Biography Of Peter Cook

by Harry Thompson

  East Anglian Artists designed posters and other literature for local CND and socialist groups, but it also served as a meeting point and a place to hang around in. A frequent visitor was David Frost, who demonstrated the technique of picking up the telephone and saying ‘I’ll just take this on my other phone,’ before making a clicking noise and continuing the conversation on the sam phone. ‘He was definitely on the escalator all the way to the top,’ says Roger Law. East Anglian Artists straggled on until Law was finally expelled from the Cambridge School of Art, shortly after organising an Anti-May Ball with Peter Fluck. They took over an unoccupied house in a nearby village, painted the walls with satirical illustrations of establishment targets and sent invitations to every CND activist in the country. The whole thing ended calamitously in a massive police raid.

  While not especially committed to the CND cause per se, Peter disliked the lies and subterfuge that characterised government nuclear policy, and could certainly be described as a sympathiser. In February he appeared with David Frost at a CND Benefit called G*A*L*A*X*Y, in which he was rude to the Queen. He also took his first straight part for over a year, appearing at the ADC in a Bamber Gascoigne adaptation of Reuben Ship’s The Investigator, an anti-McCarthy satire starring Derek Jacobi, Richard Cottrell and Chris Kelly. In all this activity he did not forget Pembroke, and took the lead in the 1960 College revue Something Borrowed, although the majority of the script was written by Geoff Paxton. Among Peter’s limited contribution was a sketch that was to become one of the most famous of his career.

  Entitled Leg Too Few, but subsequently retitled One Leg Too Few (the show had an alphabetic theme, and it had been crowbarred in under the letter ‘L’), it concerned a one-legged man’s audition for the role of Tarzan. Peter often cited it as his favourite of all the sketches he’d ever scripted, and claimed in 1993 that ‘I’ve never written anything better.’30 Dudley Moore, who was to play the hapless auditioner Mr Spiggott on hundreds of occasions, called it ‘The funniest single sketch’ they ever did together, ‘a real classic’.31 Jonathan Miller described it as ‘one of the most masterly sketches of twentieth century English humour.’32 The BBC had rejected it outright.

  What Moore enjoyed most was the circumspect diplomacy of Cook’s theatrical agent:

  Peter:

  Now, Mr Spiggott, I couldn’t help noticing almost at once that you are a one-legged person.

  Spiggott:

  You noticed that?

  Peter:

  I noticed that, Mr Spiggott. When you have been in the business as long as I have you come to notice these little things almostinstinctively. Now, Mr Spiggott, you, a one-legged man, are applying for the role of Tarzan – a role which traditionally involved the use of a two-legged actor.

  Spiggott:

  Correct.

  Peter:

  And yet you, a unidexter, are applying for the role.

  Spiggott:

  Right.

  Peter:

  . . . A role for which two legs would seem to be the minimum requirement . . .

  And so on, until the most famous line in the sketch, which often elicited cheers from seasoned Cook-watchers. It was also Miller’s favourite:

  Peter:

  Your right leg I like. I like your right leg. A lovely leg for the role. That’s what I said when I saw you come in. I said, ‘A lovely leg for the role.’ I’ve got nothing against your right leg. The trouble is – neither have you.

  It was a punchline so strong that Peter could afford to spend seven sentences setting it up. Miller called it ‘An example of language disclosing two previously unrecognised meanings. It is the sudden leakage that occurs between the figurative, on the one hand, and the concrete meaning. Through Peter’s comic timing, what happens is a catastrophic and sudden and abrupt permeability between these previously completely separate categories.’33 Which has to be one of the most roundabout ways ever devised of defining a double meaning, albeit a delicious one.

  Miller also pointed to the comedy created by Spiggott’s ‘brazen and happy indifference to his situation . . . that curious hospitable friendliness towards the questions . . . we are amused by the gross discrepancy between the cheerfulness of the man and his otherwiserather painful predicament.’34 In short Peter had, whether inadvertently or otherwise, discovered the virtues of engendering in the audience a feeling of sympathy towards the comic target, allied to a sense of superiority over him. That is the key to the sketch’s enduring success, together with an entertaining parody of the language of diplomacy, a smattering of wordplay and some good jokes that perhaps should not be overanalysed.

