinov says. “The effects of our arrival were quite astonishing. One man was outraged to see us, and shouted; a woman giggled, the children were absolutely still, as if mesmerized, and a dog went mad and howled its head off.”

The tour was filmed for a two-hour documentary, also in aid of UNICEF, and Ustinov has high admiration for the retiring head of the mission there, a physician named Carl Taylor who, Ustinov says, could pass for a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

After the travels with the book, he joins his wife for a Caribbean holiday. “I can’t float as long as she can,” he says. “So I get out of the water and write, and then I feel renewed nostalgia for the 18th Century, when there was nothing to do but write.”

Ustinov did a season of “King Lear” with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford in 1981-82. “Enjoyable but exhausting,” he says, and the idea of another long theatrical run is not appealing. “My interests are too wide, it may be, and I like to travel.”

His last outing in Los Angeles was in “Beethoven’s 10th,” a pleasure to do here, less so in New York and least so in Palm Beach. “No one had heard of Beethoven there, unless they knew him personally. Someone in Fort Lauderdale said they’d heard that someone had died in the audience one night. I said it wasn’t the kind of thing we’d have noticed.”

Ustinov sips his decaffeinated coffee. “I’ve an idea for a new coffee,” he says. “Guaranteed to cause sleeplessness and give you nightmares. I’m calling it Cafka.”