  His commitment to the Pembroke revue notwithstanding, Peter was now going into College less and less. He had been demoted from the first eleven, although he was still willing to turn out for the seconds at the last minute if he had an hour or two to spare. He was part of a group that sometimes met in the rooms of John Dwyer, who, being President of the Junior Parlour, was the only third year to live in College. He would entertain them with Mr Grole monologues and even with early versions of the Alan Bennett sermon from Beyond the Fringe. In general though, his Pembroke friends were losing touch with him, and even getting slightly annoyed by it. The more people he knew, the more people wanted to know him, the more he tried hard to keep them all entertained and happy, the more he could only offer a performance, as opposed to genuine friendship. According to Peter Lloyd, ‘He became in some respects an uncomfortable companion to have. Eventually he monopolised the conversation in the sense that everybody else would fall quiet and he would perform among us until he went. Some of us, Tim Harrold was one, tried to keep up with it, and most people were just prepared to admire the spectacle and listen. And others would have liked to have taken some part without having to vie for humorous lines and characterisations in which they were no match. Latterly he would go into one of his characters, monologues or styles of speech almost as soon as he saw you or spoke to you, and so one ceased over the three years to talk to the Peter Cook who had come up, and more and more one listened to, or acted the straight man to, one of his characterisations. He must have been aware that some people were trying to say things and he wasn’t really letting them. I don’t think he tried to make anybody look small, he just adapted himself to whatever heckling or interruption he got, and used it to develop his performance further.’

  According to Tim Harrold, who had tried to keep up, the more he and his friends saw of Peter, ‘We got to know him less and less.’

  To some extent Peter had made a rod for his own back. Anyone who combats loneliness and amasses popularity through being constantly witty puts equally continuous pressure on themselves never to halt the performance. For years people had looked to Peter to cheer them up and make life bearable; never the other way round. The more he entertained people, the more exaggeratedly boring his own problems must have seemed, the less he must have wanted to burden people with his real thoughts and fears, the more afraid he became of intimacy. Peter scented the frustration of his old Pembroke friends but could do little, other than cast them adrift in his wake. Later, when he was at his unhappiest, he dismissed them all as ‘mathematicians and scientists’ who ‘never bought a round’, who ‘emerged blinking into the sunlight in their last year, all with first class honours’35; but this was just reciprocal frustration finally breaking through the barrier of good manners.

  Peter’s new gang were all going pls: Eleanor Bron, John Bird, David Frost, Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen, Trevor Nunn, Richard Cottrell, John Fortune, Corin Redgrave, Colin Bell and Peter Bellwood would run into each other several times a week at parties, blurring on occasion into Wendy’s art school crowd. They were all confident, articulate and interesting people, and according to Richard Cottrell, who was once drunk for three days continuously, they consumed a lot of Martinis as well. Peter and Cottrell were invited – on the strength of their amusement value rather than their breeding – to join the True Blue Dining Club, a semi-aristocratic dining society at
which the members had to wear historical costume. Christopher Booker remembers that ‘Peter was always on show, from the moment he got up in the morning, all the way through the day, far into the night. Wherever he was in Cambridge, he would be surrounded by a group of people, all falling about with laughter.’

  Peter spent his last Easter holiday before Finals visiting his family in Libya. It was an inauspicious trip; just after he departed Grandfather Mayo died, and he crossed with his mother coming back the other way to be at her father’s bedside for his last few days. Sarah, who was to have gone with Peter, went down to Eastbourne instead for the expected funeral. On arrival in Libya, Peter immediately contracted jaundice and spent the holiday in bed, his little sister Elizabeth keeping his spirits up by feeding him Marmite. It was to prove a critical illness. His liver had been badly damaged, meaning that he would never again be able to drink large amounts of alcohol without seriously endangering his health.

  Peter convalesced in a darkened Cambridge room with Wendy by his side. He lay yellow-skinned and sweating in his red-and-white striped travelling dressing gown, while she grilled bacon on his electric bar fire and got to know him better. There, without any funny voices or jokes but with genuine feeling, he told her of his childhood misery and nightmares, of his great dream to open a satirical nightclub like the Porcupine in Berlin, and his lifelong desire to tear down hypocrisy and lies and pomposity and faceless officialdom. ‘He had something of my father’ recalls Wendy. ‘My father was all for social reform – but never had the guts to get out there and do anything about it. But here was somebody who looked like he might. Underneath it all Peter had a deep idealism. His confidence, though, was a total façade. The non-stop monologue, the needing to be the centre of attention all the time . . . he was just giving himself a feeling of security by speaking. Of course he seemed confident in front of an audience, but as the saying goes, “Everything that has a front has a back, and the bigger the front the bigger the back”.’ Roger Law had come to the same conclusion. ‘All the voices and the entertaining a room full of people – I assumed he was quite shy. Because you don’t put that much energy into something if you’re supremely self-confident.’

  Peter had to drag himself off his sick bed for one last gargantuan effort – to combine his Finals, from which he really needed a first class degree to be sure of a good career in the Foreign Office, with the Footlights revue that would conclude his Presidency, from which he really needed a rip-roaring success to be sure of a good career in showbusiness. Of the two, the Footlights would be the easier part. Peter’s show, Pop Goes Mrs Jessop, which opened on 7 June 1960, was the antithesis of Bird’s production the previous year. Politics was kept to a minimum, and subject to a code of strict neutrality: Peter didn’t even impersonate Harold Macmillan. Insd, the sketches had titles like The Ballad of Sir Frederick Snain and Pomegranates, Wild Fish and the Forest Melodies of Andalusia. Mr Grole did his Interesting Facts routine, and in another sketch Peter played an equally monotonous man who expounded the virtues of training ducks:

  It’s quite an achievement really. I mean these ducks are completely under my control; eating’s become second nature to them now. The possibilities are endless with ducks – I was thinking, perhaps it’s a bit too ambitious, but I was thinking of trying to get them up in the air – training them to fly.

  Peter wrote sixteen of the twenty-nine sketches on show, of which five – including One Leg Too Few – had already been aired in the Pembroke revues. Eleanor Bron appeared in that and other sketches as a secretary in pebble-glasses called Miss Rigby. One of the new items was to make it as far as Beyond the Fringe: the anti-nuclear Whose Finger on What Button?, which was one of only two political sketches in the show. The other political sketch, also written by Peter, was an anti-CND satire included to maintain the political balance, entitled Peace. To the sound of marching music written by Patrick Gowers, an agitator chants a series of questions, which are answered by the crowd:

  Do we want war?

  No we don’t!

  Do we want peace?

  Yes we do!

  Do we want worldwide complication and suffering, with women and children being knocked down by a hydrogen bomb?

  Certainly not!

  Do we not want peaceful co-existence with us all living happily together and having no worries at all?

  Yes we do!

  Well what’s stopping us?

  THE GOV-ING-MENT!

  To have included such an anti-CND item in a student show in 1960 without losing the slightest degree of audience enthusiasm ranked among Peter’s more extraordinary undergraduate achievements.

  Mrs Jessop herself, incidentally, was a Britannia-like figure who was persuaded by the cast to emit a small ‘pop’ at the opening and closing of the show. Pop Goes Mrs Jessop was of course an utter, resounding triumph, and Peter was very much its star. The scripts reproduced here cannot adequately capture the impact of his performance. As Christopher Booker says, ‘It is quite impossible now to recreate just how Peter managed so unfailingly to inspire laughter. That is why those who did not know him in those early days will never know just why he seuate achio tower over everybody else. Even the clips of Beyond the Fringe are only a shadow of his magic.’36

  Peter’s Finals were slightly trickier. They clashed directly with the dress rehearsals for Pop Goes Mrs Jessop, but he was determined not to let his father down; however he had done virtually no academic work for two years. He borrowed Michael Wild’s and Eleanor Bron’s notes, spread them across the floor of the bedroom he shared with Wendy, and paced the room night after night attempting to photograph them with his memory. For once, his mood was quiet, serious, almost desperate. Halfdan Johnson, the football captain, met him on the steps of the examination halls: ‘He had gone without any sleep for a whole week and was completely haggard. It was amazing that he took his exams so seriously. There seemed to be a dichotomy between the very relaxed person we knew on the football field, making self-deprecating remarks, and the person who was so wound up now.’

  He wasn’t entirely without tricks. On the hottest day of the exams he consulted the statute book and discovered that it was permitted to bring a carton of fruit juice into the examination hall; the invigilating don, himself sweating in full rig, was furious but could do nothing about it. Peter kept up a running battle with this gentleman. The following day he openly swigged copious draughts from a bottle of brandy, informing the fuming official that he didn’t want his answers to lack spirit. A day or two later his lack of sleep caught up with him: he blacked out in the middle of a paper and fell to the floor, seriously gashing his head on his desk. He was taken to Addenbrooke’s hospital and reappeared with his head bandaged. The examiners said they would make allowances. Rumours flew: it was all a trick, people said, Peter had taught himself to faint at will to get out of a particularly difficult paper. Nobody believed that the dazzlingly clever Peter Cook wasn’t one step ahead of the invigilators all the way. On the day of his last paper Peter took Michael Wild home with him, and Wendy plied him with strawberries to say thank you for the loan of the notes. Had he done enough? He didn’t know. It would be months before he would be able to find out.

  In his heart, Peter didn’t believe he had done enough either to make a career in comedy or in the Foreign Office. Discreetly, without telling anyone, he fixed up some run-of-the-mill job interviews, and was accepted as a junior copywriter in an advertising agency. A few days after the end of term, he went out for a stroll on a sunny afternoon to say a reflective goodbye to a Pembroke friend, Martin Hunter. Professor Hunter, as he now is, remembers: ‘We sat together on the Mill Bridge, pondering the future over a couple of pints of Greene King bitter. I was wondering whether to embark on a fourth year at Cambridge or to start with a firm of solicitors in the City. He told me that he was starting an office job after the holidays. Slightly surprised, I asked if he had thought of taking up the stage professionally – because by then his Footlights Revue had received far more t
han mere local recognition in Cambridge. ‘Good heavens no,’ he replied, ‘far too insecure. And anyway, you shouldn’t allow your hobby to turn into a job, you would lose the fun of it.’ I reminded him of this conversation a few years later, when he joined me at a table for drinks with some friends at the Establishment Club, after the show. He laughed, and said that the opportunity had been too good to miss; that it was still really just a hobby; and that he wasn’t planning to do it for very long.’

  Peter’s nervousness on Mill Bridge wasn’t reflected by Varsity, the University paper; they had him down as one of their ‘Twelve Golden Boys of the Future’. They knew that through the offices of Jonathan Miller, Peter had been booked for one more revue, a small-scale Edinburgh show that summer called Beyond the Fringe; Miller himself had come up to do a double act with Peter at the Pembroke May Ball, to brush a few cobwebs from his own performance and to acquaint himself further with Peter’s stock of material. Peter’s showbusiness career, they felt, was not quite finished yet. The landlord of his digs certainly hoped not. Peter, it transpired, hadn’t been there, or paid any rent, for nine months. Peter himself was simply apprehensive at leaving the scene of such enormous triumphs: ‘Cambridge seemed to be the hub of the world. We didn’t think that much of the outside world. When I left, I was fully equipped to stay at Cambridge forever.’37

  CHAPTER 4

  So That’s the Way You Like It